Posted on 12/28/2014 12:48:01 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
As a therapist I spend my days doing what I can to help adolescents understand that the human decision-making process is influenced by two general motivators — what we want or hope to be true, and by the facts and credible evidence available to us at the time.
We remain subject to both forces throughout our lives, but growing up means allowing the facts to govern the important decisions even if the facts fly in the face of what we want. This is not always an easy sell, and I have little doubt there will be some readers who flat-out reject what I am about to state regarding the Republican Party. I stand no chance of changing red stripes to blue, nor am I trying. Nor is it my intention to offend devout conservatives. My intention is to provide food for thought to those still willing to cast an objective eye towards the political discourse of our nation.
The Republican Party perpetuates itself largely by pandering to what we want or hope to be true. The proof lies not too far beneath the rhetoric. Even a casual consideration of the agendas of either party, Republican or Democrat, reveals the primary idea upon which each is based. At its core the contemporary Democratic agenda is a call for a greater shared good. The GOP appeals to individual self-interest. This is what breathes perpetual life into the Republican Party, but apparently to a degree that also dooms it to endlessly come down on the wrong side of history.
Unbridled pursuit of self-interest is exactly what eroded the Roman Empire into antiquity, and the same fate may befall the United States regardless of how much we want or hope for that not to be the case. Policies that pander to exclusionary self-interest at the expense of protecting and expanding an inclusive shared common good cannot be sustained within or across civilized societies.
History has punished those who came before us with this lesson over and over again, yet the current iteration of the Republican Party continues to churn out policy initiatives that favor some sectors of our populace while diminishing the good for others. It’s almost as if they are implicitly admitting, “Hey, resources are stretching thin, so wink wink, nod nod, let’s build a high wall around the empire and see how long we can perpetuate a privileged lifestyle for the chosen few, because that’s what God would want us to do.”
Rewriting election laws or redrawing congressional district maps in ways that favor white evangelical Christian voters as a means of protecting the power and influence of the Republican Party cannot serve the common good because the common good of this country is made up of a cultural and ethnic hodgepodge. In social terms, such discriminatory policies are called in-grouping and out-grouping — a practice that always leads to unrest and ultimate revolt. This is a mathematical certainty revealed to us throughout history.
Granting tax loopholes for the top 1 percent is a fiscal policy with a dismal track record of utter failure to create more or better paying jobs for average Americans. Those tired old Reaganesque politics have only succeeded in freeing up obscene amounts of cash for major corporations to use to set up factories overseas where labor is cheap and far more exploitable. Those policies have only increased the gap between rich and poor — a gap growing far too wide to be sustained, according to a multitude of renowned economists.
Failure to adequately protect the natural environment that sustains us equates to a failure of civilization on a scale not seen since before recorded history. Here again we are feeling the effects of a hypocritical self-contradiction created by combining the strange bedfellows of fiscal and social conservatism. The facts make it impossible to reconcile the demand for a dramatic reduction (if not outright elimination) of environmental regulations while at the same time aggressively seeking to expand governmental authority to shut down abortion clinics.
Environmental pollutants have been positively linked to an increased incidence of birth defects. To declare a policy agenda as the salvation of unborn children while allowing industries to increase the release of toxins known to mutate children in the womb is a cultural and moralistic contradiction of staggering proportion — one that can only contribute to the widening fissure within our society.
You won’t catch the likes of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, or Ted Cruz building their craftsmen homes downwind of those factories or right next door to the Keystone pipeline, but they will be sure to stop along the campaign trail and publicly pray for the children of families who cannot afford to live anywhere else. Meanwhile the gap between those who have and those who have not grows, bringing us closer to the threshold of economic and societal destabilization.
The urge to seize every opportunity to advance self-interest will live on in every one of us, and rightfully so. In no way is this author suggesting that the pursuit of self-interest is a bad thing. The best biological, anthropological and mathematic evidence reveals the value of individual self-interest seeking for any species or society. However, the sound science also irrefutably reveals the exponential advantages of tempering the pursuit of self-interest with meaningful sacrifices at the individual level in order to protect the interests of the greater good. These facts dictate common-sense fiscal and social principles such as not allowing banks to grow too big to fail. The outsized self-interest seeking behaviors of those banks inevitably harm the greater economic good. This is a lesson very recently learned in the collapse of the housing market — a harsh lesson delivered to us yet again by a conservative administration (Bush) doing everything it could to throw off every regulatory constraint from commerce.
