DEMOCRACY IS INNATE

The House of Representatives passed the $50 billion-hurricane Sandy relief bill. That is important on at least two levels; the area affected by the storm and for politics inside the belt line in Washington D. C.. This is the second time that Speaker Boehner presented legislation for a vote when he knew that there were not enough Republican votes to pass. It would not only take Democratic votes but a majority of Democrats, to pass the bill. He violated the Republican imposed Hastert Rule in the House, which is that you have to have enough Republican votes to pass a bill or it will never see the light of day. This post is about what that means in terms of partisan politics.

First, there is a continuum of innate political beliefs within each one of us affecting our personalities. No one is all one way or the other.  Each person’s personality is as unique as his or her DNA. Because of crime scene investigations on TV, we all know this. The spectrum of human behavior is a result of this vast genetic array. For the sake of discussion, I divide that spectrum we call freewill into five levels based on the apparent influence of one philosophy over the other in the individual: extreme liberals, liberals, middle of the road, conservatives, and extreme conservatives. Further, based on my perception of various poll results and actual voter distributions, I divide it up into percentage distributions as follows: 10%, 10%, 40%, 10%, and 10%. The ten percent extremes are composed of politically unswayable people.  Second, as I have posted on this blog site in the past, the body politic is composed of two extremes; at one extreme, we have altruistic people while at the other extreme we have selfish or greedy people. The altruistic extreme is made up of people who will give away everything to help others while the greedy are those who give away nothing for any reason. Of course, most of us (80%) fall in between the extremes, with influence that 80% may sway over to 60% one way or another. Because of their relatively small numbers, we can justifiably label the 10% extremes as radicals, which I often do.

There are real consequences in society because of the distribution of political behaviors. People, who sacrifice everything to help others, violate the basic premise of evolutionary biology because they put their own survival in jeopardy when they do so. In contrast, those who are greedy strengthen their own chance of survival. Obviously, if altruism to some degree did not aide survival it would not exist. This is the old survival of the fittest argument applied to society that “enlightened” people hate: social Darwinism. The third realization that should be accepted, which is especially difficult for altruists, is that of hierarchy dominance or pecking order dominates politics. To the greedy aggressive individual status is important, while to the altruist status by definition means very little. To the radical selfish or conservative end of the spectrum, leadership means everything; they need to be in control. As we move up and down the political spectrum, we find people who are leaders that fall toward the conservative end and followers that fall on the altruistic end. This means we have leaders among altruist and followers among conservatives; it is a matter of degree.

What has all of this to do with Speaker Boehner and the House of Representatives and the Hastert Rule? There is a small group of radical conservatives, who demanded that they be the leaders: Paul Ryan and his young guns, who are those who followed the “greed is everything” philosophy Ayn Rand, the author of the book, Virtues of Selfishness. As long as the radical 10% could hold all conservative leaning people in their camp, they were the leaders. However, greed and selfishness is in direct violation of the basic democracy, the philosophy of our government. We are an altruistic nation; there are more followers than leaders. The Hastert rule and accordingly Speaker Boehner’s manner of controlling the house of Representatives is in violation of this principle of democracy and in violation of reality. The Sandy Relief legislation broke the artificial barrier erected by the radical right and exposed them for what they are. The altruists, mainly the Democrats and some Republicans, when allowed to do so, voted ass altruist, voted to help others. The numbers of votes cast were 421; 241 in support and 180 against: that is 43 % voted to pass the bill. Regardless of the political label of our legislator, the 60:40 split should tell you something, which is that our democracy is alive and well even if conservatives are obsessed with status. Understand what happened but also know that what happened resulted from their innate beings.