Rational Philosophy

John McCain on The Daily Show with John Stewart

Last night, as I watched a TiVo’d John Stewart skewering delegates on the last day of the Republican convention, I wondered what it is about small town values that the Republicans love (but can’t define) and that seems to keep America stuck in the mire of bad politics.

If you didn’t see it, Stewart’s convention crew walked around with microphones asking Republican delegates what ’small town values’ meant to them. With big smiles on their faces and earnest willingness to answer the delegates came up with such laughable answers as “real people, real values,” “traditional marriage,” “fishing,” “church.” (The video is posted on the Daily Show website - highly recommended.)

But even those of us who distrust and disagree with the sentiment with which republicans freight the term, we all seem to understand that the essence of ’small town values’ might mean something genuinely appealing and good. So what is this essence, and how has it become distorted and misused.

Block Island, Rhode Island

I spent the bulk of the summer on Block Island with my family. Block Island is essentially a small town with a lot of tourists. (And these are mostly east-coast tourists from New York and Connecticut.) It’s easy to distinguish the tourists from the islanders. The tourists are in a hurry. They’re often nervous and rude. They lock their cars. They expect to get screwed over. They complain about stuff. The islanders understand that there aren’t that many places to go on the island, and everywhere is pretty close. You can trust people because for the most part, there’s nowhere for them to escape to. You couldn’t steal a car and get it off the island (which is car-accessible only by ferry.)

Block Island is a great lens through which to observe that the essence of small town values means enforced responsibility through enforced community.

It’s a lot easier to be rude or unfair to someone if you don’t know them and if you’ll never see them again and don’t have to rely upon their personal contribution to the community you live in. In a small town, people do know one another and rely upon one another and society functions very much as it has done for millions of years. The inherent rules of small social groups therefore tend to operate without the need for too much overt oversight and enforcement. What’s not to like about that?

But this is the problem: The rest of the country is made up of places where that kind of reinforcement can’t be relied upon. And this is the other part of the problem: Conservative Republicans wrap a whole lot of crap into the concept of small town values that has nothing to do with the core function of a mutually-reliant community (such as traditional marriage, fishing and church.)

And this is why ’small town values’ have become the political ruin of America. So much hog-swill passes for the reasonable subject of informed debate under the auspices of what small town folk care about. Every Republican candidate dives in or gets sucked in to the vortex of endless political distraction of the conservative agenda. And this means the every Democratic candidate gets sucked in, too, for fear of committing political suicide.

Other advanced Western nations don’t waste political time endlessly rehashing abortion statutes, gun control, separation of church and state, the teaching of creationism. ‘Small town values’ are the concrete boots of American politics, and until we lose them we won’t have an effective political process that will allow the nation to move forward and solve the very real problems of war, alternative fuel sources, and climate change.

Related Posts from Around the Web:

Small Town Values? I Gotz ‘Em - I’m from a small town in New Jersey, and I’m politically progressive in every possible way. Watch this clip from The Daily Show, in which people attending the Republican National Convention spoke about their views on small-town values. …

The Small-Town Values Palin Didn’t Mention - From The Seattle PI By John Kelso Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s touting of the wonders of small-town values in her acceptance speech reminded me of my ride in a red convertible a few weeks ago while serving as the …

Small Town Values? - You can’t cherry pick values. If you claim to be the party of small town values, you have to take the good and the bad.

On voting in Iowa (and elsewhere).

As has been vividly demonstrated in Kenya in recent days, and as we experienced directly here in the US at the closing stages of the last presidential election, voting often produces more losers than winners. Today is caucus and primary day in Iowa. The presidential voting process begins. But what are we voting for, and why?

In some democratic systems, such as in the UK, people vote for a party rather than a person. Of course, a strong, popular and capable party leader can make a great deal of difference in which party people vote for, but it’s not quite the same as throwing the choice of party leader out to the popular vote. I focus on this difference to help illustrate the point that in a democracy our vote counts toward a particular result — the future government of the nation — and that rationally we should use our vote to try to help bring about the future government that we believe we prefer.

