Thoughts on American Political Parties

I think that instead of rebuilding the Republican party, a new party should emerge from the left. The Republican Party seems to be a party that values paying a lot for national defense, favors very little governmental regulation of financial markets, and coddles bigots (sorry, "values voters"). Once you take away the bigotry and anti-woman posing, there is nothing unique about the Republican Party's arguments, and the new faces of the Republican Party, like Meghan McCain, have advocated toning down the anti-gay and anti-abortion rhetoric. Without that, there's really nothing different between the two parties. Both favor proportionately big defense spending and a combination of free market principles and governmental regulation.

The world has seen the problems with an unregulated financial sector, and we must re-regulate our markets if we want to remain a robust global trading partner. There is no way that Europe and Asia will trade with us and intertwine their markets with ours if we don't fix the lack of regulations that led to undercapitalized banks, toxic assets, and "too big to fail". Free market capitalism isn't a real argument anymore; there is just a discussion about how much regulation the market can tolerate, and Obama has espoused his confidence in the free market and his desire to let it work as much as possible. This is also true on the health care side: Obama does not advocate for a single-payer system to replace our current non-system. Instead, he offers a plan that creates a government system that will compete with the insurance industry's plans for American's dollars. Obama has increased defense spending and seems to be expanding our military's presence in AfPak, which will finance the work of defense contractors for years.

On the social issues: they're dying. Young people are less religious and also less likely to oppose gay marriage than any previous generation. Birth control is commonplace (though not commonplace enough). Almost nobody abstains from sex until marriage, and cohabitation rates are up. The Right has lost the culture war it waged. Meanwhile, Obama hasn't yet repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell, Barkey Frank stripped EDNA of any reference to employment discrimination protection for transgendered persons, and nobody has suggested the Full Faith and Credit problems with the Federal Defense of Marriage Act. Essentially, DOMA says that no state needs to recognize a gay marriage that occurred in any other state. However, the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution says that states have to respect the "public acts, records, and judicial rulings" of other states. DOMA is patently unconstitutional. Obama is not a radical. He doesn't even favor same sex marriage. His stance is slow-moving and moderate on social issues, no matter what the abstinence-funding, purity-ball-attending, gay-bashing crowd thinks.

Obama's presidency is moderate, with respect to social issues as well as policy. Clinton's was, too. A Progressive/Socialist party that advocates governmental interaction with the market on a much larger scale would provide a meaningful alternative to this Democratic party, one that respects market freedom as well as regulation. The real questions that remain are on the Left: debates over legalization of marijuana and perhaps other drugs, birth control pills available over-the-counter, vastly expanded infrastructure spending, low defense spending and a non-agressive foreign policy, federal regulation of the market on a scale heretofore reserved for the dreaded France (be afraid!), the expansion of the welfare state in an attempt to level out the class system and eradicate poverty, socialized medicine, gay marriage at the federal level, and a provision prohibiting discrimination based on LGB and also T status in employment and housing.

We need voices to the left of the Democratic Party's current incarnation to help implement a truly progressive agenda and to give people who oppose GOP bigotry and big guns a real choice about how far left they wish to go. This country desparately needs to give voters more choices than two! We are multicultural, multilingual, and multiracial. We have different sexual orientations and different concepts of family. We are Americans, and our political discourse must expand.

Death Penalty: Delara Darabi

Delara Darabi, a 23-year-old Iranian woman, was executed Friday. She had confessed to a murder when she was 17, but later recanted. She said that her boyfriend, who was 19 at the time, had convinced her to confess. They thought that she wouldn't be executed, since she was a minor. He is currently serving 10 years for his part in the murder. She was executed alone; neither her family nor her lawyer were informed, although notifying them is her right per Iraqi law.

Is executing juvenile offenders ever right? This is a separate question to whether the death penalty is ever right, I think; does the government have a greater obligation to give juvenlies a second chance than it does to extend the same to adults? If the government structures its laws around the idea that minors and children cannot be held to the same expectations of impulse control and decisonmaking skills that society expects of adults, then yes. A government that does not recognize a minor as a full adult cannot justly punish a minor when she fails to act with the good judgment required of a full adult.

Some critics might contend that 17 and 18 years of age are not meaningfully different in terms of developmental ability. That might be true, and surely it varies among people. However, once the government has decided that 18 years of age is a meaningful proxy for good decisionmaking and sufficient life experience, the government is bound by that proxy. 17 is different than 18, even when it's not, because the government says so. Therefore the government can't justly expect a certain level of responsibility from 17 year olds in all but one context, when that single outlier context is the one in which the government intrudes upon the very life of that person. It is impermissible for the government's inconsistency to result in the ultimate imposition of the state upon the citizen.

This line of analysis might also be meaningful in a women's right context, especially in a legal system that singles women out as dependents of men. In Iran several laws require that men act as providers and represetatives for women: women can't get a passport without their husbands' permission,

they are barred from certain professions, and a woman's life is considered to be worth half of a man's life. These laws suggest that a woman cannot take care of herself. She is inferior in every way to a man, lacking self-control and the ability to function in the world. Any legitimate government, in refusing to confer upon a segment of society the rights and responsibilities of its fully-functioning members, must similarly refuse to punish that segment for failing to exhibit those rights and responsibilities. In other words, in a legitimate society, the government can't have it both ways: either I'm an adult with full rights and control over my actions, and therefore culpable for my sins, or I'm not, and I'm not.

Iran executes more juveniles than any other country, even though it has joined the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits executing people whose crime was committed before their eighteenth birthday.

So let's turn to a free society, for comparison. In the US, we executed juvelines in 19 states until 2005. We executed those with mental impairments until 2002.