The Republican Presidential Nomination

Opening caveat: I know that quoting yourself in an article is a terrible habit. That said, because I'm basically combining several months worth of essays into a single piece, I decided that connecting my previous work together here through those quotes made sense.

Plus, let's face it: I'm too lazy to rewrite thoughts that I had already put down somewhere else.

Since this blog's inception, I have posted dozens of essays providing speculative analysis regarding the 2012 presidential election. This editorial is intended to serve as my definitive - and thus final - word on that subject.

Ten days ago I wrote a blog article on Sarah Palin's growing influence in the Republican Party (http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2010/09/about-last-night.html). As I observed:

If you had asked me a year ago whether I thought Sarah Palin could receive the Republican presidential nomination, I would have responded that there was no way in hell. In my mind, Sarah Palin belonged in the same category as Robert Taft and Dan Quayle - i.e., someone who, despite being beloved by the right-wing grassroots voters which are such a key part of the Republican base, was widely recognized as too unelectable to ever be a smart pick for that party's presidential nomination.

Instead, as I explained in an article written exactly one month before the aforementioned piece (http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2010/08/obamas-great-failure.html), I felt that the Republicans would most likely nominate Mitt Romney.

Republicans will wisely nominate Mitt Romney as a candidate whose business resume makes him the ideal opponent to a Democratic incumbent dealing with a weak economy (incidentally, his pro-business policies will also help him create a formidable fundraising apparatus to propel his candidacy, an invaluable asset in any successful presidential campaign). Helping his cause will be the fact that independent voters, who will no doubt be turned off by the radicalism of the Tea Party movement and further dismayed with what I expect to be the rabid political bloodlust of congressional Republicans (see http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/244143/you-ll-get-served-robert-costa), will perceive Romney as an ideological moderate and advocate of political stability, thus making him far more attractive in a general election contest...

Of course, all of that was before a string of Sarah Palin-endorsed candidates swept Republican primaries in congressional and gubernatorial contests throughout the nation. It was before the Tea Party movement showed itself adept at swinging elections by serving as a grassroots base which, when tapped by shrewd political aspirants, could single-handedly transform an underdog into a nominee. Most important of all, it was before the nominations of candidates such as Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, Dan Maes in Colorado, and Carl Paladino in New York made it clear that electability was less important to Republican primary voters than puritanical rigidity in one's allegiance to the beliefs of the radical right.

These developments have two major implications for the 2012 election:

1) As I pointed out almost two weeks ago (http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2010/09/on-2010.html), Romney's viability as a presidential candidate depends on Republican primary voters deciding that "support for right-wing ideologues like Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee" should come second to "a pragmatic desire to select the most electable candidate." After all, such a situation allows Romney's strengths - his business background, his strong fundraising abilities, his greater appeal to independent voters, his ability to exude an aura of moderation and stability - to almost automatically recommend him as the ideal nominee.

In a situation, however, wherein Republican primary voters feel that ideological steadfastness is more important than electability, Romney's prospects immediately disintegrate. From his support of an Obamaesque government health care plan while Governor of Massachusetts and his flip-flopping on abortion rights to his refusal to associate more closely with the Tea Party movement and his Mormon faith (which many in the Christian Right view with great suspicion), Romney's conservative armor simply has too many chinks for one to believe that they wouldn't prove fatal in a climate where acceptability depended upon passing stringent philosophical litmus tests. Since the 2010 midterm elections have provided strong evidence that those litmus tests are exactly what Republican primary voters are using to decide their candidates, the likelihood of a Romney nomination diminishes accordingly.

2) They suggest that, in lieu of Mitt Romney, Republican primary voters will likely turn to a candidate whose stalwart support for a strongly conservative social, economic, and international agenda is beyond dispute. Although plenty of GOPers fill that bill quite nicely, history has shown that the modern presidential primary process is so labyrinthine and expensive that only candidates who have reasonably strong name recognition from a very early stage wind up being competitive enough to have a chance at the nomination. Indeed, since 1976, every candidate nominated by one of the two major parties has ranked among the top four prospects in his party's opinion polls within two years of the actual election (the last exception to this rule was Jimmy Carter). That leaves Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and (of course) Sarah Palin as possible winners.

It is here that the outcome of an Iowa straw poll held last month becomes important, not only for what it reveals about the mindset of Republican primary voters, but for the simple reason that the outcome of the Iowa caucus - the first presidential primary in the nation - has a long history of deciding which candidates ultimately receive their party's nomination*:

Mike Huckabee - 22%
Mitt Romney - 18%
Newt Gingrich - 14%
Sarah Palin - 11%

Most noteworthy about Sarah Palin's fourth place finish is that it does NOT reflect a lack of support, or even affection, among Republicans. Public opinion polls have shown that GOP primary voters tend to have a very favorable opinion of the former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee, even though this position puts them at odds with the overwhelming majorities of independents and liberals who strongly disagree. Indeed, as pointed out before, Palin's political brand is so powerful within Republican ranks that her endorsement has helped the decide the outcome of several key primary elections.

That said, what her poor showing demonstrates is that - despite the high regard within which she is generally held by Republican primary voters - the fact that she is believed to be unelectable is still enough to give them pause. The caution that they are willing to throw to the wind in local contests carries more weight when the presidency is at stake.

It is here that an understanding of the nuances in voter psychology becomes important. On the one hand, they are shrewd enough to realize that nominating Sarah Palin would doom them to defeat, and place enough stock in their determination to win the White House in 2012 that they aren't going to abandon savvy in a fit of ideological passion. At the same time, ideological passion IS still a determining factor to them, and as demonstrated by the outcomes of the midterm primaries, they aren't going to choose a candidate who runs against their passions (or at best leaves them only lukewarm) just because he or she is perceived as being "more electable" than more appealing alternatives. To resolve this, Republican primary voters will probably find a middle ground - i.e., a candidate who has the "right" ideological character while being deemed "electable" according to political conventional wisdom.

Enter Mike Huckabee. Unlike Sarah Palin, Huckabee is widely perceived as being electable, in no small part due to his deftness in keeping his name prominent (his own TV show on FoxNews, constant visits to important political functions) without becoming overexposed (as has happened to the controversy-prone Palin); unlike Newt Gingrich, he is a fresh face and (so far as the general public knows) relatively free of skeletons in his closet; and, in his own right, he has a record as Governor of Arkansas with which most conservatives can readily assent, a knack for silver-tongued oratory, and a charmingly affable public persona. Most important of all, Mike Huckabee is 100% with the Christian Right and the Tea Party on social, cultural, and economic issues. In short, Huckabee is acceptable and electable enough that - despite some initial difficulties due to the aversion with which he is held by moderate Republicans in the northeast and heavily metropolitan states (which will probably swing to Romney as an anti-Huckabee) and by Mormons (who dislike his bigoted comments against their faith and will also probably swing to Romney) - the chances are greater than not that he will win the Republican nomination.

