The Republican Move To The Right

The Obama Presidency has been a very interesting and dramatic time. During the 2008 elections, the economy went through its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The Arab Spring has erupted across the Middle East, as the populace has gone to the streets to assert its rights against various oppressive governments in the region. Iran continues to cause trouble as it tries to develope the capacity to create nuclear power. In our own country the major political development has been the rise of the Tea Party and the shift in the Republican Party towards the extreme Right. During these past few years, many Progressives have been disappointed at Obama’s attempts at trying to reach a middle ground with Republicans as he tried to pass major legislation on health care, climate change, financial regulations, immigration reform, and economic relief for average Americans going through home foreclosures and unemployment. I have to admit to being disappointed at times too with Obama, though I can’t blame him for trying to reach out to Republicans. It’s tough for me to really judge Obama’s Presidency just because the Republicans in Congress during the past 4 years have been so obstinately opposed to almost every Obama initiative. This has been the result of the efforts by conservatives to marginalize or kick out the moderates in the Republican Party, and the loss of influence of moderate Republicans in the GOP has been bad for both the Republican Party and the political discourse in our country.

During the past 4 years, President Obama has tried various things to try to reach common ground with the Republicans to get bipartisan legislation. In the early part of the health care reform debate, Obama and his officials gave a lot of leeway to Senator Chuck Grassley and the Republicans in the Gang of Six Senators in the Senate Finance Committee to try to come up with a bipartisan health care reform bill. The attempts of bipartisanship on health care reform collapsed when Tea Party activists made a lot of noise during town hall meetings, which scared Senator Grassley away from making any deals with the Democrats.

President Obama had hoped that Senator Dick Durbin would succeed in his decade long effort to pass the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, better known as the DREAM Act, which would’ve given legal status to those who were brought to the U.S. before age 16, have been here for five years, have no criminal record, graduated from high school or gained an equivalency degree and who joined the military or attend college. Sadly, the bill was voted down 55 to 41 in December 2010, falling shy of the 60 votes required to limit debate and move forward, essentially killing the legislation for the 2010 congressional session. Almost all of the Republican Senators voted against the bill, including some Republicans who had supported the Dream Act in previous years (like Senators John McCain, Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley). Fifty Democrats voted for the Dream Act, along with independents Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders, and Republicans Richard Lugar, Lisa Murkowski and Bob Bennett.

The administration had hoped that the alliance of Senators Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry would in 2009 produce a compromise climate bill that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Kerry-Graham-Lieberman plan has initially included a cap-and-trade plan for emissions allowances, protections for U.S. businesses from unfair competition, protections for consumers and businesses from energy price increases and calls for emissions reductions “in the range of 17 percent below 2005 emission levels” by 2020, the level that President Barack Obama proposed in international climate negotiations in Copenhagen. The partnership fell apart without any action on climate change legislation.

In 2011, Obama entered into tense negotiations with House Speak John Boehner on a compromise deal to reduce the national debt. They initially had a deal, until Boehner faced a revolt from conservative Republican representatives. An article by Jake Sherman & John Breshahan for the September 21, 2011 edition of Politico stated

Wednesday night’s rank-and-file rebuke of GOP leadership — with 48 Republicans bolting on a temporary spending bill — underscored the fact that the House Republican majority is still struggling to find unity on major spending bills. It also showed they still need Democratic votes to help them govern.

The pressure from an angry Speaker John Boehner didn’t work — he even threatened to strip committee assignments. Four dozen Republicans —mostly conservatives — wanted more cuts, and they just said no, creating an uncomfortable scene on the House floor as the funding bill failed on a 195-230 vote. Democrats showed a rare moment of unity in overwhelmingly opposing the continuing resolution, which would keep the government funded through Nov. 18.

…It’s been a tumultuous few months for Republican leaders. Boehner had to back down on his attempt to cut a $4 trillion “grand bargain” with President Barack Obama over the debt-ceiling increase, and later had to back down on a balanced-budget amendment vote in the face of fierce opposition from within his own conference. In the end, Boehner and Obama stood on the sidelines as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) put together the framework for the deal that avoided a debt default.

The shift of the Republican Party towards a more conservative direction has been going on since the mid 1960s, when Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater had his campaign for the Presidency in 1964. The shift towards a more conservative direction took a more decisive turn in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the Presidential elections against Jimmy Carter and began the Reagan Revolution. In the past 3 decades, liberal and moderate Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, Pete McCloskey, John Anderson, Jim Jeffords, and Lincoln Chaffee began to disappear from the Republican Party. A partial explanation of the conservative shift in the Republican Party can be found in a June 23, 1996 article entitle Why Today’s Politics Stink, David Broder writes:

“The need for cross-party friendships is even greater now than in the past because the ideological differences between the parties have grown. And in both the House and Senate, a bloodless version of ‘ethnic cleansing’ has been taking place within each party.

For most of the postwar period, Democratic congressional majorities included a kaleidoscope of personalities and views, ranging from Northern liberals like Humphrey, Hart, and McGovern to Southern conservatives like Sam Ervin, John Stennis and Harry Byrd. But the conservative Southern Democrats began to disappear after the civil rights revolution. In the House, some of their seats are now held by African-Americans. But most of the House seats and all of the Senate seats that have switched parties are filled by conservative Republicans. As a result, the center of gravity in the House and Senate Democratic caucuses has moved north and moved left.

Exactly the opposite has been happening to the Republicans. With Southerners now in the top leadership positions in both House and Senate, the congressional GOP is much more uniformly conservative than it was when Dole arrived. And just as conservative Republicans have replaced conservative Democrats in the South, so liberal Democrats have replaced moderate and liberal Republicans who once were numerous in New England, the Middle Atlantic states, the Midwest and the Northwest.

As each party has become more homogeneous in terms of philosophy, there has been less tolerance of dissent. The penalties for deviating from the party line have increased.

The differences of view- even of philosophy- between the parties are genuine. But the press treats these disagreements as if they were narrowly partisan and the public often sees these battles simply as evidence of small minded, churlish behavior- and condemn everyone involved, regardless of party label. The result is a more polarized, less productive Congress- and one which the public has come to despise.”

Even more traditionally conservative Republicans have been challenged by the Tea Party for not being conservative enough and for their willingness to try to find common ground with their Democratic nominees. Senator Bill Bennett of Utah and Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana are two examples of conservative Republicans who were defeated in Republican primaries by conservative voters who favored more partisan candidates. In a May 8, 2012 Huffington Post article by Michael McCauliff, the article describes the difference between Lugar and Richard Mourdock, the candidate who defeated Lugar in the Republican primaries:

Mourdock’s heated rhetoric offered a sharp contrast to a low-key concession by Lugar, who refused to retreat from the idea of working with the other side, implicitly criticizing his rival.

“Serving the people of Indiana in the United States Senate has been the greatest honor of my public life. Hoosiers deserve the best representation possible,” an emotional Lugar said. “They deserve legislators who will listen to their entire spectrum of citizen views and work to achieve consensus. They deserve legislators who each day go to work thinking about how they can solve problems.”

Lugar seemed acutely aware that the right wing of his party had turned its no-surrender approach on him.

“We are experiencing deep political divisions in our society right now, and these divisions have stalemated progress in critical areas,” Lugar said, using a line that Democrats are likely to repeat going into the fall. “But these divisions are not insurmountable and I believe that people of goodwill, regardless of party, can work together for the benefit of our country.”

While Lugar was gracious in his speech, he released a statement that was far sharper:

“If Mr. Mourdock is elected, I want him to be a good senator. But that will require him to revise his stated goal of bringing more partisanship to Washington. He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.”

Former Governor Jeb Bush has also decried the Republican Party’s growing intolerance of opinions that do not conform to a uniform conservative view. Bush has been especially concerned about the Republican Party’s harsh rhetoric on immigration reform, as he has active in trying to get Republicans to reach out to Hispanic voters. In a June 11, 2012 New York Times article by Jim Rutenberg, the article states:

For the better part of three decades, there has been no more prominent family in Republican politics than the Bushes.

But tough talk about the state of the party on Monday by former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida — who went so far as to say that Ronald Reagan and his father would have a “hard time” fitting in during this Tea Party era — exhibited a growing distance between the family, which until not very long ago embodied mainstream Republicanism, and the no-compromise conservative activists now driving the party.

Speaking at a breakfast with national reporters held by Bloomberg View in Manhattan, Mr. Bush questioned the party’s approach to immigration, deficit reduction and partisanship, saying that his father, former President George Bush, and Reagan would struggle with “an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement.”

…friends say it is the party’s shift away from the sort of comprehensive immigration overhaul Mr. Bush had championed during his presidency that particularly pains the Bushes, who, for all of their differences, believe the system should be more humane for hardworking and law-abiding Hispanic families — whom the Republican Party must court to assure its future success. The issue has particular resonance for Jeb Bush, whose wife, Columba, is of Mexican heritage.

“It is a Bush family belief that we have to do more with Hispanic voters,” said a friend of Jeb Bush, Ana Navarro. “But Jeb understands the Republican Hispanic dynamic better than most people do because he speaks the language, he reads and listens to the news coverage, and he lives in the community.”

