Nov 6
To Gene Veith and his blogpost on how the Republican Party should be the party of the working class vs the Corporations including big Tech and other elites rather than the Democratic Party. This appeared in the Cranach blog on Patheos
Let's face it, both parties have bee owned by financial elites and the corporations for decades. The Republicans are in favor of more and more cuts in taxes and in regulations. And the Democrats became another party of financial elites and the corporations back when Clinton was President.
Neither political party is interested in empowering the working class at work. One should notice that none of the interests that the article above mentions as belonging to the working class include empowering workers at work. And the Dems, especially the establishment ones, are only interested in portraying themselves as the vanguard for workers.
What the above article seems to miss is that for all of the moral issues that it claims are working class issues, good wages, job security, and worker ownership of the workplace, issues that could enable people to create families and provide financial stability for families and neighborhoods, are not mentioned. Such stability cannot be achieved when in many from our urban areas, work for poverty wages are subsidized by gov't assistance programs paid for by tax dollars that financial elites and corporations that seek to reduce or even avoid as much as possible.
The above article is rather transparent. Loyalty is to be paid to the Republicans by workers while the Christian conservative branch of the Republican Party dictates personal morals to everyone. Certainly some of those morals can benefit all workers while some of the other morals will violate equality for certain groups like the LGBT community.
Finally, the smear that the democratic is the party of Jim Crow and the KKK has enemies: time and location. Evidence for this claim can be found in the voting records of both the 1964 Civil Rights and the 1965 Voting Rights Acts. In addition, there was a partial role reversal between the two parties regarding racial equality.
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Nov 10
To Gary Houchens and his proposal that America employs a Nationalist education, somewhat like the Patriotic education proposed by the Trump Administration. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
Besides the use of a couple of false dichotomies and some other niceties, what Houchens fails to appreciate in his proposal of a Nationalist education is that it includes an a priori approach to determining the net value of the nation after weighing the good and the bad. In fact, that there is no single net value in teaching the good and the bad of America because America is made up of different groups.
For example, I am sure that many whites would look at America as having a net positive value after weighing the good and bad of their history in America. But that is because whites have experienced more of the good than the bad in living in here. But what about the forgotten race in Houchens's article, the Native Americans? What would the net value of America be according to many of them? And we could also include the net value of America according to many Blacks? And what would the net value of America be according to nations that have experienced America's policies? How many of them would have said that there was a positive net value from those policies?
To have a Nationalist education in order to build unity and appreciation for America makes such an education take an a priori approach to weighing the good and the bad in America's history. But whether the net value is seen as being good or bad might very well depend on what group of Americans one belongs to. And yet the purpose of such an education is to build unity and appreciation. Can we see the rub?
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