I thought that
might get your attention. Usually this sort of question involves that other
political party. But as things in God’s Only Party have gotten crazier and
crazier, maybe we ought to talk about the assumption of many (most?) Mormons
that the Republican Party somehow has a corner on political correctness (pun
and irony fully intended).
First a confession.
Toward the end of 2015, I officially gave up my decade-long sojourn in the land
of the unaffiliated and signed up for the Democratic Party. I did this because
I edited the 2015 Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecture by David Magleby, which
is published in the current issue of BYU
Studies Quarterly. No, Magleby didn’t promote the Democrats. He spoke about
the necessity of political parties in the U.S. and the importance of
compromise. He made such a solid case for becoming politically involved and
joining a party that I followed his advice. “So what do you do as a citizen if
you don’t like either of the parties?” he asked. “You work to change the one
you dislike the least.” Since I pretty much completely dislike what the
Republican Party has become, it was a fairly easy choice. There is a secondary
benefit for me in joining the Democratic Party. Magleby put it this way: “Having
two competitive parties moderates outcomes and reduces corruption.” He
suggested that some of the political and governmental problems we’ve been experiencing
in Utah may be due to the dominance of one party. So, in my small,
insignificant way, I’m doing my part to bring the state back into balance.
But that’s not
the primary reason for my decision. The main motivator is that I cannot, in
good conscience, support the GOP’s rapidly accelerating descent into madness (both kinds).
Before I was unaffiliated, I was a Republican. My exit from the GOP ranks was
due to economic issues, but since then the Republican positions on almost
everything have had me shaking my head. I sometimes wonder if many of my fellow
Utah Mormons have thought much about the array of Republican positions they
effectively support by voting straight “R.” I still remember a discussion we
had in high priests group one Sunday several years ago, when a good friend of
mine expressed what I fear is a common belief among LDS Republicans. “Well,
what other issues are there?” he exclaimed, referring, of course, to the two
determining issues for many Mormons: abortion and same-sex marriage.
Well, actually,
there are a lot of other issues. And since even a Republican Congress and a
conservative-leaning Supreme Court haven’t been able to reverse abortion law
and have legalized same-sex marriage, these two issues seem to offer rather
weak reasons for ignoring all the other pressing problems of the day.
The Purpose of Government
What we have at
the core of the two major political parties is a fundamental philosophical
disagreement over the whole idea of government. While the Democrats have
generally regarded government as an extension of the people, a tool we citizens
can employ to help create a more just, equitable, peaceful, and prosperous
society, Republicans have taken a strongly negative view. Government, if you
believe Republican rhetoric, is evil. It's something to get angry about. It is the source of our problems, not a
possible solution to the many perplexities of the modern world. According to
GOP dogma, the less government, the better. The flip-side of this particular coin
is that the free market (which, by the way, is a total myth) is the solution to
virtually every problem we might face, from health care to financial
shenanigans. But with all the antigovernment rhetoric spewing from the
Republican Party over the past couple of decades, we might profitably ask just
what the GOP thinks the purpose of government actually is. If the federal
government is evil and intrusive, if it is the problem rather than part of the
solution, then what role is the government supposed
to play? I’ve been paying close attention to the presidential debates and
to rhetoric from the Republican Congress, and, as far as I can tell,
Republicans believe government should:
1. cut taxes, especially on the
wealthy
2. increase the size and cost of
the military
3. wage wars
4. allow businesses to
self-regulate
5. extract and burn as much fossil
fuel as possible
6. increase pollution
7. oppose efforts to reverse global
warming
8. keep the minimum wage at 1950s
levels
9. take away health insurance from
the poor and the sick
10. increase hunger
11. make education a function of
class
12. allow criminals, terrorists,
and the mentally ill to easily procure firearms
13. deport all undocumented
workers, even those who harvest our food
14. allow the infrastructure to
crumble
15. give handouts to corporations
16. drown itself in a bathtub
You may think I’m
engaging in hyperbole. Far from it (well, except for the last one, which was actually
proposed by that famous GOP tax scholar Grover Norquist). If you look at the
positions staked out by the dozen or so remaining GOP presidential hopefuls and
by most Republicans in Congress, these are the predictable and reasonable results
of the policies they promote. So let’s look at a few of these policies.
