by ROB URIE
The purpose of this essay is to create a broader political dialogue in order to get the US, and with it the world, out of the policy messes that the US is creating. When I speak with my Republican friends, there is widespread agreement regarding what the problems that the US faces are. Differences enter when it comes to solutions. And while there is no claim to Truth here, the left has spent more time considering solutions than the right has.
American political discourse has proceeded in recent decades from the pretense that a political ‘center’ both 1) exists, and 2) represents the policy outcomes that most Americans want. But both political philosophy and basic common sense argue against this interpretation. On the common-sense front, voters have been fleeing both of the uniparty parties to become political Independents for twenty-five years now. There appears to be no way to rid the US of the uniparty.
On the political philosophy front, the US is, and has long claimed itself to be, the ‘most capitalist nation on the planet.’ Recall that outside of the US and for most of modern history, the ‘left’ has been defined by opposition to capitalism and the ‘right’ has been defined by support for highly concentrated incomes and wealth. Around 1992, US politician Bill Clinton coined the phrase ‘social liberal, fiscal conservative,’ to define the new right-wing in the US that he represented.
The social backdrop in Clinton’s formulation is that fiscal conservatism has characteristics, such as the unquestioned funding of every war that the Western MIC can conjure up while cutting social spending and programs that benefit the rest of us. In other words, fiscal conservatism represents the political precepts of capitalism. Note that this is where Bill Clinton placed himself, through his policies, on the ideological spectrum. On the monarchist right, but with oligarchs instead.
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