Election Day: the Day of the Dead

November 4^th was election day in the United States, but it was El Dia de los Muertos in Mexico - the Day of the Dead. I was in Mexico at the time (having voted absentee), and bought the calavera pictured on this page. On the Day of the Dead, Mexicans buy these candy skulls as part of a celebration and remembrance of dearly departed friends and family. Mexicans also use this holiday to indulge in one of their favorite pastimes: parodying their own government. They construct altars and write epitaphs and political satire addressed to living politicians. What a splendid idea, especially when the Day of the Dead coincided with election day in the United States.

When I put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard), I realized that the most publicized issues this year are all worthy of parody: the fixation over "moral" issues, gay marriage, the Swift Boat Veterans, and "the economy" really diverted public opinion from some deeper problems that have been growing for decades. (Yes, I include "the economy" as one of the side issues worth of parody.) Writing a parody of these "election issues" would just result in some bitter diatribe against the media, and perhaps the dumbed-down mentality of the American electorate, so I'll skip it. Sticking to my "Day of the Dead" theme, I will write in remembrance of some dearly departed principles, one of which is that democracy is based on trust among its citizens. That deserves a small alter and some corn cakes. Light a candle and remember a time when politics was neither as petty nor as divisive as it has been in recent years.

This year we endured one of the most divisive presidential elections in my memory, and I have voted in seven of them. I was nearly despondent about the choices we had to make, and what those choices implied about the mentality of the American electorate. Liberals and conservatives do not seem to be content to just disagree any more. We hate each other. How does that come about in a country where we have so much in common - including a common fate should our leaders fail us? I was upset about the election from the beginning of the campaigns, and am still not over it, which is why I had to write this essay. It's therapy. Just as the ceremony involved in erecting altars to the deceased is a remedy for the sense of loss, so is writing. Writing is cathartic.

My frustration over this election was that there was no good choice. It was a task of selecting the less irresponsible candidate and party. I had complained bitterly to my Republican friends about the Republicans abandoning the principles that I thought they stood for: protection of individual freedom, limited government, and fiscal responsibility. Even worse, Bush's refusal to deal honestly with the public, and the Republicans' social agenda based on religious "values" revealed a degree of self-righteousness that is unhealthy in a democracy. The Republican appeal to faith is actually evidence that a large number of conservatives have lost faith in the democratic process. According to John Stewart Mill, truth is best arrived at through open discussion; not through private revelation. I threatened to vote for Kerry in retribution.

Am I exaggerating? After all, the whole nation seemed to be experiencing some kind of weird and frightening religious awakening. It  expressed itself through the resurgence of the Christian right, and their anti-abortion, anti-science, anti-gay policies. I do respect the values and lifestyles of Christians, but the mix of Christian faith and politics gives me bad visions of moral absolutism.

If the Christian Coalition and their allies had their way, abortion would be criminalized as murder, and would be embedded in a Constitutional Amendment to insure that future generations (or a Democrat Congress) did not backslide to the position that abortion is personal, not a public, choice. There is evidence of mistrust: the use of the Constitution to embed one's agenda in stone. We would "focus on the family," teach creationism in Midwestern high schools, and ban textbooks that teach the "theory" of evolution. (Emphasizing the preface "theory" before "evolution" implies that it is just a subjective position, unsupported by science or the fossil record.) Stem cell research would be curtailed. The government would dictate people's sexual habits, reading material, television content, and eventually their faith.

Do you see the irony in the politics of religious faith? If Christians have privileged insight into the Truth, then for how long do they tolerate Buddhists, Muslims and atheists? The logic of the Christian agenda coexisting with the free exercise of religion completely escapes me. You have heard that little saying: "First they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew...." When will they come for you?

While the Christian Coalition was busy trying to put God's will into law, my own state senator, Wayne Allard, was protecting the sanctity of the family. He did this by introduced the bill for a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage. The gay marriage issue seems like "moral" legislation gone wild. I am dumbfounded by the justification for a Constitutional ban on gay marriage: it "protects" the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. How exactly does the union of the two guys next door invalidate or pose a threat to my marriage? The logic of that position completely escapes me as well. Perhaps, like the free exercise of religion in a Christian state, it is not meant to appeal to logic. Perhaps the resurgence of religious extremism appeals to emotion. Is that not synonymous with "faith?"

The extreme faction of the Republican Party has always been there. In the 1950s and 1960s it was the John Birch society. In the 1980s and 1990s it was the Christian Coalition. Do you remember the presidential election of 1988? It was the election that put Herbert Walker Bush in the White House. I was living in Washington State, and attended a county caucus during the Republican primaries. The caucus was packed by the Christian Coalition, who then sent Republican delegates to the national convention to nominate Pat Robertson  for president. Robertson's followers used similar tactics to get majority votes in the primaries in other states, including Hawaii, Iowa and South Dakota. Then their candidate withered under national scrutiny.

