Saturday, April 23, 2011

Never Teach A Pig To Sing. It Wastes Your Time And Annoys The Pig.

-----Mark Twain

I have been reminded repeatedly of Mr. Twain's great wisdom of late. I've been perusing the posts of a group of people who have banded together on Facebook, allegedly to study the Federalist Papers and other writings by the Founding Fathers. I say "allegedly" because after reading these posts for several months, I have no choice but to come to the conclusion that their real purpose is to cherry-pick quotes, take them out of context (or otherwise misinterpret them), and to bludgeon them into unrecognizable form so that they can justify their own prejudices instead of really learning anything about America's history.

Example the first. While I do not have the exact quote in front of me, one posting from Alexander Hamilton unequivocally stated that the system will work only when everyone realizes that if they are willing to give up a little in some areas, they can get a lot in others. In other words, that compromise is the heart and soul of the system. Yet people posting to this Facebook site deny that that's what Hamilton meant, because for them, "compromise" is a dirty word. This, even though they could not explain to me what Hamilton's words meant if they did not mean that the system was set up to function when everyone involved worked to compromise, or find solutions everyone could live with, even though those solutions may not give anyone 100% of what he wants. They insisted on their "interpretation" in utter contradiction to Hamilton's words, which were plain on their face. And then they denied that that's what they were doing. But they never could or did offer any explanations for their stand--and that's a textbook illustration of prejudice.

Example he second. While they claim that the Founders didn't believe in compromise, they have no explanation for the existence, let alone the significance, of things such as the 3/5ths Clause in the Constitution. That's the clause that agrees, for purposes of determining how many Representatives each state could send to Congress, to count each slave as 3/5 of a person--for purposes of representation only. Southern states wanted to count slaves as entire persons, again for purposes of representation only, which would give them disproportionate representation (and thus power) in Congress; non-slave-holding states didn't want slaves to be counted at all, for purposes of representation or otherwise. The 3/5ths Clause was [oh, horrors!--Ed.] A COMPROMISE. Since the document itself got adopted only after including compromises such as this, it is impossible for the Founders to have been against compromise per se. To claim anything else is to deny fact.

Example the third. The most frequent posters to this Facebook page are all quite fond of quoting Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall's admonition that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." They tend to use it to justify not taxing them, at all, for anything. Ever. Marshall may have been correct, but taking that quote by itself is to take it out of context and also to refuse to recognize that while it may be true as a generality, it does not and cannot justify their unwillingness to pay any taxes. If the Founders did not want taxes at all, they'd not have given Congress the power to tax in the first place. Taxes are necessary. Indeed, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes noted about a hundred years after Marshall's dictum, "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization."

The people who ignore this are also fond of saying the federal government must be small, limited, and weak, and that that was the Founders' intent. They are forgetting or ignoring the Founders' collective experience under the Articles of Confederation, which was the Founders' first attempt at setting up America's national government. The Founders quickly realized that that government was too weak. It didn't succeed. Thus the impetus for creating the Constitution in the first place. Those same people also do not recognize that the same weaknesses, present in the Confederacy's Constitution, contributed mightily to the Confederacy's having lost the Civil War. Jefferson Davis's government could not compel the individual Confederate states to contribute specific funds to defray the costs of the war, to finance its own operations--in other words, to exist and to be able to defend its existence. Hence, Union victory; hence, "the Second American Revolution," designed to implement what the Founders wanted in the first place but which took a Civil War wherein over 600,000 Americans were killed, to realize.

Also note that the Founders stated the goal of creating a "more perfect Union," which phrase suggests two things: (1) perfection had not been obtained yet; (2) maybe 100% perfection would not be obtainable, but the point was, and is, to keep moving toward that "more perfect" Union. The operative idea being "movement." The Founders plainly did not want some static, stultified, one-size-fits-all-forever structure for the federal government. If they had, they'd never have said "more perfect." They'd have said "perfect." If they had, they'd never have created the process by which the Constitution can be amended. Yet the Constitution may be, and often has been, amended. The notion of "original intent" is important, but it does not slam the door against change, for the provisions for amendment, plus the compromises that were enshrined in the original document (such as the 3/5ths Clause), plus the Founders' behavior in tossing the Articles of Confederation once that document proved ineffectual, all add up to the total that life is what happens, that history changes things, and that the Founders were wise enough to build flexibility into the system so that we could cope several hundred years later.

