OK, that was kind of a long delay between Part One and Part Two. I got distracted; sue me.
So when we left off, we had a federal government that didn't seem to be able to achieve many of its goals even though the same party has control in all three branches; a nearly evenly divided electorate whose Hate the Other Side knob has been cranked up to 11 and glued in place; a large portion of the same electorate feeling that the government isn't responsive to their wants; and a set of constitutional rules that practically everyone sees as getting in the way, one way or another, but with nowhere near the consensus needed to change any of them — and no good argument for doing so, either, beyond "make it impossible for the Other Guys to win." Is all this still the case, two months later? Check, check, check and check.
C'mon, did anybody expect anything else?
Maybe it's time for all the terminally outraged politics-watchers to avert their eyes from Washington, D.C., for, say, more than five consecutive minutes and go find some arena in which what they do can matter.
People who are philosophically into political conservatism (note that this does not necessarily equate to "Republican Party") have been arguing for some time that the federal government has habitually trespassed on issues that, constitutionally, belong to state or local governments. More than half a century ago, they began crapping up this argument by trying to use it to defend institutional racism in ex-Confederate states, which was a near-fatal fuckup not only on the part of the nation's Bigoted Asshole contingent but every other political type who decided it was OK to get into bed with bigoted assholes if it got the necessary votes. From that point on, merely uttering the phrase "states' rights" was understood as code for "I have a cloak and hood made out of white bedsheets tucked in the back of my closet, and I'm so fucking xenophobic that I'm grossed out by the mere idea of pursing my lips over a water fountain where the lips of a darker-skinned person have also been poised."
And people who are dogmatically into religious conservatism have jumped enthusiastically aboard this "states' right to persecute" bandwagon in the decades since ... except for, of course, the times they had, or thought they had, enough federal legislative power to force their church's tenets into national law, and just maybe they could find some plausible non-Establishment of Religion rationale that the Supreme Court would swallow. So far, their victories have been few and/or brief — tough titty for them, but happy news for all the people who don't belong to a religious-fundamentalist church.
But here's the thing: Scrape off all the shit smeared on the "states' rights" concept by bigots, and there's a real point behind it. Until we can all collectively chill out enough to stop using the law as a blackjack with which to beat people simply for being different enough from us that we're weirded out, we could at least slow the march toward Civil War II by acknowledging that Washington is a piss-poor place to have that fight. (And in fact, it pretty much says so right in the Constitution, which lays out what Congress can and cannot do.)
Instead, try just leaning on any sympathetic U.S. representatives and senators to vigorously safeguard your rights, whether your concept of same is gun ownership, LGTB freedoms, whatever. Then turn your attention and your energies to your local government and your state government; that's where many of the real battles are going on, and no matter what your politics are, I guarantee your opponents are already swinging their swords in those arenas, and maybe winning: If you're a staunch conservative, you've probably already noticed that a solid majority of statehouses are in your camp already and can offer up the victories that have been lacking in D.C.; if you're a diehard liberal, you just as likely know the urban centers are where your allies are, and maybe you should steal the defense of "community standards" from the old-school conservatives and fight for cities' rights.
Granted, it'll be hard to break the members of Congress of their federal-meddling habit. They've long found ways to get around the constitutional limits on what they can legislate; the usual dodge is simply to offer massive funding to states, but only to those states that do what Congress wants them to. If you're old enough, you'll remember one of my favorite examples: the national 55-mph speed limit, imposed (and routinely ignored, eventually weakened, then totally repealed) because we'd had one of our periodic gasoline crises at the time (mid-1970s), and environmentalists swore we'd save a lot of gas (we didn't) if we all cruised our highways at that supposedly maximally-efficient speed. But it'll be easier for Congress to mind its own business if We the People would stop trying to make every fucking issue their business.
