The difference between Republicans and Democrats

"The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good." With that philosophical premise, former Oklahoma Rep. J.C. Watts (R) isolated the differences between members of the two political parties in the clearest manner I've ever heard, and the implications of his statement are considerable, as it explains many Republican policies for at least a generation.

Watts made the remarks in Pella, Iowa, while stumping for Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) presidential bid prior to the Iowa caucuses. Watts drew the nation's attention first as the quarterback who led the Oklahoma Sooners to consecutive Orange Bowl victories over Florida State in 1979 and 1980. He was subsequently ordained as a Baptist minister, and served in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Oklahoma from 1995 to 2002.

Torrential rain fell outside as Watts addressed a small but supportive audience of maybe a dozen at Smokey Row Coffee Co. under an American flag. It was tough to determine who was there to see Watts, or who had just come for lunch. Watts was accompanied by nearly as many Paul staffers, volunteers and Iowa Republican operatives as there were people there to hear him speak.

Watts was answering a question regarding his position on the Second Amendment when he stated Republicans believe that people are fundamentally bad and Democrats believe the opposite: that they are good.

"We are born backwards into this world," he said. "We are born bad ... no one has to teach a child how to behave badly — they are born knowing how to do that ... we teach them how to be good. We become good by being reborn — born again ... Democrats believe that we are born good, that we create God, not that he created us. If we are our own God, as the Democrats say, then we need to look at something else to blame when things go wrong — not us."

He continued: "So take the theater shootings in Lafayette [La.] — Republicans know that this was a bad man, doing a bad thing. Democrats will look for other causes — that the man was basically good, but that it was the guns, society or some other place where the blame lies and then they will want to control the guns, or something else — not the man. We don't need to look anywhere else for the blame. It's the man."

While I didn't hear Watts use the term "sinner" specifically, men being born "bad" seems an equivalence. As the Christian faith says we are all born sinners, and therefore "bad," no wonder welfare recipients are often portrayed by many Republicans as irresponsible, lazy and exploiting the system. Continuing Watts's logic, while Democrats would see welfare recipients as good people who have fallen on hard times, Republicans see them at bad people — sinners — whose personal failings and lack of faith put them in the bad position. No wonder those who share Watts's views want to cut government programs, and let the church handle relief, as it is only with the guidance of the church that they can become "good," while no amount of government support can possibly do that.

With this simple logic — that all behavior not in the best interest of society is the product of "bad" actors with no influence by external social or environmental factors — this philosophy effectively calls for the end to all of the social sciences. Poverty doesn't influence crime rates, inequality isn't an issue, institutional and structural violence isn't something to take seriously, all for example. That is, if we all become good — born again — everything will be fine. Research isn't needed. Facts aren't needed. All one needs is the "right" ideology to solve all of the world's problems.

Play this logic out with every major policy issue that separates Republicans and Democrats, from immigration to market regulation, gun control, climate change, foreign policy — you name it — and there are significant implications which illustrates why the parties are on such different paths. A bipartisan solution to a problem is impossible if the root causes of the problem are seen as fundamentally different at this basic philosophical level.

Do all of the Republican candidates believe this? That people are inherently bad? Since all are declared Christians, and the faith requires one to see all as sinners, maybe so. And if not explicitly, perhaps implicitly or subconsciously. Many Republican policies back to President Reagan certainly suggest so, and maybe Watts's generalization about the differences between Republicans and Democrats is spot on.

Leonard covered the 2008 and 2012 Iowa caucuses for KNIA/KRLS Radio in Knoxville and Pella, Iowa. He is an anthropologist and author of Yellow Cab.

"Anthropologist"

A good cleansing mental chaser:

The Perils of Designer Tribalism

".......... The Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall does not mention The Tears of the White Man in The Culture Cult, his new collection of essays. But his discussion is everywhere informed by the same spirit of salutary impatience. What Bruckner criticizes as Third Worldism, Sandall castigates as “romantic primitivism” and (marvelous phrase) “designer tribalism.” What is romantic primitivism? In the words of Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, it is “the unending revolt of the civilized against civilization.” Sandall begins with a small but telling contemporary example. In 1996, the actress Lauren Hutton took her two young boys to Africa to witness a bunch of Masai warriors and their witch doctor perform a tribal dance, slaughter a cow, and drink some warm blood straight from the carcass. The whole spectacle was captured for the television audience by Ted Turner’s minions. Miss Hutton loved it: according to Sandall, “Wow!” was her frequent refrain. But her young children, one of whom burst into tears, were terrified. Quite right, too. The purpose of the television show was to show that “Masai culture is just as good as Western civilization, if not better.” Miss Hutton’s enthusiasm was sparked by the display of “authentic” tribal passion. But her children saw the episode for what it was: a glimpse into the heart of darkness, the abyss of uncivilized barbarism.

What Sandall describes as “the culture cult” dreams of a new simplicity: a mode of existence that is somehow less encumbered, less rent by conflicting obligations than life in a modern industrialized democracy. It is a vain endeavor. The romanticization of the primitive only emphasizes one’s distance from its simplicities. Romanticism in all its forms is an autumnal, retrospective phenomenon: the more fervent it is, the more it underscores the loss it laments. “It is time,” Sandall writes, “to stop dreaming about going back to the land or revisiting the social arrangements of the past.” Miss Hutton’s happy ejaculations were prompted by such dreams. What she heard among those Masai savages as they danced about and drank blood was Pascal Bruckner’s “enchanting music of departure.” But it is, alas, a departure to nowhere. As Sandall observes, life is about “ever-extending complexity.” To deny that is to neglect the “Big Ditch” (Ernest Gellner’s term) that separates the modern world from its primitive sources. On one side of the ditch is the rule of law, near universal literacy, modern technology, and the whole panoply of liberal democratic largess. On the other side is— what? “Most traditional cultures,” Sandall writes, “feature domestic repression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism, and severe artistic constraints. If you want to live a full life and die in your bed, then civilization—not romantic ethnicity—deserves your thoughtful vote.”