During the discussion at Bloomberg View, Mr. Bush implored his party: “Don’t just talk about Hispanics and say immediately we must have controlled borders. Change the tone would be the first thing. Second, on immigration, I think we need to have a broader approach.”

This points out a sad evolution within the Republican Party. A few decades ago, the Republican Party were actually stronger on issues of civil rights and minority rights than a Democratic Party that was dominated by conservative southern Democrats. The GOP, after all, were the party of Lincoln that fought for the emancipation of slaves and they worked to expand the rights of African Americans through such laws as the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. During this brief period during Reconstruction, the first African American Congressman and Senators were elected to Congress, including such distinguished men as Hiram Revels of Mississippi, Robert Smalls, Benjamin Turner of Alabama, Jefferson Long of Georgia, Robert De Large, Robert Brown Elliott, and Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina, and Josiah Walls of Florida. Prominent Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and George Frisbie Hoar spoke out for the rights of African Americans, Native Americans and Chinese Americans during the nineteenth century. This loss of diversity within the Republican Party is noted in an article for the Daily Beast by John Avlon:

Dust off your history books and you will see Republicans once had a virtual lock on the minority vote—and minority elected officials. The legacy of Lincoln was alive and well until not so long ago. Which makes the retreat of recent decades both unfortunate and ill-timed.

Consider that the first popularly elected African-American senator was a Republican, Ed Brooke from Massachusetts, in 1966. Likewise the first Asian-American senator, Hawaii’s Hiram Fong, who was first elected in the Eisenhower era. The first Native-American senator, Charles Curtis—who went on to be Herbert Hoover’s vice president. The first Hispanic senator, Octaviano Larrazolo, also was a Republican. Ditto the first woman popularly elected to the Senate, Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith.

“The Republican Party was the party that gave hope and inspiration to minorities—and there was a coalition at first,” says Ed Brooke, now 92 and living with his wife, Anne, in Miami. “My father was a Republican. My mother was a Republican. They wouldn’t dare be a Democrat. The Democrats were a party opposed to civil rights. The South was all Democratic conservatives. And the African-American community considered them the enemy.”

That’s why every single one of the 23 African-American members of Congress before 1900 was a Republican. They wouldn’t have dreamed of being anything other than members of the Party of Lincoln—Democrats were the party of the Confederate South. Frederick Douglass summed up the sentiment when he said, “I am a Republican, a black, dyed-in-the-wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom.” This legacy echoed for generations.

“When I first went to the Senate there was one woman there, Margaret Chase Smith, who was a Republican,” remembers Brooke. “Of course, I was the only African-American. But there were a couple of Jewish senators—Jacob Javits [a Republican from New York] and Abe Ribicoff [a Democrat] from Connecticut. We had some diversity—racial diversity and [gender] diversity—but it was very small, of course. But we also had a degree of diversity as far as political ideology. We had a group of moderate senators who met for lunch once a week and we had a block of eight that usually voted together on these issues.”

The decline of centrist Republicans was one important reason for the decline in the GOP’s diversity over recent decades, according to Brooke. The shift of the party’s political base to the states of the former Confederacy coincided with the rise of social conservatism and states’ rights in what had been the progressive party in the era of Lincoln. The historic irony of a Southern Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, signing civil rights and voting rights bills into law (which his 1964 opponent Barry Goldwater opposed) solidified the shift of African-Americans into the Democrats’ camp, capped by the election of the first African-American president a half-century later.

Paul Starr wrote an article for the American Prospect magazine on the importance of the moderate Republican. He wrote:

The Republicans, in contrast, have virtually cleansed themselves of moderates and are poised to move the country sharply to the right if they win the 2012 election. The source of the party’s shift is a mysterious death that may be the single most important contemporary political development — the demise of the moderate Republican in national politics.

…By the 1994 election — the second Republican “revolution” of recent decades — the party had moved further to the right. Yet even in the mid-1990s, influential Republican moderates in Congress, particularly in the Senate (including, for example, John Chafee, Arlen Specter, Jim Jeffords, Nancy Kassebaum, and William Cohen), continued to serve as a brake on conservative policy and as partners with a Democratic administration. Without the support of those moderates, Congress would never have enacted the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in 1997.

But with the 2010 election, American politics has entered a new phase. The number of moderate Republicans in Congress has now been so reduced that the old restraints on the party are gone. As a result, in a divided government bipartisan cooperation is more difficult, and if Republicans take control of both Congress and the presidency in 2013, national policy will likely swing even more sharply to the right than it has after previous Republican victories.

…The alternation in power of the two major parties is an inevitable aspect of American politics. American elections hinge largely on the performance of the economy, and things don’t look good now on that score. So, despite the unpopularity of their policy views, the Republicans could win in 2012 and carry out the program long sought by right-wingers to reverse the hard-won social, labor, and environmental protections that the United States has established since the New Deal.

As I look at the developments of the Republican Party of the past 4 years, I have a feeling of increasing concern. This political development has even effect me personally. In my twenties and early thirties, I had several friendships with conservatives where there was a respect for differences of opinions. Since the mid 1990s, however, those friendships have become much more difficult, and I think it has to do with the change in political climate. In the past decade or so, I’ve found myself getting caught up in some exasperating conflicts with individuals and groups who do not respect my right to hold a differing opinion. I’m still willing to reach out a hand of friendship towards a Conservative Republican, but after being burned a few times, I’ve learned to make sure that the individual has the ability to respect different points of views. I’ve encountered a few individuals who think the freedom of speech only applies to people who agree with them.

I do not agree with the views of the Tea Party, but I respect the willingness of the members to get involved in the political process and their persistence in arguing their views to try to persuade the American public. This is something the Left should be doing as well. Conservative Republicans love this country just as much as Liberal Democrats. The conception that Conservative Tea Partiers have on what is best for our country, though, is very different than what Liberals feel is best for this country. The vast ideological gulf between the two sides means that there is not much common ground on many issues between Liberals and Conservatives, and this has been the cause of much of the gridlock in Congress. Without Moderates to make compromises, the Congress will pretty much stay deadlock, unless one party or the other gains strong majorities in both houses of Congress, or if moderate Republicans make some inroads within the Republican Party.

The battles between Democrats and Tea Party Republicans is not new in American history. From the very beginning, there has been partisan battles between Federalists and Republicans, abolitionists and slaveholders, Populists and industrialists, New Deal Liberals and Conservative Republicans, segregationists and integrationists. The debates between these opposing forces was good for the public arena of ideas. The important thing is to maintain the diversity of different views that contribute to the debate on important issues. Liberal voices, conservative voices, moderate voices, radical leftist voices, and libertarian and anarchist voices are all important contributors in the national debate.

I respect the right of Tea Partiers to express their views. But I don’t like the tendency of Tea Partiers to marginalize opinions that do not conform to their own. The efforts of the Tea Party to expel Moderates from the Republican Party is especially worrisome. But I’m hoping that Moderates will eventually reassert themselves for the sake of the Republican Party and the country. Cass R. Sunstein wrote in his book Why Societies Need Dissent :

…I suggest that the American founders’ largest contribution consisted in their design of a system that would ensure a place for diverse views in government. The founding period saw an extraordinary debate over the nature of republican institutions, and in particular over the legacy of Montesquieu. Montesquieu was a revered source for all sides and a central figure in the development of the idea of separation of powers. The antifederalists, eloquent opponents of the proposed Constitution, complained that the framers had betrayed Montesquieu by attempting to create a powerful central government, one that was impossibly ill-suited to American diversity. In their public writings during the debates over whether the Constitution should be ratified, many of the antifederalists urged that a republic could flourish in homogenous areas of like-minded people. An especially articulate antifederalist wrote under the name “Brutus”, in honor of the Roman republican who participated in the assasination of Julius Caesar to prevent Caesar from overthrowing the Roman republic. Brutus spoke for the republican tradition when he told the American people: “In a republic, the manners, sentiments, and interests of the people should be similar. If this be not the case, there will be constant clashing of opinions; and the representatives of one part will be continually striving against those of the other.”

Advocates of the Constitution believed that Brutus had in exactly backwards. They welcomed the diversity and the “constantly clashing of opinions.” They affirmatively sought a situation in which “the representatives of one part will be continually striving against those of the other.” Alexander Hamilton spoke most clearly on the point, urging that the “differences of opinion, and the jarring of parties in (the legislative) department of the government… often promote deliberation and circumspection; and serve to check the excesses of the majority.”

…Diversity, openness, and dissent reveal actual and incipient problems. They improve society’s pool of information and make it more likely that serious issues will be addressed. I do not deny that great suffering can be found in democracies as in elsewhere. There is no guarantee, from civil liberties alone, that such suffering will be minimized. One reason is unequal distribution of political power, which decrease the likelihood that important information will actually reach public officials and that such officials will have the proper incentive to respond to suffering. But at least it can be said that a society which permits dissent and does not impose conformity is in a far better position to be aware of, and to correct, serious social problems.

