I wear blue jeans most days. They seem appropriate for a small-town journalist, particularly since I’m no longer in the business journalism world.
That does not mean the new Blue Jean Nation is for me, though. Bill Lueders reports:
For 15 years, Mike McCabe headed Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, the state’s foremost — and feistiest — sentinel of the role of money in politics. He brought equal amounts of anger and optimism to the group’s nonpartisan mission, skewering Democrats and Republicans alike and sounding a clarion call for reform.
“I loved that job,” McCabe says wistfully. “I could have very easily done it for another 15 years.”
But McCabe decided he needed to try a new approach. His 2014 book, Blue Jeans in High Places, calls for the creation of a new political movement for people like himself who feel “politically homeless,” alienated from both major parties.
“I wrote that book as a blueprint,” McCabe says. “Blueprints are worthless unless you use them to build something.”
What McCabe wants to build is not a third party, which he jokes is a lock to come in third. His concept, similar to progressive movements in the past and the tea party movement of recent years, is to create a “first party” — one that demands change from within the existing political structure.
“We are neither elephant nor ass,” McCabe has said, “but we recognize that America has a two-party system and we plan to work within that system to get the parties truly working for all of us and not just a favored few.”
I was trying to remember a time where McCabe criticized Democrats. I can’t, unless it was for criticizing Democrats for taking corporate campaign contributions. McCabe is not a moderate.
But: What is Blue Jean Nation about? Take a look at its “creed” (which strikes me as actually McCabe’s creed, but never mind that):
We are commoners. We realize government is not of the people, by the people and for the people at the present time and we are committed to getting citizens back in the driver’s seat of our government.
We believe both major political parties are failing America. We don’t need three parties. We need at least one that truly works for the people.
We believe the biggest problem facing Wisconsin and all of America today is a political system that caters to a few at the expense of the many. At the root of this problem is political corruption that plagues us with “leaders” who are not free to lead and leaves our country paralyzed when it comes to dealing with the most challenging issues of our time.
So far, so good, except for that part about “the most challenging issues of our time.” Given the number of roadblocks the Founding Fathers put in our political system, what McCabe calls leaving our country “paralyzed” could be said to be a feature, not a bug. The right decisions are supposed to be made by our leaders. The Department of Homeland Security, created in the wake of 9/11, demonstrates that haste often makes waste.
We believe the way politicians seek public office — with fundraising that amounts to legal bribery and with advertising that is routinely misleading and often downright untruthful — is immoral and destructive to civic life. Power sought dishonorably cannot possibly lead to just and honest policymaking or clean and open government.
Many people think Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy were among our best presidents. Truman was a product of the corrupt Boss Tweed political machine. Kennedy was elected president thanks to political chicanery in Illinois and Texas. What does that say when two of our supposed best presidents got their power “dishonorably”?
Independent of McCabe’s non-acknowledgement of the First Amendment, this fails to acknowledge why we have “advertising that is routinely misleading and often downright untruthful.” It’s because it obviously works. Joseph de Maistre said “Every country has the government it deserves,” and that extends probably to every level of government.
To which McCabe replies:
We believe government is necessary to a civil and just society and prosperous economy. But we insist on a limited government — one that is as small as possible and only as big as required to do what society needs done collectively. Government programs that work should be supported and ones that do not should be reformed or ended. Most importantly, what government does must serve the broad public interest and promote the common good, not just benefit those who lavishly fund election campaigns or have high-priced lobbyists advocating on their behalf.
Independent of the contradictory second sentence (about which more momentarily), the United States of America exists because of fundamental mistrust of government. McCabe doesn’t seem to support term limits (the only term limit that would work would be limit of one term), cutting legislator pay (the fact a state legislator makes almost twice as much money as the average Wisconsin family should outrage people), placing strict constitutional limits on spending at every level (which, had that been enacted in the late 1970s, would have given us government half the size we’re stuck with in Wisconsin today), and generally taking power away from politicians. Every political fault we have in this state stems from the fact that legislators make too much money and have too much power. Blue Jean Nation does absolutely nothing about that.
Economic issues are where things start to unravel further:
We believe in hard work and self sufficiency. We also believe in looking out for each other. We agree that it is wise to live within our means and pay for what we get today instead of mortgaging the future and saddling generations to come with our debts. We believe in a free market, not a market manipulated to favor the most politically privileged participants in our economy.
Free market? Not really:
We believe in one-for-all economics – policies ensuring that the fruits of a vibrant economy benefit the whole of society. We are equally committed to rural revitalization and urban renewal. Instead of subsidizing global conglomerates, efforts to stimulate the economy should emphasize community-based small enterprise development, empower local entrepreneurs and cooperatives, and enable us to once again grow together rather than growing apart. We believe supply-side or “trickle down” economic theory has it wrong. Demand, not supply, is the primary driver of economic growth. Feed-the-rich policies have been a miserable failure, never producing more than a trickle for the masses and causing grotesque economic inequality and the slow but steady extermination of the middle class.
That previous paragraph doesn’t match “limited government” at all. Nor does …
We believe we are all in the same boat and will sink or sail together. We believe in waging war on poverty, not poor people. We believe it is everyone’s right to pursue material gain and accumulate wealth, but vigorously object to its use to buy government favors or special treatment.
That last paragraph is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with Blue Jean Nation. There is an incorrect assumption that everything applies, and should apply, equally to everybody — not merely in rights (and we can’t even agree on, for instance, whether abortion rights or rights to same-sex marriage are really rights), but in equality of outcome. The U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights was created to restrict government; it was not created to inspire Karl Marx. There is also a built-in assumption that there is one correct answer for everything that ills us, and it’s only those evil Republicans keeping us away from that Utopia. That is flat out wrong.
You would think someone who has been around politics as long as McCabe has would grasp the simple fact that since the first Congress met politics has been, and remains, a zero-sum game. One side wins; the other loses. The reason things don’t get done today is because we cannot decide the best way to fix what’s wrong. If there were obvious answers, those obvious answers would have become law decades ago.
We believe in aspiring to intelligence, not belittling it. Becoming well educated and learning to think critically should be valued and expected, not feared or obstructed. Education is our best hope for building a better and more prosperous future, and our best weapon against economic and social decline. For our nation’s youth to have a reasonable chance of experiencing the American Dream in the 21st Century, higher education needs to be made as accessible and affordable in the future as primary and secondary education have been in the past.
Hmmm. Two of the most intelligent people I knew were my late father-in-law and my grandmother. Both were graduates of eighth grade. McCabe seems to confuse intelligence with wisdom, and either with education. It was presumably a Ph.D.-holding professor who suggested recently that parents who read to children at bedtime are being unfair to children whose parents don’t.
According to McCabe, “belittling” “intelligence” means daring to question whether the public schools and higher education as currently constructed are really the best way to prepare our children for the 21st century. Elsewhere McCabe touts free college, which also flies in the face of “limited government.” (And free college is a prescription for politicians to get as involved in higher education as politicians now are involved in “free” public education.) McCabe has similar insults directed at those who don’t think spending tens of millions of dollars every year to buy land for no use at all is a wise use of taxpayer money.
It took less than a decade after the founding of our nation for the national political landscape to organize itself into two parties. Other parties have come and gone, and other parties morphed into what we have today, like it or not, the Democrats and Republicans. Even the Wisconsin Progressives ended up mostly in the Democratic Party. That suggests that politics is a binary thing, and it probably is, since every vote that takes place is a yes or no vote. (Unless you’re U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), and you’re allowed to vote “present” with no political repercussions.)
A worthy goal of a non-two-party movement would be to get government out of our lives, and deescalate the political battles that take place in Madison and Washington. Government was never supposed to be, and should not be, as pervasive and invasive as it is today.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 