Bill Hobbs, who you may recall from such adventures as “Bill Hobbs Wants Muslims to Know He Hates them” and “Bill Hobbs Wants Everyone to Know that Obama is Similar to Muslims and We All Know Hobbs Hates Muslims” among others, now is trying to pass off Martin Luther King, Jr. as a Republican hero.
Kids, this is what comes from finally getting around to listening to the “I Have a Dream” speech forty years later and not bothering to acquaint yourself with anything else from King’s oeuvre.
Filed under: The Conservative Soap Opera
Skirting around your main point, I have to ask this: do you really, honestly believe that Republicans are PRO-poverty? Really?
Besides, I like to use Jackie Robinson instead of MLK as my example, seeing as Robinson really was a Republican. Pointing it out makes some people’s heads explode.
Well, Slarti, you know, until the 60s, the Republicans weren’t the blatantly racist party and so it’s not actually a surprise that Robinson would have been Republican. Would he have remained Republican through Reagan’s presidency or through this one? I highly doubt it, but who knows?
As for whether y’all are pro-poverty… Well, I know you by your fruits and you’ve got some real fruits in charge at the moment.
If you pursue social and economic policies that accept poverty and under-employment as situation normal (in fact, some would argue that the economic theories that Republicans tend to favor *depend* on poverty and under-employment…) and then blame those that are poor and under-employed for the conditions your policies have created and maintain…it’s maybe not being pro-poverty, but it’s not exactly setting a vigorous and effective anti-poverty agenda either.
Personally, I think there are a lot of different kinds of Republicans in the US. There are those who want a sensible hand on the public pursestrings and who want to see a balance of power between workers/owners/state and producers/consumers because it’s socially and economically healthy to do it that way. Then, there those whose cultural or religious beliefs lead them to see the world in terms of hierarchy sliding to ever-more-distressing disorder, who are comfortable with the idea of the US as an imperial state abroad, and so forth — who tend to believe, though they wouldn’t put it this way, that there’s a limited amount of good stuff in the world and that certain (white, wealthy) people deserve ever bigger shares of that stuff to the detriment of others. I can find more common ground with the former, as I think it’s a good conversation to have about how and why to spend public monies and whether we’re doing the best job we can with getting value for our money. We don’t see eye to eye about the government’s role in promoting social equality (they tend to believe more strongly than I do that private incentives will fix everything), but that’s a philosophical difference that I can respect. With the second group, I have almost nothing in common and our starting premises for understanding human society and social behavior is so far apart that it’s hard to communicate with each other.
about republicans being pro-poverty, what B. said, and a big round of applause. individual republican voters may not be “pro-poverty” in any useful sense, but the policies championed and the laws enacted by the republican party do in fact have the effect of perpetuating, worsening, and spreading poverty.
(Marxist thinking has this concept known as “false consciousness” — google it for better definitions than i can give. now, i’m not a Marxist, and i’m not at all convinced that this particular label even stands for anything objectively real or useful. but if i ever did want to defend its existence, i could do no better than to point at trailer park folks displaying GOP election signs, or dirt poor farmers campaigning for Ron Paul. talk about shooting yourself in the foot.)
With the second group, I have almost nothing in common and our starting premises for understanding human society and social behavior is so far apart that it’s hard to communicate with each other.
That group is thankfully getting smaller, I hope. Education is key, of course.
Slarti, you are right, and it frosts me when I am told I am pro-abortion, when my philosophy is to educate people to the point that they are indeed rare. Pro-choice is NOT pro-abortion.
(and I may have just hijacked this thread…)
Yeah, those LBJ policies have really helped the poor.
Don’t know about Robinson, but Hank Aaron endorsed Hillary. Then again, that could just be GA politics. He owns a bunch of high end car dealerships.
Hey, my grandpa was born in a chicken coop. I was born in a hospital. The difference? LBJ.
Well, and sixty years, but who’s counting?
I’ll bet your grandpa didn’t whine and bitch about never being satisfied.
Well, actually, yeah, he did. So, it runs in my family! I’m totally going to take up smoking cigars and beating my children and then I’ll blame it on my genes!
B – it’s funny – older white southern dems give far more credit to Roosevelt for alleviating poverty than they do LBJ. The reason isn’t too hard to ascertain, if you credit LBJ with the civil rights act. Probably not fair of me to say, but there it is.
bridgett: …in fact, some would argue that the economic theories that Republicans tend to favor *depend* on poverty and under-employment
I’ve heard the exact same argument about liberals (in fact, it makes more logical sense. No poor people, nobody dependent on government, no more power.)
I tend to think that large entities are the absolute worst way to help people in need (I don’t think the United Way is particularly efficient at their mission, either). It gets ridiculed on the left, but I am a firm believer in the “thousand points of light”.
For such an arrangement to work, it has to be based in an altruistic, if not religious society. As we move away from this (as we have been for about 50 years), the only entity that can fill the void is government.
He’s an idiot on other matters, but Marvin Olasky’s Tragedy of American Compassion is a great reference on the subject. Something tells me you’ve read it, and came away not as impressed as I.
