Must one support big government to be a Democrat?

[TMA68]

For many years I considered myself a political independent, since I found myself at odds with so many of the policy positions of both major parties. Last year, however, I felt that the need to remove the incumbent president from office outweighed the disagreements I had with the only political party that had a realistic chance of defeating him. It was in that spirit that I voted in my first ever presidential primary, casting my vote for Dennis Kucinich (since he was the only candidate who had the courage to vote against against both the "Patriot" Act and the Iraq war resolution).

It was around this time that I tried to establish a positive rapport with local Democrats. Since I was absolutely opposed to virtually everything that Bush had done during his first term, I thought this would be a relatively easy task. No such luck. On several occasions I spoke with Democratic Party activists in my area, and found that the more I revealed where I stood on issues such as the insane drug war, our interventionist ("world policeman") foreign policy, our oppressive monetary system, our anti-labor/pro-land speculation tax system, etc., the more aloof and standoffish they became. The impression I came away with was that they were only interested in people who were willing to march in mindless lockstep with the ideological drumbeat of the Democratic "Leadership" Council (of which the Kerry campaign, it seemed, was a mere extension).

"Think Kerry was wrong to vote for the Iraq war resolution, and to stand by this vote even after the lack of WMDs became known? We don't want you."

"Think Kerry was wrong to vote for the 'Patriot' Act? We don't want you?"

"Think Kerry was wrong to vote for the Homeland 'Security' Act? We don't want you."

"Think Kerry was wrong to vote for the Communications 'Decency' Act (and hence for Internet censorship)? We don't want you."

"Think Kerry was wrong to vote for the Telecommunications Act (and hence for media oligopoly)? We don't want you."

"Think Kerry was wrong to vote for NAFTA? We don't want you."

"Think Kerry was wrong to vote for GATT (and hence for the creation of the WTO)? We don't want you."

"Think Kerry was wrong to vote for the Bipartisan Campaign 'Reform' Act? We don't want you.

"Think Kerry is wrong to support the drug war? We don't want you."

And so on.

"However, if you're willing to join Kerry in criticizing Bush merely on the precise manner in which he's expanding big government (both domestically and globally), not that he's expanding it, then welcome aboard."

No one actually said any of this outright, of course, but that was -- as I mentioned above -- the impression I came away with. Hence my following question:

If one wishes to be a welcomed member of the Democratic Party, must one support big government on every issue other than abortion and gay marriage?

Todd

[TheFarseer]

1. "Big Government Democrats" are a myth

Democrats want government regulation on some things and Repubs want gov't regulation on other things. Neither side is big government or small government that I can see. Republicans think they can cherry-pick issues, point out some facts and ignore contradicting facts and get away with it - and so far they're right!

[Dickie Flatt]

2. To answer your question: no

And if you spend much time here at Democratic Underground, you will find that most of us Democrats don't support the war or the Patriot Act or the various media censorship laws or most of the other things you listed.

[Blue Gardener]

3. No

The Clinton administration reduced the size of government.

[TMA68]

6. No it didn't

The Clinton administration reduced the size of government.

Not in terms of cost and intrusiveness, it didn't.

http://www.jimbovard.com/FYP%20Intro%20chapter.htm

Todd

[LiberalFighter]

7. Bush increased the size of government

Homeland Security

[Blue Gardener]

10. And you think the Bushies aren't intrusive?

Have you heard of the Patriot Act? How about the Schiavo case?

[TMA68]

11. Did you even read my post?

Apparently not, because I made it clear that I oppose the so-called Patriot Act and virtually everything else the "Bushies" have done.

Todd

[wurzel]

4. We do not have "big government". Or anything like it.

Less than 20% of our taxes go to "big Government" programs. The major part goes to Social Security which is an insurance transfer program, military expenditure and pensions, and interest on the national debt. Less than 500b of the over 2200b budget is used to fund the entire Federal Government. After paying for Congress, the Courts, and corporate subsidies very little left for "big government" as the Right describe it.

[TMA68]

8. Orwellian logic

It takes Orwellian logic to conclude that we "do not have big government" when one considers the fact that the U.S. has the world's highest incarceration rate, and the fact that this rate is driven more by laws against consensual "crimes" than by laws against violent or theft-related crimes.

Todd

[libertypirate]

5. No that's a republican myth

Although republicans claim to be the party of smaller government they hoodwink their constituents and expand government. Say one thing do the opposite and everybody is doing it. Expanding government doesn't seem quite bad, it's a perception word.

