Congress is back in session next Tuesday. The days in session? Twelve. If Republicans don’t rush through cannabis legalization, they will have missed the biggest opportunity for political success — on the order of Democrats’ huge error in opposing the Tea Party (for the stupid, tribal reasons they did).
Missed opportunities are hard to track. But this opportunity, still open, is pretty easy to see. Trump would sign such legislation. He has said as much. And Republicans could (a) express solidarity with the majority opinion on the subject and (b) gain traction with young people, who are especially likely to be against sending marijuana users to jail and ruin their lives by interdiction and prosecution and dispossession.
But, being the Stupid Party, the GOP will not do it. Right?
(Facebook, yesterday)
“Conservatives” and “progressives” are perhaps best seen for what they are on the issue of drugs. For it is here that these two brands of progressivism — socially conservative and socialist/technocratic — come head to head for a kind of weird bipartisanship.
It was the socially conservative progressives (SCP) who needed the illiberal, anti-Constitutional method of the socialist/technocratic progressives (STP), for the old federalism stood in the way of prohibiting alcohol. To get this, the SCPs pushed women’s suffrage and the income tax. These two allowed Prohibition to go national, which was the SCP flagship policy. It was a disaster, of course. And was later repealed in Progressives’ even greater debacle, The Great Depression (yes, it was caused by their policies).
But the STPs had what they needed, the foundations to develop the welfare state and the therapeutic state. That is, the welfare state and the therapeutic state were built, both, on the basis of the female vote and the income tax, and the cultural excuse that Prohibition gave — though Prohibition was ended by constitutional amendment, the general policy was secured at every level, including federal; there would be no real pushback from SCPs (who came to call themselves, with some but not much justification, “conservatives”). And the general progressive mindset allowed them two world wars, and the two wars allowed experiments in “war socialism,” which in turn paved the way for federal regulation and the full panoply of the Administrative State, plus vast programs of redistribution, including Social Security and much more.
And, with all these programs that pleased the STPs so much, there remained the psychoactive drug prohibitions, as a sop to the SCPs. And, of course, the STPs let the states regulate alcohol, in a pretense form of federalism, as a vestige of Prohibition.
I could go on and on, but you see the general tenor. The Republican Party is the SCP party, and the Democrats make up the STP party. Progressivism has triumphed, and Republicans are so ineffective because they do not realize that they embraced the progressive meme long ago, and that it corrupted their souls. And their politics.
(from LocoFoco.us on Facebook, yesterday)
A bill is in play. But it is bipartisan. Republicans should have made it partisan. Or must it be bipartisan because there are enough Prohibitionist in the GOP? What an idiotic coalition the Republican Party is. Even social conservatives and religious Christians have reason to support decriminalization (I prefer full legalization at the federal level). But this group of people are the second least politically astute group in the country.
A friend responds:
You underestimate the buy-in they have on the drug war. Two-thirds of the Republican voters have a Jeff Sessions level religious anti-pot mindset (shared by 1/2 of the democratic voters). Polling will have shown them that any caving on the drug war is going to result in more blow back from their base.
There are certain things each political party cannot do no matter how much political sense it makes. An outsider can come in with these issues and run as an R or D and get independent voter support, but someone who has come through the ranks can’t.
I volley back:
For the same reason the Democrats “had” to attack the Tea Party — not because it was ideologically required or good politics in the long run, but because it was a culture war thing. This is why I hate the two parties.
(Facebook, yesterday)
twv
Wirkman Comment 