Posts
Let's start by establishing some basic truths. You have been unofficially anointed as the de facto leader of the modern GOP. Congratulations. I, meanwhile, have never voted for a Republican in my life.
With that being said, you may find it hard to believe that I actually set aside approximately one a half hours of my weekend to listen to your "interesting" address at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). You dedicated much of your time there to defining the word "conservative" - which you see as unyielding, unbending, constant throughout time - and I would like to respond by providing an alternative definition of "conservative." Based on election results in 2006 and 2008, it would appear that a majority of Americans accept my definition as holding more validity, so perhaps you'll want to take notes.
When our Founding Fathers established the legal framework for our nation through the Constitution, they made the rather sage observation that either too much rigidity or too much flux could easily rip a nation asunder. A process was therefore provided through which the Constitution could be amended, though it is a far from easy process. An oft-quoted section of the Declaration of Independence speaks to this point: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." In other words, government should never be changed simply for light, frivolous causes; but there are indeed some extenuating circumstances under which a government may need to either reform itself or, if the government has become corrupt beyond the point of recovery, be abolished entirely to be replaced with a new paradigm. So from the very outset of our country's history, the notion of "guarded, cautious change" existed in sync with a desire for stability and continuity. During times of peace, prosperity and general contentedness, the desire for stability and continuity has reigned supreme, and this has been much of our nation's short and fortuitous existence. On the other hand, there have indeed been times when circumstances have demanded fundamental change; the 1860's, the 1930's, and the 1960's are but three well-known examples of such tumultuous periods.
Even the interpretation of the Constitution itself, while not left to wishy-washy revisionists, is not "fixed literally" but rather the subject of a process known as judicial review. The notion of judicial review does not stem from Ivy League-educated "liberal activist" judges in the 1960's, but rather a famous case by the name of Marbury v. Madison in 1803, only 16 years after the ratification of the Constitution. Though we do not arbitrarily alter the interpretation of legal rulings and we respect precedents - the legal principle of stare decisis - our interpretation of our own laws does sometime change throughout time for solid reasons, and this has always been the case. The ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson was, of course, overruled by Brown v. Board of Education. In conservative times, our Commerce Clause - which allows regulation of interstate commerce - is very strictly interpreted. In more liberal times, there is a broader interpretation of the Commerce Clause - and such a broad interpretation of this clause lead to the invalidation of many Jim Crow laws in the South.
As a conservative, your natural reaction to change, almost innately and instinctively, is a negative one; hence the linguistic origins of the pejorative term "reactionary." Even though our Founding Fathers clearly anticipated that a thriving democracy could never remain static - and therefore designed our system to accommodate various changes, both major and minor in scope - your conservative instincts naturally ground you in the past, in traditions, customs, and habits that have long reigned supreme. It is important to note that the validity of the traditions that you accept flows not from their real-world efficacy or truth, but rather simply from the fact that they are traditions. While the liberal is quick to wish to reform a broken tradition, you will defend to the death such traditions simply because they are traditions, not due to any other inherent properties or results. But just like the United States, man is not a being mired in a state of stasis. Our knowledge is not grounded by old traditions, but rather by our infinite capacity for exploration, acquisition of knowledge, and consequent self-improvement. This is why throughout all of man's history, the men defined as "conservatives" in any one epoch have nearly universally seen their ideals and assumptions rejected by future generations. Of course, there are some elements in man's life that do remain perennially constant - the "tradition" of needing to eat and drink to survive, for a trite example, or scientific properties - but overall the human condition is in a state of near constant flux. The conservative Catholic Church of the 16th Century, though initially silent, was not exactly pleased with Copernicus's heliocentric theory. The ideals that flowed from the Enlightenment - such as the notion that all men are born equal and with the same irrevocable human rights - were laughable to many in the conservative aristocracy of 17th Century Europe. Liberal Northern Republicans in the 1860's succeeded in eliminating the institution of slavery while conservative Southern Democrats fought to the death to preserve this "tradition." And in more modern history, conservatives in their respective time periods stood in firm opposition to things such as universal suffrage, the end of child labor, Social Security, Medicare, and regulations to protect the environment. Modern Republican conservatives, of course, are no different fundamentally than their predecessors; willing to defend to the death traditions, simply because they are traditions.
