Is, after all, a presidential election part of the political commonwealth? Is it a collective act of will, of desire, of greed, and of reclamation? Are all of these individual decisions independent of each other, or is an election — like the interstate highways, or the GI Bill — something we own in common, something we do together?
These weren’t supposed to be the stakes in this election. In fact, there is a strong pull in the general coverage to keep from admitting that those are the stakes even today. But they are the stakes because the malfeasance and nonfeasance of the previous administration made them the stakes. They are the stakes because the crimes and reckless avarice of the financial-services industry made them the stakes. They are the stakes because the Republicans have put them quite plainly on the table since the midterm elections of 2010. They are the stakes because a commitment to being part of a self-governing political commonwealth is the only means of common protection we have left and to deny that is to whistle your way past the true nature of the threat.
What appears on our currency? E Pluribus Unum, meaning “Out of many, one.” Implicit in that phrase is that we are a people of many parts making up one distinct whole. The Republican philosophy over the past thirty years has been to deny that. Rather, they say, it’s up to each and every individual to improve himself and his lot, and the best way to encourage that is to minimize the role of government.
It’s fascinating to me that a party which exalts individualism as much as the Republicans do can at the same time enforce such party discipline that not a single member of their party voted for President Obama’s health care bill, nor did any of them vote for much of anything else in his first term. Remember that it has a history of this behavior: as far back as 1993 not a single member of the party voted for President Clinton’s budget, which set the stage for economic surpluses several years down the road.
Don’t ask me (or them) to explain that.
I urge you to read Pierce’s post in full.