[Lexingtonian]

9. well, no

If that's what you have actually run into in Ohio, well, the reputation of Ohio as a place where people don't think is vindicated.

Then again, you're not doing so well in that department either.

The country is being run as a colonial society, which was the reality of things when FDR came into office and could only slowly be changed- Johnson got the Civil Rights Act through, and that plus the New Deal and winning WW2 were the salient purposes of the 30-some years of the domination of the FDR Democratic Party. Fighting down the colonialism of 'isolationism'/predatory warfare, Jim Crow and other race/ethnic segregation, and creating a social safety net that kept an Industrial Age society functional enough to win the Cold War.

We've now had 30-some years of domination by the Nixon Republican Party, and it has done the job of reintensifying/maximizing the colonial order and beliefs- the Messianism of the idiots, the legalized predation within and without, the occultism (i.e. power and Death centeredness), the White Man's Burden (which he doesn't bother to lift up), the enforced false social partitions, the abuse of the natural world and people Not Like Us. But the effect was to keep the racist/reactionary ignorant electorates of the late Sixties and mid Seventies from running amok and thus outlast the Russians in the Cold War (even though Jimmy Carter made the key moves that won the thing), to beat the crap out of the uneducatedness and childish psychological dependences and unexamined loyalities of the white working class in God and Country and other Agrarian Age "morality" and "values", and pilfer enough wealth together that the corporations survived the transition to the nearly-Postindustrial present. And right now, there's something of post-Cold War cleanup phase...ugly in the execution, focussed in the Middle East and peripheral societies and last cronies of the Soviet Union, but also necessary to deal with.

The U.S. has grown from a country of 100 million people in 1931 to 200 million in 1964 to 300 million in the present. And it is at a maximal cultural schism/disunity at the moment, a point in which people (rightly) resist a single person making representative decisions- the demand is for committees to make all decisions so that all parts of the spectrum of opinion, and its shifts in the public arena, are represented and influence things. What screws up is necessarily Due Process rights- such a decision process can't possibly work for the individual person with a grievance.

'Small government' is a fantasy and a part of the post-Confederate Heartland mythology that buttresses and ideology of barbarism, of not wanting to meet any positive standards of civilization. It's an argument for a Hobbesian society where there are no minority rights of any kind.

As for your list of grievances, let me suggest that both you and this Democratic Party you claim to have dealt with live in the past. Your problem is that you, and they (supposedly), believe these things you list to be of crucial importance, in the sense that having particular opinions about them enlists you in the True Faith. To me, it's all a lack of perspective and sense of what is relevant in the present on both sides. You're both stuck in the early Eighties as Democrats (if you really are one), and my analysis of Dennis Kucinich from the start was a man whose political positions are perfect for the national situation as it was in ~1984. (For comparison, Gore is a 1986ish and Dean a 1992ish Democrat, Kerry is 1996ish, Gephardt 1980ish.) For comparisons, Dubya is an evolving 1968 and 1972ish Nixon imitation.

My problem with people who champion the Left tradition, i.e. Kucinich and Nader and Dean, is two or threefold. One is that the Left is socially conservative by instincts, and if the Democratic Party is the vehicle to bring American society into the Modern Age (as I think its role is, by the opposition being the predicately anti-Modern party) and knock out the colonial/feudal social and economic order, the Left is laggard rather than elite as a faction. Secondly, the Civil War demonstrated poignantly a pattern seen elsewhere in world history- in pluralistic societies, social rights are equalized before economic ones ever are. The fundamental theory of the Left is wrong in pluralistic societies- which the Left deals with by ignoring pluralism and staying latently or overtly socially conservative.

Now, having cleared the field a little bit, back to 'big government', by which I think you actually mean systematic overreaching and infliction of unnecessary pain on certain sectors of American society.

All of your "problems" are not 'big government', they're government against your interests and come down to things that are at some levels violations of 14th Amendment guarantees of rights and liberties. Violations in spirit, if not in letter, of guarantees of Equal Protection of the Laws, Privileges and Immunities, and Due Process. In fact, the distinction between the two parties really boils down to how (and whether, really) to enforce Section 1.

Your take seems to be what is called "libertarian"- to be adamant about certain enforcements and violations of same that affect your selfinterests. Republicans are essentially the people enlisted to enforce the interests of the Christian and wealthy and white and male (i.e. the powerful) above and to the largest possible exclusion of all others. Democrats are the people who want to see the enforcement of 14/1 to the fullest possible extent- and that means social rights plus implicit economic rights.

