Political Courage
So, it is no surprise I would be called a liberal by many, friend and other alike. I like words and what they mean. I have issues with how the meaning of some words and phrases has been watered down, co-opted or are now outright slurs. Words in culture: liberal or conservative; hero or courage. In my vocation, “the priesthood of all believers”, ordination, education, and Christian.
Courage. If the federal deficit is the problem that must be fixed, then our political leaders in the House of Representatives should begin with their own salaries and benefits rather than with those with no voice in our system. If private insurance is not expensive and easy to attain, then one way to cut the budget is to end the benefits of elected representatives and that of their staffs. Non-capital hill federal employees would keep their benefits. Courage: every representative would give up their salaries and perks as the first wave of “budget cutting” and apply that to deficit reduction before touching one penny of spending for the social safety net. But, they will not. That takes courage. The Republican party will continue to argue that tax breaks for the top 2% of earners and for multinational corporations are somehow going to stimulate the economy, but as of yet that has not happened. How much longer and how much more money do they need to prove this will work? All the data says that is does not. The truly wealthy do not pay income tax, really. These folks make their money on capital gains from money making money. Many do not make or create a thing other their their own wealth. That is what the system promotes. What counts for political courage these days? Apparently, acting like Lord of the manor, legalizing discrimination, and growing the class of working poor so that labor is cheap here and abroad; and military service a plausible escape from poverty. Is that courage or privilege?
Real Political Courage
Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Washington Post, Post Opinion | May 31, 2011There was a time when this is how we defined political courage in America: a politician standing up for deeply held principles, in opposition to his party and a popular president, regardless of consequence. But today, we have adopted a new and distorted definition of political courage, one that rewards those who claim to be making hard choices, when in truth there is nothing hard about what they’ve chosen.
Case in point: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Ryan has been called courageous, a hero of sorts, by members of his party, by members of the media and even by some Democrats. And what is it that Ryan so bravely did in order to receive the outsized praise heaped upon him these past two months?
He proposed a federal budget that, in every respect, articulated extremist Republican ideology. He balanced the budget using faulty assumptions that no respected economist outside the Heritage Foundation has called reasonable. And he did it by slashing health-care benefits for the elderly and the poor, for children and the disabled, all while giving $4 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.
If we applaud false courage, we’ll only get more of it, and less of the real thing, at a time when we need real courage more than ever. Solving this problem, then, must be a shared responsibility. It is the media’s obligation, as much as it is our own as citizens, to highlight genuine political courage for what it is, and to reject Ryan-style courage for what it isn’t.