It’s official.
At the Tennessee Legislature this year, the inmates took over the asylum.
Never have so many half-assed legislative ideas been enacted into law in the history of Tennessee, and the fact that this many maleficient kooks could arrive in our state’s capitol at the same time defies even Murphy’s Law.
At a time when the message from the public is that they want government out of their lives, the Tennessee Legislature interfered repeatedly as their mutated sense of conservatism lurched to the point that intellectual conservatives like William Buckley would now be considered liberal by them.
The Thought Police
The legislators are nothing less than the Taliban of thought for Tennesseans, doing anything they can to force us to live the way they tell us, think the same way they do, and to limit our liberty to think freely and to act in keeping with our own personal set of moral beliefs.
The phantasms and delusions of these schoolyard bullies are enough to shake assumptions about the wisdom of democratic self-government.
After years of complaining about Big Government, they have expanded the reach of government and intruded into our lives on all sides.
After years of complaining that left wingers have made us unsafe, their Freudian obsession with guns has made our lives more dangerous.
After years of complaining that government was acting as the thought police, their anti-intellectual crusade substitutes fiction (men riding dinosaurs) for science, standing between teachers and their students.
Injecting Themselves
But that’s just the start. They also stand between women and decisions about their reproductive health, they stand between teachers and their collective bargaining rights, they stand between Muslims and their belief system, they stand between workers and a living wage, they stand between injured Tennesseans and the right of juries to set damages, they stand between citizens and transparency about business incentives, they stand between restaurant owners and park lovers and safety, they stand between students and university campuses as safety zones, they stand between sexuality education and parents who want their children prepared for adolescence, they stand between Memphians and self-determination on school issues, and they stand between local government and decisions about key decisions.
The principle that the best government is the one closest to its constituents has been cavalierly tossed aside as the majority spends its days punishing enemies, real and imagined. A concept like freedom of speech, thought, and religion are all disposable in the face of an opportunity for political one-upsmanship. The right wing mantra about less government is better government is as alien today as a syllogism coherently explaining their points of view.
This legislative majority is so unhinged that they make our own gun-loving, anti-intellectual right wing politicians look like Mensa Club members.
It’s incredible that the political and governmental system in Tennessee has been kidnapped by the most extremist elements of our state. If that wasn’t true, Ron Ramsay wouldn’t have gotten the boot in the governor’s race.
The Wrong Road
Ignoring mainstream and traditional conservative precepts, this group of legislators has taken Tennessee down a road to division, divisiveness, and demagoguery, consistently putting their narrow political ambitions ahead of reasonable, sound public policy. In their own way, they are the heretics, shoving aside long-held political principles of fairness in the pursuit of their cult-like objectives liberal doses of hate speech, conspiratorial thinking, and ugly confrontation and intimidation.
American history is a story of the pendulum swinging to extremes but inevitably finding its way back to the middle. Unfortunately, before that happens, we’ll have to endure and fight intrusions into our lives of epic proportions as the legislative thought police blindly and self-righteously pursue their own warped agenda.
If history teaches us anything, it is that extremism has a short half-life in American politics and the political party that embraces it risks radioactive decay, whether it’s the Democratic Party of the Sixties or today’s Republican aka Tea Party. We remember how former Alabama governor and segregationist George Wallace had similar levels of support in his day for a philosophy not unlike the Tea Party, but because he could not shift from populist diatribes to serious answers and policies, he flamed out.
Here’s what puzzles us the most. First, we don’t understand how guns became the totem for all things conservative. Rather than fighting for family values of yore, our legislators are instead fighting for guns to be so ubiquitous that they are not only carried, but sold, in McDonald’s.
It’s Not a Game
The other side of this coin is the legislators’ clear hatred for cities and urban dwellers, an attitude that leads them to treat us as less deserving and to use Memphians as political foils. It’s a curious brand of politics, because it puts the political self-satisfaction of forcing your opinions on others ahead of what is best for the two million city dwellers who in large measure will shape the future for Tennessee.
There are consequences from the strident actions and rhetoric of our legislative majority, and sadly, because everything now becomes a litmus test for whether someone is a “true” conservative, there are people who know that the laws they are passing are bad policy and that they are feeding the fires that divide us and enflame some extremists.
As Fox News’ Shep Smith said: “I just wonder if anybody’s gonna settle down a minute and go, Wow, we better settle down here, relax. … What we do know is that when leaders on either side of the aisle go with this over-inflated rhetoric and they tell us it’s the end of the world, it’s Armageddon, the Marxists have taken over Washington, it’s the end of the world as we know it, we’re moving into socialism… when they say things like that, that maybe some of them don’t believe, and then the fringes believe it, and then they go out and do stupid things…Well, I mean, it’s all kind of tied together isn’t it?”