Fortunately, I don't think he'll win in the general election. There are several reasons for this:

1) Huckabee's Christian Right ideology will ultimately be too radical for mainstream America. For more, see:
http://atheism.about.com/od/mikehuckabeechristianity/a/ConstitutionGod.htm

2) Huckabee has a history of bigoted comments, particularly against homosexuals, women, and Mormons. For more, see:
On homosexuals - http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38841.html
On women - http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/12/10/12517/525/811/420237
On Mormons - http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8TFL9B81&show_article=1

3) Huckabee has been involved in TWO explosive scandals akin to the Willie Horton debacle that did so much damage to Michael Dukakis's presidential bid in 1988. For more, see:
Wayne Dumond - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/12/04/documents-expose-huckabee_n_75362.html
Maurice Clemmons - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/29/multiple-police-officers-_n_373119.html

In short, when all is said and done, the chances are that an Obama-Huckabee election would turn out roughly the same way as an Obama-Palin contest, which as I wrote earlier (in the same blog that I quoted at the very beginning of this article), means that Huckabee "would walk away with the the bare minimum of what would go to the Republicans anyway in these contests - i.e., between 37% and 43% of the popular vote", as well as the electoral votes of Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and Indiana.

And there you have it. At long last, my FINAL prediction on the 2012 presidential election.

* From http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2010/09/amazing-case-of-reverse-evolution.html:
Remember that the Iowa caucus is the first major presidential primary in the nation. It was the Iowa caucus in 2008 that eliminated Rudy Giuliani from serious contention and established McCain, Romney, and Huckabee as the GOP frontrunners, as well as gave legitimacy to Barack Obama's then-underdog campaign against Hillary Clinton; it was the Iowa caucus in 2004 that destroyed Howard Dean and made John Kerry the heir apparent to the Democratic presidential nomination; heck, the Iowa caucus even helped launch Jimmy Carter to the presidential stage in 1976 and George H. W. Bush in 1980 (although the latter lost his party's nomination to Ronald Reagan, his choice to be on Reagan's ticket was in no small part due to his success in the Republican primaries, beginning with Iowa).

The Wall of Separation Between Church and State

I posted these comments as my Facebook status:

I know I'm repeating myself, but this is an issue that requires constant repetition; one of the most basic American freedoms is at stake.

"Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state'... is absolutely essential in a free society."
- Thomas Jefferson (1808)

"That's what we need to do - to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards."
- Mike Huckabee (2008)

This conversation followed:

Kevin Brettell
I agree with you. And, in fact, I can use a religious text (the Bible) to back up my feelings. "In my father's house, there is room for many mansions. (John, 14:2)." This particular line has been interpreted by many (read: most) Biblical scholars to mean that people of many faiths, as long as they are good, will be welcome in God's house. Who the heck knows which one he really prefers, if any?

Matthew Rozsa

Although I try to maintain a certain emotional distance from the subjects about which I comment on Facebook, I must admit that the one addressed in this post is very personal to me as a Jew. To understand why, one need only look at the text of the famous letter written by President Thomas Jefferson to the Virginia Baptists, from which the quote cited above was culled:

Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.

Defenders of those who advocate basing government policy on conservative Christian beliefs - including not just Mike Huckabee but Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh, to name only a few - usually try to wriggle out of accountability in one of three ways:

1) They will argue Jefferson's use of the phrase "religious institutions" means that he wasn't referring to individual political leaders, but only actual churches and other ecumenical bodies. What this claim conveniently overlooks, though, is that when politicians like Huckabee and Palin take part or all of their political agenda from the vision of their church, their attempt to impose that agenda on the public WOULD constitute a direct (albeit de facto) rise to government ascendancy of that particular faith . Even though the body of the political leader would technically constitute one degree of separation between the "religious institution" and its "use [of] government power," the end result that Jefferson feared would still have come to pass - namely, that individuals with those religious opinions will have been able to "force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith."

2) They will claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. While I could rebut that assertion by pointing to the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution of the United States, and the personal writings of key founding fathers from James Madison to Benjamin Franklin, I shall instead simply refer to another Jefferson quote (1814):

Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.

3) They will assert that, since a majority of Americans are Christian, it is only fair that Christian beliefs should determine our policies. There are two fatal flaws to this position:

i. While most Americans are indeed Christian, that doesn't mean they all interpret the teachings of that faith in the same way as right-wingers like Palin and Huckabee. Indeed, there are many issues on which a significant majority of American Christians actually dissent from the views of their conservative counterparts.

ii. The foundation of liberty is not majority rule; it is individual rights. Although the proper functioning of democracy requires that the will of the majority be used to elect public officials and (in some cases) pass laws, that does not mean that a free society can exist in which a majority can do as it pleases to the rights of a minority. As James Madison wrote (1788):

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.

Thomas Jefferson was much more succinct in his First Inaugural Address (1801):

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

In short, there is a cruel irony to the shrill insistence from so many conservatives that Barack Obama's policies threaten America's most fundamental liberties, for while none of his initiatives contradicts the tenets of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution upon which our nation was founded, the proposals of individuals like Huckabee, Palin, and Gingrich do precisely that.

John Hagan
Matt, I agree with your post. However, the project I'm more interested in, more than arguing about the separation of church and state, is framing liberal Democratic issues as values issues like the Republicans have with their issues. I don't think that, politically, the separation of church and state is the correct response to somebody like Huckabee or Palin. What I would say is:

John Hagan
God wanted us to be good shepherds of the earth, and the Republicans haven't done that. God wanted us to take care of "the least of these" and Republican tax cuts for the wealthy do not do this. God wants us to love our neighbor as our friend, and the so called religious leaders who vilify Muslims and promote intolerance have not done this.

John Hagan
In short, I don't argue that Jesus would have voted Democratic. I argue that Jesus would not have voted. If you're religious, that shouldn't mean your a conservative. Your religion has values that both parties violate. So vote your conscience, not your churches'.

Matthew Rozsa
My concern here has nothing to do with how the paradigm of "values issues" is used today to the detriment of liberal causes, even though that's the subject you address. Instead I am frightened by the increasingly aggressive and outspoken movement to eliminate America's vital separation between church and state through (a) falsifying public understanding of history so as to make it consistent with that erroneous perception and (b) allowing specific religious beliefs to determine government policies on questions ranging from sex education, gay rights, the use of Christian language and images in state institutions and documents, and the conduct of our foreign policy to the teaching of evolution, the use of public funds for parochial schools, school prayer, and even censorship in our libraries (see http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2010/09/ike-on-palin.html). Beyond that, there is a long history - both within and outside of America - of individuals and groups who use religion as the basis of their governing philosophy persecuting those who do not share their views. As a secular Jew whose friends and loved ones have a diverse range of religious opinions, this is especially worrisome to me.

Incidentally, though, I think you're wrong about the relationship between "values issues" and liberalism. Had Christ been alive now, his activist temperament would have made it impossible for him to not vote, and his strong egalitarianism on economic and social issues (to say nothing of the anti-establishment attitude) would have made it far more likely that he'd support a John Kerry or Barack Obama than a George W. Bush or a Sarah Palin.

Of course, if that doesn't convince you, I could just point out that Jesus was Jewish - and we all know how Jews tend to vote. ;-)

Debating the Flat Tax

Matthew Rozsa's Facebook Status Update

"He mocks the people who proposes that the government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor."
- Grover Cleveland

At least Cleveland didn't have to deal with the arrant hypocrisy of today's Republicans, who argue that the solution to our economic woes lies in extending tax cuts that (1) only help the rich while (2) adding $3.7 trillion to our national debt over the next decade.

.
Kevin Brettell
Well, I would make 2 arguments. I read a recent column (can't remember the author, unfortunately) which leaned on the fact that the top 5% of income earners in this country pay something like 60% of the total income taxes collected. On the face of it, that's absurd, and a complete injustice.

