Wednesday: Foxhole Liberals

My mom called me the other day.  She was visiting my brother in AZ over Easter and as the conversation wrapped up, she told me cheerily, “I’m going to one of those tea party thingies!”  Knowing my mom’s susceptibility to Republican messaging, I warned her, “You know, those thingies are mostly about anti-tax stuff.  You have to be really careful.”  I’m relieved to discover that there is quite a bit of anger directed at the financial industry at them as well but, still, I worry.

My mom bought into the whole uber pro-life, pro-war, anti-liberal message of the Bush era.  For eight long years, we could barely be in one another’s presence without wanting to kill each other.  In the past couple years, she kind of came out of the trance.  Last year, I got her to vote for Hillary.

Now, the reason I mention this is because my mom is a Democrat who has traditionally voted for Republicans over social issues.  It’s her religious background that lures her into their camp every single time.  And she mostly goes along with their program except that when I made her do her political compass a couple of years ago, it turned out that she was more liberal than I was.  She didn’t believe it at first until I pointed out to her but she likes a lot of liberal ideas, social justice and social security and medicare and all that.  She’d claw your eyes out before she’d let you take her VA benefits away.

I suspect that there are a lot more people out there who in the next couple of years are going to discover their inner liberal.  After all, it’s one thing to rail about deadbeats on unemployment when times are good.  It’s quite another thing to be ON the unemployment line, realizing you haven’t done anything wrong but that the wealthy shareholders of your company preferred a juicier dividend to your wage slavery.  And SCHIP shouldn’t be given to people who have jobs, except when those jobs suddenly no longer cover the costs of living.  And social security privatization can probably be postponed until the next century or at least until after my generation dies.

There is nothing that will concentrate the mind so keenly as poverty.  The Great Depression featured many such conversion stories.  The farmers of the dust bowl who were sometimes reduced to eating nettles and saw their children melt away due to malutrition didn’t all start out as fans of FDR.  But they started to see the sense of his WPA programs and his soil conservation projects.  The perpetually poor of the Tennessee Valley weren’t all pinko commies, but after the TVA brought power and light to Appalachia, Democrats were able to capture their hearts.  We might not all like the byzantine rules and restrictions of a union shop, but really, how many of us want to go back to the days when we were paid third world wages, had our children working with us and had no benefits?  That wasn’t so long ago.  My own grandfather, who was born in 1912, was forced to leave school in eighth grade so he could earn his keep.  12 years old and he was already doing a man’s work. Do we really want to chuck all of that because a few unions have overreached?

The powers that be have spent close to a generation spreading a message of begrudgery.  They’ve directed our attention down onto the person below us.  If we weren’t getting a bigger piece of the pie, it’s because of the welfare queen or the quota system or the uneducated lazy poor.  But now there are two classes in America, the wealthy, well connected who control the money, and everyone else.  Now, the rich are looking down at that everyone else and complaining that they have to share their hard earned wealth with us in the form of taxes.  WE are the new welfare queens to them.  The ‘everyone else’ category contain a lot of people, both educated and uneducated, union and professional, Democrat and Republican.  That everyone else is the new working class and it contains all of the people who do not pull down million dollar bonuses each year or have their wealth socked away in offshore bank accounts.  That everyone else are all equally vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and we are starting to figure it out and cast our attention up instead of down in the food chain.

That social safety net doesn’t look so bad now that we’re all sitting in the same foxhole, does it?  There’s nothing wrong with getting rich with your own efforts but gambling away someone else’s money suddenly isn’t so virtuous anymore, is it?  Maybe we should have elected more women because countries that have more women in office tend to have fewer social problems.  And really, are the proscriptions against gay marriage that important when we’re all struggling to keep our heads above water?

Keep it in mind as you watch the tea party phenomenon develop.  There is an opportunity out there to turn this country on its head for the persons who seize it.  And it won’t be long before Americans all over the country demand more of their government to do something.  Liberalism may become the next new religion for Republicans too.

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