A video discussion between Mike Papantonio and John Nichols, Washington Correspondent for The Nation Magazine, on the decline of the Moderate Republican

Geoffrey Kabaservice, Roosevelt House Visiting Fellow and author of the recent book, “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party” talks about the roots of the decline of Moderate and Liberal Republicans

Olympia Snowe talks about how she didn’t have a lot of company as a moderate in Congress

Suhail Kahn, former Bush administration official and board member of American Conservative Union, talks about the concern of Muslim Republicans of the Islamophobia within the Republican Party

Hispanic Republicans debate fellow Republicans against SB1070

Senator Dick Durbin endorsing the Dream Act and criticizes Republicans who had previously supported the Dream Act. Senator Inouye also voices his support of the Dream Act

Immigrant Activists protesting Republican offices in 2010 in Chicago

CNN’s Don Lemon talks to R. Clarke Cooper of the Log Cabin Republicans about GOP policies toward gays

An Interview With Democrat Nancy Hirstein

The Democratic Club of Sunnyvale was formed over a year ago for Democrats in Sunnyvale, California and the neighboring region to promote Democratic values. I attended a few meetings last year and found the group to be dedicated to using the political process to fight for local environmental, labor and economic fairness issues. They’re a nice group of people. One of the individuals whom I met was Nancy Hirstein Smith. Nancy is the founder of the Democratic Club of Sunnyvale and has been heavily involved in campaign and voter registration efforts.

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Thanks, Angelo! It’s an honor to be invited to answer questions about myself and the Democratic Club of Sunnyvale. Before I start answering your questions, I wanted to brag that our club has been growing steadily since its first meeting in May 2009. It’s hard to believe we’ve already been in existence three years!

You were one of the founding members of the Democratic Club of Sunnyvale. How did the Democratic Club of Sunnyvale come into being?

When I became active in local party politics, I noticed that our area has a lot of dedicated Democrats and a lot of active clubs, but I had to drive 20 minutes to get to most of the meetings. Many groups were concentrated in San Jose or further north in Palo Alto. There was a great club that meets in our neighboring city, Santa Clara, but they are what is known as an issues club and are not focused on local Sunnyvale candidates and concerns. Sunnyvale is the second largest city in Santa Clara County and I began to feel more and more strongly that the progressive Democrats in Sunnyvale needed an organization just for them. At the Regional delegate elections in January 2009, I recruited five other Sunnyvale residents and we formed a core team that came up with the bylaws and mission statement for a so-called geographic club. In May 2009, we held our first meeting, signed up more than 20 members, and by September 2009 were officially chartered by the California Democratic Party!

How did you become a Democrat? Was there a particular person, book or historical figure that influenced your political outlook?

I took a journalism class at the fundamentalist Christian college I attended. For one of my assignments, I did a story about how students would register to vote and then vote straight-ticket Republican without any understanding of local issues or candidates. To prepare for the story, I searched hard to find Democrats to interview among all the Republicans at the school. When I found Tony, an aide to the area’s state senator, he recruited me to gather signatures for delegates to the National Democratic Convention in 1984. Imagine my surprise to find my name on the petition as a delegate!

Tony and I went on a few dates, but it didn’t work out. He was an intense person and soon became embroiled in a scandal related to the story I did about voter registration. After Tony wrote, copied and distributed fliers in the campus dormitories that scolded students for not voting conscientiously, the local paper (not just the campus paper) wrote an exposé about how Tony used state resources to copy those fliers

For quite a few years after that, I adopted a political stance of “journalistic objectivity.” I still remember Tony fondly for shoving me in the deep end of the political pool. My name made it on the ballot even though my candidate, George McGovern, dropped out early in the race. The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s people hounded me for months to pledge for Rev. Jackson instead. At this conservative college, I flaunted my liberalism: I wore a black leather jacket and put a “Vote Democratic” poster up in my dorm room window. It was all very exciting.

The journalistic objectivity didn’t stick. Being a chameleon and trying to blend in means you cannot debate issues and influence others. As I mature, I am becoming more and more comfortable expressing what I really think about issues, even if I still can’t quite shake the softer touch.

When I attended your meetings last year, we were able to meet many Democratic politicians in the Sunnyvale City Council and in many state offices. How has it been to meet these various officeholders? Do you think the club has influenced these officeholders?

I’ve been involved in Sunnyvale politics for a while, so I already knew all the Sunnyvale City Council members when the club started. I’ve also known some of the County Supervisors and Assemblymembers.

Our club started in 2009, the year after a presidential election. Not only is 2012 a Presidential election year, it’s also the first election after redistricting. I’ve recently had the honor of meeting or deepening acquaintances with several fine Democratic candidates for State Assembly, State Senate, and Congress.

There is a protocol for inviting candidates and presenting them to your club members. When you first invite them, you want to be very clear about what will happen at the meetings, what the format will be, who goes first, and how much time they have to present themselves. The process needs to be fair to all candidates, as much as you can possibly control. Even though there are often more candidates for local city council seats than for higher office, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s less work to plan forums or debates for higher offices.

My impression is that, the higher the office, the more politically savvy the candidate. The more they know about how debates and forums work, the more challenging it is to meet their needs. It’s been a thrill to get to know them all, no matter what level of office they are pursuing.

For local candidates, it’s especially helpful that our club fills out response forms for them when they answer questions for our club. One candidate, who did not quite get our club’s endorsement, felt a lot better after she read some very positive responses in her candidate evaluation forms. Candidates for higher office really appreciate having a Democratic club in Sunnyvale, a group of people they know will be sympathetic to their positions. We met some grateful candidates after redistricting changed all the boundaries. Sunnyvale was affected in that we got new representatives for our state assembly, state senate, and congressional districts. All Democratic candidates for these seats have visited our club meetings at least once in the 2012 election cycle.

The Democratic Party is far more diverse than the Republicans, with moderates, liberals, progressives, all under one tent. How do you think the majority of the club members lean?

Funny story. When we set up our vision statement and guiding principles in 2009, we claimed that “We are an active and welcoming group that promotes progressive, Democratic values and positions.” Before May of 2012, I would have said that our members tend to be quite progressive. However, it turned out that one of our regular attendees was a registered Republican. We discovered it after we elected him president and he got a bit more scrutiny! When I reported this kerfuffle to the Democratic party chairman in our county, I joked that we are maybe a bit too welcoming.

Our meetings are open to anyone, unless we are holding a vote to endorse candidates in a race. We have invited several Republicans to take part in talks of general interest to the community. However, we never intended to let any of them claim membership.

The Republican almost-president in question offered to register as a Democrat and will soon have a seat on our board, so this story has a happy ending.

What are some things that the Democratic Club has done to promote its values and get them translated into political action? What are some issues that are important to the members of the Democratic Club of Sunnyvale?

In the winter of 2011, we spent a lot of time as a club defining what we value. To me, the results were somewhat surprising because they aren’t necessarily things the people would think differentiate Democrats from non-Democrats. The top five things our club members value are community, participatory democracy, compassion, pragmatism, and patriotism. We intentionally measure our monthly programs, the candidates and propositions we endorse, the people we elect to leadership positions within the club and the projects we undertake against these criteria.

In the winter and spring of 2012, we made a big push to became a more active, rather than have lectures at every meeting. We recruited leaders from the club to head up committees. After three years as president, I wanted to let someone else lead the group. We have been working with an organizational development expert — who offered her services to the Democratic Party — to make the transition a smooth and successful one. She’s giving us a lot of great advice about how to recruit good people, act from our core values, and clarify our guiding principals.

We had to take several steps back and restructure the club. I’m confident that we’ll emerge a stronger club that focuses on recruiting and electing qualified Democratic candidates.

What are some unique things about being a Democrat in the middle of Silicon Valley? Are they more interested in environmental issues, economic issues or social issues?

One exciting thing about Silicon Valley is its engineers. There are many very smart, analytical people in our club. When we discuss issues during a meeting and the exchange of ideas gets a bit lively, listening to the rational arguments of the engineers in our club gives me deeper insights into ideas like environmental conservation, transparency in government, ranked-choice voting, and campaign finance disclosures.

As the 2012 elections loom, what are your thoughts on important state and national issues that may be on the 2012 ballot?

The biggest concern to me now are the ginormous, democracy-killing concentrations of wealth. One of the biggest threats to our democracy is the growing wealth divide. Unless we take steps now, wealth will continue to be concentrated among the wealthiest 1% and we’ll see no more of our middle class and our hard-fought meritocracy.

Also, I hope we can do something about the Citizens United travesty. It is outrageous that faceless corporations have more rights than individuals.

What’s your opinion on President Obama’s first term?

I think the continuing drags on the economy and the nasty divisiveness in Congress have kept President Obama from making as much progress as I would like to see on some items on his agenda. The President’s records on privacy issues and net neutrality isn’t as strong as I’d like to see. I wish he would have come down a lot harder on AT&T after their snooping scandal broke just before he took office.

While he didn’t pursue the torturers, the scammers in the banking near-collapse or the invaders of privacy, he did take up several causes I support. He’s standing up for equal pay for women, keeping the estate tax, marriage equality, and healthcare for all.
I’m quite sure Mitt Romney doesn’t share my values, so I’ll throw all the support I can to reelecting President Obama.

In the past year, the Occupy Wall Street protests have sprouted throughout the nation, crying out against the growing economic inequalities in our country and pushing for greater accountability of our nation’s financial institutions. How do you think these protests might influence the upcoming elections? Do you think the Occupy message will influence the way Democratic candidates run in local and national elections?