Then I read some more. My facts may be off here, so try not to be too harsh on them. The top 5% of earners may pay 60% of the total income taxes, but they also earn 75% of the total income. That's a pretty messed up disparity. It means, to me at least, that my feelings about a flat tax are spot on (or would at least alleviate this). If everyone paid the exact same percentage of their income in taxes, we wouldn't have this issue. I don't agree that directly increasing taxes on the rich is the answer. A flat tax across the board is the only fair solution to the issue, in my opinion.

Matthew Rozsa
‎1) I disagree that having the top 5% of income earners pay a majority of our total income taxes is absurd or unjust. While the percentage deducted from their gross total would be cripplingly high if taken from the income of a minimum wage earner or even an individual in the middle class or upper-middle class, the reason it is fair to tax those in the top five percent at that rate is because doing so will not negatively impacting their standard of living in any meaningful way. Because government is expensive (including not only those much-maligned liberal social welfare programs but also through such conservative staples as subsidizing the military-industrial complex, engaging in new international conflicts, and continuing the war on drugs), it makes sense that the bulk of the government's revenue needs should be shouldered by those most financially capable of affording it. That said, I would still support a progressive income tax rate even if we were to decrease spending (which, incidentally, I think we ought to do).

2) I agree that the wealthy do not pay their fair share in taxes, as evidenced by the fact that they earn 75% of the total national income but only pay 60% of its taxes. That said, a flat tax would not solve this problem, since it would not only fail to maximize government revenue, but would also expect those with lesser incomes to pay more than they can afford while allowing those with higher incomes to pay less than they reasonably could. Instead I suggest a three-pronged solution to this problem:

i) Allow the George W. Bush tax cuts on the wealthy to expire, which would automatically bring in $3.7 trillion over the next decade, and dedicate that money in its entirety to paying off the budget deficit, which would be a long-term investment against higher taxes in the future.

ii) As another long-term investment against higher taxes on future generations, cut as many superfluous government programs as possible. This should include, among other things, all unnecessary military expenditures, from our involvement in nations like Iraq and Afghanistan to the trillions of dollars in waste from various military projects that are believed to be above scrutiny (and before you say that such cuts would gut our military establishment, bear in mind that during World War Two, Senator Harry Truman of Missouri became a national celebrity by saving taxpayers millions of dollars in unnecessary military projects and downright waste, none of which hampered the ability of our armed forces to win their single greatest conflict). It could also incorporate ending "vice" laws that cost us trillions of dollars fighting victimless crimes, such as the war on drugs or measures rendering prostitution illegal (indeed, ending the former would not only save us trillions of dollars but actually billions more in revenue, as the substances could now be taxed).

iii) Increase taxes on the wealthy back to the levels they reached during the days of Eisenhower's presidency, when the top tax rate was 91% on individuals earning more than $400,000 a year (the equivalent of $5,000,000 today). While conservatives will throw their expected temper tantrum about how this is "socialistic," I would refer them both to my blog article on that subject (http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2010/09/rant-on-mccarthyism-of-obamas-critics.html) as well as to the simple question of whether they are implying that ol' Ike Eisenhower was a pinko.

‎3) Although you mention the fact that 75% of our total income is received by 5% of our citizens in passing, the reality is that this statistic cuts to the core of our current economic problems. I refer you to the analysis of Marriner Eccles, a Federal Reserve chairman who wrote an astute explanation of what caused the Great Depression:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation s economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

That is what happened to us in the twenties. We sustained high levels of employment in that period with the aid of an exceptional expansion of debt outside of the banking system. This debt was provided by the large growth of business savings as well as savings by individuals, particularly in the upper-income groups where taxes were relatively low. Private debt outside of the banking system increased about fifty per cent. This debt, which was at high interest rates, largely took the form of mortgage debt on housing, office, and hotel structures, consumer installment debt, brokers' loans, and foreign debt. The stimulation to spending by debt-creation of this sort was short-lived and could not be counted on to sustain high levels of employment for long periods of time. Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product -- in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups -- we should have had far greater stability in our economy. Had the six billion dollars, for instance, that were loaned by corporations and wealthy individuals for stock-market speculation been distributed to the public as lower prices or higher wages and with less profits to the corporations and the well-to-do, it would have prevented or greatly moderated the economic collapse that began at the end of 1929.

The time came when there were no more poker chips to be loaned on credit. Debtors thereupon were forced to curtail their consumption in an effort to create a margin that could be applied to the reduction of outstanding debts. This naturally reduced the demand for goods of all kinds and brought on what seemed to be overproduction, but was in reality under-consumption when judged in terms of the real world instead of the money world. This, in turn, brought about a fall in prices and employment.

Unemployment further decreased the consumption of goods, which further increased unemployment, thus closing the circle in a continuing decline of prices. Earnings began to disappear, requiring economies of all kinds in the wages, salaries, and time of those employed. And thus again the vicious circle of deflation was closed until one third of the entire working population was unemployed, with our national income reduced by fifty per cent, and with the aggregate debt burden greater than ever before, not in dollars, but measured by current values and income that represented the ability to pay. Fixed charges, such as taxes, railroad and other utility rates, insurance and interest charges, clung close to the 1929 level and required such a portion of the national income to meet them that the amount left for consumption of goods was not sufficient to support the population.

This then, was my reading of what brought on the depression.

How can we solve this problem?

I refer you to an article by economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich (see next post):

Matthew Rozsa
Hint: Go back about 50 years, when America's middle class was expanding and the economy was soaring. Paychecks were big enough to allow us to buy all the goods and services we produced. It was a virtuous circle. Good pay meant more purcha...ses, and more purchases meant more jobs.

At the center of this virtuous circle were unions. In 1955, more than a third of working Americans belonged to one. Unions gave them the bargaining leverage they needed to get the paychecks that kept the economy going. So many Americans were unionized that wage agreements spilled over to non-unionized workplaces as well. Employers knew they had to match union wages to compete for workers and to recruit the best ones.

Fast forward to a new century. Now, fewer than 8% of private-sector workers are unionized. Corporate opponents argue that Americans no longer want unions. But public opinion surveys, such as a comprehensive poll that Peter D. Hart Research Associates conducted in 2006, suggest that a majority of workers would like to have a union to bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions. So there must be some other reason for this dramatic decline. But put that question aside for a moment. One point is clear: Smaller numbers of unionized workers mean less bargaining power, and less bargaining power results in lower wages.

It's no wonder middle-class incomes were dropping even before the recession. As our economy grew between 2001 and the start of 2007, most Americans didn't share in the prosperity. By the time the recession began last year, according to an Economic Policy Institute study, the median income of households headed by those under age 65 was below what it was in 2000.Typical families kept buying only by going into debt. This was possible as long as the housing bubble expanded. Home-equity loans and refinancing made up for declining paychecks.

But that's over. American families no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going. Lower paychecks, or no paychecks at all, mean fewer purchases, and fewer purchases mean fewer jobs.

The way to get the economy back on track is to boost the purchasing power of the middle class. One major way to do this is to expand the percentage of working Americans in unions. Tax rebates won't work because they don't permanently raise wages. Most families used the rebate last year to pay off debt -- not a bad thing, but it doesn't keep the virtuous circle running. Bank bailouts won't work either. Businesses won't borrow to expand without consumers to buy their goods and services. And Americans themselves can't borrow when they're losing their jobs and their incomes are dropping.

