In response to Obama’s signaling that he will include some GOP ideas in the stimulus package, Melissa McEwan recently observed:
…all six of the RNC chief candidates are wringing their hands about how to avoid becoming a permanent minority, but apparently our newly elected Democratic president wants to help restore their well-deserved deficit of credibility by using their party’s ideas.
Swell.
Also, Rick Warren regrets to inform you that the Bible forbids you from divorcing your abusive spouse.
In my more optimistic moments, I like to think that Obama is deliberately riling up the progressives so that we’ll put pressure on him. That way, when he carries out a slightly-more-liberal-than-expected agenda, he can say popular opinion forced him to do it.
Today I’m having trouble believing it.
I have no problem with the basic idea that Obama would like to reach out and forge a stronger coalition in order to surmount the great challenges of our generation.
I think he should reach out. I think he should consider proposed solutions that come from all over the political spectrum. I just wish I had more confidence that his imagined future coalition is a place that I would be proud to call America.
I’ve heard an awful lot about this place called America; I grew up here, after all. America is, among other things, a place where people who don’t like each other can still manage to share a town without violence or oppression.
Tolerance is the basic value that makes it work. Tolerance and community spirit. If you’re missing either of those things, you’re part of the problem.
See, the big tent has a maximum occupancy, but the maximum occupancy changes depending on how the people inside the tent behave. If we all throw our elbows around, some people are going to get knocked out of the tent. We all have to agree to keep our elbows in a little bit so that as many people as possible can enjoy the tent.
That’s why the liberal ethic of tolerance does not allow us to tolerate those who do harm to others.
Real families, children of gay parents, are suffering in California today because the anti-gay ballot measure Proposition 8 passed. These children know that their families’ legal rights are insecure because so many voters acted on the belief that committed same-sex couples don’t deserve the same protections that committed opposite-sex couples have.
If you think gay people are icky, but you voted no on Prop 8, then you chose not to do harm. You are (in this context, at least) among the tolerant, even if you would never invite a gay couple to your neighborhood barbecue or want your faith community to recognize their union.
Recognizing the rights of other human beings is compatible with a moderate political position. Depriving them of their rights in order to prevent them from doing something you disapprove of is NOT tolerant. It causes suffering. It’s hateful.
Rick Warren has a right to hold hateful opinions and talk about them to as many people as will listen. But I don’t have to give him my respect or attention, any more than I have to invite the neighborhood sex offender to my dinner table.
Obama has chosen to give Warren a role at the inauguration that symbolically places him ahead of all other faith leaders. This suggests to me that Obama doesn’t share the tolerant liberal’s guiding principle regarding who should or shouldn’t be allowed to share the big tent.
(Maybe someday Rick Warren will declare that even though he thinks God hates fags, he still thinks they’re human beings with the right to legally marry their loved ones. Until then, he should be treated as what he is: an uncivil, intolerant creep who shares the tent really, really badly.)
The Republican party has for years specialized in encouraging all the elbows they see, especially the elbows with a lot of muscle behind them.
This is true of their social policies, which strongly favor the interests of white Christian able-bodied men, as well as their economic policies, which favor rich people over poor people and rich corporations over the average citizen.
This is not what I call community spirit.
So when Obama wants to appropriate Republican notions to sweeten his economic policies for Congress, I want to wave my arms and shout, “Wait just a darn minute!”
I thought business-people were supposed to take risks, and that that was why they deserved to reap massive profits off of private enterprise; so that they would have a cushion to fall onto should their enterprise fail. And now we’re bailing them out because why?
Well, it’s not entirely a bad idea to do so, but how about attaching some conditions to that money? Tax incentives for businesses that don’t lay off employees– that’s a good one. It’s good for the economy because it puts more money into consumer hands, and also it means that hardworking people don’t suddenly find themselves eating cat food because the mortgage industry got dangerously stupid and screwed us all.
Republicans, however, generally don’t like to condescend to help out the average worker. We’re supposed to be pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, not complaining about the political party that runs around cutting bootstraps.
How can we be expected to work with these people? Why would Obama deal with them when they haven’t shown one iota of civic spirit toward ordinary Americans? Why should anyone trust the Republicans until they prove they’re no longer the party of stomping on the little guy?
The When Obama says bipartisanship, he means tolerating the intolerant by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.