Posts tagged mitt romney
"Why I'm not freaking out about the idea of a Mitt Romney presidency" (The Guardian, UK)
Because I kind of think we all need to read this. Just in case, you know? And if you’re too lazy or too proud to read 10 small paragraphs, here’s the takeaway section:
Over time, we in the US tend to do OK. We’ve made serious mistakes as a country, sometimes dodging apocalypse or genocide by a combination of luck and sheer bloodymindedness. We’ve let our government take action in gruesome ways – internment camps, Vietnam, Iraq. And, as citizens, we’ve stood by while injustices rolled over other people’s lives (this individualized list is too painful and too long to articulate).
But we tend to learn from our mistakes; we tend to correct them, as best we can. Our always re-enforced self-interest and offhand sense of fairness produces a kind of lazy arc toward justice. Frustration and outrage bring wars to an end (“We’re still in Iraq? Why?”). Protest and disenchantment with pursuing a failing cause allow rights to expand (“I’m not going to get up off the couch to keep gays from marrying”).
Romney’s vision of the America in the rearview mirror is a comparatively lonely one. Nostalgia only beckons those who haven’t seen progress. Women don’t want a return to a time when they couldn’t sit in a boardroom without holding a steno pad, or only have control over their bodies if no one knew about it. Black people don’t want to roll the clock back to racial double-vision and divide. Gay men and women don’t want to give up the simple gift of visibility (or even the right to serve in the military).
And however much a Romney administration might push for policies that inch us toward the past, such moves will find resistance. The No 1 force moving America forward is the inertia of tiny gains. But, by golly, those add up: there’s a black man in the White House – and that can never ever be undone.
Dear Young Conservative
Dear young conservative,
I hope you are reading this. My ideal reader for this piece is an actual person under thirty years old who self-identifies as conservative. I would like it very much if this letter found readers beyond my typical (and beloved) echo chamber of liberal comedians and comedy fans. If you’re reading this and you’re not a young conservative, I’ll bet you’re friends with one on Facebook and I would love it if you could pass this along to them.
First off: I in no way mean for this to be patronizing. I’m not mocking you, young conservative. I know what it is to be a young conservative. I was one.
When I was in high school, in the early part of the first George W. Bush presidency, it seemed kind of cool and punk to me to identify as conservative. I didn’t agree with their social policies, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, what if all my liberal high-school-kid friends were wrong? It was a ton of fun to think of myself as the sole voice of reason among a bunch of wrong-headed young people who hadn’t read the same blogs I had, and hadn’t been introduced to Ayn Rand by their girlfriend last summer the way I had.
Looking back on all that, on the times I argued with my History teacher in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other things, I am deeply ashamed. And this shame comes not from the fact that I now have different political beliefs, different political beliefs shared, in some form, by almost all of my colleagues and friends. I almost always relish having a minority opinion. It’s a stubborn, age-resistant part of my personality. I am still the guy who loves hating the thing everyone else likes, or liking the thing everyone else hates. I didn’t like the movie DRIVE very much. I know. Come at me. So I’d be the first person to want to have a political belief counter to the ones treasured by all my friends. I argue most frequently with people I’m actually in total agreement with. I’m just that asshole. So it’s not that I felt the need to join the herd and now that I have, I’m ashamed to have ever felt differently than I do now.
I am ashamed because I accepted into my heart and head a system of thought I now believe to be, to borrow a term from my old friend Ayn Rand, anti-life: that government should only exist to make it easy for businesses to do business, the idea that it is our civic duty to have no civic duty. I no longer believe that the way to make things better for everyone is to let people with money do whatever they want, whenever they want. I feel I’ve earned the crap out of this belief, given that I used to believe precisely the opposite, and I’ve taken a long journey to the side I stand on now.
And I urge you, before you dismiss me as a long-haired Hollywood goofball liberal, to read on, and to listen to me in every bit the earnest that I am writing to you. Please don’t pull the dismissive ripcord in your mind, the one labeled “You’re just saying that because you’re biased, etc…” that all of us use every day to reject the idea that someone who disagrees with us may have a point. This ripcord is cynicism, plain and simple, and it mars political discourse and if we continue to pull it every time someone starts to say something that doesn’t jibe with what we already think, life on this planet will soon be quite literally impossible.
So:
“”I wish my moderate Republican friends would simply be honest. They all say they’re voting for Romney because of his economic policies (tenuous and ill-formed as they are), and that they disagree with him on gay rights. Fine. Then look me in the eye, speak with a level clear voice, and say, “My taxes and take-home pay mean more than your fundamental civil rights, the sanctity of your marriage, your right to visit an ailing spouse in the hospital, your dignity as a citizen of this country, your healthcare, your right to inherit, the mental welfare and emotional well-being of your youth, and your very personhood.”
It’s like voting for George Wallace during the Civil Rights movements, and apologizing for his racism. You’re still complicit. You’re still perpetuating anti-gay legislation and cultural homophobia. You don’t get to walk away clean, because you say you “disagree” with your candidate on these issues.
I thought I was kind of a wordsmith, but (obviously) Pulitzer Prize-winner Doug Wright is a better one.
Sidenote: I Am My Own Wife is a knock-down, drag-out amazing one-man play — revelatory when I saw it my sophomore year of college.
littlelaur replied to your photo: Hey, you guys, I think I know who Laura’s leaning…
busted. although mitt was really wooing me with the whole discussion about allowing me to make it home in time to make dinner for the real breadwinner.
And, hey, if you can’t be home to make dinner, the least you can do is make sure that you’re kids always grow up in a loving, homogeneous, two-parent, hetero-friendly household so that they don’t turn to guns and crystal meth to solve their problems.
I need Kanye to moderate the next debate
He would moderate the shit out of a debate.
Hey, women, Mitt Romney will let you leave early for your kids!
But I thought the question was about equal pay for equal work…???
I’m just gonna put this out there…
I’m in the middle class and I don’t feel crushed. But I do feel talked down to whenever Mitt Romney ever refers to me in blanket economic statements.