In your address you spoke extensively of free-market capitalism, which you see as being under assault. Let us first understand that the United States, even in the boom years of the Industrial Revolution when the Robber Barons ran wild, never had a pure laissez-faire capitalism, just as surely as the Soviet Union never attained a pure communism. Soviet farmers were known to maintain small agricultural plots for private use, just as the United States government provided crucial capital investments in infrastructure such as the railroads. However, the highly undiluted extremes of both of those systems have long ago been repudiated. In purity or near purity, both laissez-faire capitalism and command-economy communism result in unmitigated human suffering, inefficient allocation of resources, degradation of the natural environment, and a concentration of wealth and power between the hands of an elite few while all others languish in varying degrees of abject poverty and powerlessness. Communism gave the Russians (and all others who have attempted it) generations of political oppression, poverty, and massive suffering. Along the same lines, before the government took an aggressive role in regulating the market and providing a social safety net, the United States's near-unbridled capitalism gave us widespread child labor, soot-filled skies and polluted rivers, 14-hour workdays at bare subsistence wages, and absolutely no social protections for workers in the event that they were injured on the job or became unable to work due to illness. People worked at grueling physical labor until they died, for men typically between the ages of 40 and 55. If at any point they became sick or unable to work, they were kicked out on the streets of overcrowded cities to die of disease and starvation. And to the conservatives on the right-wing of American politics in the 19th Century - i.e., Democratic politicians such as Winfield Scott Hancock - this model was perfectly acceptable. The Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society; all of those were, according to conservatives, "assaults on capitalism." So perhaps you are somewhat correct in noting that those of us on the left wish to "assault" laissez-faire capitalism. We are certainly not, however, the first generation to assault this institution, to seek to reform it in order to establish more parity between workers and management, to embed it in a social context. As President Obama succinctly put it, "labor is the superior of capital; capital could not exist, were it not for labor." As liberals, we do not accept the unyielding validity of the capitalist model simply because it is an "American tradition." We are pragmatists and we are guided by empirical data, not papers from the Heritage Foundation. If we believe that an additional regulation can lower unemployment while not leading to adverse side effects, we will generally seek to implement this regulation even if a conservative may perceive this as an "assault" on traditional capitalism.
You also made the curious claim that President Obama, instead of inspiring and uplifting Americans, has sought only to frighten and belittle them; that he sees America not as a "shining city on a hill", but rather as a "soup kitchen...in some dark corner of a city." By making those claims I can only assume that you have been hidden under a rock since the onset of the 2008 campaign. I can only assume that you never took notice of the tens of millions of people who have been incredibly inspired by Obama's message; of the college students who abandoned their studies to volunteer for his campaign; of the veterans of the Civil Rights movement, such as Jesse Jackson, literally moved to tears at the moment of his election; of the countless Americans who stated that his election alone had restored much of their confidence in the American Dream after it reached historic lows during the Bush Era. In attempting to frame Obama's view of America as negative, I can only assume that you never listened to the numerous speeches in which he aptly noted that his own story would be possible in no other country but America, of his constant praise for this nation and its people, or that he ends his book, The Audacity of Hope, with the very phrase "my heart is filled with love for this country."
You make the curious claim that President Obama wishes to draw up the demons of class envy, dividing Americans for the utilitarian aim of riding a wave of populist fury to re-election, and in the process denigrating the hard-working and successful members of our society. As far as dividing Americans, we have no better model of that practice than the Rovian playbook of the GOP over the last decade, in which, as Governor Sarah Palin put it, "real Americans" in the Heartland are engaged in a violent culture war with us "fake Americans" in big cities and on the coasts. President Obama, from day one, made his campaign one of inclusiveness and unity; as President, he has made truly unprecedented overtures to conservative Republicans, who have proceeded to generally reject and gleefully snub him at each available opportunity. As far as denigrating and "punishing" the successful, I think that most of the successful and affluent would happily pay the "punishing" tax rates of the Clinton Administration in exchange for the Clinton economy (which, for the record, produced larger capital gains for investors than the economy of the Reagan years, though those gains have now been largely wiped out by the Bush recession.) Republicans and conservatives have long been the masters of utilizing class envy for electoral purposes; who can forget President Reagan's tirades against the evil "welfare queen" who supposedly leeched off of hard-working - and of course, white - middle-class families? And, Mr. Limbaugh, how do you explain the fact that President Obama won a majority of the vote of not only the very poor - those making under $20,000 - but also the very rich - those making over $200,000? If your logic were true, the affluent would be engaging in highly deleterious behavior since President Obama despises them and wishes to expropriate their wealth.