If you're sincere, and I have my doubts at this point, you have a choice on your hands. First of all, you convict Kerry so easily of intents you object to rather than admitting he generally went along on those votes- the PATRIOT Act vote was 99-0 or something, and Democrats insisted on the sunset provision. Even the sainted Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus rights at the psychologically worst point of the Civil War in the North and had Maryland's secessionists jailed, on the view that he was dragged into it by their predicate willingness to violence and conspiracy which at that particular moment could not be afforded to be dealt with after the commission.

You can be a Democrat if you acknowledge (1) that Nixon Republicanism holds sway in this country, and some Democratic behavior is admission of its domination and the way the people who champion it are wrongheaded but not absolutely in the wrong, and (2) everyone's rights guaranteed by Section 1 of the 14th Amendment are being violated, with the only proper solution being the enforcement of it for all- there being many, many, people whose rights are being far extensively violated than yours or mine at present. And it will take (3), a personal analysis or faith that the turnaround is near.

Libertarians generally amount to being Republican voters because they can't overcome their selfcentered perspective and discovery of the privileges given the classes they tend to belong to- white, vaguely Christian, male, and the socioeconomic climbing it permits. Republicans who like to smoke pot, as the cliche goes.

[TMA68]

12. Thanks for illustrating my point

If that's what you have actually run into in Ohio, well, the reputation of Ohio as a place where people don't think is vindicated.

Then again, you're not doing so well in that department either.

Coming from someone who is that quick to resort to childish ad hominems, I'll take that as a compliment.

'Small government' is a fantasy and a part of the post-Confederate Heartland mythology that buttresses and ideology of barbarism, of not wanting to meet any positive standards of civilization. It's an argument for a Hobbesian society where there are no minority rights of any kind.

If you're done posturing, would care to explain how this rant against "small government" applies to the issues I raised in my original post? For instance, is the racist drug war your idea of supporting "minority" rights? Or are you going to join your Republican "opponents" in denying that the drug war is even racist?

As for your list of grievances, let me suggest that both you and this Democratic Party you claim to have dealt with live in the past.

Let me suggest that you are exuding the very arrogant closed-mindedness to which I referred in my original post, and that is compelling so many potential allies and members of the Democratic Party to either vote 3rd party or sit home in disgust election after election.

Your problem is that you, and they (supposedly), believe these things you list to be of crucial importance,

While your problem, apparently, is that you think you're a final authority on what is or isn't of "crucial importance," when in fact you are not.

in the sense that having particular opinions about them enlists you in the True Faith.

You, of course, being the supreme authority on why I hold the beliefs that I do. :eyes:

To me, it's all a lack of perspective and sense of what is relevant in the present on both sides.

The Iraq war isn't relevant? Civil liberties aren't relevant?

You're both stuck in the early Eighties as Democrats

What do the early Eighties have to do with opposing the Iraq war and Bush's "Patriot" Act?

(if you really are one),

Well, I'll put it this way, I'm far more opposed to the Bush administration's neo-fascist policies that Kerry is.

My problem with people who champion the Left tradition, i.e. Kucinich and Nader and Dean, is two or threefold. One is that the Left is socially conservative by instincts,

Whatever that means. People who oppose such things as the drug war and Internet censorship are usually defined as socially liberal, not socially conservative.

and if the Democratic Party is the vehicle to bring American society into the Modern Age (as I think its role is, by the opposition being the predicately anti-Modern party) and knock out the colonial/feudal social and economic order, the Left is laggard rather than elite as a faction.

Would anyone care to translate this into plain English? Is this some long-winded way of saying that Democrats should support police state legislation at home and military adventurism abroad? If not, then what? These cryptic generalities are meaningless unless it is explained how they apply to specific issues.

Now, having cleared the field a little bit,

Having cluttered the field, more like it.

back to 'big government', by which I think you actually mean systematic overreaching and infliction of unnecessary pain on certain sectors of American society. All of your "problems" are not 'big government',

False, the "problems" I outlined in my original post are all the result of government legislation.

they're government against your interests and come down to things that are at some levels violations of 14th Amendment guarantees of rights and liberties.

And that are at many levels violations of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th Amendments.

Your take seems to be what is called "libertarian"-

While yours seems to be what is called "authoritarian."

to be adamant about certain enforcements and violations of same that affect your selfinterests.