I watched Robertson participate in a question-and-answer forum with the other five Republican presidential candidates just prior to the primary elections. He was humiliated on national television when Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder of Colorado repeatedly quoted him verbatim and then asked him to explain what he had meant. She effectively painted him as an extremist by using his own words. Robertson only got 6% of the vote in the presidential primary. Bush received 53% and Bob Dole received 32%, which was very reassuring to those of us who had seen our county caucuses "railroaded" by the conservative right.

As scary as the moral majority is, I feel their ability to do damage is limited by the majority of the population that opposes their agenda. We had a chance to vote to become "Jesus Land" twenty years ago, and turned it down. (Remember, Pat Robertson could only get 6% of a Republican primary vote in 1988. What would his chances have been in a general election?) Has the country undergone such a complete religious conversion in the last 20 years that we would vote for such a candidate today? I think not, which brings me to my theory of why the Republicans won, and why I voted as I did.

The pundits proclaimed that exit polls showed the election was about "values." I wonder. I think the election was about the failure of the Democrats to come through as a party of genuine reform. I reject the Christian Coalition and everything they stand for, yet when it came time to put pencil to ballot, I voted for Bush. So, with my disgust over the Republicans' agenda and their complete defection from libertarian principles, why did I not vote Democrat? I said that I would, and when my absentee ballot was sitting in front of me, I just could not make myself vote for John Kerry, and I want to explore the reasons why. After all, I am what the Christian right would consider a contradiction: both moral and secular. I am a reasonable person who values his personal liberty. Yet, when I had to choose the lesser of two evils, I chose to vote against the Democrats. (I think for many of us, this election was about who to vote against.)

I know why. It's the class warfare platform. I cannot vote for a party that blames society's most successful people for the unfulfilled expectations of others. I cannot vote for a philosophy that sees an expanded federal government as the antidote to the evils of the private sector. In Central America that argument might carry water. Here it simply illustrates how little we appreciate the opportunities our system has to offer. I was voting for values alright, but they were not the values the media seized on as the essential points in this election. I voted for secular values: educational reform, social security reform, and a reliance on the private sector as the engine of prosperity. I voted for the right to keep my own property. That is not an expression of greed. It is an expression of principle. Individual property rights are a component of individual liberty, and protecting those rights compatible with both maximizing individual liberty and equality of opportunity.

I voted against the idea that there is no moral merit to the reward of intelligence, hard work, and taking risk. I voted against the universal lie that we can all have everything we believe we are entitled to, if only we can get someone else  to pay for it. The idea that wealth earned by the most productive and hard-working people in this country is public property is immoral.  So, in that sense, I suppose I did vote for values: the values of my father and my grandfather. I voted in remembrance of their protestant, grass-roots, hard-working lifestyle, and for the idea that government's role was to regulate but interfere in that lifestyle as little as possible.

That lifestyle was not just acquisitive but accumulative. Past generations did not expect to maximize current consumption, but rather to accumulate wealth, and to pass it on to their children and to their children's children. State-sponsored consumption violates this expectation and deprives future generations of the wealth of their parents. In fact, the ever-expanding redistributive state not only deprives future generations of wealth, but transfers to them the burden of our current consumption. This is immoral.

Rather than use my own ancestors as a source of authority, allow me to cite philosopher John Rawls, from his own investigation into the concept of justice:

Each generation must not only preserve the gains of culture and civilization, and maintain intact those just institutions that have been established, but it must also put aside in each period of time a suitable amount of real capital accumulation. This saving may take various forms from net investment in machinery and other means of production to investment in learning and education. (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 252)

I cite Rawls because I want to make a point about the morality of allowing people to keep as much of their money as possible. We have a moral responsibility to allow our citizens to create and pass on their wealth to future generations. The Democrats only presented one side of the moral equation: to fund current levels of consumption so as not to pass on a debt to future generations.

In an era of global competition, our expectations have yet to adjust to the reality that millions of people elsewhere in the world will work longer and study harder to make the income we have come to expect as a birthright.  What that implies for all of us is that we need a better system of education, a renewed work ethic, and the courage to defend the principles of achievement. It implies a change in our mental and emotional attitudes toward self-reliance, and a greater sense of responsibility for our own lives. It implies that the "guarantees" of an unearned income until death, infinite medical care, and prosperity through taxation be exposed as hollow and unachievable. These cultural adjustments are just the minimums if we are to maintain the standard of living we have come to expect. No, make that the standard of living we now believe we are entitled to, regardless of education or effort. We are about to discover that we must earn what we believe we are entitled to.

