All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

Op-Eds

The Strange Establishment Backlash Against Bernie Sanders

Leave a comment
English: 2009 Black Tie Dinner Distribution - ...
English: 2009 Black Tie Dinner Distribution – Human Rights Campaign Foundation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I have friends and supporters in the Human Rights [Campaign], in Planned Parenthood,” Democratic presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on January 19.  “But you know what, Hillary Clinton has been around there for a very, very long time and some of these groups are part of the establishment.”

The comment in reply to Maddow’s query as to his feelings about those groups endorsing Clinton’s campaign rather than his own, produced an immediate and bizarre backlash from both Clinton and the groups in question. “Really Senator Sanders?” tweeted Clinton. “How can you say that groups like @PPact and @HRC are part of the ‘establishment’ you’re taking on?”

Well, let us count the ways.

Planned Parenthood is a “non-profit” business with a history going back nearly a century, which has for decades kept its lips firmly latched on the US government’s corporate welfare teat to the tune of half a billion dollars a year. It keeps that money flowing with intensive, ongoing lobbying and litigation to ensure that a plurality of American politicians support its goals and guarantee its revenues. It’s as much a part of the American political establishment as any investment bank or old-money K Street lobbying shop.

The Human Rights Campaign is a more interesting case — and more obviously “establishment” than even Planned Parenthood. It’s younger (founded in 1980) and poorer (only about $40 million in annual revenues), but historically, it’s been purely a partisan establishment political project. HRC’s job, for 30-odd years, was to cajole LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) voters into pulling the lever for Democrats instead of for Libertarians, Greens and other political candidates who actually supported LGBT rights. And it did a pretty good job as PR flack. The Democrats nearly monopolized the LGBT vote without ever having to actually earn that vote.

Here’s a good indicator of just how “establishment” the Human Rights Campaign is:  Bernie Sanders publicly supported gay rights at least as early as 1983. Hillary Clinton finally stopped publicly opposing same-sex marriage three years ago, once the end of the fight was clearly in view. HRC isn’t supporting its better ally in its stated cause.  It’s supporting the Democrat it expects to win — the “establishment” Democrat — because only winners get to dispense the favors HRC feels it has earned.

The notion that Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign are anything but “establishment” through and through doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Legislation: The Moral of the Story

Leave a comment
The controversial Ten Commandments display at ...
The controversial Ten Commandments display at the Texas State Capitol. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It feels to me (and Google seems to bear the feeling out) as if not a minute goes by without someone asserting “you can’t (or shouldn’t) legislate morality” and someone else retorting “oh yes you can (and should)!” This is a pet peeve of mine. Please bear with me as I explain why the peeve is important and why it  underlies nearly the entirety of political discourse.

What does it mean to “legislate morality?” Well, let’s break the expression down.

“Legislation” refers to passage of rules or laws by political bodies. These rules are generally understood to apply to everyone within a legislature’s claimed jurisdiction.

“Morality,” per Webster’s, is “the quality of an action which renders it good; the conformity of an act to the accepted standard of right.” Its opposite, “immorality,” would then be that which is bad, or which violates the accepted standard of right.

There are two kinds of legislation: The kind which prohibits some activity, and the kind which compels some activity.

A law forbidding  use of heroin is a moral claim — the claim that heroin use is WRONG.

A law compelling payment of taxes is also a moral claim — the claim that supporting the state financially, whether you feel like doing so or not, is RIGHT.

What looks like a third kind of law really isn’t. Laws that “allow” some activity while subjecting that activity to various regulations are just complex mixtures of the aforementioned prohibitions and compulsions.

There’s a moral claim at the bottom of every law. If you are legislating, you are legislating morality. Every time. No exceptions.

The real question that all this “can’t/can legislate morality” nonsense obscures is “WHOSE morality?” When we reach that question, things tend to break down into arguments over “America as a Christian nation” versus “secular humanism for the win” and so on.

The only political idea offering a plausible resolution to these arguments for a nation of 300 million plus individuals of varying moral persuasions is libertarianism.

That resolution is, oddly, one which can only be characterized with a phrase that most people denounce when it’s applied to politics: “The lowest common denominator.”

Libertarians believe that legislation should only prohibit, not compel, and that the only thing it should prohibit is the initiation of force. So long as you’re not  killing, raping, assaulting or stealing from others, you should be left free to practice whatever moral code appeals to you — and to gain adoption of that moral code by others through persuasion rather than through force.

For a country torn by moral and political conflict, as ours is, libertarianism is the only political idea that lets us answer “yes” to the question “can we all get along?”

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

King for a day. The rest of the year, not so much.

2 Comments
English: Tomb of Martin Luther King, Jr. & Cor...
English: Tomb of Martin Luther King, Jr. & Coretta Scott King (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since 1986, Americans have observed the third Monday of January as a federal holiday: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Schools and communities put on marches and commemorative events.  Some workers (sadly not including most of the working poor of all races to whose advancement King dedicated his life) get the day off.

It’s an election year, so we can expect bombardment by politicians’ pledges of allegiance to this or that sub-set of Dr. King’s values.

Republicans will piously assure us that they hew to King’s dream of “a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Then they’ll get back to finding new ways to keep African-Americans from voting.

Democrats will highlight their support for voting rights and likely also name-check Dr. King’s final effort, the “Poor People’s Campaign,” even as they inveigh against the gun rights that made the civil rights movement possible and against the emerging sharing economy that’s freeing and empowering America’s working poor without any help from government.

Neither party’s prominent presidential candidates will likely address themselves to Dr. King’s thoughts on war and peace. The Democrats have already driven their only peace candidate, Lincoln Chafee, from the race, and on the GOP side Rand Paul’s mildly non-interventionist campaign is on life support.

King opposed the great American war of his public life, the war in Vietnam, rightly referring to the US government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

What would he think of a Democratic Party whose standard-bearers (not to mention the first African-American president!) never met a war they didn’t like, or of a Republican Party whose front-runners are so intent on fomenting war with Iran that they’d rather leave American prisoners in Iranian hands than bring them home,  and posture over the Iranian release of American naval personnel caught out in a covert operation in Iranian waters as if that constituted Iran provoking the US rather than the other way around?

I was less than two years old at the time of Dr. King’s assassination. He’s never been anything but a larger-than-life historical figure to me. Nonetheless it offends me that nearly 50 years after his death he’s become a mere plaster saint, periodically and faux-prayerfully invoked by competing political factions who want to traffic on his popularity without bothering to live his values.  It should offend you too.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY