I worry a lot these days, but mostly I mourn.
I mourn for a generation suckered by the truth-is-in-the-middle okey-doke, fed a constant diet of false equivalency by the likes of South Park. The myth of the giant douche and turd sandwich. Even in that illusion, there exist differences which I would cast as quite reflective of our bipartisan choices: one is a tool that can be useful in the right context, and the other is completely unconsumable. There is a reason, whether you comprehend it or not, why the term “South Park Republican” exists. When someone is trying to sell you on both parties being exactly the same, they're still trying to sell you on some political morsel, there is no “neutrality.” That itself is a political position.
Acting as if eight years of George W. Bush would have been exactly the same as eight years of Al Gore, as if is, obviously a position that benefits one of the men named above more than the other. I'll let you guess whom. The very act of posing as apolitical is a political act. To borrow from Howard Zinn's quaint turn of phrase: “You can't be neutral on a moving train.”
We are given cute little nostalgic reminders of a “better era of bipartisanship” that, in fact, barely ever existed, if at all. We are told of the glory days of old "Tip" O'Neill, an era when the Democratic Party was, as described by Richard Nixon strategist Kevin Philips: "history's second-most enthusiastic capitalist party." This is disguising the collaborator as the pragmatist.
I will admit I preach pragmatism, which is why I bristle against Bernie or Bust, but there is a limit to the pragmatic concessions one should reasonably make when faced by an opposition whose entire mission is obstructionism and non-cooperation. I can be pragmatic when faced with the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton, because she represents a lot of the values a moderate Rockefeller Republican may have represented back when they still existed.
As a liberal progressive, I am willing to negotiate with reasonable conservatism, there is room for dialogue with the likes of reasonable conservatives i.e. Rockefeller Republicans i.e. Reagan Democrats i.e. Clinton Democrats.
There is, no room, however, for dialogue with the Republican Party as it currently stands. Decades of Christofascist rhetoric and pandering to the lowest common denominator have transformed that party into a big government (just corporate welfare instead of welfare welfare) hawkish caricature that in no way resembles its former self. This is a party which Richard Nixon, creator of the Environmental Protection Agency, renewer of Sino-American relations, would find himself tossed out of as too liberal, a “RINO” i.e. a Republican In Name Only. They already make the likes of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan look like reasonable moderates, which I assure you they would not be in a healthy sociopolitical environment.
How long until today's Republicans are the future's Democrats? This is a toxic ideological shift that has been occurring over the last three decades, one which threatens this nation's future.
I bring, as example, the case of Republican Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Here we have a politician once considered such a right wing extremist dinosaur that his defeat in the 1964 presidential election against Lyndon B. Johnson was a 486 to 52 electoral vote landslide. A landslide engendered in no small part by the country's fears, stoked by LBJ, that Goldwater was such a conservative extremist that his hand on the wheel of state during the Cold War could very well spell nuclear apocalypse.
Goldwater would have no place in the modern day Republican “big tent”. Goldwater went down to his last days decrying the extremist Christian fundamentalists who took the Republican Party hostage from Reagan onward. Barry Goldwater, a man who was once seen as such an unhinged cuckoo that his election might incur an apocalypse, would be “too liberal” for the Republican Party in 2016. This is a man who famously warned against the growing power of what we today identify as “Republicans”, decrying against them: “In the past couple years, I have seen many news items that referred to the Moral Majority, prolife and other religious groups as 'the new right,' and the 'new conservatism.' Well, I have spent quite a number of years carrying the flag of the old conservatism. And I can say with conviction that the religious issues of these groups have little or nothing to do with conservative or liberal politics.”
While the Republican Party shifted into a mockery of itself, the Democratic Party eagerly moved to the right to fill the space the Republicans left behind. The victory of the Reagan Democrats and Clinton Democrats were an affirmation of this, the last nails in the coffin of the liberal politics championed by the likes of Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, and McGovern.
Even the likes of “socialist” Bernie Sanders, representative of what is perceived as the “far left” in today's politics, espouses taxes on the upper class lower than those of Republican hero Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bernie Sanders is, after all, nothing more than a weak New Deal Democrat, a shadow of the glory of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his promise of a Second Bill of Rights, and yet he is the best we have today in the day and age where Democrats are classic moderate Republicans, Republicans wish for a Christian equivalent of Sharia Law, and New Deal Democrats are apparently “socialists.”
Our country has experienced a shift, a dangerous shift over the decades, one which has to be identified, called out, and reversed at all costs. This is for the sake of true liberals as much as it is for the sake of true conservatives like Goldwater.
Is it any wonder, then, that with this toxic political shift our country has experienced over the last few decades, that I decry the malevolent laziness of “the truth is in the middle?" For that to be the case, there would have to be a middle. There is no middle in a contest between 1960s Moderate Republicans (2016 Democrats) and Corporatist Christofascists (2016 Republicans).
Who in their right mind can look back on Bush v. Gore or Bush v. Kerry, in this day and age, considering the ramifications of eight years of George W. Bush? Can you really say Barack Obama and a presidency with Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the most powerful office in the land is, “the same thing?" It's pure laziness, flattening of detail.
When you allow such a false equivalency from your favorite cartoon satire, you are smoothing away the wrinkles of your brain, smoothing away the differences, just as they wish you to.
Barry Goldwater, once representative of the most conservative politics to be found in these United States, was quoted as saying four years before his death in 1998, “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”
We find ourselves now, in Barry Goldwater's nightmare.