This conservative idea that you discussed in detail of "punishing success" through higher taxation merits additional commentary. In my earlier years, I did in fact subscribe to the libertarian brand of thought; why, I thought, should the people who work the hardest pay more in taxes than the slackers at the bottom? As a high-achieving and highly focused student, I chafed at the thought that I should be punished while deadbeat students - people who often made fun of me for "studying too much" - should be rewarded for their indolence and lack of drive. This is a typical youthful viewpoint because it detaches my individual success from the context in which that success occurred; in other words, it ignores the "full picture." What would my life have looked like had I been dropped, upon birth, into an impoverished, unstable, and war-ravaged country such as Somalia? Even with the same level of drive and academic acumen, how far would I have progressed in attaining success? As I grew older and began to look at my own history and the environment around me, I made a key realization. My own success was never entirely "my own" success. I made it past my infant years because I live in a country with a well-developed hospital system, clean drinking water, great disease control, and thus low infant mortality rates. I was fortunate to attend some of the best public schools in the world, and my middle-class parents, other than very modest property taxes, never had to pay a dime for this privilege. My very first job and a key launching pad in my career was at a public library, through a grant financed with Florida taxpayer money. I attended a public university with taxpayer-subsidized tuition - the University of Florida - on scholarships largely paid for with taxpayer money. So many things that have made my life so much more productive and happy - the electricity that powers my home, the public streets and Interstate highway system, the vaccines that saved me from the scourge of childhood disease, the clean drinking water that comes through my faucet, the police officers and firefighters that protect my safety, and even the Internet on which I am now typing this response - exist either entirely or largely due to what you would label as "government intervention" in the free market. I would not be where I am today were it not for this type of "big government" intervention into my daily life, just as my mother before me would have never been able to afford college without the Pell Grants that lifted her out of intergenerational poverty in Kentucky. Without these institutions and government efforts, my own personal responsibility and hard work would be irrelevant; as billionaire Warren Buffet once commented, his financial acumen would be rather worthless in the jungles of a sub-Saharan African country that lacked well-developed institutions. And as Warren Buffet notes, it is the moral obligation of those of us who have benefited the most from these institutions to support them for future generations. To assert otherwise would be a grand act of hypocrisy; it would be the equivalent of me stating that I could have achieved everything I did sans all of those beneficial investments that my government made in me. Progressive taxation does not "punish success", nor does it lead to the destruction of wealth. The states with some of the highest marginal tax rates - California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut - harbor far, far more wealth than low-tax states such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Social democratic countries such as France and Sweden actually have a higher human development index (HDI) score than our nation. Progressive taxation helps to level the playing field by ensuring that wealth does not become a function of pedigree; it guarantees an investment in all American citizens to ensure that they can reach their full potential, regardless of the condition in which they may happen to be born. And this is to not even mention the fact that much of the wealth of today was, in fact, built on centuries of slavery, oppression, and abrogation of human rights by the powerful at the expense of the weak.
And finally, you touched on the notion that conservatives only see "Americans" in a crowd of strangers, not various interest groups at war with each other. This is so patently false that I am amazed that you were able to maintain a straight face while stating it. Social conservatives are well-known for their bitter hatred of "alternative" lifestyles. Are these the same conservatives who, as recently as the 1990's (and many still today) harbored doubts about the "morality" of interracial marriage? Are these the same conservatives who, like President George H. W. Bush, maintain that the non-religious are not "full Americans"? Are these the same conservatives who, like Sarah Palin, maintain that there is a dichotomy between the "real America" and the "fake America"? Are these the same conservatives who made outright appeals to racism in defining the immigration issue? Are these the same conservatives who portrayed President Obama as a Muslim and a foreigner, as if Muslims and foreigners are bad people? Are these the same conservatives who wish to tear down affirmative action programs because "black kids are taking the seats of their kids in universities"? Are these the same conservatives who believe that the "homosexual agenda" is a bigger threat to our nation than radical Islam? Are these the same conservatives who, like President Reagan, hold condescending views towards the "welfare queen single mothers" in the working class? Are these the same conservatives who have described feminists as "men masquerading as women?"