Here you demonstrate once again that you are not nearly as all-knowing about my political views as you so arrogantly presume to be. I don't use drugs, yet I oppose the drug war. I don't know anyone serving in Iraq, nor am I subject to a possible draft, yet I oppose the Iraq war. I'm neither black nor Muslim, yet I oppose both racial and religious profiling. On issue after issue, it is the "interests" of everyone -- not just myself -- that concern me.

Republicans are essentially the people enlisted to enforce the interests of the Christian and wealthy and white and male (i.e. the powerful) above and to the largest possible exclusion of all others. Democrats are the people who want to see the enforcement of 14/1 to the fullest possible extent- and that means social rights plus implicit economic rights.

Another meaningless generalization since it ignores the question of how it applies to the specific issues I raised.

If you're sincere, and I have my doubts at this point,

I have similar doubts about you.

you have a choice on your hands.

Indeed, we all do.

First of all, you convict Kerry so easily of intents you object to rather than admitting he generally went along on those votes- the PATRIOT Act vote was 99-0 or something,

Russ Feingold didn't put his tail between his legs and meekly "go along" on the Patriot Act, yet was reelected anyway. So I simply don't buy this lame cop-out excuse that I hear every time Democratic politicians vote for anti-civil liberties or pro-imperialist legislation.

and Democrats insisted on the sunset provision.

There is no "sunset provision."

"Under Section 224 (b) 'With respect to any particular foreign intelligence investigation that began before the date on which the provisions referred to in subsection (a) cease to have effect, or with respect to any particular offense or potential offense that began or occurred before the date on which such provisions cease to have effect, such provisions shall continue in effect.' In other words, if the government says that their desire to burglarize, or wiretap you or search your files is part of an investigation that started before December 31, 2005, there is no sunset clause. This could be for a 'potential' offense. What is a potential offense? Something you thought about? Something you might have thought about?" -- http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/112001_f_word.html

Even the sainted Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus rights at the psychologically worst point of the Civil War in the North and had Maryland's secessionists jailed, on the view that he was dragged into it by their predicate willingness to violence and conspiracy which at that particular moment could not be afforded to be dealt with after the commission.

And he was wrong for doing so, just as politicians from both parties were wrong for enacting an anti-Bill of Rights, anti-civil liberties bill they didn't even read.

You can be a Democrat if you acknowledge (1) that Nixon Republicanism holds sway in this country,

Authoritarianism is what holds sway in this country, as evidenced by (among other things) the fact that the U.S. has the world's highest incarceration rate. Republicans bear a large amount of responsibility for this, of course, but so do many of the Democratic legislators who time and time again have voted in favor of police state legislation.

(2) everyone's rights guaranteed by Section 1 of the 14th Amendment are being violated, with the only proper solution being the enforcement of it for all- there being many, many, people whose rights are being far extensively violated than yours or mine at present.

But it matters not whether they acknowledge that rights gauranteed under the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th Amendments are also being violated?

And it will take (3), a personal analysis or faith that the turnaround is near.

Whatever that means.

Libertarians generally amount to being Republican voters because they can't overcome their selfcentered perspective and discovery of the privileges given the classes they tend to belong to- white, vaguely Christian, male, and the socioeconomic climbing it permits.

Authoritarians posing as "Democrats" tend to avoid rational discussion of issues, preferring instead to make veiled personal attacks against those with whom they disagree.

As for your red herring about libertarians, while I do have libertarian viewpoints on many issues, I've never voted for a Republican in my life, because I'm as disgusted with their self-righteous arrogance and fascistic tendencies as I am with many of the Republican-lite "Democrats" who profess to oppose them, all the while voting to advance their neo-fascist agenda.

Todd

[Lexingtonian]

13. a narrow p.o.v.

If you're done posturing,

Uh, thanks...

would <you> care to explain how this rant against "small government" applies to the issues I raised in my original post? For instance, is the racist drug war your idea of supporting "minority" rights? Or are you going to join your Republican "opponents" in denying that the drug war is even racist?

If you need me to spell it out, the distinction between "big" and "small" government is an obsolete argument about the Roosevelt Presidency and the New Deal. The country doesn't have 'big' government and hasn't since WW2, but obviously it has had to scale up the bureaucracy and agencies to deal with the Industrial Age and Cold War and its tripling in population. If you think the correlate involved is overreaching police powers and overpursuit of suspected criminals, as a matter of fact the studies say that the smaller police forces were made and the smaller 'government' got, the worse the civil rights abuses that ultimately resulted. The LAPD is the famous case study. Don't ask me to waste more time on this stuff.