If you agree with me on this principle, then you must also agree that in the 2004 contest, it became the voter's obligation to pick the less irresponsible party. This was a tough call, and the reason that this year's election was the hardest choice I have faced in seven consecutive presidential elections. Who will cause the greatest harm? You can find a few hundred examples of wasteful government spending approved by both parties. In fact there are organizations are dedicated to doing just that (Citizens Against Government Waste). They make their mark alerting the public to boondoggles such as the item in the recent "tax package" approved by Congress that allotted $189 million to help car dealers sell Oldsmobiles. The specter of a $417 billion budget deficit amid a presidential agenda aimed at cutting taxes produces an orgy of finger-pointing among supporters of both the right and the left. Was it unrestrained spending or tax breaks for "the rich" that imperil our way of life?

That is my argument. It is our own inflated expectations of what we "deserve" that produced the deficit. It is the idea that we can deliver everything that we have promised to retirees, to farmers, to the unemployed, to the unions, to the drug companies, to "victims" of cigarettes and other dangerous products, and have someone else pay for it. Only in a dumbed-down world does this have any credibility. If you simply allow the giant Ponzi scheme of Social Security, Medicare, farm subsidies, medical subsidies, and growth federal spending on everything from education to Oldsmobile dealers, you will always have deficits. The answer to the question of how much we should pay in taxes will always be the same: "More."

I think the issue should be not how much money is available to tax, but rather what is our moral obligation to pay for social services above a minimum level that is socially just. After the election was over the governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, framed the question in a way that illustrates my frustration with the Democrats. He announced on CNN that the Democrats were the "real" party of moral values. They should have stressed during the campaign the immorality of "children going to bed hungry while we give tax breaks to the rich." (Interview with Wolf Blitzer, CNN International, 11/7/04)

Well, is that really the choice: eliminate the tax breaks to the rich or let children go hungry? How outrageous for Governor Rendell to mischaracterize the Democrats' priorities in such a sanctimonious way! If the Democrats want to keep children from going to bed hungry, why don't they make some effort to divert the billions of dollars being spent on Social Security, Medicare, and farm programs toward the truly needy?

The truth is that the Democrats' priorities are the same as the Republicans' priorities: to use public money to buy patronage, and stay in office. They are shoveling money to a plethora of middle class interest groups that offer political support in return for that money: public employees unions, teachers' unions, minority groups, farmers, seniors, and limitless numbers of groups who claim to be disadvantaged. Best of all, they grant a blank check to the American Trial Lawyers Association to pillage corporations and individuals alike under the guise of protecting the public interest. Where are the lawyers for the hungry children? They are in private practice, extorting money from corporate America on behalf of a class of disingenuous whiners who claim their health problems have been caused by mold. (That's the hot new personal injury claim: mold).

Here is the bottom line: the cause of exploding budget deficits is not lack of tax revenue. It is our collective expectation, fed by self-righteous politicians, that our needs can be fulfilled by taxes on others. Here is the real source of the U.S. budget deficit, explained succinctly by the Office of Management and Budget:

For example, the temporary shift from annual deficit to surplus in the late 1990s did nothing to correct the long-term deficiencies in the Nation's major entitlement programs, which are the major source of the long-run shortfall in Federal finances. (emphasis mine) Source: Analytical Perspectives: Budget of the United States Government 2005, OMB, p 181.

I know, it was Bush who expanded the Farm Bill. It was the Republicans who passed the enormous Prescription Drug Act of 2003, accelerating the insolvency of the Medicare system. I acknowledge that the Republicans have hardly been the party of fiscal responsibility, and their "win at all costs" election strategy nearly cost them my vote. But at least Bush had the courage to admit that the social security system was both insolvent and unjust. Despite its unpopularity with the public, Bush stood fast on maintaining his tax cuts. In fact, he defended them on principle, saying in effect that the money people earn belongs to them, and is not collective property. He defended his effort to institute accountability in public education, as faltering as that effort has been. In short, between the two parties, the Republicans looked more like the reform party; the Democrats like the party of populism.

So, who did I memorialize on November fourth? I suppose it was my own faltering faith that the Democrats would actually prove to be any different than they have been in the past. I will build my little altar to the ideals of self reliance and realistic expectations. I will put offerings on this altar to the dead spirit of public trust. All around me are interest groups petitioning the government for money in their own blind self-interest. All around me are people who have an agenda for my life, and that depending on who gets their way, it will cost me my freedoms or my property.

Worse, all around me are people who believe that the proper role of government is to perpetuate a giant Ponzi scheme of confiscation and disbursement. The government has gone so far beyond its mission of protecting the public safety and managing the economy that it has altered our very expectations of what government is supposed to do. Well, I say it's time to starve the beast. Bring on the Middle Ages! In the unlikely event that the U.S. becomes a Christian theocracy, I have a small house in Mexico where I can go to live out my days.