February 2001
If, as Dr Carasso suggests, a segment of the so-called working class actually believes that the Republican Party has their best interests at heart, they are simply not paying attention. However, if indeed, this be the case, one is reminded of the first third of Abraham Lincoln's famous dictum, the part that states, "you can fool some of the people all of the time".
Accepting that Carasso's assessment is in fact true, it is a measure of the resounding success of the Republican's doubly duplicitous strategy aimed at rescinding decades of social progress in the name of compassionate conservatism while, at the same time, attempting to commandeer traditional Democratic benchmarks such as Social Security as if they were Republican inventions. Their reasons for now embracing programs that they once fought tooth and nail when they were first introduced by Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression, may have more to do with the fact that such programs are extraordinarily popular in America today, and not because, uncharacteristically, they fit into a grand Republican scheme for social uplift; any attempt to rescind them now would be political suicide.
If the past decade is any criterion, the Republican aversion to change as averred by Carasso's working person is clearly contrary to recent history. Gingrich's Contract on America's main focus was to force draconian reductions in the Federal Government. The principal targets at that time were the Department of Commerce, The Department of Education, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Administration. One is compelled to conclude that Republicans considered the administration of weather prediction, telecommunications, air traffic, the oceans, the atmosphere, the census, the environment, atomic and other forms of energy, public education and countless other governmental functions and services performed by these agencies were either unimportant or not within the province of government. However, in the past few weeks we have witnessed that not only are these agencies no longer under attack but that in some cases they will be headed by the same persons who lobbied for their destruction only a few years earlier.
To be sure, Republicans since Ronald Reagan seem to be immutably attached to certain beliefs and principles of conduct. Current pronouncements and enactments of the newly installed president show the party irrevocably committed to enacting a broad spectrum of anti-social edicts and legislation, adversely affecting the future of persons, groups, places, and democratic processes, viz., women with problematic pregnancies; gays; lesbians; minorities; the very poor; the drug addicted; organized labor; the United Nations; foreign aid; arms control; endangered forests; endangered species; endangered wetlands; the purity and health of our air, water and soil; campaign reform; gun control; education in the natural sciences; the separation of church and state; escalating populations; and thus on and on. At the first level these unrelenting assaults are aimed at curtailing human rights achieved at great cost over the past half century; at the second, they are designed to frustrate attempts by concerned citizens and professional environmentalists to salvage a planet rapidly deteriorating at the hands of avaricious, crass and exploitative business practice.
Despite the enormous volume of politically oriented verbiage broadcast by the electronic and print media during the recent political campaign, the less affluent among Republican voters never quite got the message that under the Bush tax plan the richest 1 percent of Americans will receive 100 times more in tax relief than the middle class and 1000 times more than their low-income brethren. W's assertion that "everyone deserves a tax cut" is merely a cruel deception intended to capture the workingman's vote on the false premise that it will somehow improve his economic well being. The more probable result of this tax plan and the concurrent one that abolishes all estate taxes, will be to widen the breach between the very rich and the very poor. James Madison, defending the newly drafted U.S. Constitution in the Federalist Papers, expressed the conviction that government had the duty to maintain a balance between the weak and the strong members of society, i.e., to protect the former against the ravages of the latter. In the end, Bush's tax plan, tilted so extravagantly towards the rich, will harm the workingman far more than it will help him.
America's vast military establishment is a product of over five decades of bipartisan congressional cooperation intended to ward off the Communist threat during the Cold War era. It is not, of itself, an economic benefit to the nation as Carasso's working man is apparently disposed to believe. Armies and navies consume vast amounts of the nation's resources in men and treasure. Their purpose is to provide the security that a nation requires to carry on its peaceful pursuits in commerce, science and the arts. They do not return a profit unless, perversely, we were to turn them into mercenaries and to divert our war industry to the production of weapons for export (which it does to a very significant degree at the present time) so that other countries may continue at will to murder their own citizens and those of their neighbors.
The Republican predilection for ever more massive destructive power in our armed forces goes far beyond the need to ensure the security of the United States. At some point this overabundance of military might becomes an agent for global instability rather than an agent for global peace. The notion that the U.S. must invest $trillions in a National Missile Defense (NMD) boondoggle, purportedly to defend ourselves from the likes of North Korea, Iraq and Iran (but in fact designed primarily to sustain the domestic aerospace industry), is an outrageous absurdity. Our allies and friends around the world fear rather than welcome this intrusion into the present, relatively placid state of international affairs. Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has warned the U.S. that NMD might "trigger a renewed arms race." A Japanese news agency describes NMD as "not a shield but a spear".
One sure outcome of a massive rearming in the U.S. over and beyond any reasonable need will be that former enemies, notably Russia, on their own admission, will, with regret, void all existing arms control treaties with the U.S. and, presumably, will commence a rearmament program of their own to counter this unprovoked aggressive move on the part of the United States. The second victim of this inane policy will be the venerable and long lasting Antiballistic Missile treaty in place since 1972. The first victim was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, rejected by the Republican dominated Senate in October 1999.
One wonders how it is possible that Carasso's working person can swallow Republican claims that they favor small government. Never in the history of this nation has a government become so big, so powerful, so pervasive, so intrusive and so profligate as during the twelve years of Reagan and Bush. Rather than grow the size of government predicted by Republicans, President Clinton's eight years in office witnessed shrinking budgets, not only as a natural consequence of the end of the Cold War, but in real terms: the civilian federal work force decreased 25% relative to the size of the U.S. population from 1992 to 2000.
Far from staying "away from my private life", the Reagan-Bush program of moral absolutes obtrusively entered the private lives of individuals in ways reminiscent of the medieval church. By executive decree Reagan forbade doctors and clinicians receiving federal support to even mention birth control or abortion options for women experiencing problem pregnancies resulting from medical, domestic or financial duress. Agencies, in the U.S. and abroad, were forbidden to use their own money to provide birth control information or abortion services if they received any financial support from the U.S. Government. Tragically, the same fanatical cycle begins anew with the Bush II presidency.
The notion that environmental interests must conflict with good business practice wherever these forces happen to intersect has been vigorously promulgated by the Republican propaganda mill and is clearly believed by Carasso's working person. The fact that this premise is quantifiably false has been demonstrated repeatedly by business groups who actually adopted environmentally friendly practices and discovered that their production, profits and their standing in the community improved significantly in the short term, measured in years. In the long term, measured in decades, the relentless Republican hostility towards government regulations that enforce standards for clean air, clean water, toxic-free soils, protecting species and ecosystems, will not only endanger the future well being of the U.S. economy but will ultimately create a backlash, directed at the responsible lawmakers as well as the miscreant polluters.
It is a curious thing that Carasso's working person's fondness for Republicans is due in part because "they follow the Bible and the Judeo-Christian traditions", but then expresses his dislike of gays, lesbians and presumably all others who appear to diverge from his concept of virtuous living. Perhaps the statement that best reveals the mentality of this prototypical personality is the assertion, "America has always been a country of Anglo-European culture and ethnicity". Aside from this wrenching display of naked bigotry, this person is completely ignorant of American history. All of this leaves the rest of us with the nagging suspicion that perhaps this vignette may not be just an anomalous distortion but may in fact be an accurate microcosm of the greater truth.
Howard Garcia