I have three items for my write-up today on W.A. Swanberg's biography
of six-time Socialist candidate for President, Norman Thomas. The
biography is entitled Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist.
1.
Swanberg narrates that Thomas' newspaper column eventually came to lose
its popularity, for Thomas criticized both Republicans and Democrats,
which was a turn-off to newspapers and many of their readers. Thomas
did, however, praise politicians when they acted according to his
principles of peace. Thomas, for example, praised President Dwight
Eisenhower's final speech as President, in which Eisenhower warned about
the military-industrial complex.
Do I like partisan articles, or
articles that criticize and praise both sides? It depends. One reason
that I like partisan articles, particularly when they're partisan in
accordance with my own political orientation, is that I would like to
believe that simply voting for a political party will solve our nation's
problems. But life is more complex than that, for virtually every
"solution" that politicians propose will have its strengths and
weaknesses. I feel that my role as a voter is to determine if the
strengths outweigh the weaknesses, and to vote accordingly. What really
rocks my world is when I have a firm pro-Obama ideology set in my mind,
along with my justifications for that ideology, and then I take the
risk of reading conservative Townhall columns and encounter arguments
that President Obama's policies are grossly problematic. Are these
conservatives correct? I doubt that they are entirely. But I don't
think that simply dismissing their arguments as "lies" is the way to go.
Like
Thomas, I do like to praise politicians who do what I consider to be
the right thing, whatever political party they may be in. When I read
an article about Republican Governor Jan Brewer's decision to expand
Medicaid, for example, I clicked "like".
2. One reason that
Thomas' message of disarmament was so unpopular, according to Swanberg,
was that there were many people in the United States who made a decent
living within the military-industrial complex. I usually don't read
this in liberal writings that glorify the 1950's-1960's as a time when
the middle-class was strong and widespread. They talk about unions,
progressive tax rates, and government funding of highways, but they
usually don't mention the role of the military-industrial complex in the
existence of the middle-class.
In 2012, I occasionally wondered
if voting for Mitt Romney would be better for the economy than voting
for Barack Obama would be. It wasn't because I believed that tax cuts
for the rich would magically trickle down to the rest of us and
stimulate economic growth. Rather, it was because I thought that Mitt
Romney's program of increasing government spending on the military would
serve as stimulus. Granted, it would probably also run up the deficit
and the national debt, but at least it would give people jobs. It does
seem to me that government spending on defense has created more jobs
than has government spending on infrastructure. I've not seen
statistics on this, so I'm open to correction, but I'm just stating my
impression. I wish, though, that the government could create more jobs
by spending money on peaceful projects rather than weapons that we don't
need. I'm not saying that we don't need any weapons, but, in
2012, Obama said that even prominent people in the military were saying
that they did not need all of the money that Mitt Romney wanted to spend
on defense.
3. John F. Kennedy's Catholic religion was
controversial in the 1960 Presidential election, as a number of people
feared that Kennedy as President would obey the pope. Thomas himself
shared that concern, for he wondered if Kennedy's Catholic religion
would influence his policies on, say, birth control, an issue that was
important to Thomas (though, as Thomas noted, he himself had lots of
children and grandchildren!). Thomas discussed the issue with Margaret
Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and she wrote to Kennedy to
express her concern, only to receive no response. But Thomas came to be
satisfied with Kennedy's public statements about the religion issue,
finding them to be honest and forthright.