The McCarthy Legacy

Back in the early 1950’s America was haunted by a witch-hunter named Joseph McCarthy. He was a mainly a one man show who managed to work up an anti-communist frenzy across the country which resulted in a lot of professional lives left in ruin and a national paranoia the likes of which has not been seen in America until the election of our first black President and the subsequent rise of the Tea Party movement. I remember the McCarthy hearings well, for they were the first day time television I had witnessed as a child growing up among what would be called moderate Republicans today.
Ever since the Obama election liberals have been the proverbial frogs in the kettle of water. In these times, there are numerous voices heating up the witch-hunt, fueling the fire that heats the water that eventually will boil the frogs unless they have the wisdom to simply stop sitting there pretending they can take the heat of the conservatives’ cauldron when in fact the temperature is near the boiling point. These heat-generating irrational voices come from Fox News, talk radio, the House of Representatives, the Senate: in short, they are a siren-like chorus that enchants and infuriates the public to such a degree that the bricks and spit have already begun to fly. Guns and grenades may be just around the corner. Enough of taking the heat.
Meanwhile, the national conversation has shifted to such a conservative extreme that what was once moderate Republican thinking is now labeled socialist or liberal. For example, the health care bill that the House just passed is a mere shadow of what Nixon proposed in the 1970’s. What used to be Republican thinking is now labeled socialist, and what is now Republican thinking is simply anti-governmental or the party of NO.
Most of the Tea Party types are losers. They think like losers and act like losers. That’s what happens when you think only defensively, only reductively, only negatively. You define your existence by what you are against, not for. You score no points because you are too busy trying to prevent the other side from scoring any. It is a strategy that goes nowhere but down.
The Democratic Party seized the middle of the political spectrum in the last election and has slowly but carefully maintained a centrist course, much to the chagrin of true liberals, who would much rather have seen an expanded Medicare program come out of congress than this 30 million new accounts cornucopia for the insurance industry.
However, the new McCarthy-ites are not having any of it, even if the bill is mostly derived from old Republican ideas. They want less government, or even no government, because they have nowhere to go philosophically except further right into some wild new frontier of libertarian nihilism, the middle ground having been occupied by the Democrats because the middle ground was vacated by the right as they looked for higher ground from which to look down on the land they relinquished. They sooner or later will find that the soil is rather thin the higher you go. So they are left with nothing but denial: No nothing. No. Just say no.
The problem in America is that the true liberal has been left behind, disenfranchised, by the Democratic Party shift to the middle. You would never know it as a problem because the extreme right holds most of the apparent microphones and megaphones. In fact, actual liberal views are buried beneath whatever ground is being managed by the party in power namely, the Democrats.
The good news is that as long as the Tea Party folks have sway over the Republicans, the Democrats can rest assured that the Republicans will be a long time in trying to reclaim that very fertile middle ground.

The Assumption Divide

The things that separate conservatives and liberals begin with very different assumptions about what is important and what works. All of their approaches to problem-solving stem from their often differing assumptions about responsibility, function, and progress. Here are a few of the assumptions conservatives (Con) and liberals (Lib) tend to embrace:
1. Con: Capitalism creates competition, and that is good.
Lib: Cooperation rather than competition serves the people best.
2. Con: The “playing field” will never be level and never has been.
Lib: The “playing field” can be made more level through law and policy.
3. Con: The individual is entirely responsible for his/her own outcome.
Lib: Government’s job is to protect the weak from the exploitation of the strong.
4. Con: Criminals should be punished. (stick)
Lib: Criminals should be rehabilitated. (therapy, education)
5. Con: Economies must grow to survive.
Lib: The ideal economy is sustainable.
6. Con: That which governs best governs least.
Lib: Government should be a player, not just a referee.
7. Con: People are self-interested, motivated by fear and greed, driven by competition.
Lib: People are naturally good, like to work, and tend to contribute to society.
8. Con: Caveat Emptor (Let the buyer beware.)
Lib: Caveat Venditor (Let the seller beware.)
9. Con: Market volatility is the price for opportunity.
Lib: Economic security is more important than getting rich.
10. Con: Wealth is a right.
Lib: Wealth is a privilege.
11. Con: Health care is a privilege.
Lib: Health care is a right.

There are many more assumptions that both liberals and conservatives make, but these are enough to show that most political positions assumed by either group are based on assumptions about human behavior.
Conservatives assume that human nature is untrustworthy, selfish, and by nature aggressive, so why not accept those “facts” and build an economic system that utilizes that nature? If folks get out of hand, simply punish them. Otherwise, let the system self-correct. Capitalism, for them, is as close to a perpetual motion economic machine as mankind can find.
Liberals, on the other hand, always seem to want to give mankind the benefit of the doubt and assume that people can be cooperative, can change, and can be reformed with just the right therapy or positive incentive. They also see losers as victims of the system rather than flawed individuals who simply don’t have the gumption to pull themselves up by their bootstraps (not that anyone wears bootstraps these days) and try again. The conservative likes to use old adages like the one referring to bootstraps to validate his view that losers remain losers because they give up trying to win.
Each group’s assumptions about human nature are, in part, the direct result of the other’s existence. They are a chicken and egg duo that continues to drive politics today. Neither is entirely right or wrong but is simply one side of the spectrum that is the reality of human nature.
There was a time when politics was a meeting place for ideas. Today, it is a battleground where self-righteous pontification takes the place of dialogue and the possible arrival at that “settlement in the wilderness” called Consensus. The U.S. Senate in particular is the primary locus of the most uncivil war since the one Lincoln presided over. Neither liberals nor conservatives have a handle on the exact nature of humankind, and therefore neither should be so trusting of the assumptions each holds so dear. Given the behavior they exhibit from either side of the aisle, they are in no position to make any claims on a true knowledge of human nature except that it is flawed and in need of something beyond the status quo.
Today’s health care debate is supposedly about principles. Most of it is about manufactured nonsense and irrational fear based on false assumptions. The debate does not even come down to the last pair of assumptions in the list: Is health care a right or a privilege? At whose profit is lack of health care justifiable and at whose is it not?
When the well-being of the corporation takes precedence over the well-being of the citizen, something has gone wrong with somebody’s assumption scheme, and something has to change. Otherwise, that old adage about “the strength of a society is measured by its capacity to care for its weak and elderly” has no currency, and we are left with the mechanistic ‘survival of the fittest. As a result, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness as our ideals seem lost in the wake of survival mode.