REAL ID: Told You So

If by “federalist” you mean members of, or sympathizers to, the Federalist society (which includes the Neocons- the Federalist society is died in the wool corporatists), then wake up and smell the coffee- most of the so-called “States Rights” advocates are only advocates of states rights where they disagree with federal policy.

If by federalists you mean to include liberal Democrats, like me, than you’re way off base. I’ve never supported REAL ID, in fact I’ve always hated it.

My philosophy is not about just giving more power to the federal goverment. I don’t go “gee, that gives more power to the federal goverment- yummee!” It’s about solving problems, in the engineering sense. Which means that a) you have to identify the problem, b) you have to be able to explain how the proposed solution will help the problem, c) there isn’t a more effective solution available, and d) once the solution is implemented, if it turns out it doesn’t help the problem, either the problem was misidentified, or the supposed solution needs to be changed.

Note that the New Deal, the gold standard of liberal Democratic governance IMHO, had a lot of aspects that didn’t work. Hint: FDR dumped them, and went with those things that did work.

Liberal Democratic thought is, effectively, the scientific method applied to goverment. This is an important concept.

REAL-ID failed on all of these accounts. First of all, I question how big of a problem terrorism really is. To date, it hasn’t been that impressive, by pretty much any measure. Our own over-reactions to 9-11 have made Osama Bin Laden way more effective, and way more influential, than he had any hope of being by himself. But even if we accept terrorism as a problem, REAL-ID doesn’t help stop future attacks, and is much less cost effective than putting that money into intelligence gathering and law enforcement and first responder prepardness (all of which will save more lives from terrorism per dollar spent than REAL-ID will). And there is zero chance that the effectiveness of this program, once implemented, will ever be reviewed.

Yep. The actual elected positions are pretty much straight corporatists.

Of course, if dare oppose stuff like this, you’re an America-hating, terrorist-helping, traitor, and should expect to get treated as such by the media and all “right-thinking” Americans. The New Deal Democrats got purged from power no later than seventies, when they were replaced by the New identity-politics “Democrats”, who were replaced by Republicans.

Two general reasons: civil rights and encroaching facism/corporatism.

The original New Deal coalition was between Northern White Catholics and Southern White Baptists, and was primarily economic in emphasis. Remember that Strom Thurmond was originally a New Deal Democrat! When the civil rights movement came along, the Southern White Baptists rebelled (again) when the Democratic party leadership did what was right. By and large the Northern White Catholics didn’t care much about civil rights one way or another, and so didn’t rebel as well.

But in the Seventies and Eighties, that’s what the party became about- helped along by the Republican “southern strategy”, effectively courting the White Southern Baptists with code-word racism. Note that Bush Sr. was still playing the southern strategy card as late as 1988, with the Willie Horton ads. Well, if the Republicans were the party of racists, then the Democrats were the party of race. Unfortunately, at the time, there weren’t enough blacks and other minorities to make up for the loss of the Southern White Baptists- except maybe for women, who didn’t vote as a block or along identity lines (see the failure of Geraldine Ferro). Worse yet, by identifying the party so closely with minorities, they alienated the majority- while forgetting their main attractor was economic.

The other problem is that the economic elite of this country have, by and large, always been anti-democratic and pro-aristocracy. There’s nothing like having the chance to be an aristocrat to make you pro-aristocracy. There are those who are this way to such an extent that they are willing to commit treason in order to further this belief (see Smedley Butler and the plot against FDR).

These people didn’t go away and they didn’t give up- they took over the media and began a decades long smear campaign against the New Dealers. How the hell did the Republicans get and keep the title of the party of fiscal responsibility? Because the media granted it to them. And never once thought to question the conventional wisdom, even when it’s been thirty years since the last time a Republican managed to balance a budget. What’s new about Fox News isn’t it’s pro-Republican bias, it’s how blatant the bias is.