Anybody who reads or listens to much political commentary during this election year will quickly detect a recurring theme. There is an orchestrated attack on the “single-issue” movement.
Congressman John Ashbrook, in a recent analysis of this phenomenon, says that what really bothers the people who hate the single-issue movement is not that they are single-minded but that they are issue-oriented. The kind of people who populate the bureaucracy do not understand, and are inherently fearful of, the kind of people who are not motivated by the quest for governmental power or patronage.
The liberals’ new hostility against single issues is really a dislike of the issues which motivate the grassroots organizations and movements. American voters are concerned about taxes, busing, abortion, gun control, and other problems created by government intrusion into family concerns.
Whether the epithet “single-issue” is applied to any given group seems to depend on whether it is liberal or conservative. Only conservative groups are tagged with the epithet “single-issue”, whereas liberal groups which work for a single goal are said to have “legitimate concerns” and be working for the “common cause.”
Senator George McGovern recently complained that 36 single-issue groups are active in South Dakota alone. He was glad to welcome the support of a strange collection of single-issue voters in his 1972 campaign for the Presidency, but today he recognizes that most of the 36 single-issue groups are a threat to his 1980 reelection to the Senate.
The issue of busing shows the liberals at their most hypocritical. Busing means the use of the power of government to force defenseless children onto buses and drive them to schools they don’t want to go to, and to which their parents don’t want them to go. Busing isn’t even very controversial; the overwhelming majority of black and white Americans oppose it.
But funny thing, when the NAACP sends lawyers to argue for busing in court, no one criticizes it as a single-issue organization. When citizens protest against forced busing, it suddenly becomes a suspect single issue.
Gun control is the issue that shows the liberals at their most illogical. Faced with a skyrocketing crime rate as a result of a coddling of criminals, the liberals react by demanding that we regulate guns owned by law-abiding citizens. Funny thing, only those against gun control are damned as single-issue people.
Abortion is the issue which shows the liberal establishment at its most ruthless. More than a million unborn human lives a year are killed for the sake of convenience, comfort and careers.
When the National Abortion Rights Action League works in campaigns or in courts for abortion on demand, no one c alls it “single-issue.” But when 100,000 pro-lifers gather at the U.S. Capitol on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, suddenly they are labeled narrow-minded single-issue people who want to force their views on others.
Probably the largest and most powerful single-issue movement is the tax revolt. It started with Proposition 13, swept across the countiy like a mighty tide, and is still raging.
The producing, wage-earning families of Middle America have suddenly discovered that they are the chief victims of the liberal order, and that government cannot provide the solutions because it caused their main problem: inflation. Congressman Ashbrook concludes that what really concerns the liberals is their gnawing fear that the single-issue movement isn’t single at all. It is really a single movement whch is issue oriented, and all the issues are part of the whole.
Every movement must have moving parts or it won’t move very far. Each of
the issues categorized as “single” by the liberals represents a part of the national
grassroots rebellion against the concept of big government spending and bureaucratic/
judicial meddling in our lives.
