The Good Old Days (according to the Far Right)

IT WAS INEVITABLE: NEW TEA PARTY SENATOR THINKS CHILD LABOR LAWS ARE UNCONSTITUTIONAL
By Dave Neiwart

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/it-was-inevitable-new-tea-partying-r

EXCERPT (Click on link above for photo and explanation of what the far right wants to take us back to):

Yes, we used to joke (or half-joke, anyway) that hey, next thing you know, Republicans are going to start demanding a return to legalized child labor.

It's not a joke anymore.

Utah's newly elected Republican Senator, Mike Lee -- the Tea Partier who unseated Robert Bennett -- posted a video of a lecture he gave last week on the Constitution. It was quite a lecture: Not only does Lee reveal himself to be a far-right "Tenther" -- a conspiracist approach to the Constitution borne out of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s -- but as someone who believes child-labor laws are unconstitutional, too.

...this whole episode is deeply emblematic of the important point that Paul Krugman made today -- namely, that the Right's embrace of this kind of ideology really reflects a significant divide in American politics, between people who simply believe people should want to return to the "good old days" before FDR and the New Deal, and people who believe that the incredible economic and cultural powerhouse that era produced was the product of a desirable balancing act between governmental power and individual rights.

As Krugman puts it:

There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.

This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.

But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.