Further, most of the people who claim they want to "restore" the federal government to what the Founders "intended" are not thinking through the consequences of doing that (allowing, hypothetically, that that presumption were correct, which we've already seen is not), which would be largely to destroy America's primacy and security in the world. It would turn the United States into the Balkans. Yet the people who insist that they want to "restore" America are always claiming America is the best, most powerful, most prosperous, most freedom-embracing place on Earth -- "rah-rah, we're Number One!" They always want America to be first in everything they think is good, but they won't recognize the fact that infant mortality rates in this nation are disgraceful, that high school graduation rates in this country are abysmal, that we are falling behind in the creation of new technology and in the education of our future generations . . . I could go on and on, but in short, that we are increasingly ill-prepared to meet the challenges of the future and thus are at grave risk of losing our presently privileged place on this planet. If they get their way, America will become the ultimate example of The Law of Unintended Consequences, because none of them seem to be able to see what the end result of what they say they want actually will be. [A perfect illustration of my contention that we have to stop trying to teach our children WHAT to think and that we must start teaching them HOW to think, but that topic deserves full exploration in its own post.--Ed.]

The saddest thing of all is that the people who advocate these positions do not seem to realize that if they get their way, they're still going to pay. It may be paying into a different pot, and it may even be more than they are paying now. But they'll be paying, because one way or another, the services their taxes now support will still be in demand, will still be needed for the country to function. Consider this: President Reagan's budget "cuts" were not so much cuts as they were redirecting whence the tax money would come. Infrastructure maintenance comes immediately to mind. The federal government used to provide assistance to the states to maintain our roads, bridges, and other transportation channels. Once Reagan's budget eliminated that assistance, the needs didn't magically go away. Their burden shifted to the states, which varied widely in their ability to take on that burden unassisted. The long-term result? Our bridges and roads are now falling apart, and we're going to have to pay far more to fix them than we would have had we just kept maintaining them with small but regular infusions of federal assistance in the first place. Yet instead of recognizing this and implementing a simple, straightforward plan to do that fixing, we're all pointing fingers and laying blame . . . and the repairs and upgrades we desperately need are not getting done. Maybe the Second Law of Thermodynamics really does apply to human behavior and governmental systems as much as it does to gaseous bodies [you may thank me for that straight line as soon as you use it to make some editorial comment about the Congress.--Ed.]

Unfortunately, recognizing all this does not solve the larger problem. If you consider what many Tea Partiers say about ending government hand-outs to Wall St. banks and protecting Medicare, you'd think those people would be making common cause with Democrats, not Republicans. But the GOP has managed to tie conservatism on social issues so tightly to its financial agenda that there's a knee-jerk reaction in the Tea Party: Democrats = liberalism, liberalism = bad. They are so locked into this way of thinking that they do not see the real facts, which contradict such presumptions. And as long as we're locked into that filtration of facts, we are living in a world much more like George Orwell's 1984 than in the America the Founding Fathers envisioned.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post. Just one question; You write: "They are so locked into this way of thinking that they do not see the real facts, which contradict such presumptions."

But most Democrats truly are "liberal" on social issues. Obviously, I think this is a good way to be, and I myself am Liberal on social issues.

But what if most Tea Partiers really are hostile to social liberalism of their own free will? What if--and I hesitate to think about this--it's not just Republican propaganda, but rather that they--meaning the rank-and-file Tea Partier-really are that narrow-minded in their thinking?

Eclectic Iconoclast said...

A cogent point, and thank you for your comment. I think my point was less about what Democrats stand for than it was about what they are perceived as standing for, however.

I have many, many socially conservative friends. In some respects, I have become more socially conservative myself--more for reasons of what comports with rational behavior than anything else--but what I mean is that even if we don't see the social issues the same way, why should that automatically prevent us form being able to work together for our MUTUAL economic benefit?

We can disagree without being disagreeable; we can agree to disagree but still work together . . . IF everyone understands that EVERYONE must give a little to get a little. It's not the position per se but the willingness to tolerate differences of opinion, to live and let live. The position on the political right is that you aren't just different when you disagree with us; you are evil and bad and must be stopped. But the one doesn't necessarily follow from the other, and until we can unbuckle the notion that Democrats' stands on social issues automatically make their economic ideas worthless, we're not going to get anywhere.

Which is a long-winded way of saying why can't we consider each idea on its own merits instead of seeing who'd proposing it? After all, the GOP was all for mandatory health insurance premiums until the Affordable Health Care Act adopted them . . . and suddenly, because they were in a bill proposed by President Obama, they became anathema.

As an aside, you are aware, no doubt, that the GOP never will take any serious steps to undo the social legislation the Democrats have passed, if only to continue to have it as a wedge issue in their favor. And I hate that. That is putting personal political gain ahead of the needs of the country as a whole, and that is anathema to me.

Eclectic Iconoclast said...

Ah, that should have been either "who's proposing" or "who'd proposed," not "who'd proposing." Sorry about that. I never can proofread my own writing effectively . . . until it's too late to fix! I know what it's supposed to say, so that's what I see. My apologies for the typo. But the point I'm trying to make is still valid.