New evidence on these points come from a study by the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on whether American foreign policy serves the needs of the middle class.
Roughly 65, Ohioans work at military facilities, in tank factories, or in other defense-related jobs; communities such as Dayton and Lima could be devastated by significant contractions in military spending. Moreover, military service offers Ohioans — and people across the nation — access to myriad opportunities that might otherwise not be available. Of course, abruptly eliminating a major source of public employment, socialized medicine, and industrial planning would negatively affect many middle-class Americans.
And that point might have some relevance in intra-right debates between defense hawks and libertarians. The left wants to increase investment in public employment, not reduce it.
After all, large swathes of the Pentagon budget do not go directly toward job creation, or education subsidies, or health-care benefits. If those funds could be reallocated to the progressive purposes Brands champions, then a middle-class standard of living would ostensibly be put within the reach of thousands of Americans who currently lack it.
In it, Grandin argues that national expansion — first, through the westward march of the frontier, and then through overseas empire building— has long served as a means of dissipating the forces of class conflict and thus, social reform , by both providing a path to upward mobility for a select subset of the population, and projecting internal social animosities outward. But if imperial expansion facilitated democratization and social progress, it also quarantined those goods, and eventually undermined them.
Meanwhile, such means of displacing social conflict always, eventually, fail on their own terms. And the past 17 years of war in the Middle East have brought home pervasive anti-Muslim bigotry. And not only because the operations of the state require people to operate them; an accountable, deliberatively democratic state requires its citizens to be engaged with it, understand it, and work within it to make it better.
True democracy, then, requires civic engagement by citizens—not just debate, but participation. In this way, active self-government is actually a precondition of individual freedom and dignity. In other words, to a civic progressive, a self-governing society makes demands on its citizens.
It requires both knowing something about public affairs and feeling a sense of belonging. Moreover, civic engagement requires action. The antidote to a consumer-rights- and preferences-directed society where the individual is interchangeable with the consumer is not merely one in which individuals only opine or even point and direct the institutions of our government. The antidote is a citizenry that actually rolls up its sleeves and laces up its boots. Unlike the rights-based individualism in vogue among the Left, civic progressivism hails from a much older tradition.
But the founders of the party—including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe— wanted more than republicanism. They wanted enfranchisement to extend tothe broad mass of people: thus, democracy. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.
Civic progressivism was a consistent strand running through Jacksonianism into the Progressive era and the New Deal, where the question became how to preserve democratic government in the face of concentrated economic power. The leading labor union at the turn of the last century, the Knights of Labor, couched its argument for a shorter workday not in terms of individual rights, but instead in the language of civic ideals: that shorter work hours would improve the moral and civic character of workers, freeing them to engage more fully in furthering the public good.
Yet, at the same time as the Knights of Labor rose onto the scene, a nascent rights consciousness appeared among the legal debates of the day. After all, prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, states could and did act in contradiction to the Bill of Rights—establishing religion, for example.
New Jersey, for one, restricted full civil rights to Protestants until This began to change by the s during the Roosevelt presidency, when the Court continued using the language of rights, but with a more liberal interpretation. Indeed, the New Deal era saw a growing concern for the rights of individuals apart from the state—though not exclusive of civic responsibility. Roosevelt himself spoke the language of rights. His Four Freedoms evoke the idea that individuals hold certain rights and that the government owes something specific to individuals as a consequence.
Despite the calls for duty by Roosevelt and the millions who answered during World War II, the language of rights served a political purpose during this time and did not dissipate. Under this construct, happy consumers were those whose needs and wants were satisfied. What better contrast is there to these authoritarian regimes than to emphasize the rights of the individual in the United States?
Yet even rights liberalism, in its incipient stages, saw absolute individual rights in terms of the benefit to the larger society. Over the years, though, this changed; later the courts would protect speech on the value of self-expression, quite separate from any benefit that would or would not accrue to society as a result.
John F. Kennedy continued in this civic progressive tradition. Now the trumpet summons us again. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. For our privileges can be no greater than our obligations. He knows the country would never support the level of sacrifice for this war that implementing a draft would demand.
But this is one of the very reasons why the all-volunteer Army was designed the way it was—to prevent a commander in chief from fighting a war that lacks the support of the public. New York Rep. Charlie Rangel has taken this directive literally and been proposing a re-instatement of the draft since This is not to argue that we now need a draft to defend the country.
The point is that the administration is happy to push the self-sacrificing volunteers in our military today past their breaking point to reinforce their failed policy.
And yet as the situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate, insurgency exploded and manpower shortages grew more acute the stress these failures placed on the fighting men and women grew ever more burdensome. Soldiers, in theory, expect a year between Iraq rotations. But in this war, rotations last only six months. They are basically cowards that hide in the shadows. I am sure you remember the debacle the Afghanistan withdrawal was.
Liberals left Billions of dollars of equipment that will be impossible to replace in the near term. Liberals were directly responsible for the deaths of at least 11 Marines. The bloodiest day for American military in almost 20 years.
The equipment and supplies they left behind will kill your sons and daughters for decades to come. No remorse from liberals. That what they get paid to do. When Lt. Col Scheller criti cized the incompetence of the Afghanistan surrender what did the liberals do? They Court Marshaled him. A Marine with 17 years of faithful service to his country and to you.
0コメント