Apparently, Mr. Limbaugh, you and I have been exposed to two entirely different sets of conservatives. The ones whom I know see two fundamental sets of people: people who are acceptable - i.e., people who look, act, and think like them - and people who are different. The different people, in their view, are to be skeptically regarded at best, downright persecuted and destroyed at the worst. The only "Americans" in their view are those similar to them, the ones rooted in what they perceive to be a correct interpretation of our "traditional values." Everybody else, according to them, is working implicitly or explicitly to destroy the foundation and moral fabric of the country.
What has made the United States one of the most prosperous and dynamic nations in the world is not our blind adherence to the traditions of our ancestors, but rather the suppleness in our social and political systems coupled with our ability to correct the course when it becomes necessary. Just as Lincoln took a monumental step in fulfilling the promise that "all men are created equal" and FDR fundamentally renegotiated the social contract between government and citizen, so now does President Obama promise to usher in a new era of American innovation in areas such as clean energy, international relations, educational attainment, and healthcare reform. He could succeed at these reforms, or he could fail miserably. But for you to claim that he is attempting to "destroy America" simply by making these efforts only demonstrates your remarkable and profound ignorance regarding the most central and underlying theme in our short history: we never settle for the state of the present when we can do better in the future.
The United States has never been a nation that is afraid of the future, never has been a nation that is afraid of marked change and dynamic innovation, and never has been a nation that looks to the past as an indicator of our best and most prosperous days. On the other hand, conservatism as a political ideology is blindingly terrified of the future, inherently unable to produce new ideas and firmly anchored in the dogmas and stale traditions of the past. The ideals that liberals promulgate today will become the basic truths that conservatives will fight to maintain 150 years from now. And that is precisely why the political conservatism of the past has always been soundly rejected by future generations, just as your brand of reactionary, hateful conservatism today will one day find itself where it belongs - in the dustbin of historical irrelevance.
Respectfully yours,
Adam Harpool
With that being said, you may find it hard to believe that I actually set aside approximately one a half hours of my weekend to listen to your "interesting" address at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). You dedicated much of your time there to defining the word "conservative" - which you see as unyielding, unbending, constant throughout time - and I would like to respond by providing an alternative definition of "conservative." Based on election results in 2006 and 2008, it would appear that a majority of Americans accept my definition as holding more validity, so perhaps you'll want to take notes.
When our Founding Fathers established the legal framework for our nation through the Constitution, they made the rather sage observation that either too much rigidity or too much flux could easily rip a nation asunder. A process was therefore provided through which the Constitution could be amended, though it is a far from easy process. An oft-quoted section of the Declaration of Independence speaks to this point: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." In other words, government should never be changed simply for light, frivolous causes; but there are indeed some extenuating circumstances under which a government may need to either reform itself or, if the government has become corrupt beyond the point of recovery, be abolished entirely to be replaced with a new paradigm. So from the very outset of our country's history, the notion of "guarded, cautious change" existed in sync with a desire for stability and continuity. During times of peace, prosperity and general contentedness, the desire for stability and continuity has reigned supreme, and this has been much of our nation's short and fortuitous existence. On the other hand, there have indeed been times when circumstances have demanded fundamental change; the 1860's, the 1930's, and the 1960's are but three well-known examples of such tumultuous periods.
Even the interpretation of the Constitution itself, while not left to wishy-washy revisionists, is not "fixed literally" but rather the subject of a process known as judicial review. The notion of judicial review does not stem from Ivy League-educated "liberal activist" judges in the 1960's, but rather a famous case by the name of Marbury v. Madison in 1803, only 16 years after the ratification of the Constitution. Though we do not arbitrarily alter the interpretation of legal rulings and we respect precedents - the legal principle of stare decisis - our interpretation of our own laws does sometime change throughout time for solid reasons, and this has always been the case. The ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson was, of course, overruled by Brown v. Board of Education. In conservative times, our Commerce Clause - which allows regulation of interstate commerce - is very strictly interpreted. In more liberal times, there is a broader interpretation of the Commerce Clause - and such a broad interpretation of this clause lead to the invalidation of many Jim Crow laws in the South.