Tax cuts for working families, as President Obama intends, can do more to help because they extend over time. But only higher wages and benefits for the middle class will have a lasting effect.

Unions matter in this equation. According to the Department of Labor, workers in unions earn 30% higher wages -- taking home $863 a week, compared with $663 for the typical nonunion worker -- and are 59% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance than their nonunion counterparts...

Although America and its economy need unions, it's become nearly impossible for employees to form one. The Hart poll I cited tells us that 57 million workers would want to be in a union if they could have one. But those who try to form a union, according to researchers at MIT, have only about a 1 in 5 chance of successfully doing so.

The reason? Most of the time, employees who want to form a union are threatened and intimidated by their employers. And all too often, if they don't heed the warnings, they're fired, even though that's illegal. I saw this when I was secretary of Labor over a decade ago. We tried to penalize employers that broke the law, but the fines are minuscule. Too many employers consider them a cost of doing business.

This isn't right. The most important feature of the Employee Free Choice Act, which will be considered by the just-seated 111th Congress, toughens penalties against companies that violate their workers' rights. The sooner it's enacted, the better -- for U.S. workers and for the U.S. economy.

I also have more long-lasting proposals, which I outline here:
http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2010/08/facebook-musings-on-economic-policy.html

Kevin Brettell
Just a very quick point: I was saying that at face value, having those high end wage earners pay such a large percentage is absurd, but upon further checking, stops being so, and is actually absurd in the other direction. I'll look into your other points after dinner/tomorrow.

Laura Brown
In a perfect world. A vision to behold.

Democrats: 1832 & 1932

The following article consists of excerpts from a Facebook debate in which I participated almost a year ago. In order to make it more readable, I have excised specific passages from that discussion and cobbled them together to create this essay. That said, as you will see, none of the text itself has been altered; sections have been omitted, but that which was included has not been changed in any way.

A key difference between liberals and conservatives is how they feel about this quote:

"The task of government in its relation to business is to assist the development of an economic declaration of rights... Every man has a right to life; and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living. He may by sloth or crime decline to exercise that right; but it may not be denied him."
- Franklin Roosevelt (1932)

The problem with conservatives who claim that they agree with that quote's message is that their policies blatantly contradict its objectives. How can you say that every man has a right to make a comfortable living and then oppose economic stimulus measures that create jobs? How can you recognize a right to survive through one's work and then oppose providing universal health care to those who put in a full day's labor and still cannot afford decent insurance? In short, what use is any economic declaration of rights if it does not entail the right to labor empowerment (by cultivating the growth of unions through the EFCA), the right to earn enough through forty hours of work to support both yourself and your family (by raising the minimum wage), and the right to not have one's very security undermined through the reckless cupidity of big business and Wall Street firms (such as would be prevented by the financial regulations that most Republicans oppose)?

Because America is a populist democracy, it is politically unproductive for any mainstream politician to openly denounce the principles articulated by Franklin Roosevelt in that 1932 campaign speech. That said, because the modern Republican Party thrives on the contributions of America's financial upper class - and because that upper class wishes to preserve its own disproportionate social and political power, as well as all maximize its wealth even at the expense of other people's fundamental economic rights - it consistently supports policies, pushed forth by the Republican Party it subsidizes, that go against our nation's most basic democratic ideals. Indeed, when the antecedents of the contemporary Republican Party advocated similar policies (in those days made manifest by its support of the Second National Bank), the founder of the Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson, responded with this immortal observation:

"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes... There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing."*

To me, this battle for America's economic soul is fundamentally the same now as it was when Andrew Jackson and the liberals opposed Henry Clay and the conservatives in 1832, and as it was when Franklin Roosevelt and the liberals opposed Herbert Hoover and the conservatives in 1932. It's a struggle between the ideals of the Democrats of '32 and the conservatives who, though professing the same basic values, actively work against them.

For the original debate from which this was culled, see:
http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2009/12/democrats-of-32.html

* - Though I neglected to include this in my original post, it should be noted that the Jackson quote came from his Veto Message on the Second National Bank (July 10, 1832). For more on Jackson and his movement's contribution to the formation of economic liberalism, I highly recommend "The Age of Jackson" by Arthur Schlesinger.

Barry Goldwater and Mike Huckabee

Matthew Rozsa

COME ONE, COME ALL! WITNESS THE AMAZING CASE OF REVERSE EVOLUTION!

"The conservative movement... has as one of its basic tenets the belief that government should stay out of people's private lives... and stays out of the impossible task of legislating morality."
- Barry Goldwater

"What we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."
- Mike Huckabee

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Matthew Rozsa
Quick context: Barry Goldwater's quote comes from an editorial he penned on why homosexuals should be allowed to openly serve in the military. Mike Huckabee's line is from a speech he delivered as to why the Constitution should have amendments outlawing abortion and gay marriage.

Jessica Roberts
stabbity stab stab

Sean Davis
This kind of thought process is quite terrifying, I sincerely hope we never live in a theocratic state...

Matthew Rozsa
From an MSNBC article last month:

"This week, Huckabee topped the pack of potential candidates in a 2012 caucus poll commissioned by TheIowaRepublican.com website. Huckabee garnered 22 percent to Mitt Romney's 19 percent. Newt Gingrich received 14 percent, Sarah Palin 11 percent, Texas Rep. Ron Paul 5 percent, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and South Dakota Sen. John Thune 1 percent each."

Remember that the Iowa caucus is the first major presidential primary in the nation. It was the Iowa caucus in 2008 that eliminated Rudy Giuliani from serious contention and established McCain, Romney, and Huckabee as the GOP frontrunners, as well as gave legitimacy to Barack Obama's then-underdog campaign against Hillary Clinton; it was the Iowa caucus in 2004 that destroyed Howard Dean and made John Kerry the heir apparent to the Democratic presidential nomination; heck, the Iowa caucus even helped launch Jimmy Carter to the presidential stage in 1976 and George H. W. Bush in 1980 (although the latter lost his party's nomination to Ronald Reagan, his choice to be on Reagan's ticket was in no small part due to his success in the Republican primaries, beginning with Iowa).

In short, Huckabee is not just some random kook. There is a substantial possibility he will be the Republican presidential candidate in 2012.

Matthew Rozsa
The only question that matters is WWJD?

By that I mean, of course, what would Jefferson do?

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."
- Thomas Jefferson (January 1, 1802)

Kevin Brettell
I completely agree with you that the "conservative" way of thinking has been hijacked almost beyond recognition. That said, the one thing you mentioned Huckabee being in favor of that I'm ambivalent about is abortion. I am truly (and heart-wrenchingly) torn on this issue.

Sean Davis
I do not wish to start a large debate about abortion (mostly because I won't have the time to respond in a timely fashion), let me just say that whereas I do NOT think people SHOULD use abortion as means of birth control; I also wholeheartedly believe that the government has no right regulate morality and even less of a right to tell us what we can and cannot do with our bodies (which is also why I'm in favor of legalization/decriminalization of MOST illegal drugs).

Kevin Brettell
I disagree to some extent, Sean. I firmly believe that a fetus is a living human, and therefore, and abortion is the ending of another person's life. The ONLY times I'm ok with it are in the cases of rape/incest and danger to the mother. We regulate, and with good reason, who may take a life and why. I don't see this as any different.