Voodoo Economics
Supply-side
economics has had over thirty years to prove its merits. So, what are the
results? Well, it has been so thoroughly discredited by actual experience that
even George H. W. Bush’s snarky label has proved to be too tame. It’s really
more like zombie economics. Every time you think it’s finally been killed, it
rises from its grave to plague us for another election cycle. Even though it
has given us 1920s-style inequality, deficits through the roof, and increasing
poverty, it is still the universally accepted economic dogma of the Republican
Party. The economic plans promoted by the current GOP presidential candidates
simply double down on trickle-down. Tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of
our rogue financial sector, resistance to raising the minimum wage, and cuts to
benefits for the poor and elderly. We know where this leads. It’s the
trajectory we’ve been on for thirty years. We can do the math. Is this really
the future the Republicans want? Apparently so. The problem is that the
Republicans haven’t had an original economic idea since Reagan, and his idea
was a long-term disaster that is still wreaking havoc. The official Republican
economic philosophy, unbelievably, is still that if you cut taxes on the
wealthy, deregulate business even more, and cut Social Security and Medicare
and food stamps, then the economy will magically grow at unprecedented rates
and produce grundles of high-paying jobs. Unfortunately, the math just doesn’t
work out. But facts have simply stopped mattering to the GOP. They invent their
own and repeat them inside their little bubble until they convince themselves
that black is white.
Guns, Science, and Socialism
Two of the hot
issues (pun again intended) in recent years that shed light on the state of the
GOP are global warming and gun control. The arguments Republican politicians
and government leaders offer regarding gun control are so specious they aren’t
even worth rebutting. The top GOP dogs simply shrug their shoulders and say
there’s nothing we can do to stop the carnage. Nothing. It somehow doesn’t
register that almost all other civilized countries have figured this thing out.
Only America is exceptional, but in the wrong way. Unfortunately, the NRA
controls the GOP on this issue. That Congress refuses to close obvious loopholes
in the screening process and even rejects a bill to deny guns to individuals on
the terror watch list is simply mind-boggling. There is not a word in the
English language to describe this sort of stupidity.
And what about
global warming? The Republican response is to deny a virtual worldwide
consensus among scientists, ignore subtle signs such as our rapidly melting
glaciers, mutter unintelligible hints of a scientific conspiracy, and fight
against all reasonable efforts to prevent this crisis before it is too late. This
should not be a political issue. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger sees this. It
should be a human issue. But because the Democrats have accepted the science
and proposed measures to reduce our greenhouse emissions, the Republicans feel
obligated to take the opposite position.
This is the same
sort of thinking that made Obamacare the GOP’s favorite boogeyman. So what if
it was based on conservative ideas, including Mitt Romney’s signature
accomplishment as governor? It was promoted by President Obama, so it had to be
opposed. If the Republicans had really taken the best interests of the American
people to heart, they would have learned from our foreign exemplars in this
matter and pushed for a single-payer system. But that is, gasp, socialism. So
what if “socialized medicine” in many countries provides quality health care to
all members of society at a significantly lower cost than our chaotic market-based
system? (Yes, their systems are not perfect, but they are far better than
anything we’ve concocted.) But no, we can’t learn from other countries. Ideology
always prevails over common sense in the GOP.
The War Party
It’s no secret
that the GOP is the war party. Although they preach deficit reduction because
it attracts votes, they really want to spend a lot more on the military—and
then not fund these expenditures. Even though America has, by far, the most
expensive military in the world. We spend more on our military than the next
ten countries combined. In 2012, we spent $682 billion. China, Russia, the UK,
Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy, and Brazil combined to
spend $652 billion. The Pentagon is one of the largest landholders on the
planet, with 662 military bases in 38 countries, according to Politifact and
the Pentagon. But these numbers may be low because some countries prefer not to
disclose a U.S. military presence. Ron Paul claimed in 2011 that the U.S. had
900 bases in 130 countries. The truth may lie somewhere in between, although
some of these bases are admittedly very small. But still, 662 is a rather
impressive number. Do we really need 40,000 troops in Germany, or 50,000 in
Japan? Which war, exactly, are they fighting?
