“I am a pro-life Roman Catholic conservative. I always have been.”
So says Michael Steele.
Well, plenty of “pro-life Roman Catholic conservatives” are rather less than convinced. And “pro-life Roman Catholic conservatives” determine American elections.
Admittedly, that is mostly the white ones. But there are rather more black Catholics than is generally supposed. And they tend to be “pro-life” and “conservative”. Father Pflager himself is not, after all, black. But Alan Keyes is, for all his departures from Catholic Social Teaching on economics.
Clarence Thomas hovers somewhere between Opus Dei (in which case it might now have the majority on the Supreme Court) and the Episcopal Church’s tiny remaining traditionalist wing (which also has a certain African-American following), but will doubtless die on the side of the Tiber on which he was born.
And Opus Dei’s fully signed-up include the Chicago Civil Rights veteran Squire Lance, the man who should have been given the Illinois Senate seat.
In the person of Steele, the Republicans are clearly reaching out to that constituency. And by actions such as the failure to appoint Lance, the Democrats are letting them. Where are the black “pro-life Roman Catholic conservatives” fighting for social justice, Civil Rights and peace at the heart of this Administration, of the Democratic Congressional Delegation, or of the Democratic National Committee (now chaired, after all, by the pro-life Governor Tim Kaine)?
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We can see where the mixed-race “pro-life Roman Catholic conservative” fighting for social justice, Civil Rights and peace is.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately it is too little, too late (although Mr. Steele appears to be a fine man) and it shows a lack of imagination in copy catting of the new Obama led Democrats with black leadership. The Republican party is pretty much dead and only survives on life support because of its southern state base and pockets of western libertarianism. It was killed by the neo-con and globalist viruses that still inhabit its soul and world vision. It will go the way of the Whigs, sooner rather than later, to be replaced with a pro-life, pro-worker and small government alternative........at least I hope so.
ReplyDeleteThen you need to hold President Obama to the tradition of those Republicans who called for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War, an outcome which would have precluded both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
ReplyDeleteOf that rural and Western half of the Republican Party which supported the New Deal.
Of Eisenhower, with his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, and with his denunciation of the military-industrial complex.
Of those Congressional Republicans whose votes passed Civil Rights in the face of Dixiecrat resistance.
Of Nixon, who ended the Vietnam War as President Obama will end the Iraq War, and who began détente with China as President Obama is beginning détente with Iran (and beyond).
And of Republican opposition to Clinton’s unpatriotic job-exportation, unpatriotic sweatshop-importation, and unpatriotic global trigger-happiness, all continued and expanded by the unpatriotic Bush Administration.
Or else, make it clear, he has no hope of re-election, nor even of re-nomination.
Pro-worker and small-government?
ReplyDeleteI know, I also wondered about that one.
ReplyDeleteHuge numbers voted Democrat last year because they wanted their country back. The name of that country is America.
She is the country that long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs both against the exportation of that labour to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves.
And she is the country that could until very recently say that she led the world in that she “did not seek for monsters to destroy”.
For she is the country of big municipal government, of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, of very high levels of co-operative membership, of housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, of small farmers who own their own land, and of the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice.
At the same time, those same voters made it clear at exactly the same polls that (in Florida and California) they wanted back the country where marriage only ever means one man and one woman, that (in Colorado) they wanted back the country that does not permit legal discrimination against working-class white men, and (in Missouri and Ohio) that they wanted to preserve the country where gambling is not deregulated.
The name of that country is America, too.
Let me clarify my small government, pro-worker statement. We live in an era of extremely large government (it has never been bigger in USA history at the federal, state or county levels !!!). Large government colludes with the plutocrats at the expense of the worker. Despite campaign rhetoric by Obama, there will be no rollback of international trade agreements that continue to ship jobs to Asia at the expense of the US worker. Unions are a good thing but become useless when they lose their bargaining power when the alternative for business is easy off-shoring. Large government is synonymous with corruption and hence the weakest link- the worker- often gets only rhetoric and the short end of the stick.
ReplyDeleteIt was in the era of much smaller government - 50's and 60's, that US workers enjoyed their best days. My father was a municipal union worker in NYC , bought a house and a car every few years. This would be impossible today despite having the biggest government in history. Fireman and policeman jobs in NYC used to be well paid to support a family, but now their salaries and benefits have been severely reduced in this era of big government. Many work as security guards as a second job to supplement their income.
I may not have the complete answers in this post-industrial and globalized economy, but bigness (whether it is the oligopolies that run the economies and large government with its endemic corruption, revolving door relationship with Big Business and its inherent inefficiency) are not the friends of labor or anyone else.