What’s in a name?

[motivated by someone surprised I'd show support for the Greens]

I think labels are the end of critical thought, by the way. 

There's always been a lot of Green in me: sustainability, taking responsibility rather than passing it along, justice (those concepts share some commonality), democracy (though I lean towards super-majorities rather than simple majorities), nonviolence.  All but the first and last are often touted as traditional American values (for “taking responsibility” read “rugged individualism”).  Even the Dems and Reps recognize the importance of these values.  They espouse them in BIG letters, even if they ignore the devil in the details.  And they lose them in the details because they are so busy fighting for power and maintaining the status quo, that they hardly address the details (though it seems the Dems do a better job than the Reps, which could be the cause for the impression that the Dems aren’t as single-voiced as the Reps).

Dems try to promote some of these, but giving these more than lip service incurs a cost, and asking voters to pay now the full cost of what they want now isn’t a recipe for getting elected in the US.  What’s the saving rate in the US?  How large is the personal debt?  Why do you think the national debt is so high?  Where were credit cards invented?  OK, I don’t know the answer to that one.  But do you see some commonality here?  How do you garner votes?  Promise benefits to the voters that they don’t have to pay for up front. 

The Dems, at least the ones that get elected, know how to get elected; they can’t make the voters pay for all they owe, they can’t make them pay for benefits bestowed “ago.”  But they know the importance of the Green positions.  So they try to tread a middle path but wind up mostly failing.  Still, the idealist in us votes for them because they make us feel good for trying, even if they’re not trying all that hard.

What do the Reps try to do?  Push the costs into the future as long as they can without even paying lip service to what caused it.  Making immediately happy voters, who later come to realize when the debt doesn’t go away easily that government is not working.  We vote for them because we think we’ve paid enough already and we want our due (or perhaps we’re selfish though we don’t admit it).  And they say the things that make us proud to be Americans, so we feel good about voting for them. 

And maybe that dichotomy of feeling good about our voting records but not feeling good about the state of the country is part of the reason for the polarity and high partisanship of politics these days.  We feel something is wrong, but we don’t know what it is, we can’t believe it’s ourselves because we feel good about whom we’re voting for, so it must be the side we don’t vote for, but we don’t know why, and at the root is that the folks we vote for are hood-winking us, so we take that tension out on the folks running against whom we vote for—if only they’d work with the folks we vote for, we’d see some progress!!!  Talk about arm-chair psychology!  Don’t believe for an instance that I know what I’m talking about.

What’s the TEA Party trying to do?  Reduce taxes and reduce the debt.  Good for them, but what are they gonna give up for it?  I’m not seeing any rallying cry behind “Cut entitlements!”  “Reduce the military!”  All I see is “Increase efficiency.” “Reduce fraud.”  After hearing these same nebulous goals/promises for 20+ years, I’m thinking there’s not much left to do on these. 

And what about the Greens?  Nice basic tenets, but they place a lot of blame on corporations.  And I’m not ready to do that.  Sure, the tunnel-vision focus on short term profits of American capitalism can make corporations an emblem of incurring debt for future generations to pay once I’m outta the hot seat and of the dissolution of personal responsibility into a corporate responsibility.  But corporations are made up of individuals.  And ascribing blame to corporations won’t help as much as ascribing blame to the individuals that make up those corporations.    Corporations don’t make decisions, guns, errr, people do.  Dehumanizing the blame is inaccurate and not as effective as holding actual humans accountable for their decisions.  And holding an entire corporation accountable punishes many who are at worst innocent, at best, Yoda notwithstanding, trying to do right. 

And it’s not entirely the corporation’s fault or the decision-makers of the corporations.  We—ok, not you and me, but our legal system and government—created, or at least adopted, the idea of the corporation.  Is the idea of shielding personal liability for a corporation’s actions bad?  I’m pretty sure we’d have fewer jobs if we didn’t have corporations.  On the other hand, corporate actions might be more responsible, though isn’t bad publicity a strong motivator (not enough I’m guessing, look at Halliburton, BP, and Deep Water—how much do you think the possibility of bad publicity motivated their decisions)?  Maybe we could have a sliding scale of personal liability, rather than the almost all-or-none of our corporations law.  The sliding scale, though, would increase the legal uncertainty, which would chill business, but probably not as much as eliminating the liability shield of corporations law.

[OK, now I’m thinking about the pressures of decisions in a business environment.  That topic needs some attention in this blog, I’m thinking….]

So, don’t call me a Green, Dem, Rep, liberal, or conservative.  Once you do, you’ve put me in a box and no longer consider the nuances of my opinions.  Perhaps I align best with the Greens, but I think they’re wrong, way wrong in some important ways. 

I don’t believe anyone fits neatly into any party.  Why do you think setting a party platform is so difficult?  And how can it possibly be that everyone (or even most everyone) who’s against legal abortion is for state’s rights (that seems contradictory!) or an expansive Second Amendment.  Or everyone who’s for a cap and trade CO2 system is for closing Gitmo?  Some of these issues have no overlap.

But you know, most folks probably have a pretty solid overlap of core values.  If we can find that common core, figure out why that commonality can generate diametrically opposed results, we can build consensus, solve problems, and build a better community.  OK there’s another topic that needs some more attention here, too.