So what are we
going to do with this massive military? Well, I listened to the recent
Republican presidential debate. Good grief. Except for Rand Paul, it sounded
like a roomful of teenage video game players bragging about all the ways they
were going to create mayhem and carnage. They made Dick Cheney sound like a
Girl Scout. Most of their boasts were reckless and some were either senseless
or illegal. But that’s what it takes to get votes from the GOP base. Would I
trust any of these warmongers to be commander in chief of the largest military
by far in the world? Would I trust them to deal with ISIS? Hardly. If we have
learned anything from the Iraq debacle, it is that usually the more bellicose
we are, the bigger the mess we create. Oh, and by the way, the latest news is
that under President Obama’s more measured response, ISIS has now lost 30
percent of the territory it once held.
The Trump Mirror
Many Utah
Republicans support Donald Trump. But not as high a percentage as in the nation
as a whole. This is not surprising. Most Utahns probably find his crassness and
his absurd policy ideas off-putting. But let’s look at the Trump phenomenon and
what it means. I would suggest that The Donald is not an aberration. He is the
destination the GOP has been heading toward for some time now. He is not the face of the Republican Party. He is the mirror of the GOP. For so long now,
Republicans have been told by their leaders that government is evil; it is the
problem. And compromise is a sellout. The subtle undercurrent of this message,
which most Republicans haven’t been perceptive enough to recognize, is that if you
denigrate the messy democratic process of our republican form of government,
which often produces less-than-optimal results for either political extreme,
you are opening the door to dictatorial methods and leadership from circles
that are not used to engaging in the give and take of democratic negotiation.
In other words, you open the door to Donald Trump, a blowhard billionaire bully.
But The Donald is
actually doing the GOP a big favor, even if he doesn’t win. He is showing
Republicans exactly what they have become. Look at the percentage of the party
that supports even his craziest, most unconstitutional ideas, such as the ban
on Muslims entering the country. If you don’t like Donald, don’t blame him. He’s
not inventing these wacky positions. He’s not the source of the anger. He’s
merely echoing back to the party faithful what they have come to believe and
feel over the past several years of tea-party hysteria and Faux News misinformation.
His views on Hispanics, on women, on Muslims, on other politicians? He only
spouts them because he is shrewd and understands how much they resonate with the
Republican base. If you don’t like The Donald, maybe you don’t belong in the
Republican Party, because he is merely reflecting its real values, what it has
become.
Not Enough Navel-Gazing
After the
thrashing Mitt Romney received in the 2012 election, the GOP party bosses did
some serious navel-gazing. They even commissioned a study to identify what they
would need to do to win the presidency in 2016. The results were predictable.
Demographics in the country were changing. Older white males, who represent the
GOP base, were a shrinking segment of society. They would have to find ways to
appeal to ethnic minorities, women, and younger voters. They would have to
choose a candidate who was not so far right that he would turn off the moderate
independents. So, how did this little exercise in self-analysis go? Obviously,
there was not nearly enough navel-gazing.
Look at the roster
of candidates the GOP has fielded. Not a moderate in the bunch. Well, maybe
John Kasich. On some issues. But who are the leaders at this point, as we head
into the first primaries? Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and a rapidly
fading Ben Carson. Ted Cruz? Seriously? He’s the best hope for beating Trump?
Cruz couldn’t get 10 percent of the moderate vote. He annoys even his fellow
Republican Senators. So much for the GOP learning anything from its own self-study.
This is a party that is totally rudderless and is searching in all the wrong
places for its soul.
So?
Well, maybe more right-leaning
LDS voters ought to look at the party they support and recognize it for what it
has become—and reconsider how they vote.
Bernie Sanders,
anyone?