I’ve been involved for 12 years with an organization called United for a Fair Economy. In that time, it’s been very difficult to raise the issues passionately about the evils of concentrated wealth and dynasties that pass untouched through generations by inheritance. Then, along came the Occupy Movement and took their outrage to Wall Street. Suddenly, everyone now knows there is an issue, even though many don’t know all the nuances and actual craziness that’s going on. I hope people continue to educate themselves, keep up their energy, recruit sympathetic and viable candidates, and vote. It’s the best way to make some changes. It’s the only way to make changes.

A big benefit of being in a club is just meeting people who share the same values and forming friendships with those people. Three years into the club’s existence, how has it been to see the club grow and evolve? What are some future plans for the Democratic Club of Sunnyvale?
The next big step is for me to hand over the reins to another president and take a role as an adviser. I would be delighted to see something I helped create continue on after I’m no longer its leader. I’ve made a lot of great friends in the club and look forward to many years of working together with them on current and upcoming progressive causes. This sounds like a cliché, but finding like-minded friends get so much harder after your twenties. Political organizations are a great way to meet people and make friends. It’s like a bulwark against the chaos to have people you can join with to make change possible.

Here are more interviews that I did for Everyday Citizen

An Interview With Cartoonist Ann Cleaves
An Interview With Muslim American Activist Zahra Billoo
An Interview With Cartoonist Monte Wolverton
An Interview With Cartoonist Adam Zyglis
An Interview With Reverand Gerald Britt
An Interview With Cartoonist Tjeerd Royaards
An Interview With Poet, Activist, and Teacher Diane Wahto
An Interview With Cartoonist Jesse Springer
An Interview With Cartoonist Steve Greenberg
An Interview With Eric Wilks
An Interview With Cartoonist Greg Beda
An Interview With Poet Melissa Tuckey
An Interview With Cartoonist Andy Singer
An Interview With Author Robert Balmanno
An Interview With Cartoonist J.P. Jasper
An Interview With Cartoonist David Cohen
An Interview that Everyday blogger Diane Wahto kindly did of me

Youtube videos of former California Assemblyman Sally Lieber talking about getting legislation through the California Legislature. Nancy Hirstein Smith introduces Sally Lieber.

Jasper and the Tea Partier

Over the past three months, someone close to me had to go to the hospital and it was a hectic time. During the interval, I had time to reflect on our relationship and I appreciate the many talks we used to have on life and politics. He is a bit more conservative than I am, so we tend to argue about the merits of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. But he has always had a respect for differences of opinion, and he’s always respected my right to think for myself. It’s something that I cherish and try to live up to in my own life.

These past few years I haven’t had many of those respectful type conversations with conservatives. They’ve tended to be two monologues running past each other, rather than dialogues where there is an exchange of ideas. During my teen years and into my twenties, I used to have conservative friends whom I used to be able to have conversations about politics where there was still a respect for the other person. That changed sometime in the mid to late 1990s. I’m not sure what happened. The type of conservative people that I met during the later 1990s tended to be less tolerant of differences of opinion than the one I met as a younger man. From their point of view, anyone who was liberal was anti-Christian or unAmerican and there was no way any opinions that I would try to express would be respected or taken seriously.

These past few years, I’ve gotten into some exasperating conflicts. I’m not really sure why some people think it’s o.k. to harass individuals who have opposing opinions and to try to intimidate individuals to make them afraid of exercising their freedom of speech. As Americans, we all have the right to express our own political opinions. I think that’s why I’m bothered so much by the political climate of today, where hyper partisanship rules and the Tea Party are pushing for uncompromising conservative politicians in the Republican Party. The gridlock and bad blood in Congress between conservative Republicans and the Democrats is bad in the long run for this country. I don’t think being a conservative Republican is bad. But I do think the intolerance of different opinions that I see on the Far Right is a very bad thing.

Though I criticize conservatives for this, I do not think they alone are guilty of this. I think this tendency is just one of the flaws of human nature. During the 1960s, radical leftist students would often shout down speakers who held different points of view. I think anytime a group sees things in black and white terms and thinks their way is the only way to do things, then that group will inevitably feel the need to impose their beliefs on everyone else. In history, you see this tendency manifest itself with Robespierre and the Reign of Terror, with Torquemada and the Inquisition, with McCarthy and the Red Scare of the 1950s, with Mao’s Cultural Revolution and with Stalin’s purges. It’s the danger of groupthink. I had an experience of groupthink in the 1990s when I attended an evangelical church.

The reason that the freedom of speech is important is that no one person is omniscient. It’s important to have a diversity of opinions in the market of ideas so that these ideas can be argued over and the strengths and weaknesses of these ideas can be tested. That’s why democracies, messy as they are, are ultimately stronger than dictatorships. We’re all human. I’ve met conservatives who are real jerks. But I’ve also met conservatives who are really kind and thoughtful individuals. Most liberals I know are nice. But I’ve met my share of liberals who aren’t so nice and are rather mean. Experience has taught me that there are certain people whom it is safe to be friends with and to have honest exchanges of opinions. And there are certain people that it is better to avoid.

For a democracy to function well, there should be some respect for a diversity of opinions. People can disagree and still be friends. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were close friends even though Jefferson was an ardent Republican and Adams was a strong Federalist. Conservative Ronald Reagan and liberal Tip O’Neil were friends in the 1980s. Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda were best friends even though Stewart was a conservative Republican and Fonda was a New Deal liberal. Conservative Orrin Hatch and liberal Ted Kennedy were closer friends who collaborated on many bills that really helped America. I end this blog with a quote from Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address:

During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety.

But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

A youtube video of Gabrielle Giffords returning to the House for a vote

A youtube video of the friendship of Republican Orrin Hatch and Democrat Ted Kennedy

A youtube video of the friendship of Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton

A youtube video of a scene from the HBO series “John Adams” about the friendship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams

If you enjoy this cartoon, take a look at these links for more of my political cartoons at Everyday Citizen. You could also join my Jasper the Cat facebook page.

Jasper Writes A Blog
Conversations During The Holidays
Jasper and the Cop
The Parents Visit the Occupation
Cartoons About Occupy Wall Street
Jasper and the Moderate Republican
Obama and the Republicans
Jasper And the Homeless Veteran
Jasper Celebrates the 4th of July
Jasper Meets Howard Zinn
Jasper and the Nature Poem
The Reunion
Government and the Market Economy
Jasper Joins Two Protests
Bob the Nerd Vampire
Jasper Debates War
Jasper Finds His Way Home
Jasper Escapes the Detention Center
Jasper At A Detention Center
Jasper Meets a Poet
Jasper’s Day
Jasper Tackles Health Care
Jasper Protests the War
Jasper and the Economy
Jasper Sings a Protest Song
The Road To Health Care Reform Cartoon
A Cartoon about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A Cartoon about My Experience in an Evangelical Church
A Cartoon about Political Debate
A Cartoon On Gay Marriage

Supporting Barack Obama

Election times are here again and Obama is going through the same criticisms that all past Presidents face during an election year. If a Democrat is President, the Republicans accuse him of being a bleeding heart socialist who’s out to destroy the American family and raise taxes unreasonably. If a Republican is President, then Democrats accuse him of being a heartless corporate shill who is in the back pocket of CEOs and is a crazy Christian fanatic. As I’m to the left of the political spectrum, I’m biased towards that direction, but I realize that Democrats and Republican Presidents tend to be more complicated than that. In the 2008 elections, I was originally a Hillary supporter, but I’ve grown to like Obama personally. Obama is not as great as his supporters say he is, but he’s not the worst President in our history, as his conservative critics say he is. He’s a decent president, who has accomplished a lot more than we realize.

I read a historian write that you can’t really judge a President until 20 years after his Presidency is over, and the full implications of his policies are played out. I like Obama, but I have a hard time judging him. I generally like the direction of his policies, although I have disagreements with his immigration policies and other issues. It’s hard for me to really judge him just because the Republican opposition has been so vehement. Past Democratic Presidents could always find common ground with moderate and conservative Republicans on some issues to get things accomplished. There really isn’t any common ground between Obama and the conservative Republicans that make up today’s Congress. I don’t really blame Obama for this. Over the past few years, the Republican Party has gotten more uniformly conservative, and these conservative partisans have done what they can to push out the more moderate Republicans from having any influence. More mainstream conservatives like Senator Bennett and Senator Lugar lost elections to Tea Party conservatives who are much less likely to compromise. So the collaborations between Democrats and Republicans on major legislation, like Senator Lugar working with Senator Kennedy on the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 or Lugar’s collaboration with Senator Nunn on the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program of 1992, Senator Hatch’s famous collaborations with Senator Kennedy on the The Ryan White Aids Act, The State Children’s Health Insurance Program, The Americans with Disabilities Act, and various other legislation, are now less likely. It made me realize how important moderate Republicans really are to the political process.

Many conservative critics say that Obama is our worst President, but I don’t think Obama is a bad President at all. In my lifetime, the worst Presidents are probably Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Both Presidents had some substantial achievements: Nixon opened up relations with China, pursued detente with the Soviet Union, and had some domestic programs that were surprisingly liberal; while Carter negotiated the Camp David Peace Treaty and had an energy conservation program that was decades ahead of its time. Both men though had deeply flawed presidencies that outweighed their good points.

