Give Conservatives "The Small Stuff"... In Exchange For Single Payer Healthcare

Dear Fred,

Thanks for your email.

Last night I was bemoaning Roe v. Wade for getting so far ahead of national sentiment that it inspired the catastrophic reaction of fundamentalists "coming out of the woodwork" where, previously, they had been content to dwell in apolitical isolation.

Not only are The Fundies "out of the woodwork," they are now burrowing into American women's vaginas more deftly than a gynecologist with a patient in stirrups.

Yes.

By all means...

Give 'em the "small stuff" in exchange for "single payer."

Once single payer is in place, we finally engage the process of "socialized capitalism," simultaneously charting course toward civilization and away from the suckhole of neo-barbarism.

The major stumbling block "in all this" is the GOP's abandonment of conservatism for radicalism. (Imagine the migration of America's political center: Obama is a Rockefeller Republican yet Republicans see him with a hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other!)

The loons who now rule The House of Representatives are fully prepared to destroy the existing state to resurrect the presumed Golden Age of " radically-individualistic, six-shooter Cowboy authoritarianism." 

"Home! Home on the range! 

Where the deer and the antelope play. 

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word 

and the skies are not cloudy all day."

 

In fact, radical "Republicans" now believe that the destruction of the state is the only certain way to avoid the irrevocable triumph of liberalism, at least insofar as liberalism is the cornerstone of Liberal Democracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy

If you haven't read my post "Republicans For Revolution, by Mark Lilla," I encourage you to take a look. It's dense but rich.  http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/09/republicans-for-revolution-by-mark-lilla.html

Here is a key passage:

The real news on the American right is the mainstreaming of political apocalypticism. This has been brewing among intellectuals since the Nineties, but in the past four years, thanks to the right-wing media establishment and economic collapse, it has reached a wider public and transformed the Republican Party. How that happened would be a long story to tell, and central to it would be the remarkable transmutation of neoconservatism from intellectual movement to rabble-rousing Republican court ideology. The first neoconservatives were disappointed liberals like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, who saw the failures of a large number of Great Society programs to deliver on the unrealistic expectations of its architects, and consequently began to appreciate the wisdom of certain conservative assumptions about human nature and politics... 

Sometime in the Eighties, though, neoconservative thinking took on a darker hue. The big question was no longer how to adapt liberal aspirations to the limits of politics, but how to undo the cultural revolution of the Sixties that, in their eyes, had destabilized the family, popularized drug use, made pornography widely available, and encouraged public incivility. In other words, how to undo history. At first, neoconservatives writing in publications like Commentary and The Public Interest (which I once helped to edit) portrayed themselves as standing with “ordinary Americans” against the “adversary culture of intellectuals,” and to that end promoted “family values” and religious beliefs they did not necessarily share, but thought socially useful. Yet by the Nineties, when it became apparent that lots of ordinary Americans had adjusted to the cultural changes, neoconservatives began predicting the End Times, and once-sober writers like Gertrude Himmelfarb and Robert Bork started publishing books with titles like On Looking into the Abyss and Slouching Towards Gomorrah.

The new apocalypticism reached a fever pitch in a symposium published in 1996 in the widely read the conservative journal First Things, edited by the late Richard John Neuhaus. The special issue bore the title “The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics,” and was provoked by a court decision on physician-assisted suicide. The opening editorial put the following question before readers: Given that “law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality,” and that, due to judicial activism, “the government of the United States of America no longer governs by the consent of the governed,” have we “reached or are [we] reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime,” and therefore must consider responses “ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution”? To raise such a question, the editors insisted, “is in no way hyperbolic.”²

Pax tecum

Alan

***

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Fred Owens <froghospital911@gmail.com> wrote:

I blame small pissy govt regulations for the advent of Reagan.

Not major interferences but small-scale avoidable bullshit.

I feel that the mandated nationwide 55mph speed limit in the 1970s unconsciously drove half of America nuts. Mandated, no vote, nationwide, useless -- taking away our right to drive as fast as we want.

My belief is that if conservatives and other Americans are relieved of some regulatory burden, they will go away or at least keep quiet.

The trouble is that people on the left want to fix things.

The introduction of school busing and the the rejection of school prayer were two other Tea Party incubators.

I say give 'em the small stuff and demand single-payer universal health care.

--
Fred Owens
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