SLARTIBARTFAST. Are you for real coming to my blog and trying to say that America was a more altrustic society fifty years ago than it is now?
1958?!
Really?
The Great Society might have been a Great Idea, but it was hamstrung by a surge of conservative opposition and funding issues created by an enormous financial vacuum in Southeast Asia.
Ugh – I merited all caps :)
What I’m saying probably makes no sense unless you’ve read Olasky’s book. The old system (before 1929, not 1958) relied on the Christian concept of compassion (literally, “suffering with”). Charity was not carried out by a third party, and in the early days of America, it did work. Yes, EVEN accounting for the evils of slavery (and later, Jim Crow).
Even Olasky’s critics say Tragedy of American Compassion was impeccably researched and footnoted (they just don’t agree with his conclusions – I don’t agree with all of them either)
I don’t want to speak out of turn; I’ve forgotten half of the points of the book (I read it over 20 years ago!), and I lost my copy in our 2002 fire. This discussion has made me want to read it again. I have half a mind to order you an extra copy :) I swear, it’s quite an eye opener – NOT some knuckle-dragging screed.
Yes, charity did work wonders. The Native Americans were charitable enough to die off politely so that white folks could expand into their vacated lands. Negroes were charitable enough to volunteer to leave their homes in Africa in order to give the brand new Christian nation generations of uncompensated labor. As the industrial revolution brought a new era of prosperity, though, and working class ingrates stopped being satisfied with the robber barons’ Christ-like magnanimity, the lazy riffraff started doing crazy things like forming unions and dabbling in (gasp!!) socialism. Why, when that system of charity– which was totally impervious to greed and human rights abuses EVEN accounting for slavery and Jim Crow– hit a couple of rough patches like the Great Depression, the thankless hoi polloi got so worked-up that the Christ-like robber barons had to let that commie slime-ball FDR foist that godless New Deal on us.
I say it’s high time we scrap all our Soviet collectivist anachronisms and give ourselves over completely to the Holy Grace of the Free Market, just like they’ve done in Iraq. Before I go to sleep tonight I’m gonna pray for the Second Coming, where Jesus is gonna throw the tax collectors out of his Father’s temple again but keep the money changers this time (but only so the filthy rich people can keep all their Christ-like altruism organized).
Actually, Republicans can be accurately called anti-poverty since they are generally anti-teachers-union.
Because it is the national teachers union and the Democratic party who are fighting tooth and nail for the currently dismal status quo in education.
Oh sure, they want more money, what interest group doesn’t? But they sure don’t want any sort of innovation or accountability to go with it that might upset the balance of their power.
Seriousy, watch this video (I promise it’s short but fascinating) and tell me who is actually keeping down the poor.
Is it those ugly ugly ugly Rethuglicans, associated with and nationally pursuing the education reforms such as the charter shools presented here?
Or is it the teacher’s union, that bedrock interest group of the Democratic party, that is keeping these poor and minority students down?
And with that tired right-wing talking point, Lee, so begins your specious argument.
Lee, Republicans (and other conservatives) have funneled so much money away from public education that teachers– who deserve at least a gainful salary, good benefits, and a stable and productive working environment; wouldn’t you agree?– have had to fight to draw decent pay and sufficient resources out of an ever-shrinking pool of money. The answer isn’t to bust unions and throw public money at divisive, counterproductive, and often thoroughly corrupt stopgaps. The answer is to prioritize our public spending so that our tax revenue flows into the commons instead of into fewer and fewer private hands*. That goes for schools (for white people, too), health care (for everyone, even white people), and other things that we should consider non-negotiable elements of our national infrastructure.
We have plenty of money for these things, as long as we’re not throwing it at useless military toys, paranoid, outdated technological boondoggles that refuse to work, and (lest we forget) imperial adventures that only benefit a small number of disaster capitalists.
The underlying problem here is that conservatism as a governing philosophy is a miserable failure to all but a select few. That it continues to maintain such a following is a testament to the enduring success of a certain backlash political strategy from the 1960s (and it’s many subsequent adaptations).
*Silly me: I thought that’s what “promote the general welfare” meant.
CS, I guess I deserved that.
Sorry I stepped into the intellectual territory of my betters.
Don’t give the native americans too much credit. They were up against Manifest Destiny for being from a different hemisphere than Jesus.
Just bad luck, I guess.
And the great white devil wouldn’t have gotten very far without the help of a few other africans who were kind enough to capture and enslave their fellow africaners.
Credit where it’s due.
You are far too charitable, Slarti. I haven’t read the book to which you refer, but I don’t doubt that there were many instances in our history of individuals being charitable to one another. I’m sure there were also plenty of organized attempts to distribute charity.