Nixon overreacted to the Pentagon Papers and his enemies list, his use of the government to break into the psychiatric files of Daniel Ellsberg, the stonewalling of the Watergate investigation, his firing of his cabinet after his reelection, all point to a person who abused power and was a threat to the Constitution.

Carter was a good man who was way over his head when he was President. He had Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House, yet he kept his distance from the Democratic legislators that he needed to pass his programs, and as the writings of Tip O Neil, Walter Mondale and Ted Kennedy attest, Carter often baffled the people in his own party. Since Carter didn’t take the time to build up relations with these legislators, there was no sense of loyalty to Carter’s more moderate policy proposals among the liberals in the party and the liberals turned to Ted Kennedy during the 1980 Democratic primaries. A President with better political skills, like FDR, wouldn’t have let that happen.

I don’t think Obama is on the level of a Franklin Roosevelt or an Abraham Lincoln, but I do think he’s a decent President. In researching this blog, I found two articles that do a good job of articulating Obama’s achievements.

Paul Gastris wrote an article for the Washington Monthly called The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama where he wrote:

Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in wilderness protection in fifteen years. A revolutionary reform to student aid. Signing the New START treaty with Russia. The ending of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Even over the past year, when he was bogged down in budget fights with the Tea Party-controlled GOP House, Obama still managed to squeeze out a few domestic policy victories, including a $1.2 trillion deficit reduction deal and the most sweeping overhaul of food safety laws in more than seventy years. More impressively, on the foreign policy front he ended the war in Iraq, began the drawdown in Afghanistan, helped to oust Gaddafi in Libya and usher out Mubarak in Egypt, orchestrated new military and commercial alliances as a hedge against China, and tightened sanctions against Iran over its nukes.

Oh, and he shifted counterterrorism strategies to target Osama bin Laden and then ordered the risky raid that killed him.

That Obama has done all this while also steering the country out of what might have been a second Great Depression would seem to have made him already, just three years into his first term, a serious candidate for greatness.

And yet a solid majority of Americans nevertheless thinks the president has not accomplished much. Why? There are plenty of possible explanations. The most obvious is the economy. People are measuring Obama’s actions against the actual conditions of their lives and livelihoods, which, over the past three years, have not gotten materially better. He failed miserably at his grandiose promise to change the culture of Washington. His highest-profile legislative accomplishments were object lessons in the ugly side of compromise. In negotiations, he came off to Democrats as naïvely trusting, and to Republicans as obstinately partisan, leaving the impression that he could have achieved more if only he had been less conciliatory—or more so, depending on your point of view. And for such an obviously gifted orator, he has been surprisingly inept at explaining to average Americans what he’s fighting for or trumpeting what he’s achieved.

In short, when judging Obama’s record so far, conservatives measure him against their fears, liberals against their hopes, and the rest of us against our pocketbooks. But if you measure Obama against other presidents—arguably the more relevant yardstick—a couple of things come to light. Speaking again in terms of sheer tonnage, Obama has gotten more done than any president since LBJ.

Tim Dickinson wrote an article for Rolling Stone called The Case For Obama where he wrote:

Less than halfway through his first term, Obama has compiled a remarkable track record. As president, he has rewritten America’s social contract to make health care accessible for all citizens. He has brought 100,000 troops home from war and forged a once-unthinkable consensus around the endgame for the Bush administration’s $3 trillion blunder in Iraq. He has secured sweeping financial reforms that elevate the rights of consumers over Wall Street bankers and give regulators powerful new tools to prevent another collapse. And most important of all, he has achieved all of this while moving boldly to ward off another Great Depression and put the country back on a halting path to recovery.

Along the way, Obama delivered record tax cuts to the middle class and slashed nearly $200 billion in corporate welfare — reinvesting that money to make college more accessible and Medicare more solvent. He single-handedly prevented the collapse of the Big Three automakers — saving more than 1 million jobs — and brought Big Tobacco, at last, under the yoke of federal regulation. Even in the face of congressional intransigence on climate change, he has fought to constrain carbon pollution by executive fiat and to invest $200 billion in clean energy — an initiative bigger than John F. Kennedy’s moonshot and one that’s on track to double America’s capacity to generate renewable energy by the end of Obama’s first term.

On the social front, he has improved pay parity for women and hate-crime protections for gays and lesbians. He has brought a measure of sanity to the drug war, reducing the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine while granting states wide latitude to experiment with marijuana laws. And he has installed two young, female justices on the Supreme Court, creating what Brinkley calls “an Obama imprint on the court for generations.”

What’s even more impressive about Obama’s accomplishments, historians say, is the fractious political coalition he had to marshal to victory. “He didn’t have the majority that LBJ had,” says Goodwin. Indeed, Johnson could count on 68 Democratic senators to pass Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act. For his part, Franklin Roosevelt had the backing of 69 Senate Democrats when he passed Social Security in 1935. At its zenith, Obama’s governing coalition in the Senate comprised 57 Democrats, a socialist, a Republican turncoat — and Joe Lieberman.

In his quest for progress, Obama has also had to maneuver against an unrelenting head wind from the “Party of No” and its billionaire backers. “Obama is harassed as well as opposed,” says Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. “The crazy Republican right is now unfettered. You’ve got a Senate with no adult leadership. And Obama’s up against Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey, the Koch brothers and the rest of the professional right.” Compared to the opposition faced by the most transformative Democratic presidents, adds Wilentz, “it’s a wholly different scale.”

Despite such obstacles, Obama has succeeded in forging a progressive legacy that, anchored by health care reform, puts him “into the same conversation with FDR and LBJ,” says Brinkley, “though those two accomplished more.” Goodwin, herself a former Johnson aide, likens the thrust of Obama’s social agenda to LBJ’s historic package of measures known as the Great Society. “What is comparable,” she says, “is the idea of using government to expand social and economic justice. That’s what the health care bill is about. That’s what Obama tried to do with the financial reforms. That’s what he’s doing with education. The Great Society was about using the collective energies of the nation to make life better for more people — and that’s what Obama has tried to do.”

When this elections comes along, I’ll follow the advice that Howard Zinn gave to progressives in 2008. Zinn advised progressives to vote for Obama, but that after the elections, to stay active and work to move the public to issues that are important. Don’t rely on just Obama or Congress for progressive change. We have the responsibility to try to move the country towards fairer immigration laws, climate change legislation, gay marriage, controlling corporate power, combating economic inequality and helping the poor and suffering in our community. Howard Zinn wrote in the May 2009 issue of the Progressive Magazine

I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.

Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it’s not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past…

…This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, “Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln’s point of view.” Lincoln didn’t believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, “We’re not going to put ourselves in Lincoln’s position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us.”

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That’s how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

That’s been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.

A youtube video of Barack Obama’s “The Road We’ve Traveled”

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

A youtube video of Barack Obama announcing the death of Bin Laden

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010

A youtube video of Barack Obama announcing the end of the combat mission in Iraq and discussing the future of the U.S. commitment to helping build a stable Iraq

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — legislation to fight pay discrimination and ensure fundamental fairness to American workers

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Act

A youtube video of Barack Obama talking about stabilizing the auto industry

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act

A youtube video of Barack Obama nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court

A youtuve video of Barack Obama nominating US Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court

Jasper and the Moderate Republican

I partially based this on a blog I wrote for Everyday Citizen on March 10, 2010

If you enjoy this cartoon, take a look at these links for more of my political cartoons at Everyday Citizen:

Obama and the Republicans

Jasper And the Homeless Veteran
Jasper Celebrates the 4th of July
Jasper Meets Howard Zinn
Jasper and the Nature Poem
The Reunion
Government and the Market Economy
Jasper Joins Two Protests
Bob the Nerd Vampire
Jasper Debates War
Jasper Finds His Way Home
Jasper Escapes the Detention Center
Jasper At A Detention Center
Jasper Meets a Poet
Jasper’s Day
Jasper Tackles Health Care
Jasper Protests the War
Jasper and the Economy
Jasper Sings a Protest Song
The Road To Health Care Reform Cartoon
A Cartoon about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A Cartoon about My Experience in an Evangelical Church
A Cartoon about Political Debate
A Cartoon On Gay Marriage

Obama and the Republicans

Way back in January, I wrote a blog about possible areas that Democrats could work with Republicans on. I had thought that there must be some common ground between the Tea Party Republicans and the Democrats that they could work on. After seeing how the Republicans in the House rejected the compromise that their leader Boehner had fashioned with Obama on the debt ceiling debates and constantly rejected any proposals of Obama, I feel pretty naive about thinking that Democrats could work on some issues with these new brand of Republicans.

If my memory is correct, I think this conservative Republican revolt started towards the last years of the Bush years, when they revolted against Bush’s support of the McCain/Kennedy immigration reform bill. I think this uncompromising attitude is bad for our country. In the past I remember how Democrats and Republicans were always able to find some common ground.

Even though most Democrats opposed the Bush political philosophy, they still found some areas to agree on. Ted Kennedy teamed up with Bush on No Child Left Behind and worked with John McCain on an immigration reform bill.

During the 1990s, Clinton worked with Newt Gingrich and the Republicans on welfare reform, a capital gains tax and the first balanced budget since 1969. Before the Monica Lewinsky derailed their talks, Clinton and Gingrich had planned on working on centrist reforms on Social Security and Medicare.

