DIGRESSIVE GOP LEGISLATION EXPLAINED

Unbelievable, in the year 2013, the question before many state legislatures in the United States is who should vote. After all, this is the United States; a country founded in 1776 on the principle that all men are created equal, meaning all people, are given equal opportunity and not equal strength, intellect or whatever but equal opportunity.  Above all else, this founding concept is based on the idea that everyone decides on who should have the power to make decisions in their name. We as a nation have fought long and hard to win the vote for women (19^th amendment; 1920) and for freed slaves which did not happen until (1965).  To have such digressive legislation before elected bodies is a shocker when we realize that it is almost 250 years since our country was formed, 100 years (actually 93years) since women could vote, and 50 years since the government codified the right of black people to vote.  

North Carolina legislature, the lawmakers in my State, is a classic example. They welcomed the recent SCOTUS decision to allow states to discriminate against whomever they chose to discriminate against with immediate steps to gerrymandering, requiring voter ID, halting Sunday voting shorting voting hours, etc. I look at the responsible Supreme Court Justices as achronanistic anomalies, so much so that they seem bestial. Finding the same tendencies in the entire majority of the North Carolina legislature seems incredible. Finally, moving to the people who elected them and finding the same thing is truly astonishing.  There has to be some fundamental explanation beyond denying people of color the vote.

Conservatives somehow believe they deserve the right to select their leaders and to deny the same right to other while expecting their deference. In their mind, they have created a moral group, like a group of fundamentalist in some church basement, who decide they can get into heaven but no one else can. How man times have you seen that religious people claim they can do whatever they want to do because they have God on their side; park on your lawn, clog your street, play ungodly loud music, etc.

So it is with Republicans, they want to be treated as royalty and expect a king’s deference from the people. Although they attack the most vulnerable first, a closer look tells us that they are taking positions huge blocks of white people do not support; they split the white vote. They vigorously object to any suggestion that they are trying to form a two-class society: them and everybody else. Again, like the Church basement, only people who vote with them can achieve ruling status, or get into heaven. If a black person votes for them, they accept the vote but act as if they deserve it and are glad to acknowledge that the black person also knows they deserve it. I talked to a man who actually believed black men should “thank the white men”, only he used the pronoun “us”, for bringing them to America the land of opportunity.

It is easy to look at this as a failure in education, but that would that all educational systems are failing; conservatives range would wide. The only explanation I can think of is that it is in the genes. Almost every book I read reinforces that belief.  I am aware of the political scientists who are convinced that politics is environmental but recent studies have shown that there is a strong genetic component: Hatemi, P. and Rose McDermott: The Genetics of Politics: Discovery, Challenges and Progress. Scientists do most of these studies using a technique referred to as partitioning of variance, which in my mind has difficulty in portioning the variance in the environment.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff did a great job of explaining family and political structure relate to the conservative and liberal mind set in his book, Moral Politics; How Liberals and Conservatives Think. (2011).   I found strong reinforcement to my view of genetic bias from reading Albinos Seed, a remarkable good book by David Hackett Fischer, about the colonization of America but more reinforcement from many other books dealing with evolutionary psychology.

It is almost as if there are two different intertwined tribes living in America, the selfish and the altruistic. Two tribes much like chimpanzee and bonobo ape, two species, who look alike but act entirely different in term of social structure, as discussed by Nicholas Wade in his book, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors (2012). One would expect that human mates would select one another at random in a free society. However, a recent and ground breaking discovery made by political scientist Peter Hatemi, which is that mates select one another in a non-random fashion and not by random chance. If that choice depends on political leanings, selfishness could be perpetuated, even if parents teach their children not to be selfish, at least that is what I taught mine, who I know are altruistic but also I hope are liberal. 

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