Of course I think the 'War on Drugs' is very highly racist in effect, on the whole foolish and wasteful, and run with a dogmatic idiocy. Almost every DEA agent I've met thinks so too. In fact, I'm spending a good portion of my spare time working to get reenfranchisement of parolees and probationers in the state next door (mine happily doesn't disenfranchise them) where they need a constitutional amendment passed to achieve that. I do it in the slowly won conviction that getting the people recently out of jail the vote back is the first, and among the hardest, step in reforming the whole criminal 'justice' system to meet its so shamefully abandoned aim of rehabilition. I really hope my idea of minority rights and criminal rights, and willingness to work in the gutters and trenches for it meets your approval. If not, maybe my times spent working in a homeless shelter, redistributing surplus food, and fixing up low income housing does.

Let me suggest that you are exuding the very arrogant closed-mindedness to which I referred in my original post, and that is compelling so many potential allies and members of the Democratic Party to either vote 3rd party or sit home in disgust election after election.

Well, no, it's annoyance on my part and something called brusqueness. The narrow and judgmental beliefs you accuse me of are very much on your end. Your inflexible, extremely conventional, terms are very limiting and oversimplifying and are a bit blind to the wider picture. I think 'provincial' is too strong a word, but I think it's worth the effort to accept that other people's frame of reference and perspective might be different, might challenge you in unusual ways, and be at least as functional.

To rephrase my previous post: I think your attack straight on Kerry is on a wrong target and the argument, while I agree perfectly with you on the illiberal legislation being horrible, amounts to the idealist's fallacy of political argument. This fallacy is to insist on abstract ideals being obeyed by other people in every situation, rather than allowing situations to be the particular problems with the limited range of good solutions (if any) that they are in real life.

Well, I'll put it this way, I'm far more opposed to the Bush administration's neo-fascist policies than Kerry is.

Probably true, but he was tasked with coming up with politically viable solutions to the problems, transitions out of the Bushian "solutions", for the national electorate as it was at that time. You are not responsible for any such thing.

Would anyone care to translate this into plain English?

Does the word Modernity mean anything to you as a concept about society, rather than its gizmos? I'll admit the academic talkers make it seem fuzzy and highly unclear, but it's as big an idea as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was about clearing the pervasive occultism and paganism out of European thinking and behavior, which is to say religion, in favor of a clear and simple theism. Modernity is the next step, an advance in human maturity (to progressive people), and involves clearing dogmatic theism out of Western thinking in favor of something else- ultimately an enlightened humanism or personal spiritual experience-based religiosity.

In politics Modernity amounts to people rejecting the authority of much of the doctrines and dogmas of the Divine and Revealed Order of the World of the faith and ethnic traditions. Many or most traditional social divisions (and partitions of political power and wealth) along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and religious beliefs cannot be long sustained in the face of Modernity, because once the claim of God's Will to them (in whatever direct or indirect way) is given up, the rationales for maintaining them are found to be generally smaller than imagined and discovered to be shrinking rapidly- indeed, turning to zero or negative. Modernity means equality, nondiscrimination, meritocracy.

But the pre-Modern world doesn't give up easily. It is the way of the world when/where things are/were more brutal, traumatized, mentally sicker, barbarian, inhumane as a general condition- its God and harsher rules are forms of coping with its higher level of violence, its crueler poverty, its ugly varieties of survival. In order for it to leave us, it demands of us to settle its accounts, bills us all for the trauma and wrongs of the Past. It then tests us harshly on whether our inhumanity has diminished sufficiently.

And that is why the Right is the way it is, talking Culture War, and some kind of sense pervades it all that something irreversible is happening. That is why the politics of the present is so unapologetically nasty and fatalistic and fervent- in the Eighties there was a sense that everything could be undone again. That is why I have put the snippet from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Adress as my .sig- the present is another Civil War, now in its early 1865 stages.

That will be $5,000 for tuition. Just kidding.

False, the "problems" I outlined in my original post are all the result of government legislation.

The solutions involved are also going to involve government legislation, one way or another. Btw, was the 13th Amendment, legislation that it was, 'big government'?

And that are at many levels violations of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th Amendments.

This Administration and its Party don't much respect the body proper of the Constitution much either, if you want to be in any way comprehensive- it would be a much easier and very much shorter exercise to enumerate the parts they have respected fully and properly. You might have all your blank sheets of paper left over if you are meticulous enough.

