October 18, 2011 6:22 AM

This just in: Compassionate Conservatism is neither

(The Washington Post poll is here)

It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention that this recession has helped to create an America that’s meaner, more divided, and far less compassionate. We can see it in the people some of y’all have elected to office. I don’t include myself in the equation for the simple reason that even if any of the mean-spirited Republicans in Congress represented my state or district it wouldn’t be because I helped to elect them.

We live in a time when, now more than ever, the safety net that has long protected the disadvantaged among us is being shredded by those who think that we bear no collective responsibility one for another. It’s an adapt or die world, and if you can’t fend for yourself, well…. We’ve seen Republican audiences cheer executions, allowing the uninsured to die, and large-scale government layoffs. The amount of suffering in this country has reached historic proportions, but as the need has multiplied, the desire among certain segments of the population to assist those in need has shrunk. America is broke, so the thinking goes, and therefore we must make some hard choices.

Except that America isn’t broke, and the idea that we no longer have the resources to care for our fellow Americans in need is crap. We have ample resources to conduct two never-ending far-flung wars…and yet we can’t care for the sick and needy here at home? Have we really become a society that would rather kill nameless, faceless people in foreign lands than care for those within our own borders who legitimately need a hand? In a land where there are more than four unemployed Americans for every vacant job, it’s no longer possible or credible to argue that the unemployed are lazy, shiftless slackers who’ve grown accustomed to sucking at the public teat. Our military provides health care for sick, ill, and wounded Iraqis and Afghans, and yet we refuse the idea of universal healthcare as “Socialism”?

I’m not about to posit an “eat the rich” argument. We need success, and we should applaud those who become rich. Conversely, we should also expect that the rich recognize the debt they owe to a country whose stability, prosperity, and rule of law made it possible for them to become rich. The rich must recognize that they didn’t become rich on their own, and that they bear a responsibility for maintaining a system that allowed them to reach such heights.

I’ve listened to numerous Right-wing pundits argue that we need to shrink the size of the federal government (to use Grover Norquist’s analogy, to a size small enough that it can be drowned in a bathtub). Government, the argument goes, is wasteful, inefficient, and ineffective; therefore we must get rid of it. Is government some or all of these things? Of course it is. Does that mean we need to throw the baby out with the bath water? Only if you believe that we bear no collective responsibility to one another. I’m sorry, but “I got mine; you can damn well get your own” is simply not a credible, compassionate, or humane argument. Republicans in Congress may be trying to dismantle the social safety net, but I have a difficult time believing that a majority of Americans support that idea. Most Americans recognize that one of the primary responsibilities of government is to ensure that the “least” among us have a safety net available to them. If we can’t, or if we refuse, to care for one another, what claim to humanity do we really have?

Wasteful. Inefficient. Ineffective. Yes, government is all of those things, but if all we focus on are the problems, we lose sight of the purpose of government. Barney Frank once said that government is just another name for what we choose to do together. I have a hard time believing that Americans collectively choose killing and destruction over compassion and caring. Yes, government needs to be reformed. That’s neither newsworthy nor new information. Government by its nature has ALWAYS been wasteful and inefficient, and at times it’s been ineffective. The challenge is how to reform government, how to make it less wasteful, more efficient, ad more effective. We shouldn’t have to kill the patient in order to kill the disease.

WE DESERVE BETTER.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on October 18, 2011 6:22 AM.

A look at the future of Tea Party America was the previous entry in this blog.

Just in case y'all were wondering how we got to where we are.... is the next entry in this blog.

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