Source: Capital New York

By Mark Hay

On a rooftop just south of Park Slope, just after the last major salvo of July 4 fireworks over Manhattan petered out,  a lightly buzzed Jonathan Judge, president of the Brooklyn Young Republicans, stepped in front of the view of the skyline.

“We are gathered to celebrate our independence from foreign domination,” said Judge, a compact young man with bright orange hair and, like most of the men in attendance, a thick goatee. “And our independence from corruption and for reform.”

Judge and 15 club members and guests had gathered atop the roof of former congressional candidate and vice chair of the King’s County Republican Party Susan Cleary, simply to celebrate, they all said. Also in attendance were Lucretia Regina-Potter, the B.Y.R.-backed candidate running for State Assembly against Peter Abbate in the 49th district, and Joseph Hayon, a N.Y.-9 Congressional candidate running on religious values. (Hayon claims no affiliation with the B.Y.R. He said he got an e-mail about the event and just decided to make a prolonged appearance.)

With the view of the city’s major fireworks largely obscured by midtown’s skyscrapers, and the fireworks from the Gowanus and Prospect Park coming in irregular bursts, the night turned to drink and discussion of their core values.

“We’ve got all kinds of Republicans here—conservatives, libertarians, all kinds,” said communications director Roy Antoun, a Rutgers student and county committeeman and an enthusiastic admirer of Ron Paul. “But at our core, we all believe in two things: reform and some type of limited government.”

“Our club has matured into an individual, reform-thinking organization,” said Judge, seeking to distance his organization from the county Republican organization, and by implication, Brooklyn Republican chair Craig Eaton. He added, “We find flaws in both parties—the way that they support the status quo.”

Still, they spent most of the evening talking about the ineffectiveness of the local Republicans. They think the state party is fairly useless, they don’t like the county leadership, which they feel is insufficiently transparent, and they had complaints about sub-leadership party functionaries, too.

Antoun was unhappy with his first local organizer because she failed to tell him where to show up to be a Community Council delegate. Regina-Potter has it out for the organizers and low-level folks in the 49th Assembly district.

Mostly, they were angry at the whole existing New York Republican firmament, in a comprehensive, Tea Party kind of way: for them, the party is an edifice that needs to be destroyed and remade.

“It’s not a party, it’s just a messed-up institution,” said Yakkov Bard, who says he is still a registered Democrat but intends on changing his registration soon. “I don’t think they have a goal, really.”

It should be said here that it’s hard to know what the goal for the Brooklyn Republican Party ought to be, realistically.

Brooklyn Republicans exist in helpless, seething discontent in a very Democratic borough within a very Democratic city. In Brooklyn, the 900,000 enrolled Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly eight to one.

The only real Republican force in the borough is State Senator Marty Golden, who is a sort of hyperlocal powerhouse, but thoroughly actualized in his fiefdom as it currently exists, and certainly no threat to the city’s established political order.

A beleagured state party, led by Chariman Edward Cox, provides no succor to Brooklyn, seemingly resigned to putting the same brave, hopeless candidates up against incumbent Democrats in downticket races, and focusing what little energy and means it possesses on manufacturing enthusiasm for gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio and on boxing out Mike Long’s Conservative Party of New York from the party’s tactical decision-making processes.

“Party leaders don’t do anything to organize or consolidate the party,” said Antoun, claiming that the Republican leadership has gutted the civil society mechanisms that could help Republicans to take more of Brooklyn than ever before.

“When associations are made by organized clubs—outside the express will of the party boss,” added Judge, “they are attacked.”

He says that the local Republicans organization deliberately seeks to destroy grassroots movements, and that a number of candidates had been called and harassed by higher-ups in the party for expressing dissent. Judge, Antoun and Regina-Potter say that internal debate about the direction of the party has been all but eliminated in Brooklyn, if not the city and the state.

Asked for his observations on the party, Judge said, “It doesn’t exist to be observed.”

