What Vision For America?

Anyone who has met me can probably guess which way I would tend to vote. I am that vocal. And yet, last night in the Democratic debate, I heard two different visions for America. They seemed very much in contrast to me. And I know which one I would like to see be implemented in the future.

I am the son of an FDR liberal mother and a flapper grandmother. My father was killed when I was six months old during an Air Force Mission, and my grandfather was killed when I was 10 by a patient's .38 (he was a psychiatrist). Perhaps as a reactionary young man, and certainly as a result of the failed Iranian hostage rescue, I voted for Reagan in 1980, and thought I was conservative throughout my 30's. But I came to realize that I was only a fiscal conservative, and, perhaps true to my upbringing, a social liberal. And so, in my late 50's, I have come to see politics somewhat the same but also very different from my mother and grandmother.

They were products of the Great Depression, WW II, and Ike. Republican Failure, Democratic Rescue, Democratic Triumph, Republican Main Street.

If you study a bit of history, you will read of Hoovervilles: the cardboard shanty towns that the then homeless built in reaction to President Hoover's economic policies. FDR did a lot more than simply saying "All you have to fear is fear itself", and WW II provided the economic stimulus that ended the Great Depression. But it was a popular General who became a Republican President that brought true economic prosperity to many Americans. A Republican President who today would be regarded as a Socialist. For FDR was "That Socialist in the White House" and Ike continued and built on (in his own style) the economic policies remaining from the the previous decade. (Poor Ike would be banished from the party, or forced to recant, in today's climate.)

But today is different. Or is it?

In some ways it is very different. By the 50's America had a near monopoly on foreign trade, because a good deal of the world was still in recovery from WW II. No Japan or China or Europe to compete with for selling manufactured goods. Americans were proud of their accomplishments, and most (at least in the white world) where fully participating in a society that was much more economically equal.

Americans had a choice too, then. Sit back on their triumphs. Do their jobs, come home to their houses, enjoy life. After all, American Life had been paid for in blood. And yet they didn't. Remember the iron lung? Polio? That was conquered. Go to the moon in a decade? Done. Transistor? Invented. Digital computer? From one in world in the 40's to one in every company in the 60's.

America had the choice to sit back and incrementally improve. It didn't. Perhaps the ideological race with Communism was the reason. Perhaps not. But it didn't.

Perhaps I just hear in black in white. But last night, in the sixth democratic debate, I heard a clear choice. Strike out in a new direction, the way we should go. We haven't been there before, but we should. Or, make small, steady improvements, that we know we can make. That we know we can handle.

That's what I heard. And I know which way I want America to go. I want America in 2016 to strike out the way America did in 1940. In 1950. In 1960. The way Americans have always gone. Blazing a new trail, towards a better, newer, richer country. That is the American Way!