United We Fall
Two days after the election and I’m already starting to get in touch with my inner Republican. I mean, let’s face it – these guys know how to frame issues, and they have made the very important discovery that a majority of Americans would rather stick it to others (foreigners, gays, liberals, the UN, whoever) than help themselves. Liberals can lament this fact – or we can learn from it.
Yesterday in the comments, Push Poll pointed out this beer-fueled rant from Angry Bear, about “shutting off the spigot” that sends seventeen cents of every tax dollar from the Blue States to the Red States. I’m not sure if it was meant to be taken seriously, but it seems like the makings of a very compelling and novel political platform that’s well-suited to the hard realities of 21st century America.
One thing that’s obvious from the Presidential election is that there is very little to be gained by appealing to Red State (or any) fundamentalists on the grounds of economic self-interest. Yes, these people are often poorly-paid, poorly-educated, without health benefits, and stuck in communities that have been systematically reduced to a thin, white cultural paste by big box retail chains and cookie-cutter housing developments. But, apparently, they like it that way.
I think it’s time we got the message. We need to stop pushing for programs that bleed tax dollars from the centers of progress and innovation in an attempt to create opportunities and benefits for people who obviously have no use for them. We need to stop trying to nationalize social issues like gay rights, gun control, abortion, secular education, and affirmative action and focus our attention on protecting them in the areas where citizens sympathetic to those values make up the majority. We need to stop acting like everyone should naturally want to face their problems like adults and work together to solve them – perhaps the most offensive conceit inherent in American liberalism, and one that has gotten us exactly nowhere since the 1960s.
In short, pace John Edwards, we need Two Americas, now more than ever. We need a Red State America where “cultural conservatives” feel safe and free to impose religious standards on everyone and everything, and we need a Blue State America where we can be as nasty as we wanna be without having to listen to anyone lecture us on “family values.” Forget trying to unite. Let’s celebrate our differences, abandon this troublesome notion of national standards and universal values that we can never agree on, and bring about a revival of Federalism, only this time, for keeps.
The educated elites of the coasts need to stop pretending we have anything to teach people that already have it all figured out. I mean, clearly, these people know the Moral Truth for themselves – just ask them. Who are we to argue? All we ask is that, in exchange for us rootless cosmopolitans backing off from forcing them to be tolerant, reasonable and realistic, they take responsibility for the outcomes of their own policies and stop blaming far-away liberals, academia and Hollywood for their problems.
You want to teach creationism in your schools? Fine, do it. Abstinence-only Sex Ed for teens? Sure! Bans on abortions (except to save the mother’s life)? Hell yeah, why not? If people really think these ideas are worth trying, they should try them out on themselves. Just leave the rest of us out please, OK?
But, here’s the catch. The states have to sink or swim on their own merits. If high-school girls in Mississippi start getting knocked up and are lost to the economy for 18 years raising their kids, let Mississippi worry about it. Don’t expect farm subsidies paid for with Blue State tax dollars, no pork and slush from the federal trough, no AFDC money. If kids graduating Kansas high schools are systematically rejected from accredited science programs at major universities because their heads are full of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, too bad. These are local problems, and if the people are fed up with it, they can put pressure on their local officials.
Call me an optimist, or even a Republican, but I have a certain confidence that when you set freedom against oppression in an open market, freedom’s going to win every time. But the Red Staters have gotten so accustomed to coasting by on subsidies and federal handouts that they’ve forgotten the economic price of intolerance. Want to start an advertising agency in Alabama that can compete with national shops in New York and San Francisco? See how far you get attracting creative talent when you make gays unwelcome in your state.
Blue State Democrats urgently need to reframe these cultural issues as economic ones, and that means we need to let go of the metaphysical rightness and justice of liberal ideals that we got so comfortable with during the 1960s and return to a more instrumental notion of freedom. That is, freedom doesn’t work because it’s right, it’s right because it works.
Lately, the anti-Bush left has taken to calling itself the “reality-based community.” Well let’s use what we know about reality and science to set up a little experiment. We’ll pit our notions of a liberal society, with progressive taxes, investment in infrastructure and social services, and social tolerance, up against the Red State version with small government and religious values in a straight-up economic competition, with no help from the federal government. As Angry Bear says, “Wait ten years and see who comes out ahead.”
In policy terms, this would mean Blue State Democrats should actively oppose all programs whose net impact is a wealth transfer to the Red States. Make a big deal out of this. Challenge Red Staters’ pride. Stigmatize programs like farm subsidies, use-rights to federal land for mining and grazing, excessive military bases, and net-negative use of programs like AFDC and Food Stamps as “handouts.” Insist on a dollar-for-dollar parity of money collected from states via taxes to dollars distributed via federal programs, subsidies, tax exemptions, etc. Most Red Staters will buy it because they probably believe they are net contributors rather than recipients of federal largesse.
At the same time, national and local progressives should fight like hell wherever they have big majorities to protect important programs and safeguard individual and group rights in their own communities. We know from experience that these people are never satisfied having it their own way – they always seek to inflict their version of the truth on everyone else. Every election, progressive communities will have to deal with some harebrained ballot initiative or other trying to ban gays or impose school prayer – we’ll just need to swat them down enough times that the crazies give up and go to live in peace in their own regions.
This new spin on States Rights (or Devolution, or Local Sovereignty) has all the makings of a winning 21st century political message: it’s simple, it’s deeply destructive to the social fabric of the country, and it lets one group externalize all its inner conflicts by pissing all over somebody else. Who needs unity and consensus, when all it does is lose elections for those who are fool enough to advocate for it? Time to leave behind the childish notion that we can all move forward together, when it’s clear that two halves of the country are dancing to two different drummers. The prosperous and liberal half of the country can get along fine – much better, in fact – as our own tax base, without the handout-addicted Red States (and Red areas of Blue States) dragging us down. What fools we were to persist in believing in the big “One America” illusion when the facts were staring us in the face.
After all, Red Staters could not have been more clear. They don’t want Democratic values and they are not going to give their support to Democratic-sponsored programs in their own economic self-interest. Let’s take the hint. If they want to run supply-side theocracies in the states where they can get away with it, that’s just dandy. We’ll back off and keep our corrupt, godless, big-government ways to ourselves – along, of course, with our money.
7:23:59 AM 
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