Thoughts on Republicanism

As I watched the Republican candidates debate last night, with all the talk of illegal immigration and building walls, all I could think of was this:

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulder in the sun,
And make gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there,
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

- Robert Frost 1914

Thom Hartmann has a meme on his radio show about the basic, bottom-line difference between liberals and conservatives. He says that the basic world view of the liberal is born in the the Enlightenment thinking of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which was furthered by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the writing of our Constitution. He contends that liberals believe that human nature is basically good and the the purpose of government, in addition to providing for the nationl defense, should be to enable citizens to reach their potential and to backstop the poor, the elderly, the infirm, and those who fall through the cracks. Alternatively the basic world view of the conservative, born in the thinking of Thomas Hobbes, says that human nature is basically evil and that people must be controlled and supressed, that the purpose of govenment is soley that of providing for national defense and to use it’s authoritarian powers to control the people. Also that each individual is responsible for his own fortune and that government has no place in helping it’s citizens to survive, a “good fences make good neighbors” philosophy taken to it’s extreme.

Watching the goopers debate last night it was painfully obvious to me that Thom’s observation is, as he would say, spot on. All any of them talked about, with the possible exception of Ron Paul, is how we need more laws to control the people, more police, more walls, more enforcement. There was very little about health care or education or reducing poverty in America, not to mention the horrific situation they’ve gotten us into in the Middle East. A sizable number of the field even raised their hands when asked if they did NOT believe in evolution.

These people frighten me. They really frighten me.

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