I grew up in the dying days of the American liberal state. In the 1970s and 1980s the welfare state of FDR and LBJ was now giving way to the stark reality that many of the people it sought to lift up were in fact become wards of the state. A legacy of spending other people's money at an exorbitant rate, without any consequences for the failure of these programs, was finally giving way to some common sense: the Reagan revolution that rightly lowered taxes, sought to make people become responsible for their own lives again, and recognized that government was often the problem and not the solution became the majority opinion that has held for over a generation.
It's ironic, however, that a new 'liberal' scam has arisen. But this scam is being perpetrated by a form of government that has shifted continually to the right, and as such government control has increased exponentially in the name of freedom. Consider three examples:
1. Here in my home state of Kansas our secretary of state Kris Kobach has made it his signature issue that thousands of illegal aliens are voting and distorting our democracy. As such, then, measures must be taken to ensure that everybody voting is identified to be eligible to vote. Kobach has become something of a celebrity within far-right circles for his crusades and has reportedly earned close to a million dollars (much of it while in public office) by selling his services to anybody who wants to shut questionable voters out of the voting booth, even as his plans are often thrown out or are recognized to be ineffective and the problem is in fact not a real problem. In truth, I think it makes common sense to ensure that only citizens can vote and IDs ensure that we are who we say we are. In this day and age in which the viability of our electoral process is undergoing multiple attacks, shouldn't we know who is voting, just as we are questioning who is putting money into our campaigning and we are questioning how those votes are being counted?
But here's the scam...who gets to decide who is voting? The government. Only by going through a long and sometimes laborious process, all determined by the state, can we then have the right to vote. Some who do not have government-issued IDs (usually the poor or minorities) are excluded, even if they actually are citizens. People are not assumed to have a right to vote; only by proving their worthiness to the state are they enabled to vote. It's like assuming that people are guilty rather than making state in a trial have a burden of proof of guilt. We decry this in totalitarian dictatorships, but a form of it has crept into our own thinking here in the United States.
2. The expansion of rights to abortion and same-sex marriage and other issues is likewise another area in which government control is or will be restricting these things in the name of 'conservatism'. As a Christian I believe abortion to be wrong...but who decides whether something or not is illegal? Conservatives want to restrict freedom to choose, and must necessarily use the compelling power of the state to make their position felt, even as in many other areas (gun control) they vehemently say that the government has no right to interfere. And as a Christian I believe that homosexual behavior is a sin...but who gets to decide who others should sleep with? Must the state get to decide who others can and cannot marry? It seems strange that conservatives never say that multiple marriages (which Jesus called adultery) should not be illegal (and are supporting a man on his third!), even as they forbid same sex marriage. But marriage between two people whom the state says are incompatible to marry one another? Let the state ban it in the name of conservative freedom.
3. Then finally there's Mr. Trump's wall, which is perhaps symbolic of the modern conservative boondoggle of government waste. For years conservatives would wail about how the state would spend endless amounts of other people's money trying to fix social problems. Continually governmental social services failed to fix the problems they were claiming to solve, but yet the programs continued, and the only people to benefit from them were the legions of social workers who got their steady paychecks from the state in an industry that could never die.
Now Mr. Trump seeks to build a wall costing something in the neighborhood of $20 billion. Will it work? No, of course not. People will always find other ways to enter into the country. Ladders, tunnels, the trunks of cars, and the Canadian border will make this wall look like a laughable inconvenience the day it is finished. Mr. Trump proclaimed throughout his campaign that Mexico (the modern conservative movement's 'other people') would pay for it, but in fact they are not going to all; the shrinking amount of revenue in the governmental pie will have one more giant fork put into it. And the people who will be helped the most? The contractors who build these wall, raking in millions in profit by demanding more and more to make things work, just like social programs during the days of LBJ. The liberal mantra of the need for governmental control continues on.
At least the old liberals were honest about this. They knew they had to bring money in via taxes in order to create their programs, and at least they tried making people's lives better, even if they failed. But these new liberals? They are only concerned about the few at the expense of the many, even as they increase governmental control in many aspects of lives and spend billions to get their way.