As a conservative, your natural reaction to change, almost innately and instinctively, is a negative one; hence the linguistic origins of the pejorative term "reactionary." Even though our Founding Fathers clearly anticipated that a thriving democracy could never remain static - and therefore designed our system to accommodate various changes, both major and minor in scope - your conservative instincts naturally ground you in the past, in traditions, customs, and habits that have long reigned supreme. It is important to note that the validity of the traditions that you accept flows not from their real-world efficacy or truth, but rather simply from the fact that they are traditions. While the liberal is quick to wish to reform a broken tradition, you will defend to the death such traditions simply because they are traditions, not due to any other inherent properties or results. But just like the United States, man is not a being mired in a state of stasis. Our knowledge is not grounded by old traditions, but rather by our infinite capacity for exploration, acquisition of knowledge, and consequent self-improvement. This is why throughout all of man's history, the men defined as "conservatives" in any one epoch have nearly universally seen their ideals and assumptions rejected by future generations. Of course, there are some elements in man's life that do remain perennially constant - the "tradition" of needing to eat and drink to survive, for a trite example, or scientific properties - but overall the human condition is in a state of near constant flux. The conservative Catholic Church of the 16th Century, though initially silent, was not exactly pleased with Copernicus's heliocentric theory. The ideals that flowed from the Enlightenment - such as the notion that all men are born equal and with the same irrevocable human rights - were laughable to many in the conservative aristocracy of 17th Century Europe. Liberal Northern Republicans in the 1860's succeeded in eliminating the institution of slavery while conservative Southern Democrats fought to the death to preserve this "tradition." And in more modern history, conservatives in their respective time periods stood in firm opposition to things such as universal suffrage, the end of child labor, Social Security, Medicare, and regulations to protect the environment. Modern Republican conservatives, of course, are no different fundamentally than their predecessors; willing to defend to the death traditions, simply because they are traditions.
In your address you spoke extensively of free-market capitalism, which you see as being under assault. Let us first understand that the United States, even in the boom years of the Industrial Revolution when the Robber Barons ran wild, never had a pure laissez-faire capitalism, just as surely as the Soviet Union never attained a pure communism. Soviet farmers were known to maintain small agricultural plots for private use, just as the United States government provided crucial capital investments in infrastructure such as the railroads. However, the highly undiluted extremes of both of those systems have long ago been repudiated. In purity or near purity, both laissez-faire capitalism and command-economy communism result in unmitigated human suffering, inefficient allocation of resources, degradation of the natural environment, and a concentration of wealth and power between the hands of an elite few while all others languish in varying degrees of abject poverty and powerlessness. Communism gave the Russians (and all others who have attempted it) generations of political oppression, poverty, and massive suffering. Along the same lines, before the government took an aggressive role in regulating the market and providing a social safety net, the United States's near-unbridled capitalism gave us widespread child labor, soot-filled skies and polluted rivers, 14-hour workdays at bare subsistence wages, and absolutely no social protections for workers in the event that they were injured on the job or became unable to work due to illness. People worked at grueling physical labor until they died, for men typically between the ages of 40 and 55. If at any point they became sick or unable to work, they were kicked out on the streets of overcrowded cities to die of disease and starvation. And to the conservatives on the right-wing of American politics in the 19th Century - i.e., Democratic politicians such as Winfield Scott Hancock - this model was perfectly acceptable. The Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society; all of those were, according to conservatives, "assaults on capitalism." So perhaps you are somewhat correct in noting that those of us on the left wish to "assault" laissez-faire capitalism. We are certainly not, however, the first generation to assault this institution, to seek to reform it in order to establish more parity between workers and management, to embed it in a social context. As President Obama succinctly put it, "labor is the superior of capital; capital could not exist, were it not for labor." As liberals, we do not accept the unyielding validity of the capitalist model simply because it is an "American tradition." We are pragmatists and we are guided by empirical data, not papers from the Heritage Foundation. If we believe that an additional regulation can lower unemployment while not leading to adverse side effects, we will generally seek to implement this regulation even if a conservative may perceive this as an "assault" on traditional capitalism.