As usual when this site veers into politics, you have gone a tad far with the rhetoric. But, there is no denying the correctness of your point. This legislative session resulted in some truly bad, poorly thought out, profoundly unconservative legislation. This is not a conservative legislature; this is a Republican legislature. And there is a big difference between the two.
You hit the seminal point. The Tea Party Republicans are not conservatives. They are extremists.
And we may have gone a “tad far,” but we sure feel better.
We’ll just have to endure it until the radical fanaticism blows over.
Thanks for the awesome post. It’s time to tell it like it is about these crazies.
And it seems to me that all of your posts involve politics so I don’t know what anonymous is about. Keep it up.
Right on. This is the worst legislature in history and it’s unbelieavable that a bunch of white guy from podunk towns think they should tell the rest of us how to live. Passing a law to strike down Nashville’s anti-discrimination ordinance is the ultimate show of their bad feelings toward cities where the blacks, the gays, and the others live. And Haslam aids and abets.
So how is it that cities are drowned out and we need to start thinking about what we can do about it. I think a good start is for Wharton to raise hell about this.
JB:
We wish we knew the answer to that. You would think that it could start with a mayors’ coalition that joins together on some key issues, notably that local government is better at making local decisions than legislators in Nashville.
This is a genuinely serious time and it’s why we are exorcised and outspoken about the damage that is being done to fundamental principles of our society. This is being writ large in Congress and in some unfortunate decisions about the Patriot Act by the president.
Those of us here don’t want to look back and say that we weren’t outspoken enough as American values were fundamentally altered. And that’s how serious we think these trends are.
Awesome post. I have been worked up all week about the discriminatory and backwards legislation they are trying to push through. Sickening and embarrassing. We’ve been all over the national news this week due to our backwards thinking. Thanks for reinforcing the hillbilly stereotype, TN legislators.
While I agree – the rhetoric in this post is a tad over the top – I also agree that your recent legislation in TN is strange, even after adjusting for ideological differences in Oregon vs. Tennessee. Obviously Tennessee leans more conservatively than Oregon in general (which is totally OK) – but some of these laws have just been flat out weird.
Here in Oregon we have the opposite behavior. Because the Portland metro area is 2/3 of the state’s population – as Portland goes so goes Oregon. As a result, the rural areas are ALWAYS complaining about Portland forcing it’s ways on them, and that they should make Portland it’s own state so that they could live how they want without Portland forcing our rules on them… People in Oregon (and the USA in general) look at maps and immediately forget that acreage does not vote, people vote. So when in Oregon most of the state is colored red with a few small blue spots – those in the red areas get angry – but the forget that VERY FEW PEOPLE LIVE THERE! We have counties in Oregon that are HUGE but have almost no people, one Oregon county has less than one person per square mile.
In Tennessee there is a much higher concentration of the population in “rural” areas than in Oregon. The split is much more balanced between “rural” and “urban” population – and as such the rural interests in Tennessee seem to have much more influence politically. Additionally, from the outside, it appears that the rural influences may be more organized and have better solidarity than the urban crowd. So it looks like the rural folks run the politics to the chagrin of the urban crowd. Even remote areas in Tennessee have higher population density than some of our fairly populated counties.
It is an interesting difference.
Good observations, Portland.
We admit it: we are outraged so our rhetoric completely reflects our attitude. The consequences are too serious to act like this is politics as usual.
I’m mad as hell and your post was accurate in every aspect.
I live on the opposite side of Tennessee from Memphis in a small town, but I totally agree with you on these points. It seems as if Haslam and the teabaggers in Nashville have gone way off the deep end. Can they really be so smug as to think that their way is the only way and that they can force Tennesseans to behave the way they want us to behave just because they pass some silly laws? Probably. Thing is, hubris has a way of tripping up even the most arrogantly assured fools. Thanks for speaking out Memphis! Don’t worry about hyperbole. We desperately need strong rhetoric from sane people in our state.
hey, Memphis is not exactly a bastion and well of progor ressive thought, action, politics, education or anything else ! neither is the rest of the state really, so don’t pat yourselves on the back ! look around, listen, and understand what Memphis TN really is- it might as well be the largest city in Mississippi from a historical and practical perspective. There must be 25 better cities in the region in which to live anyway !
The fact that Shelby County is a blue county in a bizarre red state makes it progressive enough for us.
Focus on the subject at hand Shekel. Stay on topic. BTW, how’s the search coming for your Marine Corp service record?
…25 better cities in the region in which to live…
Really? I would like to see a list of such cities within our region. However, a word or warning: if the list is topped by such “cities” as Tupelo, Dyersburg or Jackson, TN then I will not take the time to read the entirety of the list.