The new crop of Democratic progressives in the House scares me. I am a liberal and a progressive. But these new Reps have a huge chip on their shoulder. Not surprising given the past two years of dealing with Donald Trump, but that’s no excuse, certainly not for someone who seeks to be a leader.
They are arrogant and self-righteous. They are in fact the mirror image of those on the Right they hold in contempt. They throw out excoriating labels without thought for they see the opposition as cartoons, cardboard figures, all guilty of the worst of conspiracies to destroy our democracy. As I said in my previous post, it smacks of McCarthyism on both sides.
They call things immoral which are not immoral, other than perhaps in the religious sense. Immoral means something that does not conform to the pattern of ethical and social conduct accepted by a society. Thus, for example, being filthy rich is certainly not immoral in our society. Jesus may have said it was immoral to be rich, but modern-day Evangelical preachers certainly don’t say that, nor does our society. In fact to be rich beyond one’s wildest dreams is an accepted goal or fantasy.
It is, however, unjust for someone to be a billionaire many times over or for a baseball player to get $330 million over 13 years, when many people in this country are dirt poor, when they do not have adequate medical care, where 1 in every 8 Americans cannot depend on having enough food on the table, where a large proportion of people live in substandard housing, where the middle class is no longer middle class but sinking into lower class, when young people either can’t get an advanced education because of the expense or they become saddled with huge debt, and the list goes on.
Thus progressives quite rightly propose various ways to tax the wealth of the extreme rich. But “unjust” doesn’t have the self-righteous ring of “immoral.” It doesn’t have the God-like condemnation of “immoral.”
Likewise the other day when a Republican used as an example a black appointee of Trump’s to prove that he wasn’t a racist … that was not a racist tactic. It was a political tactic to evade the issue. Whether the Representative is in fact a racist cannot be gleaned from this incident. He was just supporting his President.
Just like Representative Omar cannot be called an anti-semite because of her comments that AIPAC encourages people to pledge their allegiance to Israel or uses money to influence people. She may in fact be anti-Semitic, but that can’t be gleaned from her statements.
AIPAC, like all PACs, does gain influence by spreading money around; that’s the American way. And there is a certain “Israel right or wrong” aspect to their posture which I don’t like and think is not in America’s best interest, but that does not equate with pledging your allegiance to Israel.
Basically, she’s an American muslim who supports the Palestinian cause. That’s not being an anti-semite or racist, that’s a political position. She is, however, immature and does not choose her words carefully, nor when called on them does she back down. She seems intoxicated by the publicity she is reaping.
In fact, Omar is also guilty of the same thing she accuses Israel’s supporters of … blind support. She has never criticized, as far as I can tell, the Palestinian elected leadership, not Arafat who for decades was a disaster for the Palestinian people, nor the current PLO or Hamas. I on the other hand am an American Jew who in general supports the Palestinian cause but I also have lots of criticism for the Palestinian leaders as well as Israel.
We are living in a time when the number of people who are willing to give opponents the benefit of the doubt regarding their humanity, their good faith, seem to be in the minority. People who try to be objective. Whether on the left or the right, there is such a loathing for people on the other side (often even in their own Party), a feeling that they are beyond contempt, worthless, that it is hard to see how we as a nation are going to heal and get back to the point where, as the legal phrase goes, people agree to disagree.
It is a sad state of affairs for the country that for most of its history, regardless its flaws, has been the guiding light of democracy for the rest of the world. The country of the Bill of Rights, of freedom of expression. Of agreeing to disagree.
