WE Know Too –

Posted by Solomon Kleinsmith

By Standing on the Sidelines Centrists Just as Responsible for Fiscal Insanity

(Part 3 of 3 – )
To folks who watch politics closely, no part of the spectrum is without culpability for the fiscal situation we are in. The remaining moderates from years of ideological purification bent too far and let both parties overspend and undertax our way to where we are, and its not like moderates are invulnerable to the all too easy urge to give more and ask for less… its been a long time since we had a major politician say anything near JFK’s adage that we shouldn’t just selfishly look to what the government can do for us.
We’ve had problems with debt for generations, but have managed to keep those issues relatively small… up until the last few years. For a passionate centrist like myself, it would be very easy to merely point out that the debt problems really began to skyrocket around the same time as both parties began pushing moderates out and began working their way towards their current record level of ideological polarization… but thats not what I’m going to do here. That wouldn’t accomplish anything, and we’ll never know if things would have been different had we had more moderates in both parties.
What matters is what lies ahead of us. In a representative democracy it is up to the people themselves to rise up and put people who represent their views into office. In that… we have failed. We have elected people who have squandered our prosperity for political gain, and we continue to let both ends of the political spectrum walk all over us. Its no wonder the left and right see moderates as wishy washy… its not true, but it sure looks like it if you don’t get to know some personally and find out that its not that we don’t know what we think, its just very few of us know what it is we can do about it.
I’ve given up on both major parties, but regardless of whether you have or not, if we are to be the force that argues for fiscal sanity, we need to become a voting bloc that is as loud and clear with our views as the netroots and labor are on the left, and tea party and corporate interests are on the right. We need to unite and not be willing to vote for lesser evils that promise to do anything less than not only pay for any bill they want to pass that spends, but spend LESS and bring in more income until we get our fiscal house in order.
This is OUR generation’s great challenge. Not terrorism… which while a threat is no threat to us as a nation, and certainly not this absurd culture war between the far left and far right. Both of those issues are small in comparison to the disease that is racking our body politic from the inside over the last generation. Last generation fought and won the cold war, the previous fought for civil rights, and the one before that saved the world from totalitarianism.
If we are not the group of voters that takes the unenviable mantle of telling the American people that we have to stop taking more than we can afford, and actually have to sacrifice a little to fight two wars, pay down our debt and dig our way out of a deep recession… nobody will. If we don’t do this, what is the point of building a force in the center in the first place?