You know what this reminds me of?
House Republicans voted Wednesday to chop $260 million from Amtrak’s budget, less than a day after a deadly train crash that Democrats pointed to as a prime example of the dangers of shortchanging the nation’s transportation needs.
With the wreckage from Tuesday night’s six-fatality derailment in Philadelphia still dominating the news channels, the House Appropriations Committee voted 30-21 along party lines for a $55 billion transportation and housing bill that would give Amtrak almost a fifth less than its typical $1.4 billion share. The panel defeated Democratic amendments meant to restore or boost the funding.
It reminds me of when Bob Dole, during his vice-presidential debate with Walter Mondale in 1976, accused the Democrats of starting every war in the 20th-Century and causing the wounding and deaths of enough people to fill the city of Detroit.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself that this is an odd mental association. Why does the Republicans’ decision to respond to a deadly Amtrak derailment with a 20% cut in Amtrak’s budget remind me of Bob Dole making a partisan issue out of both world wars and every other conflict our country engaged in up to that point in the 20th-Century?
It’s because Congressional Republicans don’t see public transportation as a group project. Only Democrats use buses and trains. Derailments are their problem. There weren’t any Republicans dead on the tracks in Philadelphia.
You and I both know that this is false, but it’s the same kind of thinking that led Bob Dole to blame everyone wounded in war on the “Democrat” party. We’re not in this together.
It’s how they think.
This is a particular example of a general problem…
How do you get support for funding public services — education, transportation, health — when half the political nation doesn’t believe that the word ‘public’ has any actually-existing referent?
How do you do social provision when half the political nation doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as ‘society’?
What’s the compromise position half-way between does and doesn’t exist?
Under those conditions, there can’t even be a politics.
Yes, it’s hard to see how “democracy” works!
When 1/2 the population thinks that car insurance was invented by Karl Marx and that flouride is a plot to destroy “ur preshus bodily fluuds”, we do have a problem. It used to be that Democrats were for giving teachers a 4 % raise, while Republicans said it should be 2%. Now the republicans think that teachers should be taken out and shot.
There is a serious disconnect going on.
I like John Cole’s (Balloon Juice) analogy of two people discussing what to have for dinner. One suggests Italian and the other insists on eating tire rims and anthrax. Even the “middle ground” is nothing like food.
How do you do social provision when half the political nation doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as ‘society’?
We really are dealing with social nihilism here so far as the Repubs go. There is no common good, just “government” as a piñata to be smashed so that billionaires and corporate interests can loot what’s inside while their “elected representatives” get their cut because “free enterprise” and “freedom.” For these people the “ordinary American” is a contemptible loser in a “Fuck you Jack, I got mine” kind of way.
This is what our politics has become.
As we’ve seen over the last ten or so years, the issue for Republicans who hope to stay in office isn’t appealing to moderates in their own party or independents; they’ve got to throw red meat to their base (and everything else be damned). There are preciously few swing districts anymore. That’s why the House is so radical. I wouldn’t expect the Senate to make such a boneheaded PR move right after a derailment. Those Republicans have to cover their tracks (so to speak).
they really are ridiculous. and because so many of their constituents are ignorant and stupid, and have never traveled outside of this country to know just how far behind we are in rail transportation…
that’s why they like them stupid and ignorant.
Or to see how real countries handle health care and higher education.
But I forget. Back at the turn of the century (21’st), Republicans were praising Guatemala. That’s who they think we should emulate – Guatemala, not France, not Germany, not Denmark – Guatemala.
It certainly appears they’re bent on reducing us to a second-rate banana republic.
They and their constituents are nothing more than short sighted and selfish. They are unable to fund anything that requires funding beyond the current budget. Any policy that requires multi year funding is looked upon as something that in the future might infringe upon their freedom/liberty.
Also a reminder that Bob Dole Bob Dole was always a shitbag.
I once bumped into Tom Kean at the Newark train station.
“There weren’t any Republicans dead on the tracks in Philadelphia.”
Right? So are the Tom Keans of the world calling the cel phones of the GOP Congressmembers they are tight with and saying, “Look, you’re messing with our Acela line here?”
1.6M in Detroit.in 1984? There were 1.8M in 1950. In the 80s it dropped below 1M. In the Bush43 years it dropped 25% to just north of 700K and the auto industry required an unprecedented takeover and bailout. I wonder what Dole had in mind that would help the people of Detroit actually stay in Detroit.
That bailout required ALL Americans (well, mostly future and middle class Americans) to pay up for the good of the country. And it was almost entirely (and successfully) executed by the Obama administration with the good of the nation in mind. Can you image if the auto bailout had been executed by Bush or McCain and a Republican Congress?
Err I mean 1976, not 1984.
The republicans flatly wanted the US auto industry to die and the pension/health benefits of the union workers to be seized by creditors. Remember, the Republicans represent the scab Japanese auto companies in the South.
The Republican Party takes the view that they are in a war to save America and that the Democrat (sic) Party is the enemy within supporting whatever the enemy-without de jour happens to be. J. Edgar Hoover provided them with that framing in hs Masters of Deceit. Joe McCarthy was already running with that logic when the book was published. It resurfaced in the 1960s in William Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason. Rush Limbaugh mainstreamed it much of the country during the Clinton administration. And FoxNews made it the media conventional wisdom in the aughts.
It was given practical form in the religious right’s framing of the Carter administration in the runup to their election of Ronald Reagan.
And it fundamentally has a racist anchor. White people fly; even that notion is changing to white people fly first class. Black people take the train (or the bus if there is no train service). The story shapes the reality except when gas prices and airline hassles cause white people to rediscover Amtrak and upstart companies like Megabus price so low that white people seeking big bargains start going by bus instead of driving. The fact that the latter two social spaces are reintegrating the US even minutely means that the free-enterprise highway-lobby-bound Republicans want to stiff Amtrak just like they want to stiff the USPS. The competitors of these two venerable government services pay Republicans good money to vote their pocketbooks and sound like free market purists. And it continues the era of the isolating practice of driving an automobile in a sea of hostile other people driving an automobile. Family and workplace are the only allowable social environments for Republicans Party theorists. The easy sociality on the train that the Greatest Generation shared in wartime cannot be allowed to reduplicate.
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One point that I made a few years ago here is that part of the reasons so many Americans don’t support social/infrastructure services is that they have little awareness of what social/infrastructure services they do have.
It wasn’t always this way. Before the Telecom changes in 1986/7 – which included ending the Fairness Doctrine and allowing greater media consolidation – every public broadcasting TV or radio station was required by law to devote a certain amount of time to PSAs – Public Service Announcements. There was a certain process for approving PSAs. For example, they couldn’t help one political party.
One common PSA topic was to inform you of services available – maybe how to get education loans, or assistance for home heating costs. Maybe health care assistance or special opportunities for Seniors. Local PSAs might tell you about planned road and transit construction projects. I still see PSAs all over when I visit other countries – billboards, TV spots, newspaper ads – with this kind of information, In the US you have to search it out.
And of course, in the US some of this space has been replaced by grifters – like those in the education “loan” industry who arrange worthless educations for people in exchange for big government-subsidized loans.
The Reagan revolution was in part about crippling the parts of the government that did not directly benefit the extreme wealthy. Unfortunately, the incompetent Democrats did nothing to fix this despite having the power to do so several times over the intervening decades.
○ Boehner calls ‘stupid’ a reporter’s Amtrak question on lack of U.S. funding