Matthew Rozsa
For a rebuttal on the issue of abortion, see one of my earlier blog posts:
http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2009/09/quick-rebuttal.html

There is also an excellent essay by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan on this subject:
http://www.2think.org/abortion.shtml

Kevin Brettell
One of the points made in your second link rebutting my point regarding rape/incest is, in my opinion, inherently flawed. It states that if you truly believe in a right to life, why is the life of a fetus produced by rape/incest less important than that of a fetus produced normally? I would argue that it isn't; it is simply inhuman of us to expect a woman to carry a child produced in a such a manner. We make exceptions to laws all the time. I'm ok with this one.

Another argument, that life doesn't begin at conception but is instead a chain leading all the way back to the primordial soup is just plain laughable. It's a straw man argument and they know it.

Matt, while I appreciate that you, at a minimum, understand where pro-lifers come from, I disagree that it is a requirement for people who are anti-abortion to do the same. With the exceptions of the cases that I outlined (danger, rape, incest), I firmly believe that there is no justification for abortion. None. I can't compromise on this issue because I simply can't. I can't respect the opposition's view on this because the evidence that I see (and yes, my gut) suggests that they are wrong on such a fundamental level that it is my duty to argue against them.

We legislate certain moral issues all the time. And as I believe I discussed with you, I'm generally libertarian in my leanings. My feelings toward government are, essentially, "if you aren't hurting anyone else, I don't care." In this case, I strongly feel that we have a duty to legislate against what I see as harming others.

Matthew Rozsa
The problem with your position is that it essentially states, "Women who do not believe abortion constitutes murder should still lose sovereignty over their own bodies on this issue because I, Kevin Brettell, have come to a different conclusion on that subject."

For the record, I don't fully agree with the position outlined by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan; I only included it because I think it provides an interesting and forensically rigorous scientific perspective on an issue in which such points-of-view are normally woefully lacking.

As far as I'm concerned, the lack of any consensus on the "life status" of the unborn renders it unthinkable for the opinions of one group - however impassioned - to be imposed on another. If there ever was a definite scientific consensus that abortion constituted murder, I would absolutely be in favor of outlawing it. That said, in lieu of such a finding, the notion that one group has the right to force another what to do with their own bodies on the basis of their personal opinion is frankly horrifying to me - as it should be to you.

Similarly, your unwillingness to acknowledge that people who support abortion rights aren't "anti-life" betrays an ideological intolerance on your part that isn't particularly flattering. Using the same logical rubric you've established, I could just as easily refer to opponents of abortion rights as "anti-woman," since if one were to completely ignore how the other side feels on this issue, I could assert that your point-of-view is unthinkingly callous to how your position effects a woman's right to control her own body.

Of course I don't do that. Why? Because I'm not a sanctimonious prick.

Matthew Rozsa
PS: I am a prick. Just not a sanctimonious one.

Kevin Brettell
I apologize, I didn't clearly state that I don't believe that people who support abortion rights are anti-life. I know plenty of people who support abortion rights who also think it's morally reprehensible. I just happen to not support abortion rights (except in the circumstances I outlined).

Matthew Rozsa
You see, I don't think that abortion is morally reprehensible. That too is an oversimplification which lends itself to unjust condemnation of the women who are forced to make these very difficult decisions.

Matthew Rozsa
PS: The point that I was ultimately trying to make, though, is that the essence of conservatism is the belief articulated by Barry Goldwater, which in full reads:

"The conservative movement, to which I subscribe, has as one of its basic tenets the belief that government should stay out of people's private lives. Government governs best when it governs least - and stays out of the impossible task of legislating morality."

While I may disagree with Goldwater's conservative beliefs on matters such as economic policy, I certainly agree that it is consistent with the Jeffersonian precepts upon which our nation was founded (as elaborated upon in the Jefferson quote mentioned a few posts earlier). What's more, that brand of conservatism is in blatant contradiction with the right-wing ideology espoused by Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and their brethren, which was best summarized by the full version of the Huckabee quote:

"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."

Kevin Brettell
And that's something we can agree on. The current "conservative" movement is just plain scary.

William Jennings Bryan and Paul Krugman

I'm not going to add much commentary here. Simply providing two brief excerpts will make my point so clearly that any additional analysis would be superfluous.

First, an excerpt from a speech delivered by William Jennings Bryan's during his legendary presidential campaign in 1896:

There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.

Now an excerpt from an editorial published today by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. In it, he exposes the economic ideas preached by the modern right-wing (and particularly by the Tea Party movement and its supporters in Congress) as fraudulent in its claims of egalitarianism:

Tax-cut advocates used to pretend that they were mainly concerned about helping typical American families. Even tax breaks for the rich were justified in terms of trickle-down economics, the claim that lower taxes at the top would make the economy stronger for everyone.

These days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case... Instead, it has become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a year are rich. I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class — the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on. Why, they can barely make ends meet...

The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.

You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes.

And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.

But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

This is very similar to an observation I made three weeks ago about why I have so little respect for the grievances of the Tea Party protesters and their champions on the right... and not just on economic matters. Rather than rewrite that piece, I'll just cite the pertinent paragraphs as a means of closing this article (for some reason I can't get the text to not be blue... sorry about that):

Although Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party movement, and the rest of the radical right loves to claim that they are persecuted, in danger of losing their freedoms, and engaging in valiant campaigns comparable to those waged by the founding fathers and other great American patriots, the reality is that none of them are in any real danger when they engage in their protest movements. No one is ordering law enforcement personnel to drag them off to prison or threatening violence against them (which is more than can be said of how they treat their various targets); no one is jotting their names down on lists to be used to prevent them from getting a job or buying a home, and no government agents are wiretapping their phones or investigating their personal lives in order to find ways of smearing and thereby discrediting them. Their claims of being victims and martyrs notwithstanding, neither the leaders nor the grassroots followers of these movements have ever incurred any real risk as a result of their self-expression.

What's more, none of them are fighting for causes that actually involve their sacred rights and liberties. Some of the evils against which they fight WOULD be very serious if they were real - see the death panels in the health care reform bill, the advent of an Obama-led dictatorship, or the plan to indoctrinate children with Socialist ideas via a presidential back-to-school speech - but invariably their claims are either exaggerated beyond all proportion or fabricated entirely. What few real-life battles are then left in their crusade involve outrage over matters that are remarkable in their pettiness and lack of perspective, like whey they fulminate about having to pay tax increases to help the unemployed and poor because they are in a higher income bracket (and yes, surveys have found that Tea Partiers tend to be more affluent than average Americans) or when they rant because they feel too many Latinos are immigrating to this country and too many people choose secular lifestyles and too many homosexuals are thinking about getting married, raising children, and joining the military.

Now compare all of this with the historic freedom fights with which right-wingers often juxtapose their own silly missions (and in this case I feel deeming them "silly" is pretty objective):

The American Revolution, from which they get so much of their rhetoric and symbolism. The real American revolutionaries were men and women who, if they were lucky, only risked dishonor and disgrace at being forever branded as treasonous rebels; if they were unlucky, the penalty was death on the battlefield or at the end of a hangman's noose. They fought for the cause of democracy and the right to self-rule (not just over higher taxes, as some believe; that was the catalyst, not the cause).

