Falsifying the Results. Conservatives are making lots of strange, silly noises about how the election that overthrew the Republican Party in Congress wasn't a repudiation of conservatism and the policies of the Bush Administration at all. Rather, the voters were showing their genuine conservatism by reproaching an Administration that had lost its way and abandoned its own policies. Democrats have swung far to the Right, away from the Left, and it was their conservative switch that enabled people to vote Democratic. Sure, sure. Whatever you say.
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So conservatives should be ecstatic with the result, right? They have triumphed, the Left has been defeated. Nancy Pelosi is Ronette Reagan and Barrie Goldwater all rolled up in one.
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These same commentators pretend that Bush abandoned Reaganite fiscal conservatism, so was punished for embracing pork-barrel politics. This entirely falsifies the Reagan Revolution, which tripled the national debt during Reagan's two terms and added a third to that enlarged debt under his vice president, the elder George Bush, when he continued the Reagan Revolution in his own (one) term. So the Reagan Revolution was the exact opposite of fiscally conservative. It quadrupled the national debt in 12 years!
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The New York Post pretends that the Nation's economy stands to lose big due to Democratic takeover, because Democrats will at once let the tax cuts that Bush Republicans instituted end, restoring the tax rates under Clinton, and retain what the Post dishonestly calls "the widely despised death tax". But under Clinton, we had so much economic growth that we achieved the greatest budgetary surplus in the history of the world! Wouldn't that be fiscally conservative? And the "estate tax" — not "death tax" — is widely adored by people who understand that it affects only the very rich, has never been aimed at the poor or middle class, and reduces the need for money to be taken from the poor and middle class by bringing in more money from the rich. At end, then, truly progressive taxation is fiscally conservative, because it puts the Nation in the black, not red, and puts more money in the pockets of people who actually spend it, not tuck it away in bank accounts — some offshore.
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One thing that has changed, however, is the Red-Blue dichotomy. Bob Beckel, a self-described Liberal, suggested late on the nite of the election, that the whole Red-Blue thing was never accurate and is now meaningless. I disagree that it was never meaningful, but agree that the color-coded map has changed dramatically, especially if you look at governorships and the U.S. Senate map. Part of what has happened is a realization by conservative voters that the Republican version of conservatism did not match their own. But part is also a reflection of the dispersion of population from Liberal areas to historically conservative areas in search of winter warmth.
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Arizona surprised much of the Nation in rejecting an attempt to restrict marriage to a man and a woman, the only state's voters to do so. Why Arizona? Because Arizona has attracted retirees from more liberal parts of the Nation. So has the South, but the South is hugely populated, whereas Arizona was litely populated before the silver set chose to spend their golden years in the sun.
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While older people tend to be more conservative than they were in their youth, Northeastern and Midwestern Liberals who become a bit more conservative in their old age are still more Liberal than people taught to be conservative from birth. Arizona also, like much of the Southwest, now has a significant and growing population of immigrants who have become citizens, and their more Liberal stands on some issues will be making increasing impact on the politics of the entire Southwest, including even Texas, in time.
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Alas, many Mexican immigrants are socially far more conservative than Northern retirees, but it's easy to allow your values to evolve when you are physically and financially comfortable, and freed from the social immobility of hidebound Mexico. Allowed by society and by financial circumstance to think new thoughts, many Latinos question the restrictive traditions imposed upon them in their youth, so may go thru the reverse of the process Northern Liberals experience and become more Liberal as they get older, not less. As they begin to feel that they can be what they want to be rather than what they were told to be, they begin to accept that other people have the right to be what they want to be too.
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The vote against gay marriage even where it passed was apparently less overwhelming than earlier votes in other states. The country has started to relax about this issue. Civilization as we know it did not collapse when Massachusetts legalized gay marriage; it didn't end when Arizona rejected a ban on gay marriage. Ten years from now, we can expect same-sex "marriage", "civil union", or other such arrangements to be legal in a host of states. And civilization will still not have collapsed into chaos.
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Charles Thorpe, one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front at San Francisco State in 1970, wrote something that has remained with me in all the years since (approximate quote): "You know what you get when you mix red, white, and blue? Lavender." Fortunately, we are sufficiently advanced now that the homosexual-rights movement doesn't have to emasculate itself with soft images (pink, lavender) but can be as hard-edged, red-white-and-blue as everybody else. But his observation still holds.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,853 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:49 PM