This is a new category within the Rivrdog Blog. A sub-blog, even. In this category, I will write posts which challenge the conventional thinking of the conventional political parties. Readers are, of course, invited to challenge MY thinking in return by commenting on the posts.
What I will try to get at here is differentiating the political parties from religions. Politics is simply a way of conforming a behavior of mankind (political behavior, usually associated with the self-governance we have adopted as a Nation) to a certain standard or set of standards. A religion, on the other hand, is a system of beliefs and principles by which an individual measures and runs their life. It has NOT been proven that a political party must either act like or BE a religion, and in fact, in our Constitutional way of Government, such a linkage is forbidden.
Perhaps the ills of our society today have less to do with politics than they do with religion, and religion masquerading as politics. If this is the case, we need to define the circumstances, put politics on trial, and straighten out the political system by striking down that part of it which has become religion. If this is the case, we have been making the wrong corrections for generations.
The Rivrdog blog believes that Politics HAS become a religion, and in fact, it has become the MAIN religion we all adhere to in this Nation. Our forefathers all warned us about letting this happen, but we ignored their sage advice and it HAS happened.
What we must do then, as a Nation, is redefine both our lives and our Nation. This is NOT a task for the faint-hearted, or the under-educated, because it will require courage to examine ourselves, and CRITICAL thinking to examine our Nation. We do NOT have enough of either commodity right now.
Without further ado, then, let’s begin the examination of both self and Nation.
Today’s topic looks at the Right. On the Right, there is a political belief that has become “boiler plate”, i.e., a stock belief, a cornerstone of the political position (and the Religion of Right). That belief (remember that politics are not supposed to be religions!), is that Unions Are Bad. In fact, I could add an “All” to the front of those three bold words, and most of my righty friends wouldn’t disagree.
I disagree. I disagree on history, I disagree on politics, and I disagree like any educated person should disagree, because Unions aren’t Bad, Unions have (mostly) become political, and it’s the politics of the Unions, mostly cleaving to the Left as they do, that bothers the Right.
Historically, Unions all started as Craft Unions, and are still known as Craft Unions in some places. That is to say, people who work within a certain craft, or métier (to use the French/British term), have banded together to support the development of their craft, and to sell their services to the wider world. BTW, this is ALL a Union is supposed to do, and they were widely accepted when that’s all they did. There were aspects of great fraternalism with Unions in the old days. To be sure, they were still opposed, but their opposition was mostly the oligarchs who owned and ran the businesses which had to deal with their now-organized labor force, and generally, pay more for those labors, cutting into the oligarch’s profits. When Marxism arose, some of the historic figures, such as Samuel Gompers, who had organized a Union of Unions, the AFL, which later added a similar organization, the CIO, and became the feared, hated AFL-CIO, used the Marxist fervor then sweeping Europe to add impetus to Union organizing here in the USA, and in doing so, set an oligarchic belief into place that all Unions were Bad. Over the years since then (100 years or more), that belief has only strengthened in the politics of the Right, and it has strengthened at least as much as the strength of the Unions has been lent to the Left to do the Left’s political bidding.
The Religionists among the political Right have seized upon this now-historic tendency of the Unions to brand them a forever enemy of the Right, and to thereby accuse the basic idea of labor collectivism of being behind Marxism, when the historical facts say that the reverse is true. Of such trickery has Politics become Religion, which historically uses these same devices to keep practitioners in the thrall of their priests.
The Truth of the Labor situation is that Unions are simply collectivist organizations of limited scope and purpose.
I can hear the echoes from the Right, “But ‘Dog, collectivism is EVIL all by itself…”
Actually, collectivism is NOT evil, and without it, Man would not have advanced beyond the collection of primates they had evolved into, and maybe not that far (some lower primates exhibit strong collectivist tendencies). The NRA is a collectivist organization, for example, as are most political entities. In fact, we may declare that politics as we know it would not be there without collectivism, because a mob composed of individuals with no collective purpose can’t accomplish anything except smelling each other’s stink as they gather. Collectivism only becomes evil when it uses it’s it’s power of numbers and unity to achieve an un-noble purpose.
So it is with the Unions. They have a fine original purpose, and they still accomplish that purpose, and likely will continue to do that. They have been steered towards ignoble purposes, though, and need to be steered away from those. Simply abolishing (some) Unions, as Chris Christie claims to have done in NJ (he didn’t, he simply handcuffed them for the moment), is not going to solve the problem of Unions doing the bidding of the Left, in fact, it guarantees that those Unions will get even closer to the Left, not farther from it. The smart way to do this is to simply establish rules for the use of Union money (money IS the root of all this brand of Evil). The few places where this has been successfully done have active craft unions, but those Unions have little influence on politics. No constitution is trampled on when Union members are not asked for huge dues which become huge slush funds, and those funds are then given to those who are on a path to destroy the Constitution. It is perfectly acceptable for those Union members to donate their own money to the causes of the Left, just as it is perfectly acceptable for the Captains of Industry to donate to the causes of the Right. Such political donations make for a healthy Republic, and need to be encouraged. What needs discouraging is the Unions’ extortion of money from their members in the form of unnecessarily-large dues, and then handing that money over in wholesale amounts to the Left. In this respect, control of the Unions is appropriate, but it is NEVER appropriate to say they can’t exist or be politically active as it pertains to supporting their crafts.