The Culture Cult is partly a brief for the Enlightenment values of universal culture and scientific rationality, partly an attack of the various atavisms that Sandall sees impeding the growth of those values. Its method is not systematic but exemplary. Sandall proceeds through a number of illustrative case studies. There are not many heroes in this book. One finds kind words for Ernest Gellner and for Karl Popper’s book The Open Society and Its Enemies, written in the 1940s when Popper was in New Zealand. For the most part, however, The Culture Cult is a tour through an intellectual and moral rogues’ gallery. There are suitably wry bits about anthropological fantasists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, anti-industrialist utopians like Robert Owen (founder of the New Harmony commune), and randy utopians like John Humphrey Noyes (founder of the Oneida Community). Sandall also devotes whole chapters to Isaiah Berlin and to the bizarre anti-free-market rantings of Karl Polanyi. It is useful to be reminded that Polanyi, writing in 1960, believed that “West Africa would lead the world” and that record-keeping with pebbles and rafia bags in eighteenth-century Dahomey rivaled the achievements of IBM.

Most of the figures Sandall deals with are familiar. Like Bruckner and many others before him, he singles out Rousseau and the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder as the spiritual grandparents of romantic primitivism. Rousseau contributed the hothouse emotional sentimentality, Herder the völkisch celebration of cultural identity at the expense of assimilation and a recognition of universal humanity. (As the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observed, “from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire, human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity.”)

Sandall's real target is the assumption—common coin among anthropologists—that “culture” is a value-neutral term and that, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it in 1951, one had to “fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically.” In his book The Savage Mind—which argues that there is no such thing as the savage, as distinct from the civilized, mind—Lévi-Strauss spoke blithely of the “so-called primitive.” (It is significant that Lévi-Strauss should have idolized Rousseau: “our master and our brother,” “of all the philosophes, [the one who] came nearest to being an anthropologist.”) One of Sandall’s main tasks in The Culture Cult is to convince us that what Lévi-Strauss dismissed as “so-called” is really “well-called.” Sandall does not mention William Henry’s In Defense of Elitism (1994)—another unfairly neglected book—but his argument in The Culture Cult reinforces Henry’s accurate, if politically incorrect, observation that

the simple fact [is] that some people are better than others—smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace. Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal. Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal. . . . It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose..................."

“The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good.”

I concluded the same years ago, and it pretty much explains EVERYTHING regarding the difference between liberals and conservatives.

Starting with the Cold War. If all people (which includes Communist dictators) are inherently good what’s the point of having a military with nukes? If all people (which includes inner city thugs) are inherently good, what’s the point of allowing civilians to own guns? If all people (which includes Iranian mullahs) are inherently good, what’s the point in preventing them from developing nukes, as they’ll never actually use them against anyone? If all people (which includes MS-13) are inherently good, why is there a need to secure our border?

The list goes on and on. But Dems do agree with conservatives on this, otherwise why do they have locks on their doors, and security guards (if they can afford them)? The difference is that the Dems also profit politically from the ANARCHY associated by acting as if all people are good.

And finally, I don’t think the country is doomed because people are fundamentally bad...as long as conservatives can hold their ground and not cave into Democrats, we’ll be fine.

"The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good."

Mr. Watts is only half right. The difference between conservatives and progressives is that conservatives believe humans are fundamentally flawed but can be civilized by organized religion and reason-based ethics, while progressives believe humans are born as empty slates, and everything they are and become, both good and bad, is the result of environment, so change the environment and people will change.

But that is the distinction among the cognoscenti. "Pop" progressive prejudice teaches that the Jewish/Christian cisnormal white man is the cause of all evil in the world, unless he repents and submits to the will of the non-Jewish/Christian non-cisnormal non-white (and in order to be in power, one must be at least two of the "non"s). "Pop" conservatives, reacting to pop progressive prejudice, assert the opposite. Both groups strain at gnats: e.g., pop progressives fly rainbow flags in order to stick it to the pop conservatives, and the pop conservatives fly Confederate-style flags in order to stick it to the pop progressives; all the while, the progressives in power, supported by their pseudo-conservative lackeys, continue to gut society.

Most Americans are not ideological, philosophical, or intellectual. They want to live and let live, they want to work and let work, they want to worship and let worship, they want to be safe and let others be safe. They don't want to hear that homosexuality is sinful because they know gay Bob down the street is a nice guy, they just wish the freaks would stop parading down Main Street. Conversely, they don't want to hear that white people are the cause of all black people's troubles because they've never caused any trouble for any black person, they just wish the thugs would stop flashing their gang signs and playing knockout games down Main Street.

And that is why Donald Trump is likely to become our next President, because he says what average Americans have been thinking for the last 30 years, whether or not it fits the conservative world-view, because most Americans aren't conservatives, but they're tired of being blamed for every little problem that every non-conservative can think of as being a problem.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.