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Tuesday, December 10, 2013

We Can't Call Ourselves a Democracy Anymore

Or at least we can't until every last member of Congress who is on the Koch brothers' and Heritage Foundation's payroll has been sent home packing.  That's what the last few years of escalated pointless infighting should be teaching every single person in the country who is eligible to vote.

The word itself comes from the Greek δημοκρατία, meaning "rule of the people."  This busted-ass system is as far removed from that as it can get at the moment without throwing up its hands and asking England to come back and take over.  You cannot call yourself a "rule of the people" when your government is doing the exact opposite of what the people want because it's following the money rather than the voters.

The problem we have is that due to the deep pockets of millionaires who hate government making pesky laws that tell them there are only so many ways they can abuse people for a quick buck, the system has been rigged since the Gerrymanderpocalypse of 2010 to elect people to government who hate governing.

The irony, of course, is that this is all coming from a group that claims to love the U.S. and wishes to rescue it from the hands of filthy progressives.  The irony is that they "love" the U.S. like a NASCAR fan loves his battered wife.

See, the Tea Party's whole crusade against taxes because they love America is the stupidest damned thing since NASCAR itself.  Federal income tax was implemented by Abraham Lincoln, a Republican president from a much different time when the party platforms were flipped; the Republican Party was originally founded by anti-slavery activists, and the insistence on small government was in regard to stopping the plantation system that left small, independent farmers with shitty land because rich slaveowners bought up all the good stuff.  The original Republican slogan was "free labor, free land, free men."

Republicans originally wanted small government not because they believed government is inherently bad, but because the government at the time was both large and corrupt as hell.  And that small government would start with the abolition of slavery, or so they thought.  Even then they were the party of business, but for different reasons.  The original goal of the party was to keep what it viewed as government's sticky fingers out of private business.  Because that's where corruption starts.

They were the party of business, yes.  But small business.  Republicans of Lincoln's time up until the 1930s were about protecting the mom-and-pop family-owned ventures from being run out of town by huge corporations they could never compete with.  They felt everyone had the right to success, and that right would be best preserved by making business fair.

Remember Theodore "Trust-Buster" Roosevelt?  The guy who fought to break up shit like price-fixing and gentleman's agreements between large businesses that were squeezing out little-guy competition?  He's the Patron Saint of the old school Republican party.

So what happened that changed the party ideals?  Two things: The Crash of 1929/Great Depression and World War II.

The 1929 stock market crashes that precipitated the Great Depression could best be described as "too much of a good thing."  By the Roaring Twenties, government had abandoned agriculture for big-city business, such that rural populations were giving farming the finger and moving to the city where they hoped to find work.  Credit and investment had just become a thing, and people were partying like a kid on their 21st birthday with them.  Republican economic policies only saw the short-term benefit (read: shitloads of money), and not the long-term risks.

Once the crash happened and Ted Roosevelt's cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, became president and started enacting common sense stuff that works (Medicare, Social Security, etc.), that was the beginning of today's Republican party, trying to reclaim the completely unsustainable prosperity of the 1920s.

Really, the Republican Party of today, and the Tea Party in particular, are more like the NASCAR fan who is trying to make his battered wife starve herself back into her wedding dress so he can re-live the glory days when Dale Earnhardt was still alive and diet soda didn't exist.

To that end, the GOP's answer isn't so much "smaller government" as "no government."  See, "government doesn't work" is a self-fulfilling prophecy; progressives have proven for nearly a century that government totally fucking works when you have people running the country who want to make it work.  When you hire people who hate their job, of course service is going to suck.  A trip to Wal-Mart is enough to prove that.

We tried the GOP's way of doing government twice in the last thirty years.  Once in the 1980s, and again in the 2000s.  Both times failed spectacularly, and both times it took a Democrat who cared about the country as a whole instead of just his campaign donors to get shit done.

What we need to do now to fix this country and get it back to a sustainable state is, ironically, to do what any business would:

Get rid of the people who don't want to do their fucking job.