The Useful Tragedies in American Politics

by Bryan Cockfield

The Christian right has been had. In one of the most deceitful political moves of this era, the conservative movement has taken advantage of an entire group of people and forced all of America’s ignorant Christians, through religious and political rhetoric, to vote for them.

There are two tragedies in American politics as it exists today. The first is the reality that a political group has completely brainwashed a religious group and convinced them that they are not doing “God’s will” unless they people vote for conservative policies. The religious right has simply become a tool of the political right.

Religious groups of any kind should not have any clout in the government of the United States any way, let alone the fundamentalist “Christians” in the religious right. Our government was set up to be purely secular and was based on limited central government to protect the rights of its citizens.

On the other hand, it was a wonderfully executed and highly successful ploy on the part of the conservatives to bring a huge amount of voters to their cause. Even if those voters have not read the Constitution and have no knowledge of American politics or economics, they are voting because they have bought into the propaganda from the conservatives.

It is somewhat similar to Mel Gibson’s ploy after he released his film The Passion of the Christ. Just as Gibson’s primary goal was to make money by pandering to ignorant Christians, the ploy of the conservatives is to generate votes by pandering to the same group of people. (After all, if Gibson really wanted to educate people on the sacrifices made by Christ, he could have made his movie available at no cost or just told people to read the Bible.)

If these people simply realized that the country was founded on the principle of separation of church and state, it seems that we wouldn’t have so much of a problem in this regard. Even if people do not understand this basic premise, they should understand that the country was also founded on civil and personal liberty and that any law passed that abridges these basic rights is antithetical to anything any of the founding fathers would have wanted.

Even those founding fathers who were highly religious Christians (although most were atheist, agnostic, or deist) believed in separation of church and state because they realized that it was necessary to protect government from religion just as much as it is necessary to protect religion from government. None of them wanted their religious leaders to have influence on public policy just as they didn’t want their political leaders to have influence on their churches.

However, since we have been abandoning the ideals that were set up during the framing of the Constitution, the conservatives are now able to avoid key issues in politics (such as all of the financial scandal sweeping both parties on Capital Hill) by making scapegoats of “religious infidels.” Issues like this, however, should have no part in government any way because same-sex marriage and other social issues are constitutionally irrelevant.

It is also convenient for the conservative movement that a fundamentalist (i.e. ignorant) Christian will not be open to discussing religion. Anything deviating from the exact word of the Bible is wrong, and since the conservatives in political office appear this way, these are the politicians and the offices that zealous “Christians” will always vote for. Even if a policy is blatantly unconstitutional (such as the gay marriage amendments), the façade that “religious” politicians set up virtually guarantees that these un-American policies become law.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the other sad reality is the fact that those people in the lowest income tax bracket do not know that they are pawns of the political left.

Those on the left always claim to be champions of the common American. They support the poorest of the American people with things like income tax bracketing, minimum wage hikes, union support, welfare, and many other economic sanctions.

On the surface, then, it might look like a great idea that most liberal-minded people support a minimum wage increase. An increase in the minimum wage, they say, would give the American worker better means to live, to support a family, or to provide for any other basic needs.

Sure, this might decrease the amount of profit that huge corporations can make. If they are required by law to pay their employees more money, regardless of whether or not the employees have earned more money for the work that they do, then it might cut into their profits a little. That’s a small price to sacrifice for the good of society.

Except that when the American government makes it more expensive for a corporation to operate in the United States, the corporation moves its lowest-paying jobs and unskilled labor to other countries, a practice known as “outsourcing” jobs.

The left of the political strata, on the surface, hates the idea of outsourcing. It creates unemployment as corporations move their jobs abroad. But they realize that the implications of raising the minimum wage and implementing other policies that penalize corporations but promote the lower class make it more expensive for companies to operate. And, since companies exist to make money (even though a good portion of Americans think it is the companies’ social duty to be a sort of welfare system), it follows that they will operate wherever it is most cost-effective to do so.

It is an apparent contradiction within the Democratic Party. All things considered, raising the minimum wage actually increases the amount of lower-class citizens within the United States. But it doesn’t do this strictly by forcing big business to outsource. Small businesses will a hit as well unless the Republicans in Congress can get tax reform passed as pork barrel legislation.

A small business that is required to pay a dollar or two more per hour to all of its minimum wage workers is going to be forced to either increase the cost of its goods or services or lay off a portion of those workers to offset profit losses. Overall, these increased costs of living (greater prices for goods and services) or layoffs certainly are not good for the people who are living off of minimum wage.

It seems as though the only reasoning for increasing the minimum wage is to increase the amount of low-class citizens within the United States. After all, these people tend to vote for the politicians who raise their standards of living, and whatever a party can do to increase its voter base it will do. Even if it is an extremely short-sighted policy.

It is just a matter of time before people realize that they are being used by the government, either by the left or the right, and both in ways and means that the government should have no authority over in the first place. It is interesting, however, to consider that the political right doesn’t create religious people, they only mobilize them to vote. On the other hand, the political left creates its own voter base by exploiting and expanding the poor with harmful short-term policies like raising the minimum wage. Although both practices are abhorable, the greater political sin should be apparent.

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Published:
02.03.07 / 9pm
Category:
Political