I’m a lifelong Democrat, being the product of a liberal family, with a college vice president for a mother and an attorney for a father. At the same time, I’m a student of history and, going farther, of meta-history and of sociology and of political philosophy. I’ve read and thought my way through the Greeks and the moderns and still cannot wrap my head around the ways greed and selfishness and individualism is said to be virtuous.
Obviously, biologically, individualism is absolutely a non-starter. You can’t get anywhere from it alone.
At 58, I’m a fallibilist and skeptic and, I would label myself a Fabian Digger too. But I’m not ideological about any of this because I’m a (William) Jamesian, a relativist, and so I am antagonistic toward ideological reductions for the precise reason that reality itself is not ideological. My finding: in actuality, where reality is most coherent, it is the ‘least’ ideologically.
I could never vote Republican because, for me, their attachment is to ideology above reality, and so, not surprisingly, I find Republican policies to be in various ways and with certainty:
1. Anti-business
2. Anti-family
3. Anti-women
4. Anti-children
5. Anti-education
6. Anti-minorities
7. Anti-science
8. Anti-egalitarian
9. Anti-Conservative
10.Anti-humanity
BONUS: GOP is not in favor of every legal voter voting
The data is on my side of course. I can make a slam dunk case for each of these features of the GOP. Yet, in the main, in the most basic material terms, the GOP is economically nowadays the party of socializing risk and privatizing profits. The GOP is post-Capitalist, or, alternately, has come to endorse a final degenerative and plutocratic stage of finance capitalism in which the paper and speculative and derivative economy overwhelms property-based capitalism.
As the data clearly shows, a dollar earned as wage or salary, as profit on a product sold, is much more safe when there is a Democrat in the Oval office.
Everybody gets to make up their own mind about what party and policies and ideologies are best for America. After four years of watching the GOP wage a war against President Obama, and, grievous wars against the working class, women, children, minorities, veterans, and, business, I remain amazed that Romney can gain more than a few thousand votes. Okay, not so amazing; we’re still grappling with the aftermath of the civil war.