The Civil Rights Movement, including the famous March on Washington led by Dr. Martin Luther King which Beck and his supporters pretended to emulate from their safe perch of historical retrospect and lilywhite affluence. Of course, that wasn't the only battle fought for civil rights - there were countless other protests at diner counters and school courtyards, on buses in Selma and at voting booths in Mississippi. These were people, white and black, who were fighting to end segregation, job and housing discrimination, voter intimidation, laws that prevented black people from marrying whites or from serving in public office, and the countless other manifestations of systemic racism that caused unequal treatment for African Americans. In the name of this cause they risked (and often suffered) death, serious bodily injury, the loss of their livelihoods and homes, and the destruction of their personal reputations.

Now you can see why it's so hard for me to respect the Becks, Limbaughs, Palins, and Tea Partiers of this country. In a way they are incapable of understanding, they don't even respect themselves.

Milton's Letter or: My Thoughts on the Morons Who Keep Calling Obama a Socialist

A few weeks ago an editorial of mine was printed in The Rutgers Observer. In it, I pretended to have searched for the wisdom of Karl Marx and instead stumbled upon quotes from Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.

Naturally my tongue was planted firmly in my cheek through the piece. I have been bandying about those Jackson and Lincoln quotes for years, and intentionally allowed my readers to mistakenly believe that those words came from Karl Marx instead of two revered American presidents so as to illustrate, in an ironic way, how easily any liberal economic statement can be accused of having socialist connotations in today's political climate.

Of course, none of that prevented me from receiving a letter of protest from an indignant conservative Rutgers student, who for the sake of simplicity I will hereafter refer to as Milton (not his real name). In his e-mail, Milton claimed that (a) I had taken the Lincoln and Jackson quotes out of context and (b) I was wrong in asserting that Obama was not a Marxist.

Allow me to briefly address the issue of context. Let's start with the Jackson quote:

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection and... shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.

That came from a statement penned by Old Hickory to explain his vetoing of a bill that would have renewed the Second National Bank (July 10, 1832). Jackson believed (correctly) that the bank, as run by the shamelessly plutocratic Nicholas Biddle, created fiscal policies that benefited big businesses and the wealthy at the expense of the common man. What's worse, he feared that the bank had so much power that it could manipulate our currency policy and thereby create artificial recessions in order to exert its political will (a concern that wound up being validated when Biddle engaged in precisely that tactic to coerce Congress and the public into opposing anti-bank measures). Since Jackson viewed such an institution as both undemocratic and a threat to the economic liberty that he believed was just as vital to freedom as the political kind, he resolved that the bank needed to go. This comment was in direct reference to that incident.

Now to the Lincoln citation:
.
... there is one point... to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government... Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and serves much the higher consideration.

That quote, culled from Lincoln's first State of the Union Address (December 3, 1861), was an attempt by the Great Emancipator to take the immediate issue of slavery - and specifically the arguments its defenders would use to rationalize that "peculiar institution" - and pivot from there to a discussion of the mentality that he believed was used to justify the inherently unjustifiable on all economic questions, even when such arguments were blatantly inconsistent with America's founding principles. As was Lincoln's wont, he approached the conflict of his own time from a macro perspective, one that placed the ideological struggles of the 1860s into the broader sweep of history. This led him to conclude that it was important not only to condemn slavery, but to the strike at the root assumptions which allowed people to defend it. Indeed, the State of the Union Address was not the first occasion in which Lincoln took the logical step from protesting slavery to espousing the larger cause of economic egalitarianism. In the previous year he delivered a speech with a much more succinct articulation of his conviction:

While we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.

Of greater concern to me than Milton's claims about history, though, was his misunderstanding of the present. Throughout his letter he glibly conflated the economic policies of Barack Obama and of liberals with those of Karl Marx, from his insistence that the beliefs of Jackson and Lincoln were "in opposition to Marx and currently Obama" to his statement that for Jackson's statement "to be consistent with Marx and current liberal principles, the quote would have to be more like this - 'there is no necessary evils in government, so it must stop all highs and lows, rich and poor for an blessed state.'"

This kind of argument is not merely erroneous; it is downright harmful. There are three reasons for this:

1) It is factually incorrect. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Obama's policies, the simple truth is that they are not socialistic.

For further proof, we can refer to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary's definition of socialism:

noun \ˈsō-shə-ˌli-zəm\

1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

2 a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

It is important to note that this doesn't say that ANY government intervention in economic matters - be it in providing goods and services or in regulating major industries - constitutes socialism. If that was the case, we would have been a socialist state long before Barack Obama or even Franklin Roosevelt ever ascended to the White House. After all, the government does offer a "public option" in education via free schooling for children (an idea prominently advocated by Thomas Jefferson) and state colleges (supported, with an initial lack of success, by John Quincy Adams); regulates the food we eat and the medicines we take to make sure they are clean and safe (passed with the support of President Theodore Roosevelt); imposes an eight-hour workday (with the bill that set the precedent for this having been signed into law by Woodrow Wilson); prohibits the use of child labor (also passed into law the first time under Woodrow Wilson, although a Supreme Court decision overturning it required a second passage under Franklin Roosevelt); and bans the formation of corporate "trusts" that stifled competition (thanks to the efforts of Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, and Woodrow Wilson).

There is much that the earlier list doesn't take into account. For example, there are public firefighters and police officers (both of which were initially only provided by private corporations until the obvious dangers and inefficiencies of that system became too flagrant and dangerous to ignore), the Securities and Exchange Commission (which was created after the Great Depression to prevent a repetition of the fiscal chicanery that contributed to the Stock Market crash, and which was effective until weakened by Ronald Reagan and his successors), and Medicare and Medicaid (pushed into being by President Lyndon Johnson and adamantly defended even by Republicans today, despite claims that it was "socialistic" back when LBJ and other liberals supported it). Expensive economic stimulus packages also have a long and distinguished history, from the massive national economic mobilization ordered by Franklin Roosevelt during World War Two (which caused unemployment to drop from 14% in 1940 to less than 2% in 1943) to the Interstate Highway Act pushed through by President Dwight Eisenhower, which contributed greatly to the economic prosperity of the late 1950s and 1960s. In fact, if it wasn't for government regulation of the economy through civil rights legislation, it would still be legal for private businesses to refuse employment or refuse customer service on the basis of race, religion, and gender (indeed, many conservatives opposed legislation that wanted to prohibit this form of discrimination precisely because they felt the effect it would have on private enterprise was "socialistic").

In short, an elementary understanding of both the history of this country and the workings of today's government makes it very clear that spending money to end a recession, imposing regulations so as to guarantee fair play or prevent injustices, and advocating government involvement in providing goods and services are not socialistic. The reality is that "socialism" refers only to an extreme perspective in economic policy, one which argues that EVERYTHING in the economy should be controlled by the government. In the same vein, there are fundamentalist libertarians at the opposite extreme of that same spectrum who argue that NOTHING besides the military should be provided by the state. Fortunately, the vast majority of political figures and private citizens agree that the ideal lies somewhere between these two simplistic absolutes.

Of course, there are bound to be fierce disagreements as to the exact location of that happy medium, and not only is that acceptable, it's healthy and necessary. There is nothing at all illegitimate about conservatives who claim that too much government regulation can inhibit economic growth, that having the government provide certain goods and services can stifle creativity and hinder efficiency, that welfare programs to help the poor and assist the unemployed find work provides a disincentive for individual initiative, or that economic stimulus to end the recession is too expensive to be fiscally safe. While liberals may disagree with these arguments, there is nothing intellectually dishonest about their use by the right-wing in political debate, and if we are confident in the correctness of our position (which we should be), there is no reason to object when we are expected to rebut them.