(Reached for response, Eaton suggested that the Brooklyn Young Republicans were long on talk on short on constructive action. “It’s all smoke and mirrors and blogs and e-mails and statements instead of rolling up their sleeves and getting out in the field for a candidate,” he said.)

The first goal of the Brooklyn Young Republicans is to establish a foothold somewhere by actually winning. They deplored the lack of more significant help from the party firmament for Regina-Potter, who looks like CJ Craig from The West Wing if you took a picture of Craig and compressed it in Photoshop. She’s matronly and very proud to be so, leading her child with her around the event, pushing food and drink on a guest-reporter and pivoting from political topics to talk about the dinner she had just cooked and how incredibly hot the stove was.

She was not unaware of the odds she faced. “How can any average person who’s involved in politics go up against dinosaurs with huge war chests?” she asked.

There was no answer.

The Brooklyn Young Republicans speak about substantive politics with the zeal of Tea Partiers (not accidentally), and considered themselves locked in a fight with a party leadership that is not only complacent but ideologically compromised. They believe they’re gaining traction: Judge claimed that the organization, as of last count, had some 100 paying members and another 1,000 on its mailing list.

“We provide a place where we can speak without being condemned and judged for what we believe in,” said Judge. He claimed that a lack of transparency, choice on their ballots, and discourse had led many to abandon the Brooklyn Republicans. “And we bring them back,” Judge said. “We stop a lot of bloodletting.”

“The challenge of Republicanism in Brooklyn is about enunciating the common sense to enough people so that they can see that they’re digging their own graves,” said David Testilbaum, who recently became a member.

There seemed to be a consensus among the attendees that Brooklyn is teeming with secret Republicans—immigrants who have not broken into civil society, outcasts disillusioned by the party, and even Democrats In Name Only who vote for their party only for the chance to participate in a real debate and see real change come from their vote.

“There are a lot of Democrats out there who are strongly sympathetic towards the Republican Party,” said Judge. “We have actually been converting Democrats!”

Bard presented himself as living proof of that. “I used to think that conservatives ate babies,” he said. Now, he said, he believes that “conservatives are the most character-assassinated group in history.”

He told me he believes in the Brooklyn Young Republicans and their power to overcome the no-hope Brooklyn old Republicans. And he said he believes in Judge’s vision of Brooklyn as “hopefully soon a formerly Democratic borough.”

The event, scheduled to end at midnight, broke up early, with most of the attendees leaving after the food and drink started to run out. Bard and Judge stayed on the rooftop to the very end.

Republicans on the Federal level have rarely actually minimized the role of the Federal government. For example, Herbert Hoover adopted highly socialist policies after the First Great Depression in 1929. President Eisenhower called himself a “social conservative” and a “liberal politician” during his campaign for the Presidency in 1952. President Richard Nixon took the United States completely off the gold standard during his administration, inevitably giving the Federal Reserve more power over inflating currency and distributing wealth around the US, yet another example of Republicans straying away from principle and increasing the size and role of the Federal Government. The Bush administration, needless to say, has increased taxes to pay for two overseas wars and proposed the enacted “Patriot Act” which allows the Federal Government to tap into the private lives of citizens.

The misleading guidance of the Republican Party applies locally as well.  A small group of local Republican leaders organized a “Rally Against Socialized Healthcare” on Sunday, November 15, 2009. Two things were done wrong on behalf of these officials. Primarily, the party never reached out to the Brooklyn Young Republicans for this rally. One would think that with failing elections, the youth of the party would be ideal for the future of the party. Nevertheless, I grant you the leadership of the Republican Party. But I digress. The second most important fault on behalf of these officials was their misleading banner. What passed in the House of Representatives was nothing near a “Socialized Healthcare” system. Any educated voter can tell the difference between a socialized healthcare system and nationalized insurance, or the Public Option. There are fundamental political differences in these policies and our very own elected officials are too blind to see the difference.