This may seem obvious, but I think it’s not.

Political pundits, the media, political campaign managers and even candidates get confused during the voting process. They become obsessed by the process itself, on what needs to be done to get elected. But getting elected and running a successful government require two very different sets of skills.

The particular skills required to govern the country don’t change much over time: Without integrity, effectiveness and vision things will go awry.

Whether a candidate (or party) claims to have the answer to fixing health care, or saving social security, or countering terrorism really makes no difference if they can’t demonstrate a track record of integrity, effectiveness and vision. Conversely, if a candidate honestly admits that they don’t currently have definite and convincing answers to such issues (how could any one candidate possibly have all the answers?) this demonstrates integrity without necessarily proving them ineffective and lacking in vision.

The pundits, the media, the campaign machine and the candidate make the voter’s task inordinately more difficult by masking the candidate’s key qualities behind a screen of distracting and tear-inducing smoke.

The other part of the voter’s task is to ask himself or herself what kind of government he or she prefers. Again, this seems obvious, but again I would claim it isn’t. If we focus on particular issues we risk losing sight of the big picture. Issues shift. New issues arise. The kind of government we prefer really doesn’t change much over time. That’s why political systems the world over tend to polarize to a greater or lesser degree into the opposing camps of conservative and liberal, republican and democrat, right wing and left wing, fascist and socialist.

The kind of government we prefer tends to fall somewhere along this spectrum. If the party we would normally vote for has swung too far one way, perhaps we feel a swing back in the other direction is called for. But fundamentally we tend to prefer a government that aligns better with our ideological bent.

To those in Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and across the country I say, forget the hoopla, look past the mud that’s been slung, dig into the record of the candidates on matters of integrity, effectiveness and vision, and vote for a leader who lacks none of these and for a government whose ideology promises to set the country on a course that you will feel happy about four years from now.

I make no apology for belaboring the point that George Bush, who so clearly lacks integrity and effectiveness and who’s vision has been so muddled and ill-founded that it’s mired the country in a dire war, set back international relations thirty years, hobbled the country’s finances, and introduced a deplorable set of incursions on basic human rights, was elected to the highest office in the country not once but twice. We can only hope that this year’s voting process turns the tide.

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For some reason that I couldn’t quite put my finger on right away, I found Cafferty’s comment today (Judge makes a disgraceful decision) on a judge’s efforts to slow or halt a program that would require employers to fire workers with faulty social security status (illegal immigrants) distasteful. I think it was his sentiment rather than his logic that offended me, his presumption that enforcement of national law supercedes human decency and compassion, whatever the circumstance.

In another story — “Bush vetoes expansion of kids’ health insurance program” — Rep. Todd Akin, R-Missouri, supporting Bush’s veto, complains: “we’re going to provide health care to the children of illegal immigrants.”

In one section of LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive I examine the origin of the impulses that lead us toward a conservative or liberal way of thinking. It’s a spectrum of course, but the impulse toward conservative thinking seems to derive from a focus on the importance of the self (one’s right to govern one’s self, the live and let live mentality) versus the liberal impulse to value people generally and to not consider one’s own needs over and above the needs of others. I’m dramatically over-simplifying, but I hope you’ll see the point.

If we feel that national law should be put ahead of human decency, our perspective will tend toward a hard line on immigration. If we feel that the rights of human beings are more important than national concerns, then we’ll be concerned about the effects of a hard line approach on illegal immigrants. A conservative will tend to feel that we shouldn’t make exceptions when deportation of just some members of a family will break up that family. A liberal will wonder why the law must be so unfeeling.

Again, as I discuss in the book, once we have sought out the origin for these perspectives, we can consider whether either perspective is more right or better than the other. To cut to the chase, I conclude and show logically that the more liberal perspective is more enlightened and bodes better for the survival of the human species. I’m sure that a conservative would disagree, but I am also sure that he or she would be hard-pressed to defend such a position rationally and logically. Are we not all part of the human race, wherever we happen to be born?

 

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