• Tag Archives conservatives

  • Speaking of Oscillations

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                     First Moon of the New Year

    Gingrich wins.  Romney won.  Santorum won.  The longer and more divisive the Republican primary season, the better.  Let them shred each other.  It could give Obama a chance he may not deserve, but one I hope he gets.

    On the other hand.  A sharply divided and ideologically splintered opposition can make governing a real headache, especially if the Republicans retain control of the House and take the Senate.  This latter is possible, with seven Democratic seats up and only two Republican.

    The partisan in me wants to watch the Republicans blow themselves up, weaken their party back to the special interest group it used to be, but I know that’s not a good way forward for our country.  We need two parties, a more conservative, fiscally conscious and moderately bellicose one and one dedicated to justice, economic and social.  These are two legitimate strains of  thought when it comes to understanding and creating policy for our country.  The best governance comes from these two impulses fighting it out in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

    Given my druthers we would move toward the democratic socialism of  Europe, covering health care, creating affordable housing, solid support and aid for those who cannot find work, seeing that everyone gets as much education as they can tolerate, and providing solid retirement benefits.

    Martin Luther King said it best:  “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

    I believed that in 1964 and I believe it today.  We must keep working, not become faint-hearted or victims of despair.  Just when greed seems to have gained the high ground, just when hatred seems stronger than love, just when the 1% seem to obscure the 99, just then  will the high ground transform to common ground, love embrace hatred and the 99% become seen and heard and felt.


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  • Poison Fruit

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                        Waxing Awakening Moon

    Spring has sprung, then it sprang back.  23 today.  Not prime gardening weather yet.

    The conservative embrace of right wing populists has begun to bear poisoned fruit again.  They referred to Obama and African-American congressmen as niggers, Barney Frank as a faggot and phoned in death threat to several members of the House who switched their votes on health care reform.  The great irony of the moral majority, Christian right, tea-party tea bags is that by all normal political calculation they should vote Democrat.  They are, in the large part, blue collar folks, some living on minimum wage, many no doubt eligible for the health insurance provisions just passed by Congress, but conservative strategists have intentionally chosen to underwrite their social prejudices against people of color, homosexuals and folks with a college education in order to collect them into the party’s ranks.

    This is not a deal with the devil; it is the devil making a deal.

    I know these folks because I grew up with them in Indiana.  They first came to national notice in Indiana when 30% of the Hoosier electorate voted for George Wallace for President.  They were first and second generation folks from Appalachia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee and worked in the automobile and other heavy manufacturing centers in the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio area, the area long since identified as the rust belt.  Union workers in the 1950’s and 1960’s, these constituencies voted a straight Democratic party ticket in line with their economic self-interest.

    After LBJ and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, George Wallace made an independent run for the Presidency aiming himself squarely at southern Democrats, the diaspora of southerners working in the north and those other bigots nationally willing to sign up.  This came to the attention of Kevin Phillips, then a strategist for Richard Nixon.  He conceived of the moral majority, corralling the Wallace voters and conservative Christians, sometimes the same group into a winning base for conservative Republican politics.  This was the time of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.

    Right wing populism has a long and unsavory history in the US.  The KKK, anti-semite, homophobes, anti-Darwinists and love it or leave it patriots are just a few examples.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has made a career for Morris Dees and his compatriots filing suit against various organizational expressions of these folks.  When economic insecurity marries the all-too human propensity for discrimination, a violent firestorm will result.  It is no different now than it was in the post-Reconstruction days, the days during the Great Depression or the years after passage of the Civil Rights act.

    True conservatives should be ashamed.


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  • 60’s Ritual Taken Up By Gun Rights Crowd

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring            Waning Seed Moon

    OMG   The Tea Party at the Capitol.   Don’t know about you but watching so-called patriots straight arming their fists in the sky like the Black Panthers and the protesters at the Mexico Olympics created cognitive dissonance.  A speaker at the rally said, “Do we love our country or what?” then raised her fist high above her head.  The crowd roared.

    Personally, I choose “…or what.” in this context.  If love of country demands pulling back from rescuing the economy, taking care of the needs of fellow citizens and killing foreigners, then we have become not a country but a caricature of a country.

    We have had 8 years of this kind of chuckle headed, shut the brain off and leave me alone with my righteousness blather.  Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Pearl and other political refugees now await the judgment of history and it will not be kind.

    The morphing of political symbols is not new, of course.  The V finger peace sign beloved of my generation had its origin in the V for victory of Winston Churchill in WWII.  This appropriation of the rally style, signboards and pumped fists in the air by the right is not so much blasphemy as it is culture at work absorbing, adapting.

    Still, those of us marched and fought the Vietnam War and participated in the struggles for civil rights can be forgiven a twitch of the heart when seeing flag draped anti-socialists holding placards and chanting with their fingers closed in a fist above their head.  Just doesn’t seem, well, you know…right.


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  • What Rough Beast Comes?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    26 83%  28% 2mph NNW  bar 30.15 rises windchill25   Yuletide

                              Waning Gibbous Cold Moon

    The assassination of Benazir Bhutto chilled me, chilled me more than the air temperature outside.  My reaction surprised me since I have no Pakistani friends, feel no special affiliation with the Pakistani people and know only a little about Ms. Bhutto.  Yeats comes to mind:  The center will not hold.  This targeted political violence is the rough beast that slouches toward the Bethlehems in every country and toward the calm in our souls.

    There is no place on the globe any longer that does not affect us, no matter how remote from our understanding or apparent sympathies.  This is good in a general sense and perhaps bodes well for the long term future when these kind of strong links bind us together even more strongly; but now, in the short term, the ripples will have unexpected consequences.

    The material below is interesting.

    From Scientific American Online: 

    People who describe themselves as being politically liberal can better suppress a habitual response when faced with situations in which that response is incorrect, according to research that used a simple cognitive test to compare liberal and conservative thinkers. Tasks that require such “conflict monitoring” also triggered more activity in the liberals’ anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region geared to detect and respond to conflicting information.

    Past research has shown that liberals and conservatives exhibit differing cognitive styles, with liberals being more tolerant of ambiguity and conservatives preferring more structure. The new paper “is exciting because it suggests a specific mechanism” for that pattern, com­ments psychologist Wil Cunningham of Ohio State University, who was not involved with the study. In the experiment, subjects saw a series of letters flash quickly on a screen and were told to press a button when they saw M, but not W. Because M appeared about 80 percent of the time, hitting the button became a reflex—and the more liberal-minded volunteers were better able to avoid the knee-jerk reaction.

    The study’s lead author, psychologist David Amodio of New York University, emphasizes that the findings do not mean that political views are predetermined. “There are a lot of steps be­tween conflict monitoring and political ideology, and we don’t know what those steps are,” he says. Although the neurocognitive process his group measured is so basic that it is most likely in place in early childhood, he notes that “the whole brain is very malleable.” Social relation­ships and other environmental factors also shape one’s political leanings.


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