Bush H.W. Bush worked with Democrats on the American’s With Disabilities Act and the Immigration Act of 1990.

Ronald Reagan and Tip O’ Neil had many political differences, but they were also good friends, and they managed to work on bipartisan solutions to keep Social Security sustainable and in passing a historic tax reform bill.

I’m a bit more skeptical now about efforts at bipartisan collaborations. At the beginning of the health care reform debate in 2009, there was a gang of six Senator including Senators Charles Grassley of Iowa , Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Michael Enzi of Wyoming. The White House had given Grassley wide lattitude to influence the shape of the health care reform bill to try to reach a bipartisan plan. In August during the town hall meetings, when the Tea Party first made their presence felt, Grassley began making false claims of the health care reform bill having death panels, even though Grassley voted in 2003 for counseling for end-of-life issues and care. John McCain and Orrin Hatch both voted against the Dream Act in 2010, even though they both had voted for the Dream Act in the past. Lindsey Graham left a partnership with Joe Lieberman and John Kerry on a compromise climate bill that would have reduced greenhouse gas emissions. I think the Tea Party has made many Republicans afraid of collaborating with Democrats in any way.

I think one of the reasons that bipartisan collaborations are more rare is that there are less moderates in either party. The situation isn’t as bad in the Democratic Party because there is still a sizable number of Blue Dog Democrats. In the Republican Party, however, there has been a concerted effort by conservatives and Tea Party members to purge the GOP of moderates. A famous case of a moderate leaving the Republican Party is Senator Jim Jeffords in 2001.

In a June 23, 1996 article entitle Why Today’s Politics Stink, David Broder writes of the reason that moderates are becoming less frequent in either political party:

The need for cross-party friendships is even greater now than in the past because the ideological differences between the parties have grown. And in both the House and Senate, a bloodless version of ‘ethnic cleansing’ has been taking place within each party.

For most of the postwar period, Democratic congressional majorities included a kaleidoscope of personalities and views, ranging from Northern liberals like Humphrey, Hart, and McGovern to Southern conservatives like Sam Ervin, John Stennis and Harry Byrd. But the conservative Southern Democrats began to disappear after the civil rights revolution. In the House, some of their seats are now held by African-Americans. But most of the House seats and all of the Senate seats that have switched parties are filled by conservative Republicans. As a result, the center of gravity in the House and Senate Democratic caucuses has moved north and moved left.

Exactly the opposite has been happening to the Republicans. With Southerners now in the top leadership positions in both House and Senate, the congressional GOP is much more uniformly conservative than it was when Dole arrived. And just as conservative Republicans have replaced conservative Democrats in the South, so liberal Democrats have replaced moderate and liberal Republicans who once were numerous in New England, the Middle Atlantic states, the Midwest and the Northwest.

As each party has become more homogeneous in terms of philosophy, there has been less tolerance of dissent. The penalties for deviating from the party line have increased.

The differences of view- even of philosophy- between the parties are genuine. But the press treats these disagreements as if they were narrowly partisan and the public often sees these battles simply as evidence of small minded, churlish behavior- and condemn everyone involved, regardless of party label. The result is a more polarized, less productive Congress- and one which the public has come to despise.

I think bipartisanship is only possible if there is a sizable number of moderates in the Republican Party where reasonable compromises could be worked out. I think the current crop of conservative and Tea Party Republicans and moderate and liberal Democrats are too ideologically apart for there to be any meaningful collaboration. The Republican ideas on free markets and small government are too opposed to the Democrats ideas of the necessity of the federal government.

I’ve had some disappointments with Obama, but I still like President Obama and will volunteer to help reelect Obama in 2012. But after the elections are over, I’m going to work on those issues that I strongly support and do my best to pressure Obama to support those issues. I’m also hoping that some moderate Republicans start to stand up to the Tea Party and starts reasserting their place in the Republican Party. A reinvigorated number of moderate Republicans would be good for both the Republican Party and for our nation.

If you enjoy this cartoon, take a look at these links for more of my political cartoons at Everyday Citizen:

Jasper And the Homeless Veteran
Jasper Celebrates the 4th of July
Jasper Meets Howard Zinn
Jasper and the Nature Poem
The Reunion
Government and the Market Economy
Jasper Joins Two Protests
Bob the Nerd Vampire
Jasper Debates War
Jasper Finds His Way Home
Jasper Escapes the Detention Center
Jasper At A Detention Center
Jasper Meets a Poet
Jasper’s Day
Jasper Tackles Health Care
Jasper Protests the War
Jasper and the Economy
Jasper Sings a Protest Song
The Road To Health Care Reform Cartoon
A Cartoon about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A Cartoon about My Experience in an Evangelical Church
A Cartoon about Political Debate
A Cartoon On Gay Marriage

Costa-Gavras and the Political Thriller

A short while ago I checked out from the library and watched Missing, a movie starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.  It’s an intense political thriller by director Costa-Gavras.   I did not know anything of Costa-Gavras, so I decided to do a little research on him.  Costa-Gavras is one of the most respected directors today, the creator of political thrillers that expose government corruption and deceit.

Here is some information on Costa-Gavras from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Gavras).   Constantinos Gavras was born on February 13, 1933 to a poor family in the village of Loutra Iraias, Greece.  His father had been a member of the left-wing branch of the Greek Resistance during World War II, and was imprisoned after the war as a suspected communist.  Costa-Gavras went to France to study of law in 1951, and in 1956 he studied film.  In his early years he worked with the famed French directors Yves Allegret,  Jean Giono and Rene Clair.  He directed his first film in 1965.

Costa-Gavras is reknowned as a master of the political thriller.   Michael Wood, a teacher of English and comparative literature in Princeton, wrote in the booklet accompanying the DVD of Missing:

“The films of Constantin Costa-Gavras are often described as political thrillers, and the phrase is helpful as long as we pause over it a little.  There is always a strongly personal element to his stories, a human factor, and the thrills are in the politics rather than set against a political background.  The corpses and the cover-ups, whether in Europe or in Latin America, are intimate features of actual historical situations-an assasination in Greece, an execution in Chile, genocide in Germany- rather than fictional elements woven into a political context, as in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), say, or Salvador (1986) or In The Line Of Fire (1993).”

I’ve watched 3 Costa-Gavras movies that are available at the library:  Missing, Amen, and Z.  The 3 films have what Michael Wood talks about, stories of likable people who are affected by the corruption of the society around them.  The drama in these movies comes as the corruption of the society gradually reveals itself and threatens to envelope the main characters and destroy their integrity.  In two of the movies the heroes become disillusioned with an institution with which they had believed to be honest and virtuous, as they see the institutions collaborating with evil to preserve their own interests.  When I watch these films, I keep getting a sense of outrage at the injustices inflicted on innocent people and a sense of helplessness that large people have against the actions of their government.

My favorite of the films is Missing.  Missing is about the disappearance of Charlie Horman in the Chile of General Augusto Pinochet and the efforts of Horman’s father and wife to find him.  Charlie Horman was a filmmaker and journalist who had been asking questions of American involvement in the coup that toppled democratically elected socialist Salvadore Allende from the Presidency and put General Augusto Pinochet in power.    The early part of the film shows the growing fear that grips the population as the military harasses its citizens and makes them afraid to speak freely.  Charlie, his wife Beth, and his friend Terry are afraid of coming out after curfew, for fear of what the military will do to them.  In one scene, a group of soldiers randomly takes people from a line waiting for a bus to interrogate them.  Blood and corpses are everywhere, a reminder to Charlie and the viewers of the consequences of defying the soldiers.  When Charlie disappears, his father and wife go around to first the American embassy and then to Charlie’s friends in an effort to find out what happened to Charlie.  At first, the father is a firm believer in the American government and is skeptical of Charlie’s wife’s assertions that the American embassy and Chilean military are corrupt.  Gradually though, he finds out that the United States secretly were aiding in the military takeover and the truth of Charlie’s disappearance would expose the extent of the United States involvement.  Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek are the main actors and both do a good job of expressing the outrage and disillusionment of two people who had blind faith in the American government and the goodness of American intentions.  I like this film the best of the 3 Costa-Gavras films because of the appeal that John Shea, Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek bring to the roles of Charlie, his father and his wife. 

Z is the film that made Costa-Gavras famous.  In this film, a leader of a peace movement is clubbed in the head by some demonstrators after speaking in a peace rally and dies from brain damage.  At first the military and the police tell the public that the leader was an accidental death. As a newspaper photographer and a magistrate investigate, however, they find out that the men who clubbed the leader were part of a right wing organization called the Christian Royalist Organization Against Communism with ties to the military.  They also found that the police were in the crowd of demonstrators and did nothing to protect the peace leader from any harm.  As I watched this film, I was appalled at the lengths that the police went through to keep any different views from coming out.  The film begins with a general likening the military to an antibody and any differences of opinions as being like germs to be extinguished by the antibodies.  I liked the film, but I didn’t find the characters as appealing as Jack Lemmon or Sissy Spacek was in Missing.   I looked up Pauline Kael’s review of this movie ( http://www.geocities.com/paulinekaelreviews/z.html) and she wrote:

“How a political murder is made to look like an accident. Costa-Gavras’s extraordinary thriller–one of the fastest, most exciting melodramas ever made–was based on contemporary events in Greece. The picture never loses emotional contact with the audience; it derives from the traditions of the American gangster movies and prison pictures and anti-Fascist melodramas of the 40s.”

