Back atcha! All this Senatoratory's getting a bit thick, but oldtime debate used to be where the issues were genuinely examined and debated. Since the gentleman has yielded the floor, allow me to pontificate...

I was continuing to argue for the middle in my previous post, but didn't get much into my own point of view, which is a bit to the left of middle. ["really?" everybody says sarcastically] I'll pick the issue of "redistribution of wealth" to make it feasible to finish this some time today, and save all the other issues for other times.

The phrase "redistribution of wealth" is a loaded one, in part a framing that sets the groundwork for a claim that taxation to support economic and social safety nets is a unilateral and coercive action that the government takes upon itself against the will of the people. Nonsense, of course, and one could argue that since the time of FDR mainstream opinion has solidly supported some governmental safety nets. The debate has, for the most part, been over how much, both in terms of scope and cost.

The philosophy behind this view of government responsibility has consistently been based on enlightened self-interest. It seems to me that expanding the franchise to vote throughout the 20th has tied all of us closer together, and made it impossible to write off the wellbeing and wishes of any segment of the population. Anyone who feels they've been treated unfairly by "the system" has the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. And they do...Oh boy, do they! So I would observe that the only way to diminish the popularity of programs that you (collectively) see as "redistribution of wealth" is to mitigate grievances based on the perception of economic unfairness.

When people lose faith that they can succeed playing according to the present rules of the game--when they perceive the playing field as not level--some will give up, but others will demand that the rules be changed. The economic grievances these days are legendary: CEO pay ~500 times that of workers; double-digit productivity improvements showing up as single-digit paycheck gains (cited recently as 18% productivity resulting in 1% income improvemnt the last decade or so, making it inevitable that people will ask who's pocketing the difference); when the United States shows up on a chart of distribution of wealth nestled cozily between Nicaragua and El Salvador and the label "banana republic" seems uncomfortably apt; when employers play off American workers against workers in lower-cost foreign lands to minimize wages...well, the list of grievances is as long as your arm.

And it's not actually important whether those grievances are justified--whether economic hardship is the result of circumstances or lack of moral fiber--because people will turn to politics to agitate for change.

While the notion that we're all bound together is often dismissed as "collectivism", it seems to me to be eminently hard-headed and practical. A related example of the reality of the "social commons" is health care. Ensuring that everyone is vaccinated, for example, is simply smart public health policy. If you don't want your kids exposed to a nasty soup of bugs at school, you have no choice but help make sure that all their playmates are vaccinated too. It's hard for even the wealthiest Americans to wall themselves off from the world; their Nicaraguan cook might pick up a bug from a kid in school and sneeze it into their soup. In general, preventative care is simply more cost-effective, and we're being fiscally foolish to force people to wait for medical care until it's become so serious they have to go to the emergency room.

Social responsibility doesn't have to equal fiscal irresponsibility.

This is one area of my thinking where I believe that it's possible to find common ground with the "populist" branch of Conservatism. I think of many red-state Republicans as recent converts from populism, moving away from their rural roots and the cultural memory of how their ancestors were treated by the wealthy elite in the 1930s; into somehow thinking of today's Republican party as the party of the people. The trick was done by pushing hot-button social issues, of course, and distracting attention from economic issues. But I have to believe that the gene of populism hasn't been fully expunged from red state culture. There might be some common ground there, and I don't necessarily think that the stronger religious views are necessarily a show-stopper. An argument for social "awareness" based on enlightened self-interest is hardly incompatible with Christian belief. They ought naturally to be reinforcing beliefs...absent the artificial partisanship imposed through pushing hot buttons.

(The prospect of common ground, from another point of view, is probably validated by the Republican use of the divisive strategy--calculation that without it "red state" people might realize that compromise with the blue is possible?)

Finding that sort of common ground is an example of what I want for a revived center. Maybe there's no such thing as an actual political center, but a marketplace of ideas in which a partisan is somebody who does more selling than buying, most of us are both buyers and sellers, and a "centrist" is simply somebody who does roughly the same amount of buying and selling. The interests of the buyer are served by a free and open marketplace, and theory has it, though many sellers are afraid it's not true, that a free market benefits sellers as well.

To wrap it up in a bow, as it were, and thus turn the floor back over to the esteemed gentleman.