"The Fine Print", by Michael Schrader

IS THIS THE MIDWEST OR THE MIDEAST?

By Michael Schrader

(Written and posted 28 February 2011)

Here is the scene unfolding in front of the world:

Thousands of demonstrators swarm the capital shouting and carrying signs declaring that the dictator must go. The outgunned opposition flee across the border and take refuge in exile, in the neighboring state, refusing to take part in what they consider to be tyranny against the people. The head of the government contemplates planting his own people in amongst the protesters to foment unrest and chaos. Police personnel are dispatched to hunt down opposition members. Protests erupt in other neighboring capitals. Other states are trying to follow the lead of the first and quash the opposition, hoping that the unrest will not spread to them.

No, this is not the Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Jordan, Bahrain, or the rest of the Arab world; this is Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, and other states where a newly elected Republican majority has decided to take its vengeance out on Democrats and unions. Thankfully, the difference between us and the Arab world is that our governments are not willing to fire on the opposition like Gaddafi has. Other then that, though, an objective observer would have to conclude that the Republican governors are behaving similarly to those tyrannical Arab states.

When the Founding Fathers were debating what form of government we should have, they were concerned about the “tyranny of the majority”, that the majority would take its mandate as a justification to impose its will on the minority. The United States Senate was set up with filibusters and other deliberative parliamentary procedures to prevent such an occurrence. While not foolproof, as there have been instances where a supermajority has been able to cram its agenda down the opposition’s throat, such as the Republican excesses of Reconstruction and most recently the Democrats with Obamacare, all and all the system the Founders have put in place has, for the most part, prevented the majority from trampling the rights of the minority. At the state level, however, such is not the case for two basic reasons. First, many state governments do not operate under the same rules as the federal government, and one, Nebraska, is a unicameral legislature where the checks and balances of the bicameral system does not exist. Second, states tend to be much more homogenous than the country as a whole, leading to supermajorities in state legislatures that allow one party to completely dominate the other. In Oklahoma, for example, all of the constitutional offices, both houses of the state legislature, and all but one of the congressional seats are held by the Republicans. In fact, the Democrats have become so marginalized, it is rumored that in some counties the Democrats hold a county convention when the county party chair looks in the mirror.

When one party in a state becomes so dominant that the opposition is, for the most part, non-existent, it tends to get arrogant and cocky and believes that all of its ideas are good and all of the opposition’s ideas are bad, because if the opposition had any good ideas at all, it wouldn’t be the in the minority, would it? The danger with this rationale is that many elections are decided on the cult of personality and not on some obscure political platform that most voters neither know or care about. Take Ronald Reagan, the neocons “God”, for instance. There were many voters, like me, who thought that Reagan was a right-wing extremist, and looking back through time, he really was; he made Barry Goldwater look like Hugo Chavez. Why did he win in 1980? His opponent, President Jimmy Carter, came across as weak and feckless and an amateur who was way in over his head. So, then, the election of Reagan in 1980 wasn’t so much an endorsement of his policies and viewpoints but rather a rebuttal of the person of Jimmy Carter. Voters just liked Ronald Reagan, the person, much better than Jimmy Carter, the person. In 1984, Reagan won one of the biggest landslides in American history over Walter Mondale. I voted for Walter Mondale because I didn’t agree with Reagan and the Republican platform. In discussing the election with friends, family, and coworkers, the consensus was overwhelming – they voted for Reagan despite not agreeing with his policies because he was much more likeable than Mondale. If you look closely at polling data for elections, you will discover that most people vote for the candidate that they like the most, not necessarily the candidate that they agree with politically. Unfortunately, this seems to be an inconvenient truth for Republicans in Wisconsin and Indiana and Ohio and Oklahoma, who believe that they were elected based on political platform rather than personality.

Take my former Oklahoma State Representative, Steve Martin, for example. (Steve is still a member of the Oklahoma legislature, but I moved out of his district a few years ago.) While I disagreed with Steve on many, if not most of his positions, I being a registered Democrat (in Oklahoma, when you register to vote, you have to declare a party) at the time and he being a solid Republican. Yet, I voted against my party and voted for Steve because I like him as a person; my personal respect for a member of the opposite party for outweighed party loyalty. I, personally, would rather have a legislature full of members that I like and respect and have confidence in regardless of party than one of Communist-style party hacks who are incapable of independent thought and will always vote the way the party apparatus tells them how to vote. I think most people agree with me. That being the case, then, it is arrogant and foolish for any party who is swept into power to assume that it is all about a mandate to enact a particular platform; it is not.

Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, and his Republican apparatchiks assume that because they were voted into office, that gives them a mandate to attack to opposition Democrats and one of their key constituents, the unions. True, the unions have become greedy and selfish; one need only look at the events in Tulsa to see this. Last year, when the city of Tulsa was going through a significant budget crisis, the mayor asked the three public service union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), and the firefighters’ union for across-the-board wage concessions in order to avoid layoffs. The firefighters’ union agreed to the pay cuts, and all jobs were saved. However, when the AFSCME membership voted, over 80 percent voted for the layoffs, as the senior membership did not want to lose any retirement benefits, as retirement benefits are calculated from average pay. Basically, because the senior membership did not want to potentially lose around twenty bucks a month sometime in the future, they decided to throw their colleagues “under the bus”, so to speak. So much for the “all for one and one for all”. The FOP followed suit, and also voted for the layoffs, and as a result, one-eighth of the Tulsa Police Department was given a pink slip. It is selfish actions like this that have given the ideologues the justification they need for their pogroms against the unions, and they won’t stop until either the unions are eradicated from the landscape, once and for all, or the electorate decides that this kind of arrogance is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.

Ideological purity is dangerous and leads to repression and tyranny. The world’s most notorious dictators rose to power through ideological purity, convincing the people that the world is black-and-white, that you are either with us or against, that there is absolutely no room for compromise. Wisconsin’s governor has publicly stated that he will not compromise in his quest to destroy the unions, that he will not stop until his ultimate victory is achieved. Sadly, this “ultimate victory” attitude is held by many across the nation. In my quiet community of Bartlesville, we have those who hold such views - if you don’t agree with them one-hundred percent on every single issue, then you are an enemy that must be marginalized and destroyed; to these people, compromise is a evil concept that must never be spoken of.

Fortunately, we, the people, can stop this procession to tyranny. It begins at the local level, with our city councils, county governments, and school boards. We need to elect those who are not slaves to ideological purity, who are willing to compromise and disagree civilly, who see the world as it is, in beautiful hues of color, rather than in black-and-white. Then we must elect responsible people to our state legislatures who will respect the opposition and will not use their election as a justification to cram their ideology down our collective throats. Then, we move onto to federal government, replacing each and every ideologue with pragmatists who understand that achieving what is best for all means not getting everything our own way.

It is your choice. It is time for us to take back our country from the ideologues who want to usurp and destroy it.

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