Letter 2 America for September 3, 2013

Dear America,

In one of my favorite movies, the villainous protagonist, a corporate raider trying to take over a wire and cable company, addresses the annual shareholders meeting in opposition to the extant, humanistic founder's team--who point out that they respect their workers and treat them fairly, and they play a responsible role in the community by cleaning up their own pollution--to try to convince the shareholders that they should authorize the marauder's new team to run the company by dividing it up and selling its assets for more than the company's stock is then worth.  He wraps up his argument by telling them that attracting a larger and larger share of an ever decreasing market is a sure-fire route to corporate disaster.    Imagine, he challenges all present, that you own the last company making buggy whips in America as the last horses and buggies disappear from the road.  I'll bet you would make the best buggy whip in the world, he tells them, but do you want to own that company?  And that modern homily on corporate philosophy begs many other questions as well: is there such a thing as too much horizontal integration, which results in diminishing returns rather than increasing ones; if there is a cost, should a corporation be concerned about the employees; are we good guys because we are ultimate capitalists, or are we bad ones.  Of course there are many more questions that little scene from "Other People's Money" raises, but the real issue is, do we ever ask them.  That's really a question for Republicans than for Democrats as a function of socio-economic policy, but it is also a political paradigm in some respects, because politics is largely a business these days.  People get into it as a career, and they often get rich as a consequence.  But putting money aside, if the Republicans are sincere as human beings...if they truly believe the things they say they do...don't they have a vested interest in being something other than the best political buggy whip maker in America?  I'm talking about Tea Party conservatism now.

On the front page, above the fold, in Saturday's New York Times, an article titled "G.O.P. SENATORS FAIL TO HEAD OFF TEA PARTY RIVALS" began.  The story was about a phenomenon that we have seen evolving for nearly a decade now, but that finally manifested itself under the rubric "The Tea Party."  In real political terms, it started with the election in 2010 really, when there was a large enough contingent of single-minded fiscal conservatives with microphones to constitute a critical mass, and they got heard by enough people at the grass roots level that they could commandeer for themselves a cute, politically recognizable though inapposite name and run with it.  Rallies popped up everywhere and the politics of self-serving myth was born full-blown, starting with the fact that the Boston Tea Party was indeed about taxes, but the myth that it was about too many taxes paid by colonists rather than too few being paid by merchants selling tea for a mercantile syndicate created by and operating under the aegis of the British government.  That tax break gave the British East India Company a competitive edge over the colonist tea-smugglers who dressed up as Indians one night to protest.  In other words, those who perpetrated the real tea party were just criminals objecting to the strategy of the government in making them uncompetitive and driving them out of business, but I digress.  The point of the article was that the very contingent of the conservative movement in this country that chose to go by the name Tea Party, is becoming the driving political force within the Republican Party, which has been the voice of conservatism until recently.  But now that conservatism has lapsed into a procrustean, reactionary rant, the Republican Party is getting a greater and greater share of ultra-conservative votes, but conservative Republicans are becoming a smaller and smaller component of the American electorate.  As a consequence, Senators--who get elected in state-wide elections--get beaten by Tea Party activists in primaries in which party trends are not diluted by overall popular trends, but the Republicans who do get nominated cannot get elected when the populace at large votes because the Tea Party may be the majority among Republicans, but they are just irrational right wingers to the rest of us.  And thus, the Republican dream of taking the majority in The Senate is nothing more than a pipe-dream it seems.

Still, Tea Party conservatism is a problem for all of us because our representatives in the House of Representatives do not get elected state-wide.  They are elected in districts that are revised every ten years when there is a constitutionally mandated census, as there was in 2010, and in most states, the legislatures redraw the districts to concentrate the political power of the majority party on the state level.  That sounds like politics as usual, but it is something much more insidious, because the House of Representatives is populated by people who vote in accord with the popular wishes prevailing in their states, but against the interests expressed by the majority of the American people by a significant margin, simply because they have concentrated the power of Republican conservatives through this redistricting process.  That is what prevents the Republican Party from reentering the American political mainstream: self-destructive wielding of local and state political power, and that is why Washington is standing still: The Senate represents the nation but The House represents state and local politicians.  And while I suppose I would rather have inaction than conservative action, we can't go on like this forever.  Conceding to the minority is not compromise, but that is the only way in which forward political motion can be created since our second major party is dominated by a determined minority that refuses to compromise, so what are we to do short of capitulating to the demands of an ever-more strident and intractable minority.

 

The irony of all this is that main-stream Republicans are saying these things all the time, but the only way in which they can reemerge as the guiding contingent in the Republican Party is to adopt the tactics used by the very contingent that is wreaking internecine strife on the party as a whole.  It surprises me a little, but I find myself hoping that the Republicans figure that out, because the only way we can succeed as Democrats is with a rational Republican Party at our side...and the prospect of that is not too good these days.  The Republican Party may well have made the best buggy whip in American politics

Your friend,

Mike