The end of the movie lists the things that the military banned from the country and that represented dissent:   peace movements, strikes, labor unions, long hair on men, modern and popular music, Sophocles, Leo Tolstoy, Aeschylus, Socrates , Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, Samuel Beckett, , international encyclopedias, free press, new math and the letter Z, which in Greek means “to live”.

Amen is a film about Kurt Gerstein, a chemist and SS officer in Nazi Germany, who is repulsed when he finds out that the chemicals he creates are being used to kill Jews in concentration camps.  After witnessing how the German Catholic bishop stood up to the Nazis to stop the euthanasia of mentally ill people, he makes an effort to contact the Vatican in the hopes that they would make a similar effort to stop the slaughter of Jewish people.  In this effort, he is aided by a Jesuit priest whose family has connections to the upper echelon of the Vatican hierarchy.  As in Missing and Z, the two men are gradually disillusioned as they see the Pope and the Catholic hierarchy as compromising their Christian duty to publicly denounce the Holocaust because they felt that Stalin’s communism was an even greater evil than Naziism.  As someone who has been interested in the issues of Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, I felt that Costa-Gavras was fair in his depiction of the Vatican and its dealings with the Holocaust.  In one scene, the Pope allows the Vatican to take up Jewish and nonJewish refugees and hide them in churches to help them escape a Nazi roundup in Rome.   I think Costa-Gavras depicts the Jesuit priest as being the Roman Catholic Church at its best, and contrasts that with the worst aspects of the Catholic hierarchy.  In Amen, the two main characters ask important questions.  Why was the Catholic Church able to take a courageous stand against the euthanasia of the mentally ill and not take a similar stand against Jews being shipped into concentration camps?  Though the Pope secretly sheltered some Jews in churches to protect them from Nazi persecution, why couldn’t he have made a public statement condemning the Nazi policies towards the Jews?    While in Missing Costa-Gavras condemns the United States government’s complicity in the actions of the Chilen military, he is more ambigious in his criticism of the Catholic Church.  While he acknowledges the Pope’s hatred of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi ideology, Costa-Gavras also condemns Pope Pius’s feeble response to the enormity of the Holocaust.

Costa-Gavras is a recent discovery for me.  I found his films have opened the eyes of many people of the corruption of fascist government and the ease in which institutions can betray its high ideals.  Z Magazine, an activist magazine based in Boston, was named by its founders after the Costa-Gavras film Z.  Filmmakers like Oliver Stone have been influenced by Costa-Gavras’ films.  My own personal take on the Costa-Gavras films is the necessity of each person to vigilantly guard his or her own personal liberty and to keep our governments and religious institutions accountable.   Involved and courageous citizens are necessary to make sure our institutions, whether they be our government or our churches, do not stray from its highest ideals.  I end this post with another excerpt from Michael Woods’ essay:

“The hero of Missing, like the hero of Z, like the two heroes of Amen, is a good man who changes his (comformist) politics, or more preciscely abandons his old political assumptions,  for the sake of justice and what he learns of the truth.  In Z, the man is a judge who at first can’t believe that the police and the army have organized a group of thugs to disrupt an antinuclear demonstration and kill a man;  in Amen, an SS officer and an Italian priest testify, against their professional class and to their cost, to what is happening to the Jews in Europe in 1936 and after.  Ed Horman doesn’t become less American than he was, and he has  no interest in the coup or indeed in the possibility or the extent of the involvement of the United States.  But he recognizes when he is being lied to, and he finds out how little he knows about what his government is doing- what it feels it has the right to do in his name.”

The Good Joe Lieberman, The Bad Joe Lieberman

One of the big conversations that have been making the rounds in these past couple of weeks after the elections has been the fate of Joe Lieberman after the victory of the Democrats in the executive branch and the Congress.  Lieberman was a Democrat until 2006 when he ran as an independent and defeated the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Connecticut.  During the 2008 elections, he had spoken in the Republican convention and campaigned for the Republican nominee John McCain.  There has been talk since then of stripping Lieberman of the chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is responsible for assuring the efficiency and effectiveness of the Federal Government, and Chairman of the Subcommittee on Air Land Forces.

I used to be a big supporter of Joe Lieberman because of his strong liberal positions for the environment, for labor and civil rights issues.  Over the past few years though, I found myself disagreeing with his support of Bush’s war in Iraq.  I had supported Lieberman’s run for the Presidency in 2004 in spite of his position in Iraq, I think because I had hoped that he would see how badly the Iraqi situation was deterioirating since the invasion and would change his mind, as Hillary Clinton and John Edwards had done.  Though he hasn’t changed his opinions, I still respect him for being willing to think independently.  When I look at Joe Lieberman, I personally think there is a Good Joe Lieberman and a Bad Joe Lieberman.

The Good Joe Lieberman is very liberal in domestic issues. Lieberman has consistently scored over 90% in the National Environmental Scorecard from the League of Conservation Voters for the course of his Senate career, over 95% from NARAL for protecting a women’s right to choose, over 90% from the Human Rights Campaign for his senate career in opposing discrimination against gays and lesbians, a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood. In 2005 the liberal activist organization Americans for Democratic Action gave Lieberman a liberal quotient of 80 out of 100 in 2005; a 75 in 2004; a 70 in 2003; an 85 in 2002; and a 95 in 2001. He’s led the effort to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, fought attempts to weaken the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. He’s fought to protect a woman’s right to choose and he’s fought to protect affirmative action laws. He’s fought for laws to ban discrimination in employment and housing based on sexual orientation. He’s fought to prevent hate crimes against gays, to provide the same benefits for domestic partners that are enjoyed by straight spouses. He’s fought to ensure collective bargaining rights and to safeguard worker’s rights. He’s fought for laws to protect striking workers from losing their jobs to scabs. He voted against Alito for the Supreme Court. On these issues Lieberman has been very good.

The Bad Joe Lieberman is very bad in foreign affair issues and in loyalty to the Democrats. In spite of the fact that the Democrats haven’t stripped him of his chairmanship and have gone out of their way to treat him well, he still went to talk in the Republican convention and attack Obama. His support of the war in Iraq is uncritical of George Bush. He did an article in the New York Times telling Democrats to squash dissent on Bush’s policies in Iraq and to just unquestioningly support him when Bush’s Iraq policies were going so badly and criticism was justified. I think he was insane to suggest that we should invade Iran when our troops are already stretched in both Iraq and Afganistan. On foreign policy he’s been dead wrong.

Joe is not really a Democrat, but he’s too liberal in social issues to be a Republican either. He’s just Joe Lieberman. On domestic issues, we should seem him as an ally. But on foreign policy we should expect him to be opposed to Obama and the Democrats.

Against Prop 8 But Not Against Mormons, Catholics, Evangelicals

I am against California’s Proposition 8, which puts a ban in the California constitution on gay marriages.  When the ballot measure passed, I was disappointed, but I also thought that over time, people’s attitudes would change.  So when I saw protests against the change in the California constitution, I was generally supportive.  One of the things that bothered me about the protests, though, is the criticisms I see in some of the protest signs against Mormons, Catholics, and Evangelicals.  I think that is a big mistake, for not all Mormons, Catholics or Evangelicals supported Proposition 8.  A better way would be to appeal to the more liberal and moderate Christians that belong to each denomination to support the cause of gay marriage.

A common misconception among some progressives is that Christians are all conservative Republicans.  Yet a quick glance at the pews of the churches will find a diversity of political views.    Within the Mormon, Catholic, and Evangelical churches are more liberal views that do not agree with the conservative elements in their respective denominations.  If opponents of Proposition 8 begin to view a fight for gay marriage as also being a fight against these churches, it’ll backfire for several reasons.  It’ll galvanize moderate Christians who are in the fence about this issue to defend their church.  This will also gives more ammunition to conservative Mormons, Catholics and Evangelicals to marginalize their more liberal parishioners. 

Jasmyne A. Cannick, an African American lesbian activist, wrote an article called The Gay/Black Divide for the November 8, 2008 edition of the Los Angeles Times.  She commented:

“White gays often wonder aloud why blacks, of all people, won’t support their civil rights.  There is a real misunderstanding by the white gay community about the term.  Proponents of gay marriage fling it around as if it is a one-size-fits-all catchphrase for issues of fairness.
But the black civil rights movement was essentially born out of and driven by the black church;  social justice and religion are inextricably intertwined in the black community.  To many blacks, civil rights are grounded in Christianity- not something separate and apart from religion but synonymous with it.  To the extent that the issue of gay marriage seemed to be pitted against the church, it was going to be a losing battle in my community.”

Cannick makes a good point that there is a strong progressive tradition within the Christian church, especially within the Catholic and Evangelical movement.  The anti-slavery movement and the Social Gospel movement both had adherents within the Evangelical churches.  The Catholic Church has always taken up the cause of the poor and the marginalized, and since Vatican II has also take up anti-war positions.   Though the past 30 years have seen the rise of the Religious Right, there are still progressives within those two denominations and I’m sure that is true of the Mormon Church as well.

