Thanks to the Virginia Tech/Appalachian game not turning out to be very interesting, I watched part of the Tea Party for America rally in Indianola, Iowa, this afternoon. And I got very sad… but not for the reasons you might think.
I flipped over not long before Sarah Palin was to begin speaking (so she decided to go after all). As much as I disagree with Palin, I have to give her credit for always being an energetic, and in my view, a quite skilled public speaker. She does have a gift for connecting with crowds, which isn’t easy to do.
Palin spent part of her remarks talking about what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” For several minutes, for the first time in my life, I found myself nodding in agreement with Sarah Palin. You can watch the whole speech at the video linked above (starting at about the 1 hour 47 minute mark), but basically what Palin said in this portion of the speech wouldn’t have been out of place at a meeting of the Progressive Democratic Caucus.
Palin’s absolutely, 100 percent right that there’s a permanent political class in this country that doesn’t have much incentive to fight too hard for the interests of ordinary people. I wish that she’d been more explicit in pointing out that this is a problem in both parties (and arguably more for the GOP), but I give her credit for saying it.
And that’s when I got sad. I got sad because I realized how completely this power structure has succeeded in dividing working class Americans and pitting us against one another. Progressive Democrats and Tea Partiers have more values in common than either side realizes. We’re both disgusted with a government that isn’t as afraid of us as it should be.
But too many of us have bought into the big lies we’ve been told about each other, and it’s hard to believe we can ever find common ground. We certainly don’t agree on everything, but the good news is, we don’t have to. It’s ok to build a coalition based on the areas where we can come together, and agree to disagree on others.
Before we can be friends, though, this is what I need the Tea Party to know:
· Y’all have to stop acting like everyone who disagrees with you on, say, the Earned Income Tax Credit secretly wants to dig up Thomas Jefferson’s corpse and sell it to communist China. Dial back the knob a few notches. We’re all in this together. I won’t call you a racist wingnut if you won’t call me a socialist. Agreed?
· For people who think the government is almost never the answer, y’all sure do ascribe to it all kinds of spooky influence. Case in point: the guy who performed right before Palin’s speech complaining about his privately owned record label dropping him after several privately owned radio stations refused to play his song. That sucks, but it’s the free market at work, isn’t it? Other things the government is not involved with: unions; music you don’t like; young men wearing saggy pants; unwed mothers; gay people existing. If you’re strictly a political movement devoted to fiscal conservatism, then stick with that.
· I’m a proud Democrat, and I don’t think the government is the solution to every problem. There are some things governments can’t do efficiently, and others it just shouldn’t have any business doing. Every time I get tempted to envision a massive federal program, I pretend Dick Cheney’s in charge of it. Cures me every time. Any reasonable person can admit that there are serious problems with many government programs, and those are the things we’d be able to talk about, and maybe even fix, if we could unite long enough to go up against some very influential special interest groups.
· Speaking of Cheney… This is a thing that many liberals have an issue with, myself included. Where were you guys during the Bush Administration, when Cheney in particular pushed for unprecedented expansion of executive power, and the GOP-led Congress rubber-stamped billions in unfunded expenses? From my point of view, President Obama telling your health insurance provider that it can’t boot you off when you actually get sick kind of pales in comparison to things like no-knock warrants, getting Western Union to report overseas transactions to the feds, and a little thing like leaving the budget for an entire war off the books. Let me put it this way… if, in the first months of the Bush Administration, a huge chunk of Democrats funded by George Soros organized a movement to drum out cigars in the White House, you’d call BS, right?
· You have to admit that the government DOES make your life better in at least some way. You guys are big on history, right? Twice in our country we’ve tried a confederate-type government, and it worked neither time. Unless you don’t use public roads, don’t drink clean municipal water, have never needed a student loan and send your Social Security check back every month, you have to admit this.
· Speaking of history… it’s true that the 10th amendment to the Constitution assigns anything not explicitly outlined elsewhere to the states. But this hasn’t always worked perfectly in actual practice. It wasn’t that long ago that the federal Justice Department had to intervene in local issues because African American people were being killed. Not looked at funny, not merely kept out of school. Straight up murdered. For the act of demanding for their children the liberty y’all talked about so much today. And this happened within the lifetime of people who are only in middle age today. Can you put yourself in their shoes long enough to understand why many people in this country still think of the federal government as the ultimate hope?
· More history… the last time our country was in an economic crisis, it was massive federal spending that got us out of it. The leaders proposing stimulus after stimulus aren’t evil. They’re just uncreative.
In a nutshell, that’s where I’m coming from. Again, I genuinely believe that Tea Partiers and I have more in common than we know. I also genuinely believe that the solution to our problems isn’t to demonize each other and retreat to our respective corners. Let’s talk. For real.
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