You’re going to hear a lot in the next several days about Arnold Schwarzenegger. But you won’t hear much about an event with much more important ramifications – the defeat of Proposition 54.
California voters stepping into the polls read the following description of Prop 54, the “Racial Privacy Initiative”:
The state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment.
In California at least, a color-blind society is no longer our goal. Government is hell-bent on classifying us by race, nationality, creed, sexual preference, income class and more. Why? Because political power thrives on a “divide-and-conquer” strategy.
We shouldn’t be surprised that all but one of the leading replacement candidates for governor opposed the initiative. Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, Democrat Cruz Bustamante, Independent Ariana Huffington (who dropped out a couple days before the election), and the Green Party candidate (who got more coverage than he deserved) were all against Prop 54.
Prop 54 was not only noble, it was also a way of undermining politicians’ power. This initiative threatened a tool that pork-barreling politicians routinely employ to dole out massive, special interest allocations of Californians’ tax dollars.
In the marketing of political power, politicians recognize that they must align themselves with “interest groups.” In a two-party system, they can divide those interest groups between themselves – divide-and-conquer.
Every good Pork-inator had to oppose it.
A better classification strategy
While classifying people based on race is morally repugnant, there is one government classification system that could prove useful. And this classification would go directly on the ballot.
Every candidate could be labeled by whether or not they will increase or decrease the size of government. This would be much more informative than their party affiliation.
Politics has become the equivalent of professional sports. As Jerry Seinfeld once put it, “we root for the jersey.” The players move from town to town. If he wears our team’s jersey, we love him. If he wears an opponent’s jersey, we hate him.
Thus politicians don’t even need to represent the real views of the groups who support them. They merely need to display the team colors, and convince various special interest groups that they have less to fear from them than they do from the guys wearing the other team’s colors.
Schwarzenegger is a perfect example. He ran as a Republican, yet has very few – if any – issues he’s willing to take a stand on. His campaign was full of platitudes. And his supporters went into overdrive to urge another candidate – someone who took stronger stands on the issues – to withdraw from the race.
Why? Because horror of all horrors, a Democrat could win the race.
And the Democrats aren’t any better than the Republicans are in this regard. For any Democrat, nothing could be worse than a Republican getting elected. Never mind that the Republican supports nearly all of your agenda and will actually expand government faster than any Democrat could every get away with.
The solution to this problem is to classify politicians by whether or not they’ll grow the budget or shrink it.
Criteria
Of course, Republicans love to fudge this issue. They’d take such a test and say that they cut the size of government by 10 percent, when what they really mean is that the Democrats intended to double the size of government, but they kept the increase down to 90 percent (thus the 10 percent cut).
To avoid such parsing, the standard should be libertarian Michael Cloud’s “Weight-Watcher’s Test.”
Put the candidate’s budget on the scale. Is his budget heavier or lighter, in real dollars?
And the new classifications should be descriptive – perhaps even slightly pejorative.
- Those politicians who want bigger government should be called “Porkers.”
- And those that want less government could be called “Downsizers.”
Which gets to the real reason the leaders in the California recall race opposed Prop 54: They’re all Porkers – including Schwarzenegger.
Republicans, who for years have professed to be Downsizers (and will likely pretend to be so), went to the barricades to keep the guy who wears the Democrat’s jersey from winning.
But look for the “Pork-inator” to expand the size and scope of government dramatically. And don’t be surprised if one of his tools for growing the state budget will be racial and demographic group classifications.
Jim Babka is president of both the American Liberty Foundation and RealCampaignReform.org.
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