So what should supporters of gay marriage do with their Christian foes?  We should protest and go in the streets, as people have done these past couple of days.  But we should refrain from making our protests into antiMormon,antiEvangelical or antiCatholic protests and instead encourage liberals and gays within those denominations to speak out.  And we should try to persuade moderates and even sympathetic conservatives within those churches of the prejudice that arises from a ban in the constitution.  In my time at an evangelical church, I found two types of people who were against homosexuality: one group thought homosexuality was a sin and hated gays and lesbians; and the other group thought homosexuality was a sin but had close family members or friends who were gay and lesbian and sincerely struggled with loving their gay friends and family while holding on to their belief. Trying to talk to the first group is a waste of time, but I think it’s possible to talk to the second group. The people in the second group do not see gays and lesbians as two dimensional stereotypes: they are their brothers, sisters, relatives, close friends. Though it may be futile to try to convince them that homosexuality is not a sin, I think it’s possible to convince them that even if they believe homosexuality is a sin, homophobia is an even worse sin. Homophobia is like racism and sexism in that they have the effect of dehumanizing and marginalizing a group of people, making them vulnerable to a whole range of cruel treatment. Jesus went out of his way to reach out to marginalized people, to make people see the humanity in prostitutes, demon possessed people, taxcollectors and outcasts.

If we demonize Catholics, Mormons and Evangelicals, the road to gay marriage will become much harder than it already is.  If we instead reach out to the liberals within those churches, we may find support where we least expect.

A Year In Crossleft

I’ve been a member of Crossleft, a Progressive Christian website, for over a year now. In that span of time I’ve learned a lot about an alternative more progressive view of Christianity from reading the posts of the regular bloggers. During this past year, Crossleft has had insightful and sometimes heated discussions on the election season, the religious right, cultural issues, poverty issues, and the responsibility of christians to take on the social issues of this country. Every morning after preparing some oatmeal and feeding the cats, I turn on the computer and one of the first sites I start reading is Crossleft. My wife thinks I’m addicted.

Stephen Rockwell and Ketty Esquivel founded Crossleft a few years ago to offer an alternative for Progressive Christians for progressive thought and avenues for activism for progressive Christian causes. In the course of the year, Steve has posted various newspoints on ways to participate in various social causes, among them the collaboration of Catholic Democrats and pastors in Ohio (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6555), petitions to stop Congress from giving Bush a blank check on the financial crisis (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6516), pushing for bills like the Responsible Education About Life Act (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6429) and Jubilee Act for Responsible Lending and Debt Cancellation (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6381), and for ways to join grassroots movements like the Health Care for America NOW (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6371). Kety has spoken at CNN about important latin issues (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6409) and has informed Crossleft readers of forums like the recent feminist forum in http://www.crossleft.org/node/6627 and grassroots organizations like National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA) in http://www.crossleft.org/node/6467 and she has kept us informed of issues important to the Hispanic community. Both have emphasized the various opportunities that are open for Progressive Christians to partipate to help stop the American government to stop torture, to help illegal immigrants from being exploited and find fair solutions to the immigration problem, to protest the wars in Iraq. One of the things that has given the Religious Right influence in these past 30 years has been the fervent activism and organization of its followers, and Steve and Kety realize that for Progressive Christians to offer an alternative Christian voice, they need to be involved in soical activism as well.

One thing that one notices about Crossleft is the diversity of opinions of the various bloggers and visitors. I’m learning that “Progressive Christianity” is not just a monolithic way of thinking. It’s made up of political and theological progressives, political progressives and theological conservatives, mainstream liberal Democrats, more radical Green Party Progressives, Libertarians and perhaps even Anarchists. For the most part people seem to agree on the dangers of too much power concentrated in corporations and the ill effects of an unregulated free market economy, but differences do occur. We’ve had debates on whether capitalism is worth reforming (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6384 and http://www.crossleft.org/node/6372, ), on whether Hugo Chavez is good or bad (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6421, http://www.crossleft.org/node/5565, and http://www.crossleft.org/node/5559) and even the relevance of Ralph Nader (http://www.crossleft.org/node/5806). Over the course of the year, we’ve also has debates over cultural issues like homosexuality and abortion, and in political issues like finding a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian/Israeli issue. I think that the free flow of ideas and the debates are a healthy aspect of Crossleft. One of the things that I found dangerous about the Religious Right is the stifling of debate within its ranks and the forcing of conformity of thought. Jim Ramelis wrote a good post on the dangers of doctrinal purity (http://www.crossleft.org/node/5510) and the diversity of opinions in Crossleft is one of its strongest features.

The Catholic Left has been ably represented by the posts of Frank Cocozzelli. I’ve learned a lot about Catholic Social Thinking and its effect on American liberalism from reading his posts, especially Frank’s informative posts on liberal economist Monsignor John A. Ryan and his ideas of distributive justice (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6616). He has written a series of post warning of the excesses of the Catholic Right in http://www.crossleft.org/?q=blog/314, especially of their attempts to control the Catholic vote and to stifle a strand of progressive Catholic tradition. Boyd Collins wrote a series of posts of Catholic economics based on the ideas of Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6411 and http://www.crossleft.org/node/6397). The history of modern progressive Catholicism has its roots in the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII called Rerum Novarum and it has inspired many Catholics to take up the cause of the poor, to fight for economic justice.

Other Christians have offered their views on social justice based on their own traditions and outlooks. Rich Warden wrote about an economics of reciprocity in these posts http://www.crossleft.org/node/6401 and http://www.crossleft.org/node/6414 that is based on the Golden Rule and addresses basic human needs. Kristof Haavik wrote a good post based on his book “The Socialist Christian” in which he advocates a stronger government role to insure that the poor are not exploited or left to starve (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6372). Bill Peltz wrote about a post capitalist economy in one of his responses to a Boyd Collins post (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6384) that describes an economy where the workers profit from the means of production, there are worker cooperatives and the hierarchical system is eliminated or severely reduced. Jim Ramelis wrote a post about capitalism and cooperation (http://www.crossleft.org/node/5576), about his experiences in a Kibbutz and the need for cooperation in an economic system so that everyone shares in the fruits of the economy and no one is left behind to suffer in poverty. David Stefan, who has sadly not been able to post lately because of work, offered an economic system based on the philosopher Rawls that talked of putting a cap on the income of the upper echeleon http://www.crossleft.org/node/6274.

As befits a Christian site, theological debates are often a feature of Crossleft. Gary Vance is a respected voice of a politically progressive and traditional theological point of view and he has created several posts that point to a grounded Biblical view of various Crossleft issues (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6509, http://www.crossleft.org/node/6296, http://www.crossleft.org/node/6269, and http://www.crossleft.org/node/6231). I was especially interested in a debate that he had with Rich Warden about Origen, Pelegius, Augustine and the early chuch fathers (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6227) because of my own relative lack of knowledge in that area. Gary makes a good point that the Biblical ideas are very progressive ideas and they have inspired such theologically conservative people as Dorothy Day, Reinhold Neibur, and the Social Gospel movement. Rich Warden has written from a more personal theological view based on his studies of the early church fathers and outside philosophers such as Plato, and the debates on reincarnation that occurred during the summer were a real eye opener for me on the intellectual ferment of those early Christians. I’ve tended to just read and not participate in the theological debates in Crossleft and I’ve learned the most when Rich, Gary, Steve, and the others had to respond to the debate points of the other.

With all these interesting people who’ve posted in Crossleft, it was interesting to learn how these bloggers became Progressive Christians in the first place. I wrote a blog asking that question and got several responses http://www.crossleft.org/node/5586. Steve Rockwell was influence by his Grandmother and Mother, Dr. James Turner and Don Barr, and his work in a Philedelphia inner city school with an African American minister. Jim Ramelis wrote that his disagreements with George Bush’s policies pushed him to be a Progressive. Janet Margul wrote in response to another of my posts (http://www.crossleft.org/node/5680) of the positive influence of the Great Society on her political consciousness. Bill Peltz wrote in response to a post (http://www.crossleft.org/node/6365) about his experiences organizing in Mississippi, the influence of Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers, and the effect that Joe Louis had on his childhood. One thing that almost everyone in Crossleft share is a deep admiration for Bobby Kennedy.

In my year reading and posting in Crossleft, I’ve learned a lot from reading other people’s posts and I’ve learned to find my own voice and to articulate my own point of view of things. I’m not afraid of having a difference of opinion in Crossleft, and I feel I’ve made some internet friends. Before I write a post I usually check out some books and magazines from the library to research, and it’s been a lot of fun for me to write these posts. I discovered Howard Zinn from reading this site and Bill Peltz recommeded the book “Douglass and Lincoln : how a revolutionary black leader and a reluctant liberator struggled to end slavery and save the Union” by Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick that turned out to be one of my favorite books of last summer. Politically I’ve moved slowly farther left, seeing the positive influence that the mainstream liberal and more radical progressive have had on each other in terms of ideas and philosphy. Spiritually, Crossleft has been important to me just to let me know that I’m not alone. As new people, like Jerseyguy and Reverand Roger McClellan and others offer their own insights in God and politics and the world, I look forward to my next year reading and posting in Crossleft.