The common motif is a design against group or class equality/rights, not individual people. In everything these people do there's a preferred/privileged class, and a class of people to be ignored and delegitimated and degraded. It's a matter of subjective choice whether you pick the common motif or the scattershot effect on the rest of the Constitution to describe what they're doing.

While yours seems to be what is called "authoritarian."

I'm a strong federalist, and I do think Brennan's interpretation of the Constitution is the most correct. I consent to using government to stalemate, certainly not to enable, barbarity- that stalemating permits the largest amount of individual and collective freedom. I am fine with people having a comprehensive autonomy; at this point in time all they'll used individualized formulations of sovereignty for is to oppress others. And I am, or at least have been, more of an anti-fascist than you can ever be: real fascism and fascists killed and ruined the lives of enough of my relatives, and I have known enough of the worst kind myself that I can run close to the front of that contest at any victimhood Olympics. Not that I choose to participate. Fascism is just an outward form; the horrid collective reality and spiritual calamity that lies at its bottom is far more important to understand and deal with.

On issue after issue, it is the "interests" of everyone -- not just myself -- that concern me.

Another meaningless generalization since it ignores the question of how it applies to the specific issues I raised.

I am sure you mean well, but you confuse me with your contradictions.

Russ Feingold didn't put his tail between his legs and meekly "go along" on the Patriot Act, yet was reelected anyway. So I simply don't buy this lame cop-out excuse that I hear every time Democratic politicians vote for anti-civil liberties or pro-imperialist legislation.

That's too easy. Any small number of people defecting on something is fine. If the whole caucus had come out against the thing, though, the electorate was not being sufficiently rational about its real and enduring interests at the time to appreciate it. It may not have cost a single individual Democrat reelection, but The People was looking for solidarity and sympathy rather than arguments about its long term interests. The irrationality was manifested in am 85% rallying to Bush and letting Bush do as he pleased for the time being and proposing that a state of war existed. That was the political logic of the situation. As for real harm, very few people were going to care about a few hundred Arab Americans or a few thousand Middle Easterners getting their civil rights violated for a couple of months or a year or two. There was a determination to kill culpable people out there, really.

All the other stuff is less explicable or excusable, I agree. But until sometime in late 2003 and 2004 Democratic politicians really didn't feel activists and electorate backed them, didn't understand the limits they faced, were ingrates and disorganized and will-deficient and unwilling to do the necessary work on their end while they did a good amount of heavy lifting and risk taking. You reflect one variety of the criticism of them. There were unrealistic expectations/hopes/demands on both sides until both sides had to admit that they were powerless without the other's help.

And he was wrong for doing so, just as politicians from both parties were wrong for enacting an anti-Bill of Rights, anti-civil liberties bill they didn't even read.

Again you're asserting abstract ideal where the situational demands surpassed it in importance. I agree with these being violations of things held as earnest in good and moderate circumstances. But in extremely bad circumstances, two or three goods are brought into conflict and one has to be chose as the most important to preserve. I cannot regret that Lincoln, lacking the means to do so otherwise, prevented an uprising in Baltimore that would have required a lot of violence to put down or destroyed the Union cause. The real harm done by Lincoln acting as he did, and with very real regrets, was far smaller. The perfect can be the enemy of the good.

I suspect most Congressfolk didn't even want to read the Patriot Act bill the short time that they had it- they simply trusted the writers to keep it within some bounds, but they surely didn't imagine it was going to be anything but a license to stop and search any Arab or Arab-American. And voted for it grimly and sorrowfully, in the expectation that the Supreme Court would overturn the offensive parts of it as the sense of domestic emergency passed- as was done with Roosevelt's equivalent legislation (which led to e.g. interning the Japanese-Americans) during WW2.

Authoritarianism is what holds sway in this country,

Nixon Republicanism simply is might-is-right. It's all whining and sabotage when out of power. It is the traditional ruling classes. But you're missing the second part, the detail of how it works via the colonial structure and habits of the society, which is what it all defends and intensifies- the predatory corporations, the environmental destruction profiteering, the legal and 'illegal' labor markets, the Messianisms and demonizations, the criminalization of violating caste boundaries, the lawless policing, the courts that serve power rather than justice, the delegitimation of all people who protest the exploitation scheme, its occultism, its upside down 'morality'.