This is the terminal flaw of conservative fiscal policy. Of course, banks or other mass corporations will use increased revenues created by Republican tax cuts and deregulation to further increase their profits (their slice of the common good) as opposed to “trickling down” those gains to the common worker.
How many times do we have to learn that such shortsighted policies are not sustainable? The common men and women of this country might want to hurry along an answer to that question because there are plenty of conservative politicians chomping at the bit to repeal Dodd-Frank, the regulatory laws passed after the housing crash to reinstate reasonable constraints on banks and keep them from doing the same thing to us all over again.
While we are at it, we might want to remind ourselves how well it worked out for whites in the South during the years leading up to the civil war and again during the 1950s and ’60s to believe that their self-interests were too big to fail or to be compromised by the notion of elevating the socioeconomic status of black citizens into the shared common good. For the shocking number of conservative politicians who are currently passing election laws that make it disproportionately harder for minorities to partake in a true democratic process, what on Earth leads them to believe that history will not come back to haunt them?
The facts are in and have been replicated ad nauseam throughout history. Self-interest must be balanced with meaningful sacrifice for the shared common good. The notion of “common good” must be an inclusive one, not an exclusive club favoring white, heterosexual, evangelical Christians. I happen to be white, male and living comfortably a handful of dollars above the midline within the middle class. My oldest daughter has decided she wants to go to Stanford. Both of my girls have demonstrated the brain power to go anywhere they want for college. I want their dreams to come true and I am deeply thankful for institutions like Stanford who go to great lengths to reduce tuition for deserving students coming from common or less-than-common households. Not every learning institution does this. If, however, Stanford chooses a young lady from a less advantaged ethnicity or economic status over my daughter, then so be it.
My heart will break for my little girl, and I will hope I have taught her these lessons well: That prestige and success as a person do not mean the same thing. That we are only as good as our sacrifices to others. That a best effort is both the means and the end in terms of personal satisfaction, not merely a means to personal gain. That she will stay happier inside her own skin if on a regular basis she takes a break from asking herself what she wants from the world and asks herself what does the world seem to be asking of her?
I share these observations with you, the reader, because it is in my daughters’ best interest, in your best interest, and ultimately my self-interest to do so. Grabbing for short-term economic or social gains promised by politicians willing to deliver on those promises by disadvantaging people outside your in-group will ultimately harm you, your family, me, my daughters.
Polluting the environment and depleting natural resources at unsustainable rates in order to pursue the promise of more jobs in the coal, oil, textile and lumber industries instead of aggressively developing sustainable energy and industry will leave us with much to answer for when our grandkids start asking unforgiving questions.
I am asking you to recognize that the silly notion of building a discriminatory policy wall around the white, evangelical, heterosexual empire while turning a blind eye to environmental science will only seal our fate to go the way of the Romans.
I am asking you to recognize that an equitable, fair, and authentic consideration of the common good is the only sustainable form of self-interest.
Genius ignores that particular part of history. After all, what his column is really asking for, but he just can’t bring himself to write the word, is communism....
Self absorbed sanctimonious sacks of uhhh poop.
Lying scumbags. Baiting and switching is just one of their acts.
Correct. Our Framers designed the constitution with man’s proclivity to act in his self interest in mind.
Failure to adequately protect the natural environment that sustains us equates to a failure of civilization on a scale not seen since before recorded history. Here again we are feeling the effects of a hypocritical self-contradiction created by combining the strange bedfellows of fiscal and social conservatism. The facts make it impossible to reconcile the demand for a dramatic reduction (if not outright elimination) of environmental regulations while at the same time aggressively seeking to expand governmental authority to shut down abortion clinics. Environmental pollutants have been positively linked to an increased incidence of birth defects. To declare a policy agenda as the salvation of unborn children while allowing industries to increase the release of toxins known to mutate children in the womb is a cultural and moralistic contradiction of staggering proportion...
I stopped reading at “At its core the contemporary Democratic agenda is a call for a greater shared good. The GOP appeals to individual self-interest.” When you argue from incorrect premises you have absolutely no possibility of getting it right.
I agree with the headline. The GOP politicians are only concerned about their own self interests.
That's where I stopped reading.
If he can't get the past right, he has no hope of getting the middle and end correct.
A Liberal’s compassion starts and ends at a Conservative’s Wallet.
I have something in common with Liberals, I too lock my Doors to protect my Family and Property from Liberals.
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