By Bill Barth
Usually, when I write about politics, the topics revolve around local or state matters and I do my best to use measured language.
Be warned. Not today.
The trigger is yet another in the long and phony series of self-created “crises” that swirl around federal government shutdown deadlines.
Congress has one recurring job. Set a budget and fund the government. Collectively, the 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives are absolute, reprehensible failures. In any other organization they would all be fired.
And spare me the hollow partisan posturing.
Majority Republicans say: The Democrats won’t do what we tell them because they want to give government healthcare to illegal aliens.
Minority Democrats say: The Republicans won’t do what we tell them because they care more about tax cuts for rich people than healthcare for everybody else.
The closest thing I can think of to describe the way Congress operates is two 3-year-olds fighting over a toy.
The notion — as both claim — that either side speaks for “the American people” is a lie. A complete sick fabrication believed only by the blindest of the blind partisans.
The time-trusted Gallup polling operation finds more than 40% — and growing — identify themselves as Independent. Both Democrats and Republicans score in the mid-to-upper 20% range.
Polling also shows that more Americans identify as fiscally conservative — but higher numbers also identify as socially moderate or liberal.
Put that in perspective. About 1 in 4 Americans identify as Republicans and about 1 in 4 Americans identify as Democrats. Yet both sides loudly claim to speak for “the American people.”
They do not.
Here’s who they do speak for. Democrats speak for the gerrymandered hardcore left-wingers who have been drawn into safe majorities in blue states. Likewise, Republicans speak for the gerrymandered hardcore right-wingers drawn up to control red states.
And both sides speak for, and bend the knee to, their big-money donors who own the political class.
No one represents the tens of millions who find themselves adrift somewhere within shouting distance of the middle. People who may lean a little right or a little left. Who may be fiscally conservative and socially moderate to liberal. Who support international engagement, strategic alliances, strong defense and Lady Justice’s blind rule of law. Who may be repulsed by radicals on the left and right.
People like me.
Blame my folks. I grew up on an Illinois farm, where as a kid I helped raise beef cattle and grow corn, soybeans and wheat. Pretty much everybody I knew spent their days the same way.
It was a good life. A very independent life. People took care of themselves and looked after their neighbors when a need arose. Some people were Democrats, some Republicans. Didn’t really matter. What I learned from my folks was that your life was your life, and my life was my life. Don’t tell me how to live, and I won’t tell you.
Religion, politics and the like were nobody’s business but your own.
As an adult I found a guy named Reagan spoke my language. He said a person’s right to swing his fist ends at the tip of another person’s nose. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said it first, but I prefer Reagan.
I’m tired of tolerating radical right-wingers or left-wingers who belligerently want to tell me and everybody else what to think, claiming they — and they alone — speak for “the American people” and, if you resist, you don’t love your country and can’t be a patriot.
Tyranny of the self-righteous is still tyranny.
It leads to angry polarization. It leads to dysfunctional public life. It leads to social whiplash as elections swing wildly left or right. It leads to talk of national divorce. Political violence. Even calls for civil war.
This is crazy.
People who buy into that narrative are unwell.
We are broken because the few have appointed themselves to speak for the many and the rest of us have let them get away with it.
We’ve heard a lot about rigged elections and it’s true. Republican and Democrat apparatchiks rigged it to keep us from having any other choice. Pick sucky candidate R or sucky candidate D. No interlopers allowed.
It’s time for a revolution of the rational. It’s time to stop listening to loudmouths and start listening to each other. It’s time to go back to the beginning, when the Founders understood that breaking off into factions would lead to disunion; that no side should dominate others; that liberty means different things to different people. And that’s OK.
I’ve tried to live — and practice journalism — by the rules my Pawpaw and my Dad taught me. Know what you believe in and stand up for it. Give other people the respect to do the same. Look for common ground, not enemies. Defend the rights of people to be who they are. God will sort it out in the end.
And be kind.
Bill Barth is the former Editor of the Beloit Daily News, and a member of the Wisconsin Newspaper Hall of Fame. Write to him at bbarth@beloitdailynews.com.
