Conservative - 1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change. 2. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: e.g. a conservative estimate.

Rep. Patrick McHenry

The last time I checked, Representative Patrick T. McHenry (R – N.C.) had an (R), not a (D), which means that he’s part of the GOP, which means that he’s conservative, which means that he applies to the above definition.  So why has he introduced legislation which would change the way our money looks?  That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, despite two foreign wars, student protests over public education tuition increases (32% in California!), a crippled economy, and a tsunami scare in Hawaii, Rep. McHenry has found time to draw legislation which, if passed, would replace President Grant’s face with President Reagan’s on the $50 bill.

Why, you may wonder?  Because presidential scholars rank presidents, and the order in which they come out always, Rep. McHenry says, places Reagan higher than Grant.  Do you know who else is usually higher than Grant?  Grover Cleveland.  Grover fucking Cleveland.  He’s on the $1,000 bill, but the U.S. Treasury doesn’t print that one anymore.  John Adams also consistently outranks Ulysses Grant, one of the Founding Fathers, as does James Monroe and John Quincy Adams!  Click here for an entire listing of relevant presidential rankings.

The people who are on our currency in circulation are: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, and Benjamin Franklin.  On coin: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, FDR, George Washington, John Kennedy, and Sacagawea.  Notice anything?  How about those most responsible for our economic well-being appearing the most frequently?  Thomas Jefferson, appearing both on currency and coin, almost singlehandedly doubled the size of the United States with one of the shrewdest (and most racist!) purchases in all of history.  The economy that those GOP members are so desperately trying to defend was created by Alexander Hamilton, one of the non-presidents on currency.  Abraham Lincoln, while not an economist by any means, made a series of decisions which saved what-would-become the world’s most powerful economy from an incredible schism.  If economic prudence is the merit by which one is immortalized on currency, then we should just put a picture of Social Darwinist Rockefeller with the tagline “everyman for himself” on every bill.  Or pictures of slave-traders.

I remember sophomore year of college when I had to read a book by David Harvey called The New Imperialism. In it, Harvey argued that the United States had created a new empire which was based on unspoken, yet interminably strong economic dominance of foreign countries.  Not only has the “third world” come to rely heavily on the United States, our foreign influence (Pepsi plants, outsourced tailors, and so forth) runs more deeply than the ferocity of those cries of “domestic jobs” and “Americans first.”  I think this is neoliberal policy and I think it was aggrandized by the firebrand Ronald Reagan.  Actually, David Harvey wrote another book called A Brief History of Neoliberalism and I think Reagan was on the cover…

This isn’t new, by the way.  There have been proposals to put Reagan’s face on the dime, the $20 bill, and even the $50 bill five years ago, none of which have been successful because his policies are “still controversial.”  That’s a light way of putting it.  I imagine that those impacted by neoliberal economic policy, such as young Bangladese children, would feel just about the same way that American Indians felt when in 1928 Andrew Jackson’s face was put on the $20 bill.  Wait, didn’t he march thousands of American Indians to their deaths because of congressional pressure?  Didn’t the economy crash the year after his face was put on the $20 bill?

Rep. McHenry has more to worry about in North Carolina than what the $50 bills he carries around are going to look like.  How about the budget shortfalls expected for 2011?  In any case, this is stupidest, more absolutely irrelevant thing to spend time and money on.  I want the guy who led the army that defeated slavery to stay on my $50 bill, not the guy who created economically subjugating policy abroad.

Political strategists of all stripes have been pulling their hair out over the last year about the seeming fragmentation of the US into five voting blocs – progressives, Democratic Party faithful, centrists, GOP faithful, and the so-called Tea Party. The reason this is so problematic for US politics is because the United States has a voting system known as First Past the Post, used exclusively in only a smattering of countries with functional governments. Comparativists call the different forms of group identification in the US and in other states where parties are purely ideological “cross-cutting cleavages” – essentially the idea is that party identification will be fluid because parties aren’t allowed to purposefully represent one ethnicity or religious group. So, a committed Roman Catholic might believe strongly in the Puritan value set of it being everyone’s responsibility to care for the weaker brother – Jesus referenced this in the Beatitudes – and thereby identify best with the Democrats. Or, that same Roman Catholic might decide that protecting the rights of the unborn is the most important thing this election cycle, and so will vote with the Republicans.

The beauty of this system is that it balances group identification to prevent our political system from becoming overly fragmented. But in 2010, my America looks very different. Disillusioned voters on both sides, upset with a lack of leadership in Washington, are flocking to their respective pundit classes to be told the way of the future. Now, with a balanced and responsible Fourth Estate, this would be workable. But talking heads on the right such as Glenn Beck (the keynote speaker at CPAC 2010) and Sarah Palin are passing themselves off as mainstream, and in efforts to both widen the tent and make more cash, have refused to exclude even the dangerously crazy from their faithful following.  It is irresponsible to pretend that attacks from “birthers” pretending that there is something to contest about the first African-American president’s birth certificate are anything less than racist. However, it is equally irresponsible to write these conspiracy theorists off as some kind of fringe movement.  Although their ideas are certainly not typically associated with the mainstream, they seem to have found the perfect blend of ambiguity and populism to bring as many people in as possible, whether out of terror at the health care bill (“ObamaCare”) or out of fear for Obama’s tax hikes (while actually, the opposite is true).

It is fair to assert that these groups will be somewhat marginalized by the realities of the 2010 election. However, it doesn’t necessarily take a huge amount of people to push mainstream candidates out of the way. New York’s 23rd District was nearly hijacked by a Conservative Party candidate after he won support from Beck and Palin. And the dearth of leadership and epidemic of opportunism in the GOP right now is so desperate, it is not unrealistic to anticipate a new Republican Party after 2010, tied to the coffin of Ronald Reagan and some amorphous agenda focused on tax cuts and smaller government – as long as we keep the government’s hands off my Medicare.