Actual Conservatives for Actual Transit

From DC StreetsBlog:

Streetsblog: Why should conservatives support public transportation?

Glen Bottoms: We have three main reasons that we pitch to other conservatives. One is that we must reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Right now 90 percent of recoverable oil is controlled by foreign governments, most of which don’t wish us very well. Second is economic development. We’ve found that using streetcars in cities downtown spawns development. And third is that conservatives are traditional. Streetcars are a way to preserve neighborhoods by effectively promoting neighborhood cohesion and vitality.

ding ding ding ding. We have a winner.

Car companies like to portray that their product equates to freedom. It is a simple notion, that you can get in your car and drive wherever you want. Because it is a simple notion, it plays well with the idiot wing of the conservative party (of which Lind and Bottoms are not members).

The problem arises when all of our spending favors car travel that we are all literally forced to drive and that is the only acceptable and/or practical means of transportation. As we posted yesterday, they quite like that monopoly, thank you. However, 1) monopolies hardly fit in the conservative notion of market/competition-driven free market capitalism. 2) Gas taxes only pay for about half of our roads, the rest come out of taxes. 3) Gas is subsidized and the true cost is somewhere between $6 and $16/gallon (if you factor in military spending to secure oil). 4) Our gas spending predominantly goes to unstable foreign regimes.

So, in sum, we have no CHOICE in transportation, we are taxed excessively, we bail out auto industry, we support foreign dictatorships and presumably indirectly fund terrorism, and we drive budgets into the red. How is ANY of that conservative?

Conservatives Against Sprawl

It is starting to pick up steam, as our endless ranting apparently has now apparently migrated rearward from the explicit memory of our collective frontal lobe to the implicit regions of the hemisphere. Personally, I think this is one issue that can be agreed upon by both right and left, possibly for differing reasons, and we can certainly disagree on the best way out of the mess. Here is E.D. Kain at True/Slant citing Kunstler and requesting Andrew Sullivan take up the mantle (which he has in the past):

Sprawl is a result of massive statist interventions into our culture and society, and its symptoms are equally enormous. Everything that conservatism has historically stood for is undermined by sprawl. It is not only the physical manifestation of our decline, it is a poison which continues to contribute to that decline. Its repercussions can be felt in our discourse, in our speech, in our way of thinking. This is not merely a matter of aesthetically pleasing communities, but of communities which allow individuals to be a part of the whole. I doubt this is sustainable, this suburban maze - in any way: fiscally, socially, spiritually. It is, as James Howard Kunstler called it, “a peculiar blip in human experience.”

I can't disagree with anything he states. He doesn't really offer any solutions, but that really isn't his job. Frankly, he gets at the fundamental and logical disconnect in the modern conservative mind that peripherally suggests limited government then gleefully spends on highway projects, forming an endless rhetorical loop that people want their house an hour from their job and the road that caused that to be the only choice must be expanded to allow for "free choice."

Perhaps this tipping point suggests a potential coalescence of common purpose, which will be the only way out of this mess.

The Conservative Case for Mass Transit

Link, by David Schaengold at the Witherspoon Institute. The jab:

It might seem as if nothing could be less important to social conservatives than transportation. The Department of Health and Human Services crafts policies that affect abortion, the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission play crucial roles in determining how prevalent obscenity is in our society, but the Department of Transportation just funds highways, airports, and railroads, or so the usual thinking goes. But decisions about these projects and how to fund them have dramatic and far-reaching consequences for how Americans go about their lives on a day-to-day basis. Transportation decisions have the power to shape how we form communities, families, religious congregations, and even how we start small businesses. Bad transportation decisions can destroy communities, and good transportation decisions can help create them.

The body blow:

Of course, just because there is a historic explanation for why Democrats are “pro-transit” and Republicans are “pro-car” does not mean that these associations make any sense. Support for government-subsidized highway projects and contempt for efficient mass transit does not follow from any of the core principles of social conservatism.

A common misperception is that the current American state of auto-dependency is a result of the free market doing its work. In fact, a variety of government interventions ensure that the transportation “market” is skewed towards car-ownership.

...and the knockout punch:

We often hear complaints that transit systems do not earn profits. This is true (with a few exceptions), but this does not mean that transit systems are a waste of money. When was the last time you heard someone complain about how a local road never manages to turn a profit?..

Pro-highway, anti-transit, anti-pedestrian policies work against the core beliefs of American conservatives in another and even more important way: they create social environments that are hostile to real community. Once again, the ways in which automobile-oriented development prevents communities from forming are too numerous to list exhaustively. They range from the very obvious to the very subtle.

Taibbi's the Best

I rather like the idea behind this site, testing the biz potential of online journalism-slash-editorialism-debate, strikes me as the next evolution to HuffPuff:

True/Slant

Taibbi: America's Peasant Mentality

This must be a terrible time to be a right-winger. A vicious paradox has been thrust upon the once-ascendant conservatives. On the one hand they are out of power, and so must necessarily rail against the Obama administration. On the other hand they have to vilify, as dangerous anticapitalist activity, the grass-roots protests against the Geithner bailouts and the excess of companies like AIG. That leaves them with no recourse but to dream up wholesale lunacies along the lines of Glenn Beck’s recent “Fascism With a Happy Face” rants, which link the protesting “populists” and the Obama adminstration somehow and imagine them as one single nefarious, connected, ongoing effort to install a totalitarian regime.

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But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields.

You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad.

A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses!

If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

Nightmare Fuel

Is everybody yet realizing the malignant nature of the Republicans that were ceremoniously and joyously tossed from power? The only thing that can save that party, increasingly representing narrow groups such as evangelicals, the illiterate, and rich, white pricks.

Look, I think high taxes are bad, but a necessary part of civilized society. I want them to be lower, but wouldn't mind if they got us the types of amenities that places like Denmark afford. I worry that Obama is trying to be too many things to too many people and stretching our imaginary resources too thin, but at least the expenses accomplish things, unlike the previous administration that might as well just lit piles of cash on fire like the Joker in The Dark Knight.

Perhaps, that is why guys like this are so pissed off. They were basically getting money handed to them hand over fist for the past eight years with no questions asked. Hmmm...and they have a problem with welfare? How many times did I have to say their plan was to wreck government?

I recommend reading my Depression? All Part of the Plan essay or my middle finger salute to Grover Norquist, GWB, and their ilk of similarly minded destructicons...like the Joker, these people just want to watch the world burn.

For a REAL conservative, read Andrew Sullivan.