Republicans bear a large amount of responsibility for this, of course, but so do many of the Democratic legislators who time and time again have voted in favor of police state legislation.

You accuse these people of lacking principle, and conversely you yourself can't be bothered with historical perspective or context. What if their voters wanted the police state or empire during that span of time? Black Democratic grassroots activists pushed Democratic politicians very hard to vote for the draconic drug and gun sentences and aggressive enforcement, that's how bad inner city life was due to drugs, dealing, and gang violence at the time in their communities. Should the politicians be "elitist" and deny their voters' urgent and passionate pleas?

But it matters not whether they acknowledge that rights guaranteed under the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th Amendments are also being violated?

I have to think some more about how to explain it in a direct way, but remember that these are not abrogated- parts of the Republican coalition rely on them, so the violation is only selective. Public Christian religiousness and proselytization, packing heat under minor pretexts, not busting nice white suburbanites for pot possession or letting them plead down to probation, minimizing jail terms for white collar crime, and so on is all nicely protected.

The 14th Amendment is the common enemy of every Republican faction. Even the economic ones, who know that it underlies the range and extent/extension of the welfare programs and social safety net, and thus its costs.

Authoritarians posing as "Democrats" tend to avoid rational discussion of issues

Maybe getting you a bit uncomfortable about your conformity and limits to the libertarian perspective, even if you are on the liberal side of it, is worth it.

[TMA68]

14. Once again missing the point

If you need me to spell it out, the distinction between "big" and "small" government is an obsolete argument about the Roosevelt Presidency and the New Deal.

I never even mentioned either the Roosevelt Presidency or the New Deal in the first place, so you are simply attacking another straw man of your own making instead of addressing what I actually said.

The country doesn't have 'big' government and hasn't since WW2,

In terms of intrusiveness, it is far bigger than it was during WW2. But it is obvious you'd sooner say 2+2=5 than admit to this.

but obviously it has had to scale up the bureaucracy and agencies to deal with the Industrial Age and Cold War and its tripling in population.

No, it has chosen to do this. It never "had" to.

If you think the correlate involved is overreaching police powers and overpursuit of suspected criminals, as a matter of fact the studies say that the smaller police forces were made and the smaller 'government' got, the worse the civil rights abuses that ultimately resulted.

The "size" of the police force is not the issue; the issue is the laws they are charged with enforcing. When it comes to drug war, the law itself is the "abuse."

Don't ask me to waste more time on this stuff.

I never asked you to waste any time on anything. If making tortured excuses for the police state policies that "Democratic" legislators keep supporting is too time-consuming for you, then by all means stop doing it.

Of course I think the 'War on Drugs' is very highly racist in effect,

It is so in effect because it is so in design.

on the whole foolish and wasteful, and run with a dogmatic idiocy. Almost every DEA agent I've met thinks so too. In fact, I'm spending a good portion of my spare time working to get reenfranchisement of parolees and probationers in the state next door (mine happily doesn't disenfranchise them) where they need a constitutional amendment passed to achieve that. I do it in the slowly won conviction that getting the people recently out of jail the vote back is the first, and among the hardest, step in reforming the whole criminal 'justice' system to meet its so shamefully abandoned aim of rehabilition.

It is admirable that you're making such an effort, but such an effort wouldn't be necessary were it not for the unjust laws that put so many non-violent offenders in jail in the first place. So at the same time you are treating the symptoms, you are twisting yourself into a pretzel trying to make excuses for the so-called "Democrats" in Congress who continue to support the very laws which caused those symptoms.

I really hope my idea of minority rights and criminal rights, and willingness to work in the gutters and trenches for it meets your approval.

Yes, but what I don't approve of is the pathetically lame excuses you keep giving for what so many Democratic legislators have done to fuel the very fire you're fighting against.

If not, maybe my times spent working in a homeless shelter, redistributing surplus food, and fixing up low income housing does.

While treating symptoms is admirable in and of itself, it does not make supporting (directly or indirectly) the policies that caused those symptoms to begin with any less wrong.

The narrow and judgmental beliefs you accuse me of are very much on your end.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on that point, because I'm more convinced than ever that it is you who are guilty of this, not I.

To rephrase my previous post: I think your attack straight on Kerry is on a wrong target and the argument, while I agree perfectly with you on the illiberal legislation being horrible, amounts to the idealist's fallacy of political argument. This fallacy is to insist on abstract ideals being obeyed by other people in every situation, rather than allowing situations to be the particular problems with the limited range of good solutions (if any) that they are in real life.