If you're a conservative, you've likely been demanding Washington deal with one or more of these issues: "Promote and reward those who share my religious values, and restrict and punish those who don't," "Where business rights and employee/customer rights conflict, protect business rights," "Stop illegal immigration" and/or "Cut my damn taxes." For the first, as I said above, you shouldn't be holding your breath with regard to religion-inspired law, regardless of how the Supreme Court skews ideologically (remember, to the court, "conservative" currently means "strict constructionist" on constitutional matters); the second (business rights) is doable for interstate commerce, and for the rest it's just a matter of ensuring Congress doesn't put business-regulation mandates into its state funding; the third (immigration) is tougher than it looks, since there are even conservatives with reasons for winking at illegals and it'll cost a shitload more money to step up deportations to any realistic extent; and for the last (damn taxes), it's absolutely possible to get them cut, but don't be surprised if the cuts are way smaller than you're expecting, since three-quarters or more of federal spending goes to things you probably like (defense, Social Security, Medicare), while things like foreign aid or funding for public arts and broadcasting actually turn out to be tiny percentages of the budget. (Not to mention that in general, red states appear to get proportionally more federal funding than blue ones do, so maybe the budget cuts will hurt proportionally more.) So maybe, on the federal level, you might want to pick your battles with a narrower focus anyway.
If you're a liberal, your big issues are "Protect those who share my social values, and restrict and punish those who try to oppose them," "Make life fairer for the little person" (though for a vocal contingent on the left, "little person" gets effectively replaced by "only members of the identity groups we've labeled as 'oppressed' "), and "provide and preserve a government-funded safety net for people who fall on hard times." Your first (social values) is achievable provided you stick to civil rights as your social value; even most of the courts will back you there, but anything else is going to run into either constitutional hurdles or the simple fact that you don't have a lot of federal friends right now. The second (fairer lives), I'll admit, is a really broad umbrella; I opened that umbrella simply because liberalism is all about using government, in varied and numerous ways, to achieve "fairness"; the viability of your goals there are basically the same as for upholding your social values (i.e., tough to get nationally given the current political mood, except where civil rights come into play), and if you want to commit to the "oppressed identity group" definition, you've either already recognized that this makes the "non-oppressed" feel excluded and lean toward your opponents, or you never will. The last issue (safety net) is probably the most doable, at least as far as preserving what's there already — I'm pretty sure the conservatives who are ideologically opposed to programs like Social Security are wildly overestimating how many voters would support cutting them — but you might have to retreat to smaller governments if you want to keep welfare-style programs intact. So, again, pick your battles.
Reading over what I've said here, I'm guessing a socially conservative reader is thinking I'm an asshole (and I'm OK with that, because I think social conservatives currently have way too much of the busybody in them); a fiscal conservative is saying "this doesn't go far enough" (but consider that going further fiscally might generate more pushback from your countrymen than you can handle); and the liberals, of all their fiscal and social flavors, are either pissing and moaning or tacking this blog on their "Contains Microaggressions: Never Read Again" shit list.
But bear with me, conservatives: State and community rights are a big part of what your ideology is all about, aren't they? If you're not happy with the idea of enhancing them and backing off federal mandates, then maybe it's time to admit that what you really want is to jam your groupthink down people's throats even in the country's liberal enclaves, to suppress everyone and everything that isn't like you — the very thing liberals accuse you of, and what you suspect they're hypocritically doing to you themselves.
And, likewise, liberals: You're supposed to be for tolerance and diversity, right? Doesn't that include letting conservative regions of the country live their lives their own way? Maybe you'd be believed more on that subject if, say, some leftists didn't prod the ACLU to go running off with court orders every time some high school football players decided they wanted to be led in prayer on the field before the game. (And don't get me started on all the squawking over public holiday Nativity scenes/menorahs/etc. we've had to endure over the years. These are not attempts to impose institutional Christianity on the masses, folks, or at least they're hilariously ineffective ones, since no one's ever found any people who rushed out to convert after any of these incidents.)
What we might find out, if we concentrated on letting lesser governments set more of their own standards, is whose ideas are the best ones — e.g., would more people be happier in "low-tax, business-friendly" areas or "well-regulated, more-public-services" areas? When I'm feeling at my most cynical, I wonder whether that's why so many people want One Big Solution: because maybe if alternative solutions were allowed, theirs wouldn't fare too well in the comparison.
Shit, I hope not. And, really, I usually don't think that; what I do think is that in governance, One Size Fits All often doesn't apply. And that, at least in today's political climate, we're likely better off having lots of little local squabbles than this huge one that's done such a good job eroding our very sense of national unity.
