When All is Politics - Capitol Hill Coffee House

The other day I had dinner at the local Buca di Beppo, a regional chain of Italian-kitche eateries. The theme at Buca's is somewhere between gaudy and tacky, a self-mockery of first-generation immigrant classlessness; and the dining experience is similarly zany. Guests are led to the dining room through the kitchen; portions are "family-sized" - a small order for a small family; a large order for a full table. Not knowing this, I found myself facing an enormous plate of excellent chicken Parmesan, a full serving dish of vegetables, and an order of mozzarella garlic bread - round and flat, baked and served in a pizza pan.

It struck me, as I enjoyed this feast, this gastronomical orgy of splendid food, how effortless it was to obtain. I needn't produce a membership card or Party affiliation. I didn't need a well-placed brother-in-law or paygrade or official title. Only one question needed answering, and the waiter murmured it as I passed on dessert:

"Will that be cash or charge, sir?"

It's not that way in much of the world. Spoils are made accessible, not with money, but with pull - with connections, with rank, with status. Things best distributed economically; decisions that are best made on moral bases, are instead answered and handled and distributed according to politics.

We see how it goes in such societies. They have elaborate political systems to create arbitrary production targets, assign labor, produce those things central planners deem necessary, and distribute them according to ranking. All of it enforced by elaborate political police systems.

We've come to laugh at such cultures in recent past - the East Germans, with their state-engineered, dearly-bought Trabant cars abandoned by refugees once a few miles past the West German borders. The Soviet shoe factories making only one size boot. What we maybe don't realize is that we're heading down that exact same route ourselves.

Where we're rushing to is a headlong plunge toward where morals and values, income and benefits and rights and responsibilities are all determined by in-group and out-group status.

By politics. By government control; by people who increasingly use not a consistent standard, but rationalizations behind their attempts to wrest control, presumably for their supporters.

Blame Abe Lincoln. He's credited, incorrectly, with ending the institution of slavery; but what he truly established was Federal supremacy over states' sovereignty and Federal intrusion in local decisions.

Lincoln certainly didn't foresee the end result of the juggernaut he set in motion, and it's doubtful he would have approved. But his use of Federal powers, erroneously credited with ending slavery, gave rise to the second wave of group divisions and group politics: the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

An earlier attempt to divide America along group lines, the labor movement of 40 years earlier, had only limited success. American workers organized into unions, true - and there was a need for that organization. But come Sunday, they all went peaceably to the same church as the hated owners and bosses. They may have been bitter enemies in the workplace, but they were, first and foremost, Americans.

The Civil Rights movement was different. Again, an injustice was identified - a legitimate one. This one went deeper than mere mistreatment in the workplace. Groupthink organizers and idealistic American young people, together with black leaders, organized a movement that changed the laws and the way the nation viewed minority citizens.

That change was good and necessary and just. But the change to the political landscape - the introduction of group-politics and special interest groups as needing special rights and considerations - was a time bomb in the American political landscape.

What has followed - the Women's Movement; the failed Equal Rights Amendment; Affirmation Action; the Americans With Disabilities Act; and now Hate-Crime statutes and all sorts of special consideration based on racial, ethnic, sexual or sexual-orientation status have brought us into a position where the depth and breadth of a person's rights depend on where on the program they rank.

And it has brought an intrusive, all-powerful Federal Government along to enforce it.

That has spawned its own problems. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was the myth; the reality is that the political party structure is deeply entrenched in the American system. It's not going away and it's not conceivable that it could be otherwise. Newcomers to political office are helped up by party elders and behind-the-scenes kingmakers, and are beholden to them. Quid pro quo.

What happens in such a situation, what IS happening today, is that the group the officeholder is most beholden to is not the handicapped, not the capitalist class, not the alternative-gender crowd or the oil industry...but the Party itself.

And the Party's incessant need is to increase its power. It does that by challenging the opposition.

In a battle of ideas, this would be fought out by selling alternative visions and policy-proposals and aims and goals. But in a more naked quest for power, nothing more, the quicker and easier way is to smear and distort and use selective facts.

And oppose. Oppose; block endlessly. Take opposition stances; try to rationalize them but never waver in opposition.

In the United States we have watched over a decade of that. Let's not examine the Boy President's record; enough has been said. The Party closed ranks on that one; and that's to be expected. That was, after all, a question which was mostly political in nature.

But in the last five years the minority party, the Democrats, have brought constant, mindless opposition to many needed, necessary solutions to problems the nation, the culture, is facing.

Social Security reform? Demonize it as being a "gimme" to Wall Street. Ignore the fact that Social Security as it is is a Ponzi Scheme in its end stages. Exploit the less-educated voters' suspicion of the financial community - and castigate any profit that might be made in privately-managed portions as "greed."

The war in Iraq? Keep harping on how the President "lied." Ignore recent history - of which they no doubt are painfully aware. Ignore new information supporting the President's decision. Keep repeating the Talking Points as though they were proven fact, to a complacent partisan media.

The Federal Budget? Ignore the reality that the deficit is, as a percentage of GDP, right in line with what 50 years of the New Deal gave us as a standard. Emphasize that the deficit is (in dollar count) the "largest ever." Of course, talking about ways to cut that deficit, or create a balanced budget (hopefully without Clinton's smoke and funhouse mirrors) would be imprudent - and might alienate "interest groups" whose interest is the Federal teat.

Presidential appointments? Every one named is the worst ever. It's gotten so repetitive it's comical - it's as if they have a stock attack release and just insert the candidate's name. Doesn't matter, Cabinet or Judicial, they all are the worst, the most crooked, the most irresponsible ever.

(Unless, of course, the candidate is Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a candidate who enjoys classification in several protected categories - minority and female - in which case opposition is unmentioned and unremarked, again by the confederate media.)

The most telling and most obscene example on this was the Democratic caucus's opposition to any legislative rescue of Terri Schaivo, in her last days. A patently illegal order by a rogue probate judge was ordering her death - and by the most "cruel and unusual" method ever displayed in court, dehydration.

Instead of joining forces with their opponents, the Democratic caucus rationalized the insane Probate Court order and called any Federal move to protect this woman's right to existence "interference" and "activism."

There's a common theme to this, and of course it's empowerment of government. It's allying various pressure groups, and presenting the high moral road to the public, in one party's quest for added power - and for their discrediting of the opposition.

It's taking issues which rightly belong in the economic, or social/moral spheres, and implementing political solutions to them.

But, as I've written before, big government is not unlike a big dog. When it jumps up to greet you and licks you on the face, it's a beautiful thing. But it can easily turn on you - and like a rabid dog, a powerful government gone rogue may be beyond control.

We've had innumerable examples, just in the last century, of "empowered" governments and what they bring. At their best, they bring planned economies and poverty and demoralization. At worst, they become war machines for their Glorious Leaders.

Shortages and deprivation and the killings of millions to satisfy the twisted needs of leaders who first lusted for power - as today's "loyal opposition" seeks to present themselves as a "reasonable alternative." An alternative...that will use what has so far been the benign might of the Federal apparatus.

Unchecked, it will not remain benign long. That is the nature of the beast; and that is the story of human civilization.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines "politics" as "the governing of...a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs." Tip O'Neal once described it more pithily: it was the science of "who get's what."

Too often politics, holding dominance over economic choice and private affairs, translates into "you get nothing."

North Ridgeville, Ohio

April 24, 2005

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JustPassinThru is a non de plume for a blue-collar middle-class Everyman, who lives and works in the Midwest