Memo to Republicans: Your serious contenders are hypocrites, too

By David McElroy · July 22, 2011

If you believe in the democratic system and want to be a serious part of it in this country, you can be a Democrat or a Republican. That’s it. Most of those who want small government join Team GOP, believing they’re pursuing small government. Sadly, they’re mistaken.

I have lots of friends who are still active in the Republican Party, as I once was. Many of them are very sincere believers in cutting the size of government. I certainly know some who are social conservatives and neo-conservatives, but most among my friends are fiscally conservative and fairly socially tolerant people who are opposed to big government. They honestly believe supporting the Republican Party is going to cut the size of government.

There’s absolutely no evidence to support that fairy tale.

I was reminded of that again today when I saw this story about Texas Gov. Rick Perry — a wannabe Republican presidential candidate — blasting the Obama administration for cutting jobs in NASA now that the space shuttle program is winding down. (The link comes via The Agitator, a site which is worth your daily perusal.)

Isn’t a Republican supposed to be in favor of cutting government jobs? Are NASA jobs somehow special and worthy of keeping around because we all like watching rockets launch if they have big ol’ American flags on ’em? Even though I dearly love space travel (and am eager for humans to start taking it seriously as a business opportunity), I’d be happy if NASA were shut down this afternoon. A Facebook friend of mine had an astute observation about the end of the shuttle program:

“I heard the space shuttle program end. It sounded like a giant vacuum shutting off after sucking $192 billion into space. At least it was a success, though, by government standards. Only two of the five orbiters were destroyed.”

With many Republicans — such as Rick Perry — they’re always in favor of cutting someone else’s government program. Whatever program is sacred to them, of course, should be off-limits. (As governor of Texas, Perry was much more concerned about job losses at Houston’s NASA facilities than he was about principles of smaller government.)

For some Republicans, it’s the space program. For others, it’s farm subsidies. For yet others, it’s corporate welfare for their fat-cat donors. And they pretty much all love the prescription medicine benefit that’s going to help bankrupt the government. Medicare and Medicaid are even pretty popular with them. And don’t even think about suggesting that we get rid of Social Security, because that’s way too popular for them to pursue dumping that.

Taken together, you have a picture of hypocrisy on the issue of cutting the size of government. Even if you ignore the cost of insane, aggressive wars that a Republican president led us into in the last decade, government grew under Republicans. And if you add in the insane military costs, you have a picture of complete and utter insanity — one that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that limiting government is simply a stump speech for Republicans, not a subject they take seriously.

Where can you start if you’d like to get the facts that you won’t hear from talking heads on television? I’d like you to consider taking a look at a couple of books from scholars at the Cato Institute that lay out the case for how the Republican Party has betrayed you:

Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government — When this book was written six years ago, Republicans controlled the White House and Congress, so they had the chance to slash government’s size if they were serious about it. Instead, they massively increased the size of government. This book goes a long way toward explaining it. If you don’t want to take the time to read the book, at least listen to this Cato Institute book forum with the author, along with comments from the late conservative columnist Bob Novak.

Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservativism Brought Down the Republican Revolution — This one is from four years ago, but it’s still just as relevant today. It also has a Cato book forum you can listen to if you’re not willing to read to whole thing. The responder on this book forum was former GOP House Speaker Dick Armey. (I don’t think Armey takes nearly enough blame these days for the damage that his willingness to compromise caused, but that’s another story. They always talk tough about cutting government when they’re no longer in the position to do so.)

I don’t believe in the coercive state in the least. I think it’s coming apart at the seams and something else is going to replace it. (Actually, many different things.) That’s why I’m not terribly interested in trying to support one of the incumbent parties, even if I didn’t see the majoritarian system as immoral. I think they’re increasingly irrelevant. But even if you do still believe in the state — and believe it’s just fine to force people to do what the majority want, as long as it’s not “too much” — you should re-evaluate your loyalty to the Republican Party. Regardless of the rhetoric of its leaders, it’s no better than the Democrats when you actually give it power.

The only real difference between the parties is their cultures. The culture of the GOP is that of a more traditional middle-class white America. The Democratic Party’s culture is an amalgam of cultures that are very different from the cultural conservatism that Republicans are comfortable with. Personally, I’m more comfortable with some parts of Republican culture, too. They look and sound more like me than the Democrats do. But they’re just as committed to using force to control people as the Democrats are.

Republicans have been promising the same thing ever since at least the ’60s, but delivering very different results when given the power to make a difference. If you’re in favor of small government, get over the notion that the GOP is going to get you there.

It’s just a fantasy. It’s not going to happen.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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