What's Wrong With Common Sense?

You may have missed this in the run-up to Christmas the last couple weeks, but a new political movement has started in the United States. This isn't like the Tea Party or MoveOn or anything like that. It's called No Labels, and they actually want to FIX the hyperpartisan attack nature of our politics instead of adding to it.

They believe that we should not be looked at as labels like "conservative", "liberal", or "moderate", but as people with ideas that should be judged on their merits. When we disagree, we should do so with mutual respect. We should use (*gasp*) common sense and shared purpose to solve our problems. In other words, what Habermas calls "deliberative democracy".

Not surprisingly, something that is as sensible as this was immediately attacked by both the Right and the Left. In his continuing attempts to marginalize moderates so that they cannot have any say in the political process, Rush Limbaugh has taken to claiming that those who would join No Labels don't believe in anything and don't know what anything means because "they don't use labels". Just more nonsense that goes along with the thinking that if you do not subscribe to one of the two primary ideological patterns in America, you don't have "core values" or "real beliefs". The problem with this, of course, is most Americans don't adhere exclusively to one of those two patterns. People who believe in gay rights also believe in small government, people who believe in fiscal restraint also think marijuana should be legalized, or think that we should pull out of Afghanistan. But such people get condemned as RINOs or DINOs and get run out of office in favor of polarizing candidates who then go to Washington and spend more time attacking the other party than they do solving problems.

Columnist George Will, whom I actually have (or had) a great deal of respect for, put out a nonsensical column recently where he tried to compare No Labels to the recent federal ruling that declared the insurance mandate in the new health care law unconstitutional. He called the group's premise "preposterous" and said the presence of a middle that doesn't feel that anyone represents them is only "supposed". If that's the case, then why does our hyperpartisan Congress consistently get approval ratings in the TEENS? He also states that being against political retribution means that voters should not defeat candidates with whom they disagree. That's not political retribution AT ALL. Political retribution is when a Bob Bennett or a Mike Castle or a Lisa Murkowski gets a right-wing primary opponent bankrolled to the nines by interest groups because they dared to vote with the Democrats on something. And when that happens it is usually because it wasn't necessarily the voters who disagreed with them, it was the national party. THAT is political retribution, or as departing Senator Arlen Specter put more eloquently, "political cannibalism". In the case of Murkowski, she got the last laugh when the voters showed that they disagreed with political retribution.

Will tied this (awkwardly) to Judge Hudson's ruling by wondering how a "nonpartisan" discussion about such matters as those he ruled upon would take place. Uhhh, isn't a judge (especially a federal judge) SUPPOSED TO BE NONPARTISAN? The fact that we increasingly doubt this in the years since Bush v. Gore shakes the very foundation of our judicial system. If we believe that all of our judges have a partisan bias, then how are we supposed to abide by their rulings? Federal judges are supposed to have a "nonpartisan" position. To state otherwise and still think you believe in the Constitution ignores the warnings of one of its signers, our first president, George Washington:

"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

However, I do believe that parties have their place if used properly to answer those popular ends, and so does No Labels. They are Republicans, Democrats and Independents who don't believe in tossing aside party affiliation but rather believe in not using those labels as reasons to go into attack mode. In a nation where we are increasingly divided into two camps (whether we want to be or not), where these two camps go to their own kind of media and even if they are misinformed, they won't believe the facts when told they are wrong, where Ted Koppel can criticize such media for demonstrating bias and disregard of substantive news and the response by many practitioners of journalism is to start wondering aloud why there should even BE objectivity anymore, where we can't even agree on the same prime-time TV shows... John Edwards may have been right when he said we have "Two Americas" today, only it's increasingly becoming the Right's America and the Left's America. And again, so many of us in the middle don't want to live in either... we want to live in the America where we actually work together.

For George Will to refer to an attempt to trade this in for one of understanding as "mush" is to fall into the same childish mentality that makes up our politics today. Keith Olbermann had similar thoughts, also finding that those of us in the center are nothing more than "wolves in sheep's clothing", we're actually conservatives pretending to moderate... whereas Limbaugh thinks we are liberals pretending to be moderates. See, either we don't exist at all (but instead are actually with the enemy) or we're "mush". But people like John Avlon, one of the co-founders of No Labels, knows the reality and why it bothers the Limbaughs and Olbermanns of the world. They fear what they don't understand, and mostly they fear that they will be outnumbered and themselves marginalized. Which I certainly hope.

Therefore, I am making my first public appeal in the over 10 years and 310 entries of this blog that you check out the No Labels website, learn about them, decide whether or not you agree with them, and if you do agree, join us. We saw what happened when people of both parties come together to actually solve problems in the last few days. We saw a major victory for gay rights (human rights, really) with the repeal of "Don't Ask/Don't Tell", and we saw a major treaty with Russia ratified. We also saw a clunky, awkward tax cut compromise that will put us right back in the same conundrum 2 years from now, but perhaps that will be an opportunity for a more sensible solution. As 2010 ends and the Republicans preparing to take over the House are sharpening their knives for combat with the Democratic Senate and Harry "I Don't Make Deals" Reid, maybe it's not so far-fetched to think that we could do things better with just a little common sense.