a commenter!

I am sort of ambivalent about this blog these days -- still not sure what to do with it -- so I am not really trying to get readers. But yesterday I had at least one, and this person left a comment! Since that is such a rare treat, I have decided to promote it to a post, with my reply to follow:

Anonymous said...

The wealthy or the monied class will always favor whoever has their best interests at heart. This can be said today, or 100 years ago or 100 years before that. The roaring 20's or the gay 90's weren't wonderful times for all, but mostly for the wealthiest 1% of the population, people like Rockefeller and Carnegie concerned with making money and their own level of comfort; they cared little for their employees.

The same could be true today, most employees do not have the same level of comfort they had even a few years ago. Recently the news, mentioned that life is wonderful if you are the wealthiest 1% of the population.

Certainly our politians today favor big business, workers rights have taken a few steps backwards. We need to think carefully about the coming elections and hope we can find another Adams or a Teddy Roosevelt, someone who isn't afraid to do the unpopular and take a stand against big business. As was true before the Revolution it is once again the "body of the people" who politicians should be listening to.

I take issue only with the word "always" in comment.

The remarkable thing about the revolution was that -- even if the wealthy were took longer than Samuel Adams to embrace the revolutionary cause -- many of the patriots were among the wealthiest of the colonists. There were few wealthier than Washington and Hancock but they both supported the revolution. Hard to believe, but in this instance they were truly motivated by ideals -- not the pursuit of wealth.

Now, maybe they were particularly exceptional individuals, these So-Called Founding Fathers (SCFF), but they also created and inhabited an environment where ideas and ideals mattered. I think that is what we need right now -- more than a TR or Samuel Adams to save us. We all -- "the body of the people" as the commenter says -- need to work on creating a political and cultural environment where serious discussion of issues is encouraged and demanded even.

With that in mind I link here to the latest from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, a sharp-eyed and ruthless critic. He sometimes goes for the easy Menckenesque barb rather than deep analysis, but there are few sharper pens out there these days. A taste:

If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion. Or how about this: If the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

This leads me to link to an old post of a brilliant speech by Al Gore on the state of our democracy and public discourse. It begins:

I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.

[...]

In fact there was a time when America's public discourse was consistently much more vivid, focused and clear. Our Founders, probably the most literate generation in all of history, used words with astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of Reason.

Their faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well-informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge.

The values that Americans had brought from Europe to the New World had grown out of the sudden explosion of literacy and knowledge after Gutenberg's disruptive invention broke up the stagnant medieval information monopoly and triggered the Reformation, Humanism, and the Enlightenment and enshrined a new sovereign: the "Rule of Reason."

Indeed, the self-governing republic they had the audacity to establish was later named by the historian Henry Steele Commager as "the Empire of Reason."

Finally, there has been a debate about liberals should approach religion in the current political environment. As usual, Digby seems to present the clearest case:

I have no problem with politicians using religious rhetoric to inform voters of their own personal views, but when appeals to positive virtues become exclusively associated with religious values we end up aiding and abetting a whole host of conservative appeals to authority in the process. We must value reason itself, and employ it liberally and respectfully or we are going to find that the epistemic relativism that the right's been so successful with in recent years will have some very unpleasant consequences.

This nation is not going to be prosperous and successful in the future if we fail to properly emphasize the idea that reason is intrinsic to democracy. And we certainly are not going to be able to deal with the complicated challenges we face, like the rise of militant fundamentalism, nuclear proliferation or global warming unless we agree that people who do not subscribe to religion can be trustworthy and that science, analysis and knowledge form as much of a legitimate basis for human progress as religion. The right demagogues these things for the express purpose of advancing their authoritarian agenda and I don't think it's wise for Democrats to allow a new class of "religious strategists" to further empower them in some ill-conceived crusade to gain votes from the least likely people in the nation to vote for them.

If the Democratic party doesn't stand for freedom and equality and the basic rational premise of the constitution then nobody does. The Republicans sold that out when they made their bed with Jerry Falwell, even though they pretended for years that they were the keepers of the flame. I'd hate to see the Democrats capitulate to the same socially regressive forces and empower the opposition in the process.

The religious and secular left have the chance together to make both reasoned and moral arguments for social justice, civil liberties and civil rights based upon our shared liberal values. Our rational and idealistic worldviews are not in tension. There is no purpose to all this pandering to the right except perhap to give a few new strategists an opportunity create a divide where none exists so they might exploit their positions as professional mediators.

Beware the insider religio-political industrial complex. It dishonestly foments this fight with bogus statistics and bad advice. Democrats are making a big mistake if they listen to them. Their political ambition is tragically weakening the one thing that keeps the nation together and keeps the right from hurtling completely out of control --- the US Constitution and a respect for the clear-eyed reason that inspired it. Democracy is not faith based and religion isn't democratic. People need to be reminded of the difference not encouraged to see them as the same thing.