Yet another long-winded generalization that does nothing to justify Kerry's support of the policies I mentioned.

Probably true, but he was tasked with coming up with politically viable solutions to the problems, transitions out of the Bushian "solutions", for the national electorate as it was at that time. You are not responsible for any such thing.

A person who aspires to be president is supposed to lead, not follow. Thus, if there is not enough public support for a position he would like to take on a particular issue, then he should have the courage to educate people, to give them all the information that is being ignored or distorted on the corporate TV "news." Yet rather than lead, he chose to follow by appealing to the people's ignorance instead, and in so doing, tried to beat Bush on his own turf.

I'm reminded of the following quote by Noam Chomsky:

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum -- even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

If a politician refuses to challenge these "presuppositions," it is probably because he agrees with them. And if the presuppositions are flawed or flatout wrong, then he should be faulted for supporting them, regardless of what his party affiliation happens to be.

Does the word Modernity mean anything to you as a concept about society, rather than its gizmos?

Does it strike you as possible that this cryptic theory of "Modernity" you keep going on diversionary tangents about has nothing to do with the basic question of whether or not certain "Democrats" in Congress should be supporting police state policies at home and military adventurism abroad? It seems that no matter what question is asked, and no matter how simply it is framed, you use it as an excuse to give yet another half-baked dissertation on something that is at best only remotely connected with the original topic of discussion. I mean really, if someone asks you what time it is, do you start going on about how your theory on "Modernity" applies to timekeeping, all the while neglecting to address the actual question that was asked? Good grief, no wonder the Democratic Party has been struggling lately!

That will be $5,000 for tuition.

Heck, if anything, I should be getting paid for having to wade through all these long-winded diversions just to find the few sentences that are actually on-topic.

That's too easy. Any small number of people defecting on something is fine. If the whole caucus had come out against the thing, though, the electorate was not being sufficiently rational about its real and enduring interests at the time to appreciate it.

How can they be rational if their own representatives won't enlighten them about the bill in question? And how can their reprentatives enlighten them about a bill if they won't even read the blasted thing? If Democratic politicians spent half as much time leading as they do making lame excuses for why they can't stand up for the principles they claim to believe in when it comes time to vote on corrupt legislation, they would probably have won back the House last year, and possibly even the presidency.

It may not have cost a single individual Democrat reelection, but The People was looking for solidarity and sympathy rather than arguments about its long term interests.

No, they were looking for leadership, and the Democrats refused to give it, thus giving Republicans the green light to do practically anything they wanted.

You accuse these people of lacking principle, and conversely you yourself can't be bothered with historical perspective or context.

As we shall see, it is you who can't be bothered with historical perspective or context.

What if their voters wanted the police state or empire during that span of time? Black Democratic grassroots activists pushed Democratic politicians very hard to vote for the draconic drug and gun sentences and aggressive enforcement, that's how bad inner city life was due to drugs, dealing, and gang violence at the time in their communities. Should the politicians be "elitist" and deny their voters' urgent and passionate pleas?

No, they should calmly explain to them that their passionate pleas are misguided, since the drug war itself is the very thing that caused their communities to become war zones for competing drug gangs in the first place (just as Prohibition gave rise to all of the violence that surrounded the alcohol trade during the 1920s and early 30s):

http://druglibrary.org/schaffer

But that would require leadership, and they're too busy following the ignorance of the lowest common denominator to be bothered with the annoying task of leading their constituents in a constructive public dialogue -- the sort of dialogue that, if done with the right purpose in mind, would greatly reduce (if not eliminate) the very ignorance which so often fuels the passionate pleas for wrongheaded "solutions."

Todd

[funflower]

15. Be NICE to the guy, would you?

He's new.

Welcome to DU, TMA68!

No, you don't have to be a believer in "big government" to be a democrat. Nobody but you has the power to decide whether you "can" be a democrat. You can be a democrat if you want to be a democrat.

If you hang around here long, you'll see that democrats disagree amongst themselves on one or two issues....


:hi:

[Name removed]

16. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[kevsand]

17. Waaayyyyy off topic.

Yes, of course, we should support the troops and support their families (something the Bush admin refuses to do), but wtf does that have to do with this thread?

Start your own thread for this, please. And while you're at it, your pleas to support the families of the troops would reach a wider audience if your lyrics weren't quite so jingoistic. Through no fault of their own, the troops currently in Iraq are not fighting for anyone's freedom.