Ludwig Von Mises, the infamous free market economist, once stated that “the flowering of human society depends on two factors; the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound, social and economic theories and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.” Essentially, what Mises was offering was a simple paradox of the basics of democracy and republican government. In order for a voting system to work, the voters must be educated. But instead of educating the public, Brooklyn Republicans are not only jumping to conclusions, but are also rallying the same ignorant politics we have seen for decades under faulty Republican leadership. Let’s review the difference between Socialized Medicine and Obama’s Public Option.

There are several different healthcare models proposed by theorists and liberal governments around the world. In other words, “Socialized Healthcare” is too broad a term to rally a group against if we don’t even exactly know what role the government is playing in the healthcare system. One popular model used in our globalized world is the “Single-Payer” method; this is a real socialized healthcare system. Why? Because under this model, the government pools in money, usually through taxes, and then redistributes this money evenly to all health facilities in the country. We must understand that this system requires complete government control of all health-related facilities and personnel in order for this system to work. The United States is among some very few countries that do not have this form of healthcare. Another healthcare model is the “Fee-for-Service” method. In this model, individual practitioners and governments regulate prices and offer reimbursements. There are others, but at least you can see that there is a difference between government control of health and government paying for health. I’ll discuss the United States’ model later on.

What is important to understand when reviewing these models is that any socialized method requires government control or regulation of actual health facilities and doctors. Doctors receive a government paycheck, their hours are federally regulated, and government controls all aspects of the hospital equipment. President Obama’s “Public Option” in no way seizes control of any work hours or health facilities. It’s simply an insurance plan that the poor can opt into to pay for healthcare. Granted that this is a socialist move, this policy is still not Socialized Healthcare by nature nor by definition.

I can rant about the drawbacks of a “Public Option” for days, but this isn’t the debate here at the table. Instead, what we are seeing is our public officials misleading voters into thinking that the United States is falling under a “Socialized Healthcare” model. I wish these officials knew which model they were talking about because if they knew any better, their banner would read “Rally Against the Public Option.” In the United States we have had government paid for minimal healthcare since the 1960’s when Lyndon B. Johnson created, under his “Great Society,” Medicare and Medicaid to pay for healthcare for the poor and elderly. Nevertheless, even today, 65% of those insured in this country, pay into a “Private Healthcare” Model. This means that private insurance companies still play a vital role in paying for healthcare. No matter what the government is paying for, however, the government is still not controlling the way doctors do their jobs. This is important because it distinguished between a Socialized Healthcare model and a Public Option.

In countries like England, government practices true socialized healthcare because, for example, a government nurse inspects health in every home; this is mandatory government control over individual health. We obviously do not have this in the United States and our politicians are obviously misleading us. Republicans in this country need to stop focusing on the wrong issues. They need to stop harping over the notion that we are socializing healthcare when we are in fact socializing the paying methods. The less we and our legislators are educated about issues like this, the less of a chance we will gain any form of legitimacy in this country and in Congress. The sad part is, many Republicans are still electing or re-electing these misinformed tools of the system and then asking, “What are we doing wrong?” “Why is government still expanding?”

Government will stop expanding and infringing on our personal liberties when people–especially Republican leaders–realize that there are differences in certain policy. Their “cause” would be worth rallying for in countries like France or England where they actually have a Socialized Model. Their “cause” would also be worth fighting for if their local congressman, Michael McMahon, actually voted for the Public Option; but, he didn’t.

Personally, I don’t know what these politicians are doing, establishing a “rally” for something doesn’t really exist. I wish they cracked open a book or stopped watching Fox News all the time because they’re making our party look bad. I feel that true advocates of small government need a different voice in Brooklyn–true advocates who know what they are protesting.

Roy Antoun is County Committeeman in the 46th Assembly District of Brooklyn, New York. He welcomes feedback at roymantoun@gmail.com