Back in my traveling days, one of my favorite stops was Houston. While I had no particular fondness for the city or its environs, a trip there usually resulted in an invitation to my colleague Patti's home for dinner with her family.
During one such visit, her son, who was about eight at the time, asked his father and I to explain the difference between Republicans and Democrats. His father, Pat, was a reasonable man, whom I categorized as a moderate Republican. He told their son that Democrats chose to interfere in the lives of citizens in order to take money away from hard-working people to give to those less so. Republicans, on the other hand, thrived in an environment in which government left them alone, free from the encumbrance of needless regulations and excessive taxes. Given these circumstances, the economy would grow and all would be right with the world.
My immediate response: I turned to Pat and said: "How about if I tell him the truth now?"
Republicans, I explained, are the most optimistic people on the planet. They believe that if the government cuts their taxes and eliminates regulations, the right people will make more money with the benefits eventually trickling down to the rest of us. They are such believers in the inherent goodness of man that they have remade laws several times over the previous 25 years to build such a society; the first, during the Reagan years and again during the ascendancy of W. Bush.
Democrats, on the other hand, don't share these Pollyanna-ish views about mankind. They believe that if government takes this hands-off approach, baser human motivations - like greed - will dominate. The economic result of this trickle-down theory, aptly characterized by GHW Bush as "voodoo economics", is a massive redistribution of wealth to a small minority (about 1%) of the population, who will take advantage of those less fortunate. Democrats believe that the role of government must also include the protection of these vulnerable from these economic predators.
My punchline was that Republicans campaign on the premise that government does not work; once in office, they prove it.
That was 15 years ago. Don't these arguments seem so quaint today? I relate these tales to illustrate that it was not that long ago when the two political parties carved out positions close to the center of our political discourse. My, my, how things have changed! In 2012, Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann published It's Even Worse Than It Looks. Their main premise: the Republican party has been hijacked by an extremist faction that is holding the country hostage to their anti-government credos that undermine our system of democratic government. Their positions, supported without question or dissent by their in-house media apparatus - Fox News - are so out of the mainstream that the patron saints of American Conservatism, Goldwater and Reagan, could not be elected dogcatcher today, because some self-styled Republican would outflank them to the right.
My GOP friends tell me that both sides do this, both have become more extreme. I disagree; allow me to cite some examples:
- In the 2000 Presidential campaign, the press focused on the alleged statement by Vice President Gore that he had invented the internet instead of asking Governor Bush how he would finance the massive tax cuts he proposed without adding to the deficit.
- In 2016, the estimable New York Times devoted far more column inches to the non-story of Hillary's emails, instead of asking questions about the temperament, record and abilities of candidate Trump. We all know how that one turned out.
- President Trump has nominated candidates for lifetime positions in the Federal judiciary, all of whom have in common the endorsement of right-wing legal societies, hell-bent on overturning protection of Voting Rights, health care reforms, restrictions on secret funding for political candidates and women's right to choice. Several of these candidates have, in hearings to vet their abilities, questioned the legitimacy of Brown v. Board of Education. Seriously. Yet, only one Republican senator has voted against any of these candidates, who will be interpreting law well into my grandchild's adulthood.
I believe the term is "false equivalence". For the one district in Illinois that has an odd shape to protect a Democratic incumbent, I show you the convoluted construction of districts in North Carolina, which a Federal judge overturned because it eliminated African-American voters with "surgical precision". My own state, Georgia, has slightly favored the Republican Presidential candidate in the last three elections, reaching a high water mark of 54%. Yet, our Congressional delegation is 72% Republican.
We have a Congress with lower approval ratings than the Department of Motor Vehicles. They have spent their current term in blind allegiance to an woefully incompetent President who, for reasons as yet unclear, has no words of criticism for our global adversaries but plenty for our allies. They clutch their pearls at the separation of families at our borders but do nothing to resolve this human rights catastrophe nor to prevent it from recurring.
No, both sides don't do this.
