"Obi, both Ron and Rand Paul are the exemplification of a Jeffersonian America. In a time like this when big government is getting us bullshitted into more debt than the entire world is worth, that might just be what we need."
I strongly disagree, as I must hasten to say again--
Nice or no, Jefferson's America is as permanently dead and gone as Jefferson himself.
This isn't an 18th century agrarian state.
This isn't a world where we can afford--or even desire to be--isolationist.
This isn't a world where we can refuse to act (even if we can refrain from doing so.)
This isn't a nation where the population is mostly self-sufficient farmers.
This isn't a nation where the population doesn't need government intervention and aid.
This isn't a nation where the population can subsist largely on its own, free of government.
We are NOT a small, agrarian, 18th century Jeffersonian utopia.
Like it or not, we're a massive, urban, 21st century globalized superpower.
The food you eat isn't grown in your own backyard--sometimes not even your own state.
The clothes you wear, the car you drive, the laptop you own--it all came from somewhere else.
The streets and police and the infrastructure and military--that's government spending.
The many, MANY minorities that need protection can only get it from their government.
People don't free slaves because their conscience tells them to, not often--
They free them because, motives pure or no, the government tells them to.
Women and blacks don't gain the right to vote because bigotry and misogyny dissipates.
They are allowed to vote because they ultimately appeal to their government, and their government ultimately heeds that call, or is else left behind.
When your ideal state is the Jeffersonian state, one of well-off, white farmers...
Well, the rights of blacks and women and Latinos and everyone else doesn't quite leap into the minds of the public as something terribly important.
Government may not always be the answer--but when it comes to social change, more often than not, it not only has to be the answer, one way or another, but it SHOULD be the answer, it SHOULD be the hammer that forges new liberty upon the broken and half-fulfilled promises of a nation that began with the words "all men are created equal."
The closest threat isn't a month or more away in a British Man-of-War.
It's minutes away in a nuclear missile, or seconds away in a suicide bomb or cyber attack.
"Don't underestimate the power of downsizing the feds to the point of halfway nonexistence, even if it doesn't appeal to you."
I don't underestimate the effect of that--on the contrary, I view that power with the gravest sentiments possible.
I don't want a laissez-faire or small, downsized, weakened government.
I don't want a government that will leave gay rights, women's rights, religious and atheistic rights and immigration and all the social issues which matter to me so very much to someone else--
I loathe the government that looks at an issue of social reform or civil rights where MILLIONS of Americans are effected day in and day out and says "Well, it's not our place to interfere...let's leave it to the states and to businesses to decide."
If it were up to the states, we'd still have poll taxes.
If it were up to the states, who knows how much the color of your skin might STILL get in the way of your elementary rights as a human being, let alone as an American citizen.
If it were up to the states, we'd have (even more) kids being taught 2+2=The Bible and that science is a dirty word--a dirty word right up there with "homosexual."
Maybe it's not for the federal government to define love--
But it sure as hell isn't and shouldn't be up to 50 separate states to say your love is valid and legal in New Hampshire but illegal and immoral in Mississippi.
And (as the SCOTUS gets ready to rule on this) the same state should never, NEVER one day say you and your beloved are perfectly legal, loving partners and married, and the next having your rights and definition of love stripped away because the opinion polls changed and the people no longer consider your relationship valid or legal.
One day gay marriage is legal in California, the next Pro 8 comes along and shatters the lives of hundreds of thousands.
ALL while the federal government decides to idly and cowardly kick the can down the road and "let the states decide."
My goodness, I've gone on THIS long without a Shakespeare reference?
Let's fix that--Shakespeare was wrong about his astronomy, and Galileo was right.
The man was The Soul of the Age, the greatest and most quoted author in the English language, I'd argue that he's easily one of the 10 most important people in the history of the English-speaking world--
But Shakespeare was wrong. It happens to the best. Especially to the best.
He live 400 years ago, he could hardly help it.
Jefferson lived a little more than half that long ago.
He lived at a time when all the above tropes about an agrarian state were true.
He lived when all of that might have made sense, and good sense.
He also lived when women were little more than trophies for their husbands and the current President of this country would have been counted as 3/5 of a person, denied the right to vote, to organize, to do anything but the will of their master, and would have been viewed by many as a subhuman creature to be bought, sold, shackled and whipped.
Jefferson himself had some rather ugly (if sometimes inconsistent) views on blacks.
Jefferson was wrong. Just like Shakespeare. Again, it happens.
The man's face is immortalized on a mountain, rightfully so, and that face and his ideals of liberty will endure as long as the last Shakespearean sonnet or Mozart concerto--
But he was WRONG. Wrong then, and still wrong now.
The Jefferson ideal is a pipe dream, not a very inclusive one at that, and founded on ideals that are outdated--and America needs to realize that and get over the fact that it's founders, great as they were, were also flawed men, and their vision doesn't have to be THE vision for America's whole future--indeed, it shouldn't be.
The Jeffersonian utopia was great for the same folks for whom the 1940s and 50s was The Golden Age of Americana, one conservatives so badly want back--
The wealthy and white middle class.
Wasn't that great for blacks. Or for Latino immigrants. Or for women.
The situation for all three began to get better, but that came with struggling against the business-fueled status quo--the sort of status quo the GOP and Paul would have been proud of--and ultimately culminated in the 1960s...and the Civil Rights Act...
Which Ron Paul has repeatedly spoken out AGAINST.
Because, well, the CRA doesn't fit within the ideal of a Jeffersonian utopia.
That America is gone.
That utopia never existed.
And Ron and Rand Paul need to admit that and move on.
Business and the states didn't give us the CRA, didn't give those people their freedom--
Those groups and their government, after much turmoil and persuasion, gave them their freedom.
And what a surprise--who is it that votes overwhelmingly Democratic, the party of big government and of the Civil Rights Act?
Those who benefited from it--blacks, Latinos, women, and those among us who believe in the enfranchisement of those groups and of the power and capacity for change which can come from our highest ranks if only we push hard enough and long enough.
Let it not be an ugly, reviled thing to be a politician--let that be a badge of honor, let that stand for someone who is interested in his own well-being, sure, but is also willing and enabled to look out for the rights of those who need it most and who can ultimately become the engine of change and crucible of democratic empowerment in this country.
THAT is the true great blessing of big government--it has it's drawbacks and its curses, to be sure, but THAT is the great blessing it gives...
And I'll take that blessing every time...and I have to hope that Jefferson would want such a blessing for his people if he were alive today as well.
...Is my filibuster over yet...? Yes? Well, I'm sitting down and drinking some Coke, so I've already broken the rules, so yeah, I guess it is. :p
Pause error?
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