Both these men say many things I agree with. While their actions are too often something else, their words are often wonderful. I think people should read both of these books.
Most working people feel that anyone willing to work should be paid a livable wage. And that getting sick shouldn’t make you bankrupt, that every child deserves the chance for a good education, that people deserve to be safe from criminals and terrorists, and that clean air, water, and pure food should be standard. That work should not be all time consuming, but allow time to be with one’s kids. And that when retirement comes, it should be with dignity and respect. Those are Barack Obama’s words from his book. Those, and his pleadings for commonality, to rise above partisanship, aren’t too dissimilar from Beck’s.
Obama believes we have rewarded manipulation of law to the detriment of rewarding builders and designers. He refers to it as having too many lawyers and too few engineers. “Most people who serve in Washington have been trained either as lawyers or political operatives—professions that tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems.” Obama, 48.
Beck, page 9: “Through blood and sacrifice we have been given the precious gift of self-rule and freedom. But because this gift was simply handed to us, we esteem it far too lightly.”
How the new politics supplanted the old—Obama, p. 17: “Some of the older veterans (in the Senate) would wistfully recall the days when Republicans and Democrats met at night for dinner, hashing out a compromise over steaks and cigars. But even among these old bulls, such fond memories rapidly dimmed the first time the other side’s political operatives selected them as targets, flooding their districts with mail accusing them of malfeasance, corruption, incompetence, and moral turpitude.”
Obama says that voters are tired of distortion, name-calling, and sound-bite solutions to complicated problems. Yet isn’t that what they emotionally fall prey to? When people fall for negative smear—made even more possible by the Supreme Court’s ruinous granting of First Amendment rights to corporations (their masters?)—then politicians are not defeated on their record, but on unaccountable and demonstrably (but too late) false (and often deflective) assertions of “baby killing” and “supporting men in wedding gowns.” Or from groups whose ranks are misty and whose funding even mistier, but with high-sounding names and false innuendo.
“For too long we have ignored, enabled, or embraced the flawed character of those we’ve selected to protect and defend our Constitution. By lowering our standards for them, we’ve lowered the standards for ourselves. We wanted a life of ease, a life of little consequence and high reward. To get it, we repeatedly empowered thieves, liars, and con men, simply because they promised us ease. Now, because we’ve trained them that repeated injury has no consequences, they’ve grown bold and fearless. When we do speak up, they ease our pain with pork, a steady stream of entitlements, and financial candy, and back to sleep we go.” Beck, p. 10
“If you think that things would be different if your party was in power, or that things will be different now because your side won, think again. Both parties have betrayed our founding principles…” Beck p. 19
Although I think it could unfortunately change too rapidly, Obama says, and I agree, that we are less radical, less polarized, than elites would have us believe. We may sometimes get whipped up by them into an emotional frenzy, but mostly we’re regular folks. The well off (save a large share of the uncaring very top) often want people not so well off to succeed. Those not well off are more self-critical than believed.
“We believe in the right to be left alone, and are suspicious of those—whether Big Brother or nosy neighbors—who want to meddle in our business. But we understand our liberty in a more positive sense as well…the values of self-reliance and self-improvement and risk-taking. The values of drive, discipline, temperance, and hard work. The values of thrift and personal responsibility. That as long as individual men and women are free to pursue their own interests, society as a whole will prosper.” Yet also “value family…community…patriotism…obligations of citizenship…duty…sacrifice.” Obama 54-55
Senator Obama tries to get us to see nuance, to recognize complexity, to see the striving for balance, to get us to recognize the imperfections of ourselves:
And “in every society (and in every individual)…the individualistic and the communal, autonomy and solidarity, are in tension…Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost…patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, close-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.” Obama 56
“We either exaggerate the degree to which policies we don’t like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred policies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control people’s sexual practices. Conversely, it’s easy to get most liberals riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman’s reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small-business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.” Obama 57
And Beck taps a real disgruntlement: those who are prudent look punished or at least unrewarded, while those who are imprudent are saved from their mistakes, often at the prudent people’s expense. One doesn’t have to conjure forth Ayn Rand to be disturbed at that. If being productive and prudent bring no benefits, and maybe even drawbacks, the people with those qualities will, like too much of late-stage Rome, give up trying to make things better, and may even join the rotting system, accelerating its collapse. (We will leave for later discussion about how more than a few of the “imprudent” only appear so to those who don’t look into all the facts).
Beck is hard on Bush and global corporations. And debt. “Thomas Jefferson knew that government debt was not only bad economic policy but morally unacceptable because it effectively makes your children responsible for what you bought.” 23
Beck also rightly points out that the emperor has no clothes, and that our debt situation, and especially our avoiding of inevitable reality, has nearly assured us of colossal pain—and maybe ruin.
Beck is right to take to task Obama and the Democrats’ airy plans for coming up with “funding” for health care, or their completely unrealistic projected savings in Medicare.
Beck is correct in pointing out that the tax code often does things similar to subsidies: grant special interest corporate welfare to the often undeserving and often already rich.
I like his quoting Samuel Adams, “that those who prefer the ‘tranquility of servitude’ had best be prepared to ‘crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!’” 31
Obama conflates Hobbes a bit, but he is right about Locke and how his Enlightenment thinking led to our own Framers’ thoughts on how to form this democracy: “That free men would form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man’s freedom did not become another man’s tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better preserve their liberty—a form of government in which those who are governed grant their consent, and the laws constraining liberty are uniform, predictable, and transparent, apply equally to rulers and the ruled.” Obama 87
Both these men are calling us back to our roots a bit. In an ahistorical and often anti-historical society, that is a difficult challenge to answer.
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