You also made the curious claim that President Obama, instead of inspiring and uplifting Americans, has sought only to frighten and belittle them; that he sees America not as a "shining city on a hill", but rather as a "soup kitchen...in some dark corner of a city." By making those claims I can only assume that you have been hidden under a rock since the onset of the 2008 campaign. I can only assume that you never took notice of the tens of millions of people who have been incredibly inspired by Obama's message; of the college students who abandoned their studies to volunteer for his campaign; of the veterans of the Civil Rights movement, such as Jesse Jackson, literally moved to tears at the moment of his election; of the countless Americans who stated that his election alone had restored much of their confidence in the American Dream after it reached historic lows during the Bush Era. In attempting to frame Obama's view of America as negative, I can only assume that you never listened to the numerous speeches in which he aptly noted that his own story would be possible in no other country but America, of his constant praise for this nation and its people, or that he ends his book, The Audacity of Hope, with the very phrase "my heart is filled with love for this country."
You make the curious claim that President Obama wishes to draw up the demons of class envy, dividing Americans for the utilitarian aim of riding a wave of populist fury to re-election, and in the process denigrating the hard-working and successful members of our society. As far as dividing Americans, we have no better model of that practice than the Rovian playbook of the GOP over the last decade, in which, as Governor Sarah Palin put it, "real Americans" in the Heartland are engaged in a violent culture war with us "fake Americans" in big cities and on the coasts. President Obama, from day one, made his campaign one of inclusiveness and unity; as President, he has made truly unprecedented overtures to conservative Republicans, who have proceeded to generally reject and gleefully snub him at each available opportunity. As far as denigrating and "punishing" the successful, I think that most of the successful and affluent would happily pay the "punishing" tax rates of the Clinton Administration in exchange for the Clinton economy (which, for the record, produced larger capital gains for investors than the economy of the Reagan years, though those gains have now been largely wiped out by the Bush recession.) Republicans and conservatives have long been the masters of utilizing class envy for electoral purposes; who can forget President Reagan's tirades against the evil "welfare queen" who supposedly leeched off of hard-working - and of course, white - middle-class families? And, Mr. Limbaugh, how do you explain the fact that President Obama won a majority of the vote of not only the very poor - those making under $20,000 - but also the very rich - those making over $200,000? If your logic were true, the affluent would be engaging in highly deleterious behavior since President Obama despises them and wishes to expropriate their wealth.
This conservative idea that you discussed in detail of "punishing success" through higher taxation merits additional commentary. In my earlier years, I did in fact subscribe to the libertarian brand of thought; why, I thought, should the people who work the hardest pay more in taxes than the slackers at the bottom? As a high-achieving and highly focused student, I chafed at the thought that I should be punished while deadbeat students - people who often made fun of me for "studying too much" - should be rewarded for their indolence and lack of drive. This is a typical youthful viewpoint because it detaches my individual success from the context in which that success occurred; in other words, it ignores the "full picture." What would my life have looked like had I been dropped, upon birth, into an impoverished, unstable, and war-ravaged country such as Somalia? Even with the same level of drive and academic acumen, how far would I have progressed in attaining success? As I grew older and began to look at my own history and the environment around me, I made a key realization. My own success was never entirely "my own" success. I made it past my infant years because I live in a country with a well-developed hospital system, clean drinking water, great disease control, and thus low infant mortality rates. I was fortunate to attend some of the best public schools in the world, and my middle-class parents, other than very modest property taxes, never had to pay a dime for this privilege. My very first job and a key launching pad in my career was at a public library, through a grant financed with Florida taxpayer money. I attended a public university with taxpayer-subsidized tuition - the University of Florida - on scholarships largely paid for with taxpayer money. So many things that have made my life so much more productive and happy - the electricity that powers my home, the public streets and Interstate highway system, the vaccines that saved me from the scourge of childhood disease, the clean drinking water that comes through my faucet, the police officers and firefighters that protect my safety, and even the Internet on which I am now typing this response - exist either entirely or largely due to what you would label as "government intervention" in the free market. I would not be where I am today were it not for this type of "big government" intervention into my daily life, just as my mother before me would have never been able to afford college without the Pell Grants that lifted her out of intergenerational poverty in Kentucky. Without these institutions and government efforts, my own personal responsibility and hard work would be irrelevant; as billionaire Warren Buffet once commented, his financial acumen would be rather worthless in the jungles of a sub-Saharan African country that lacked well-developed institutions. And as Warren Buffet notes, it is the moral obligation of those of us who have benefited the most from these institutions to support them for future generations. To assert otherwise would be a grand act of hypocrisy; it would be the equivalent of me stating that I could have achieved everything I did sans all of those beneficial investments that my government made in me. Progressive taxation does not "punish success", nor does it lead to the destruction of wealth. The states with some of the highest marginal tax rates - California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut - harbor far, far more wealth than low-tax states such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Social democratic countries such as France and Sweden actually have a higher human development index (HDI) score than our nation. Progressive taxation helps to level the playing field by ensuring that wealth does not become a function of pedigree; it guarantees an investment in all American citizens to ensure that they can reach their full potential, regardless of the condition in which they may happen to be born. And this is to not even mention the fact that much of the wealth of today was, in fact, built on centuries of slavery, oppression, and abrogation of human rights by the powerful at the expense of the weak.