But I recently participated in a class that discussed the founding of the country from the perspective of the founders’ philosophical influences and contemporary philosophical climate. If you read the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu, then you gain insight into what the founders were trying to accomplish. It was, in theory, an attempt to create a republic that didn’t settle for emulating the old English model of inherited political power and hereditary aristocracy. There were some noteworthy holes in the execution of the concept (and even some serious birth defects, such as slavery with its debilitating social, political, and economic encumbrances), but overall it was a pretty good plan. My point, if I have one, is that I don’t believe the founders intended for their republic to remain (or devolve into, depending on your perspective) a wealthy aristocracy that condescended to an impoverished majority through voluntary charity.
I agree with your implication, Slarti, that governing a large-scale society is a potentially troublesome thing. However, one does not achieve greater physical efficiency by starving oneself of essential nutrients. If our government isn’t working, then we as citizens need to find out why. Then we need to do something about that. The solutions we hash out might result in ‘smaller’ government, or they might mean ‘bigger’ government. Or, if we’ve got the spine to handle it, we might give ourselves less centralized government that responds more to local needs and input than to the demands of Beltway corporate lobbyists.*
In the interim and beyond, Slarti, I agree that it won’t hurt for us to be charitable to one another with our time and money. But such private magnanimity is no substitute for good government of any size. I may be a misty-eyed liberal, but I believe the founders at their best would have agreed with me on that. Which is why they went through the trouble of giving Crazy George and the East India Company the ultimate finger.
*Venezuela has adopted a version of this concept with the Bolivarian Circles and Communal Councils, which (in theory) bring the nuts and bolts of participatory democracy to the neighborhood level. Perhaps this decentralization is what our corporate media and corporate-friendly government are so afraid of when they bend over backward to demonize Hugo Chávez and attempt to undermine his popularly elected government.
Oh, dear god, Exador! I had forgotten all about those stories where Europeans were just minding their business, benignly discovering things, when, upon sailing too close to the coast of Africa, they were set upon by bands of crazed, angry Africans who tied them up, expanded their ships to just happen to fit human cargo, stuffed the hulls full of people, maybe beat the white folks into submission, just for good measure, and then were forced to take those boats full of people to the New World.
Those poor, defenseless white men. Let us take a moment to remember the tragedy that is their shame in not being able to fight off the all-powerful, evil African slave traders who forced captivity… er.. owning captives upon them.
I wonder if there’s some memorial we can erect to their suffering.
Slarti, come on. No one is passing himself off as your better. You come in here and people are going to throw their intellectual weight around (or fake having it or whatever). You know that.
That’s just how it works.
CS, I’m going to have to mull over what you’re saying here some, but I just read something recently, too, about how the two forces in American politics that have been at odds since the beginning aren’t “liberal” v. “conservative” or “Republican” v. “Democrat,” but a kind of Yankee protestant quasi-egalitarianism v. a quasi-aristocracy, where the most deserving people have it the best.
It seems like you’re seeing the same thing.
I hadn’t really thought of it that way, so I still want to mull it over, but I think there’s something to it.
Don’t mull over it too much, B. I might still be crazy from the sunburned noggin and too much ‘Berber whiskey.’
You didn’t bring a hat to Morocco? That seems like a dangerous oversight for a man with your head-style (I was going to say hair-style, but…).
Hey, my people were still being enslaved by the Britsh when all that was going on, so save your hyperbole war for someone else, “lady”.
No, B. That was stupid of me. If you look at the pictures (available here), you’ll see the head-and-neck covering that our guide Lahsen was wearing. That’s what I’ll wear next time I take a long hike in the sun. All things considered though, I got off easy. My scalp is almost completely healed already.
Exador, oh, how times have changed since then. But, in a way, they’ve stayed the same. I’ll let Tim Wise explain.
Oh, snap! With apologies to Bob Marley, I think my white brothers need to be careful that you haven’t traded our physical slavery for your mental slavery.
CS, I want to address, briefly, your unwise head-gear (or lack thereof), but I’m completely distracted by your pictures of goats in trees. That is the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen. What were the goats doing in the trees? What if a goat in a tree decides to poop on you? Will US goats climb trees?
Also, you know, if I merely mention that you were running around half naked in some of those pictures, it’s going to send all my readers over there to swoon.
Those goats are very light and nimble, and the trees they climb are argan trees. The goats chew off the soft outer covering of the argan pods and discard the pits. The pits are ground to make a very versatile oil. It is quite funny to watch them climb and stand there like it’s nothing. As far as the pooping in concerned, argan trees have low branches and don’t get very tall. You’d have to work to get yourself under a pooping goat. As far as U.S. goats are concerned, I don’t know. If you grow some argan trees and get you some goats, maybe. It might just be that variety of goat.
Yet another reason I need a house…
And I did see one picture in which you seemed to have quite a red spot on the top of your head. Ouch. But I liked the scruffy face! Tee hee.
Let’s just say, “everyone’s ancestors has been horribly oppressed, and everyone’s ancestors has been horribly oppressive to someone else’s ancestors, too. Oh, and all political parties that ever were in this country have held at least one completely indefensible position at one time or another, from today’s point of view” So, you know, we all win that contest, and we can go back to discussing what to do about groups who are being oppressively kept in poverty today, and whether Dr. King would have been a member of the contemporary Republican Party.