Today is Election Day 2010: the much-anticipated midterm elections both the left and the right have been talking about virtually since 2008. America has seen the fringe enter the mainstream, the “mainstream” become fringe, and a host of otherwise unelectable candidates take center stage in an election The Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost calls a venture into “uncharted territory”.
I, for one, am scared. As a progressive who values every living human being’s intrinsic value, I fear for a populace already beaten by unemployment now having to fend even more and more for itself. The GOP’s Pledge to America laments that there are “over 2,050 different assistance programs available to states, local governments,for-profit and non-profit organizations, groups, and individuals.” A statement like that makes me think they’re all at risk, and for that, I fear for America.
A party comes out with some of the most racist vitriol ever seen on campaign posters, from witch doctors to swastikas, and, powered by FOX News and conservative punditry, takes a hold of a huge swath of the country. Undeniably, at least some of the anger powering the Tea Party activists is race-based. Just this morning, Mother Jones and Jack and Jill Politics broke the story of Tea Party activists intimidating black student voters in South Carolina. The founder of Tea Party Nation wants a Muslim-free Congress and says this openly online (and this is not the most anti-Muslim sentiment in the Party, either). For this, I fear for all Americans of minority descent. To elect the same people whose followers could put a picture of Obama with a bone in his nose on a poster sets America back eons in race relations. And let’s make no mistake, these people vote almost unanimously Republican.
The Tea Party has claimed repeatedly that it has no social agenda, but its candidates make their agendas clear: from Sharron Angle recommending rape and incest victims carry their children to term to “make a lemon situation into lemonade” to Rand Paul wanting to repeal The Civil Rights Act’s Title II to Christine O’Donnell advocating “reparative therapy” for the gay “identity disorder” to Carl Paladino’s “dysfunctional homosexual” near-flub. Glenn Beck’s attempting to inject G-d and Scriptural discourse into the political conservative agenda only galvanizes the social conservative one.
The Tea Party will equal a disaster when it comes to social issues. Their determination to not speak about social issues does not make them any less relevant, on the contrary, it makes the Tea Party’s silence on these issues that much more deafening. Their insistence that “G-d, guns, and gays” are not on their agenda is tantamount to a level of dishonesty they would never have tolerated from the Left.
As I watch the polls close, I wonder if I am watching doors of opportunity close for working families who may have to make it without food stamps, unemployment or S-CHIP insurance. I wonder if more children will be shuffling off to school unsupervised in the cold with no breakfast while a sole breadwinner has to work 2 or 3 shifts to replace housing assistance or to pay for a prescription. And all the while, corporations making bigger (and more unregulated) profits off the backs of the poor serfs they got to go to bat for them.
To the polls, everyone.