And finally, you touched on the notion that conservatives only see "Americans" in a crowd of strangers, not various interest groups at war with each other. This is so patently false that I am amazed that you were able to maintain a straight face while stating it. Social conservatives are well-known for their bitter hatred of "alternative" lifestyles. Are these the same conservatives who, as recently as the 1990's (and many still today) harbored doubts about the "morality" of interracial marriage? Are these the same conservatives who, like President George H. W. Bush, maintain that the non-religious are not "full Americans"? Are these the same conservatives who, like Sarah Palin, maintain that there is a dichotomy between the "real America" and the "fake America"? Are these the same conservatives who made outright appeals to racism in defining the immigration issue? Are these the same conservatives who portrayed President Obama as a Muslim and a foreigner, as if Muslims and foreigners are bad people? Are these the same conservatives who wish to tear down affirmative action programs because "black kids are taking the seats of their kids in universities"? Are these the same conservatives who believe that the "homosexual agenda" is a bigger threat to our nation than radical Islam? Are these the same conservatives who, like President Reagan, hold condescending views towards the "welfare queen single mothers" in the working class? Are these the same conservatives who have described feminists as "men masquerading as women?"
Apparently, Mr. Limbaugh, you and I have been exposed to two entirely different sets of conservatives. The ones whom I know see two fundamental sets of people: people who are acceptable - i.e., people who look, act, and think like them - and people who are different. The different people, in their view, are to be skeptically regarded at best, downright persecuted and destroyed at the worst. The only "Americans" in their view are those similar to them, the ones rooted in what they perceive to be a correct interpretation of our "traditional values." Everybody else, according to them, is working implicitly or explicitly to destroy the foundation and moral fabric of the country.
What has made the United States one of the most prosperous and dynamic nations in the world is not our blind adherence to the traditions of our ancestors, but rather the suppleness in our social and political systems coupled with our ability to correct the course when it becomes necessary. Just as Lincoln took a monumental step in fulfilling the promise that "all men are created equal" and FDR fundamentally renegotiated the social contract between government and citizen, so now does President Obama promise to usher in a new era of American innovation in areas such as clean energy, international relations, educational attainment, and healthcare reform. He could succeed at these reforms, or he could fail miserably. But for you to claim that he is attempting to "destroy America" simply by making these efforts only demonstrates your remarkable and profound ignorance regarding the most central and underlying theme in our short history: we never settle for the state of the present when we can do better in the future.
The United States has never been a nation that is afraid of the future, never has been a nation that is afraid of marked change and dynamic innovation, and never has been a nation that looks to the past as an indicator of our best and most prosperous days. On the other hand, conservatism as a political ideology is blindingly terrified of the future, inherently unable to produce new ideas and firmly anchored in the dogmas and stale traditions of the past. The ideals that liberals promulgate today will become the basic truths that conservatives will fight to maintain 150 years from now. And that is precisely why the political conservatism of the past has always been soundly rejected by future generations, just as your brand of reactionary, hateful conservatism today will one day find itself where it belongs - in the dustbin of historical irrelevance.
Respectfully yours,
Adam Harpool
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