That said, there IS something intellectually (to say nothing of morally) dishonest about claiming that advocates of financial and business regulation, labor rights, a public option in health care, unemployment benefits, food stamps, welfare, minimum wage increases, programs to put people back to work, aggressive economic stimulus spending or other liberal economic policies are bringing us toward socialism. Just as it would be inaccurate to claim that someone who supports less government economic intervention is advocating fundamentalist libertarianism (unless he or she is saying that the government should have absolutely no involvement in the economy), so too is it inaccurate to claim that someone who supports more government economic intervention is advocating socialism (unless he or she is saying that the government should have complete control over the economy). As such, since there is no evidence that Barack Obama, his advisors, or the vast majority of American liberals want a complete state takeover of the economy (kooky conspiracy theories to the contrary notwithstanding), the claim that any of them are socialistic is just factually wrong.

To quote the great Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

2) It breeds violence and persecution.

There is a long, tragic history in this country of people with legitimate progressive ideas being persecuted due to an erroneous conflation of their objectives with "socialism" or "communism." The most famous period during which this happened, of course, was in the early 1950s, when Senator Joe McCarthy had the nation tearing itself apart in a terrified frenzied at the prospect of potential Communist infiltration. The political atmosphere caused by his wild assertions resulted in mass firings, persecution, and blacklisting - based solely on suspicion and unsubstantiated accusation - which impacted individuals in every sector of American life, from academia and journalism to entertainment and the business world. The exact number of lives ruined during this period will never be known with certainty, although the Eisenhower administration later released the names of more than 2,400 government employees who had been terminated due to the government's anti-subversive program (only one of whom was ever definitely proved to have been engaged in Communist activity). It is also known that hundreds were blacklisted in Hollywood during the height of the Red Scare (with Ronald Reagan, then leader of the actors' union, among those who "named names"), while acts of violence against suspected communists were reported with increasing frequency.

Although the notoriety of McCarthy's actions has caused his name to be forever associated with the practice of trying to discredit opponents through false charges of socialism, McCarthyism itself actually predates its namesake. Rabid fear of radical leftists can be found as early as the First World War, when President Woodrow Wilson ordered Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to arrest (using undercover informants and warrantless wiretaps) thousands of people suspected of being having Communist, Socialist, or anarchist sympathies. It could be found after McCarthy's downfall, such as during the presidency of John Kennedy, when Adlai Stevenson (former Democratic presidential nominee and then America's ambassador to the United Nations) was spat upon and hit on the head with a placard by a right-wing mob in Dallas that insisted he was a socialist. It was rampant during the Vietnam protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, in which violence against anti-war students was often justified on the grounds that the activists were in cahoots with Communists. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn't immune to red-baiting - during his crusade for civil rights, the violence inflicted against both him and his supporters was often justified on the basis of a lingering whispering campaign that King (and the civil rights movement in general) had ties with socialists (FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover even had King followed on the basis of those rumors).

In light of this history, it is hardly surprising that the same people who claim Obama and liberal Democrats are socialistic come disturbingly close to advocating violence or oppression. One can see it in Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle of Nevada, who has claimed that "if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies," casually suggested that people need to "take out" her Democratic opponent, and stated that one of the goals of her movement is to force the press to "ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported." It can be found in the jeremiads of right-wing pundit Glenn Beck, who has joked about poisoning House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and argued that Barack Obama's administration must be stopped because it is attempting a "second American Revolution." There was the time when Fox News contributor and former Washington Times bureau chief Liz Trotta mixed up the names of Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden and then made an off-hand wistful comment about wanting to "knock off" both of them "if we could", or the time when former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin urged her supporters, "Don't retreat... Reload!" It makes itself manifest in the right-wing grassroots movement known as the Tea Party, whose protesters have held up signs saying "It is time to water the tree of liberty" (a reference to the Jefferson quote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants."), shouted bigoted slurs at pro-health care reform legislators, and even attacked Democrats who supported Obama's health care reform legislation (windows of Democratic offices in Wichita were shattered with bricks; the front door and window to the office of Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords was also destroyed; a similar incident occurred at the office of New York Representative Louise Slaughter; South Carolina Representative James Clyburn, the highest ranking black member in that body, received a fax with an image of a noose; the brother of one Virginia Congressman found the propane gas line to his house severed and later discovered that a radical right-wing website had accidentally listed his home address instead of that of his sibling).

The incitement to violence isn't only direct. It is hard to avoid drawing a connection between the wild assertions that Obama is a socialist and similarly paranoid conspiracy theories - that he is a secret Muslim, that he was not born in this country and is thus an illegitimate president, that he wanted to create death panels in his health care reform legislation, that he is deliberately and systematically destroying American freedoms. Although those who defend the disseminators of these calumnies argue that their statements don't technically constitute threats, as former Republican speechwriter David Frum observed:

If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him.

But he is not.

In light of all this, it is hardly surprising to hear that the Texas education board - which is revising its history textbooks and which, as one of the nation's largest purchasers of that product, has influence in how history is taught far beyond the borders of its own state - is rewriting Joe McCarthy's role in history so as to claim that he was vindicated. It even makes sense that Glenn Beck has advocated the restoration of the "loyalty oaths" that were commonplace during McCarthy's heyday. However, given that these are the same sources which repeatedly purport that Obama is a socialist, it becomes difficult to dismiss the timing of their discovery of the glories of McCarthyism as coincidental.

3) It stifles intelligent debate and limits our ability to solve important problems.

No policy should ever be implemented without first undergoing the litmus test of rigorous debate. At the same time, such debates are only beneficial when they involve a direct and thorough exploration of the FACTS involved in the given policies, rather than being mired in fictions and absurdities.

It is in this way that the conflation of liberalism with socialism oppresses the freedom of intellectual dialogue. When advocates of left-wing economic and social policies are accused of socialism, they usually wind up having to expend a great deal of intellectual and emotional energy attempting to demonstrate the falseness of the charges (often to no avail, since the sanctimoniousness of many red-baiters has made them impervious to rebuttal). While this would be acceptable if the charges themselves were potentially sound, the fact that they are patently ridiculous makes it unreasonable to expect liberals to have to waste their time addressing them. Naturally many liberals react to this obstacle by deciding to not even put in the effort. Even worse, many who are initially brave enough to weather the storm of vituperation become so overwhelmed by the hostility they face that they become apprehensive at the prospect of dealing with it again, eventually resulting in them either moderating their stands to be "less liberal" just so they can avoid the socialist charge or resolving to not articulate them at all - in effect, being intimidated into silence.

Forcing liberals to address erroneous charges of socialism is not only unfair, it is also detrimental to the quality of the debate. Once such a highly-charged distraction has been injected into the political dialogue about a given issue, it winds up consuming a great deal (if not a majority) of the attention regarding that subject. In the case of liberalism and the false charge of socialism, the disproportionate negative attention usually has the correlative effect of highlighting whatever points, valid and invalid, are being made by the conservatives who oppose the given left-wing idea. At the same time, it simultaneously causes the public consciousness to either minimize or entirely dismiss whatever arguments, valid or invalid, that liberals might have which support their position. A sound analogy might be made between the impact of those who cry "Socialist!" at liberal policies and the influence of hecklers on a stand-up comic's performance; even though other audience members may not like or even respect the heckler(s), as any comedian will tell you, the sheer vociferousness and shrillness of what they say almost invariably causes people to become unreasonably critical of the comedian's material, even if the so-called flaws being identified by the heckler are bogus and the material itself has genuine merit. Similarly, cries of "socialism" don't just take time away from the relevant portions of a given debate; they force people to pay attention to silly straw men instead of the real issues at stake. By muddling the clarity of the public's understanding, false cries of socialism wind up dumbing down the debate.

