In some weird mingling of disparate ideas*, it dawned on me the other day that there is an interesting divvying up of the concept of “survival of the fittest” between the Republicans and Democrats. On one hand you have the Republicans which contain factions within it that don’t believe evolution ever occurred (the biological version of survival of the fittest) yet often strain towards economic survival of the fittest, namely the free market.
Democrats on the other hand tend toward supporting biological survival of the fittest on schools and in discourse, yet reflexively want to reign in or curb the unbounded free market.
It’s just interesting that is how the chips feel. I have similar feelings about abortion: it seems just as possible to me that the Democrats, who tend to take on the stance of protecting the “little guy” could have as easily become the pro-life party. It is funny how political creates arbitrary alliances (or I should say, to an untrained mind like mine seemingly arbitrary alliances).
*One was seeing a dead lawn with thriving weeds and considering how the weeds were better adapted to the dry Kearns climate than the grass and the other was a creationist billboard on I-15 up by the Great Salt Lake.
Every time I see your profile picture, I nearly fall over, it's too much fun!
Yeah — so much of the two major parties' platforms have to do with historical twists and turns rather than a unifying Party Philosophy — the philosophies are for the most part superimposed after the fact. A way of trying to make order out of what is actually chaos. Some of the newer parties are more truly philosophically oriented, as all parties start out, but if they survive (word of the day) I'm sure the same thing will happen to them. They will begin to be shaped by their reactions to outside forces more and more and less and less by any philosophy.
As to your point on abortion, there was an interview I caught a few months ago on NPR, someone who had been (or maybe still was) a Democrat, saying that when the abortion question came up in national politics he was stunned that the party philosophy didn't stand up in defense of the fetus. Both sides are beholden to votes, though. Democrats don't want to choose the fetus over the woman because many women will stop voting; Republicans don't want to choose the illegal immigrant over the American bigot because they can't vote — yet. If amnesty does ultimately happen for those currently in the country illegally, I'm sure we'll see yet another example of political philosophy taking a backseat to political expediency.
Marie, how are you so smart all of the time? Could you write my blog for me?
You're exactly right and you said it much better than I: the current two parties in America are an amalgam of lots of political tensions, but it is only in the "base" or the fledging movements you find purity of philosophy. I think that is ultimately good: it requires a more center position to get most things done. Ideologues don't ever get pure legislation through, our system is designed to be messy, compromising, and slow. It keeps extremes from rising to power.
On a tangent, I think that is why President Obama's tack on abortion is the right one: let's talk about how to reduce the number of abortions. No one likes abortion, the pro-life camp isn't cheering with every aborted fetus. We'd all like to see more thoughtful choices and proactive steps to keep things from getting to that point. I think that is a great example of a centrist argument that we need to be having more of if we want to stop yelling and make progress.
There is nothing that warms the cockles of an eldest child's hard like being told she's the Smartest of Them All. Please keep saying it, even when it's not true!
Well said about the system and the wisdom of slowness and compromise. My perverse side looks forward to all those Tea Partiers arriving in Washington and being forced to admit compromise (gasp! what has this democracy come to?!) I agree about Obama and abortion (though I think you meant to say "the pro-choice camp isn't cheering…") It's amazing how few Mormons realize that even our church's conservative take on abortion is quite compromising — we most assuredly do NOT view it as murder (as do many other pro-life groups). Reducing the number of abortions should placate the sane elements of the pro-life camp and perhaps take some of the unfruitful moral indignation out of the rest of our national political debates (e.g. "how could caring for the environment be an important issue? it's put forward by Democratic baby-killers!") But of course reducing the number of abortions, even to zero, wouldn't solve the core problem — the spiritual tragedy of elective abortion and the culture of promiscuity it fosters has way more to do with the stunted spiritual life of the adults involved and much less to do with any violence imposed on the fetus. And that's the sort of debate that belongs to churches and individual human hearts — not to the government.
Yeah, one of the articles that "baptized" (to use C.S. Lewis language) my mind into even considering a more liberal tack within the church was Hugh Nibley's son's article in City Weekly that talked about Guam passing complete, 100% abortion bans and that put the leader of the church and the church handbook of instructions at odds with the laws of the land.
Wow. Interesting! Could you send me the link?
I ran across the Nibley interview first:
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=1NsTmXL3SNPdw4…
Which lead me to look up the Elder Jensen interview he references:
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=1kenuEZVVO-X32…
Ran across this chapter from Bennion's book later:
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=168YFzh0WUvx_R…
I ran across the Nibley interview first:
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=1NsTmXL3SNPdw4…
Which lead me to look up the Elder Jensen interview he references:
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=1kenuEZVVO-X32…
Ran across this chapter from Bennion’s book later:
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=168YFzh0WUvx_R…
Thanks. I'd not read the first two (though poor Elder Jensen has had to do a lot of this in-the-dirt damage control for the Church's image in recent years, so I'd seen similar public statements from him). I agreed with Alex Nibley's point about local Mormon leaders not really even listening to their church leaders over their political parties in many cases ("the zealots hectoring others to listen to the
leaders had failed to listen themselves"), and I'm glad he cited Pres Kimball's largely ignored "Statement on Basing of MX Missile." I noticed this same phenomenon a few months ago when the Church came out and encouraged the passing of a law in SLC that would make illegal discrimination against gays in housing and employment. Some of those same political leaders who had gained and maintained their support by portraying themselves as promoters of Mormon values at first refused to eat humble pie in the face of the Church's compassionate statement and said they would still vote against the law if it were proposed in other areas of Utah. And of course the Church leaders' encouragement of compassionate immigration reform seems to have fallen on deaf ears, as our chosen Republican leaders continue to cite obedience to the law of the land as the one and only moral consideration in solving the problem.
Sorry. I ramble and rant too much. Thank you for the links. I'll get to the Bennion one later.
Oops. Meant to say "Alex Nibley's point about local Mormon political leaders…"