None of this, though, constitutes the worst consequence of today's McCarthyism. No, the worst part is a ramification so obvious that the failure to more widely recognize it is astonishing - i.e., when liberals are correct in what they want to do, they often are rendered unable to implement it, to the detriment not just of their personal cause, but of the American people.

Take our current recession. History has repeatedly shown that the way to bring about an end to economic recessions is through policies that lower unemployment, increase wages while avoiding rapid inflation or deflation so as to maximize purchasing power, and allow the law of supply-and-demand in our free market to work on a macroeconomic level - that is, watch as increased spending fuels job creation, which in turn will fuel more spending, which will in turn fuel more job creation, and so on.

Conservatives have no meaningful proposals as to how we can make this happen in America today. Although some say that cutting taxes on the wealthy will stimulate the economy, the data shows that such measures usually only cause the wealthy to hoard their extra cash or spend it on luxury items; likewise, arguments that cutting taxes on big businesses will cause them to create jobs have proven inaccurate, since the owners of said businesses tend to pocket the additional money for personal profit instead of using it to expand their enterprises or engage in other job-creating endeavors. Similarly, claiming that tax cuts on the middle or working classes will bring about recovery is erroneous (even though liberals usually join conservatives in supporting such measures) since the unemployed obviously can't benefit from tax cuts while the non-wealthy have an understandable instinct to save when they perceive that the economy is flailing.

Liberals, on the other hand, believe that the way to improve the economy is to (1) spend as much money as needed in order to create the jobs necessary to put unemployed Americans back to work, even if doing so requires cutting superfluous military spending or raising taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses so as to avoid increasing the budget deficit and/or raising taxes on the middle and working classes, and (2) strengthen labor laws and raise the minimum wage so as to guarantee that people who receive jobs will earn enough money to be able to afford their reasonable wants and needs. This latter goal serves not only an obvious humanitarian objective but also a practical one - since ideally economic stimulus should not be permanent, the easiest way to make sure that it serves as a temporary life support system instead of a lasting crutch is to guarantee that consumers earn enough money at their jobs so that the cash they infuse into the marketplace can create a self-sustaining cycle of prosperity independent of government activity.

The essence of the liberal economic mentality was best summarized by Franklin Roosevelt in a speech during his first presidential campaign in 1932:

The task of government in its relation to business is to assist the development of an economic declaration of rights... Every man has a right to life; and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living. He may by sloth or crime decline to exercise that right; but it may not be denied him.

In the past, the programs based on this mantra have worked spectacularly well, as evidenced by the success of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (especially the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and the program of national economic mobilization during World War Two) and the host of milder policies implemented by his three Democratic successors (Harry Truman's Fair Deal, John Kennedy's New Frontier, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty, all of which addressed both the immediate issues of employment and wages and related socio-economic issues including housing, medical care, security in old age, and education). As such, it stood to reason that Barack Obama should attempt some variation of those policies in the fight against our current recession - and initially he agreed.

But then McCarthyism reared its ugly head. Before Obama had even finished hammering out the details of his stimulus proposal, protests cropped up all over America decrying his recovery plan as "socialistic." In response to this, the president decided to propose a plan that liberal economists (Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Joseph Stiglitz) instantly realized was only one-fourth as large as what would be needed to increase employment and create a real recovery (even though its price tag was $787 billion, $288 billion of it was wasted on tax cuts, with less than $500 billion going to a stimulus that, in order to be effective, would need $2 trillion). Obama's clear goal, as indicated by both his approach with Congress and his rhetoric, was to prove his right-wing critics wrong in their charges that he was a socialist, even if doing so required a package that only prevented the recession from worsening instead of causing it to actually improve.

The consequence of this is well-known: The recession hasn't ended, Obama's approval ratings are at an all-time low, and his right-wing critics still accuse him of being a socialist, as they would have inevitably done regardless of whether he'd passed a bill four times larger - as was needed - or one that was even smaller. Despite his efforts to reason with the right-wing, the hypocrisy of many of their charges still eludes them. Their complaint about the increase in our budget deficit, for example, ignores the fact that of the $200 billion budget deficit increase caused by the bill in 2009, half of that came from the tax cuts demanded from conservatives such as themselves, and even had the bill been large enough to end the recession ($2 trillion), this only would have increased the deficit by $400 billion, making it still cheaper than either George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy or his war in Iraq (and also meaning that it could be paid for without increasing the deficit by ending either one of those). Likewise, their claim of being overtaxed ignores the reality that taxes under President Obama have only increased for those who makes $250,000 a year or more.

Far worse than Obama's political woes, though, is the human toll of his failure to adequately act after the charge of "socialist" was lobbed against him. Because claims of socialism caused Obama to water down his bill to a quarter efficiency, unemployment remains sky high, income levels are stagnating at best, and the suffering caused by this downturn has no end in sight. Although much of the blame rests with Obama for capitulating to today's McCarthyites instead of fighting them, the reality is that the decision to capitulate never would have been made had he not first faced ideological bullies who forced him to choose between fighting and appeasement. Now that Obama has learned his lesson and is trying to pass the stimulus needed (albeit piecemeal), it is too late; the damage to his political brand is so serious that he lacks the resources to push through the bold program that was necessary from the beginning, and barring a decisive re-election in 2012, he will not get that back. A similar story can be told with other key issues, particularly health care reform, where claims of socialism caused Obama to take a plan that had never been socialistic in the first place (at its most liberal it merely called for a "public option," or a government-run health care provider to exist as an alternative to, rather than replacement for, private insurers) and water it down so that, while still effective, it wound up leaving millions uninsured needlessly.

This is the greatest harm of all caused by McCarthyist tactics, both as used in the past and as applied against Obama today. When they force liberals to retreat on issues where they're wrong, the only victims are the liberals themselves who have been harassed, intimidated, and/or silenced. When, however, they force a left-wing retreat on issues where the progressives are right - with the economic stimulus package and health care reform being only the most recent examples - everyone in America suffers. For that to happen in any situation is a senseless tragedy, but for it to occur as the result of an argument that has more of gravy than of grave to it is something unforgivable. It is the triumph of stentorian stupidity over the needs of humanity.

Of course, I admit that the contents of some of these paragraphs may meet with disapproval from conservatives. I welcome their dissent. I encourage an uninhibited discussion on all of these issues. In a free society, it is necessary that intelligent men and women vigorously disagree on matters of great importance.

But no society can be free when one point of view is so mischaracterized that its adherents are denied a reasonable opportunity to make their case to the public. No nation can advance when intelligent, well though-out solutions to major problems aren't given a fair hearing because they are shouted down by irrational hatreds. In short, if conservatives wish to debate me, disagree with President Obama, or criticize any other liberal in any way, they have the right to do so - but ONLY if they stick to the realm of facts. As one of America's first conservative thinkers put it best:

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
- John Adams