Buckle Up, America

My hot take on life in interesting times.

(What follows are my thoughts on where we are and how we got here. As always, these are partial, personal, biased and not presented as any kind of final version of reality. Just how it looks from here and now.)

CPR

Playing it safe can be very dangerous.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

— Bernie Sanders

Since 1980, the duopoly ruling the United States has colluded in dismantling the New Deal — a collection of last-ditch concessions the ruling class made to the working class in the 1930s in order to cut off oxygen to the flames of revolution smoldering in the ashes of the Great Depression.

FDR realized that people with nothing to lose are likely to start tearing other people’s shit down. So he created as many jobs as he could, ranging from building dams, to funding the arts, to cutting hiking trails through the mountains of the West. Further economic stimulus was provided when the US entered WWII, and everyone went to work building planes, ships, and bombs to stop the fascists. When the soldiers came home, they were met with free health care for life, free college education and well-paid union-protected manufacturing jobs that allowed them to raise a family in a decent house on what a guy could earn down at the factory.

That worked for a few decades, until the greed of the ruling class returned in the guise of anti-government activism packaged and sold as common sense. The Republicans, behind the affable actor Ronald Reagan (former Democrat, divorced, gay kid), presented a “family values” agenda (anti-gay, pro-Christian, hard on [Black] crime), behind which lurked their real agenda: dismantling the New Deal and taking back all the money that had been flowing to the working class since FDR’s reforms five decades before.

So while distracting voters with racist attacks on “welfare queens” and staged military actions in Grenada and Central America, the Reagan administration enacted policies that redirected funding away from the common person and back toward the ruling class: so-called “trickle-down economics” (where the poor are told that the best way for them to get more is by giving what little they have to the wealthy so it can trickle back down to them), closing mental hospitals — thereby creating the homeless crisis that persists to this day, cutting funding for public education and state universities — offering exploitative loans instead, allowing “American” companies to move manufacturing to Mexico, China and other places so that relatively expensive American workers could be replaced by near-slaves, reducing oversight of worker safety, cutting environmental protections, MASSIVE reductions in taxes for wealthy individuals and corporations, and the constant flow of wealth from taxpayers to the wealthy via perpetual war: Raytheon, Boeing, General Electric, Halliburton, Bechtel….

Democrats, formerly at least partly sincere in their role of representing working people, realized that the ground had shifted. They needed money, big money, to compete, and the only place to get this money was from the wealthy: Wall Street, corporate lobbyists, fat cats. To get that money, they needed to support most of the same anti-worker policies, while pretending not to. (See, for example, Bill Clinton’s support for NAFTA and “welfare reform.”)

So the US went from a system in which one party represented Capital (Rs) and one represented Labor (Dems) to one in which both parties represented Capital, but the Republicans pretended to represent working class whites (via culture war play-acting against gay rights, welfare reform, harsh prison sentences, etc.) and Democrats pretended to represent minorities and liberals (via play-acting for gay rights, defund the police, trans-rights, safe-spaces, and so on).

The upper echelons of both parties are filled with eager Ivy-leagued hypocrites who long ago accepted the rules of the game: lie shamelessly, take the money and say/do whatever is necessary to be “successful,” whatever that means. Assume the appropriate poses to convince the rubes that you’re on their side, and laugh about it over cocktails at the country club tonight.

The average American may be ignorant, but not stupid. Whether they know about this historical context or not, people are fed up. They know they’re being lied to and ripped off. Listen to pretty much any Bruce Springsteen song to hear them: “I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company, but lately there ain't been much work, on account of the economy.”

Polls going back show that anywhere from 65-88% of Americans think the country has been on the wrong track since 2010. Of course it is! It’s been on the wrong track at least since Reagan announced that it was “morning in America” and convinced the working class that “government isn’t the solution to your problem, government IS the problem.” He was right, of course, but not in the way most people understood him. Government was the only thing standing in the way of unconstrained corporate rule, so anything that undermines and weakens government is a step in the right direction, as far as Big Money is concerned. Convincing the very people most reliant on government to turn against it was a triumph of cynical manipulation. Lee Atwater, despite his death-bed repudiation of what he’d done, deserves perverse kudos for pulling off that Three-Card Monty on the American public.

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So here we are, with at least two thirds of the public consistently saying we’re going in the wrong direction, and both parties replying: “How about one degree to the left?” or “Let’s nudge it to the right a little.”

Obama offered “Hope and Change You Can Believe In” but the very defensiveness of the slogan anticipated the problem. (We’ve all been told to “Never trust a man who says, ‘Trust me.’” Why add “you can believe in” to their slogan if they didn’t already know that most of us had good reason not to believe them?)

Hey, look, a cool black dude with a hot wife and a smooth jump shot. That’s different!

But it wasn’t. The bombs kept falling on innocent people in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Blind support for Israel continued without threat of interruption. Crimes against humanity continued at Guantanamo. When the shit hit the fan in 2008, saving the banks and the bankers who’d profited from the disaster they’d created was at the top of Obama’s to-do list. Saving the people who’d lost everything they had to these bankers didn’t even make the list.

Meet the black boss. Same as the white boss.

Then came Bernie and Trump. Two outsiders only nominally aligned with their party. Bernie, a lifelong Socialist, called for radical change to the system. He wanted to go back to the spirit of FDR and bring government back to work for the people. End the wars. Finally provide government-funded universal health care. Food for school kids. Assistance for the homeless.

On the other side of the outsider coin was Donald Trump, the epitome of the man whose abusive father never loved him. A man driven by blind hunger for more: more attention, more money, more women, more fame. Both Bernie and Trump came to take over their parties, fueled by the disgust and resentment of working-class Americans.

By the way, this disgust and resentment wasn’t invisible to political power-brokers. Obama and Hillary both saw it, but thought it could be ignored or shamed out of existence. Obama gaslit half the country when he dismissed “bitter [people who] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them … as a way to explain their frustrations.” Clinton referred to Obama’s comments as “elitist and out of touch,” but before long the Yale Law School graduate tossed the same people into her famous “basket of deplorables.”

The immune systems of both parties immediately attacked their respective pathogens. Remember how all the voting machines mysteriously went down in Iowa, delaying for three days the news that Buttigieg had won the caucuses and Bernie the popular vote? Talk about a buzz-kill! When these shenanigans failed to derail Bernie, Obama, Clinton, Pelosi and other back-room dealers got together and handed the nomination to Biden, as if it were their choice all along, ignoring the passionate voices of the millions of people demanding REAL change. Can’t have that! Play it safe, guys, and see what happens.

On the other side, the Republican body politic was already too weak to fight off its parasite, so Trumpian toxoplasmosis took control of the host organism and has controlled it ever since.

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Enough history. What the hell just happened?

They keep telling us we live in a polarized, evenly divided country, but we don’t. More than two thirds of us have been asking, pleading, begging, and demanding radical, structural change for decades. That’s nowhere near “evenly divided.” The American political system, which Frank Zappa famously described as “The entertainment division of the military-industrial complex,” has been playing slight-of-hand games that keep teasing us with the appearance of real change, but deliver practically nothing.

If the only options on the table are disruption vs more of the same, disruption will win. Every time. If constructive, progressive disruption is not an option, people will choose destructive, regressive disruption. They’ll vote for anyone who says they’ll “drain the swamp,” disrupt the deep state, throw the bums out. Even if the guy saying it is a spray-tanned buffoon and convicted criminal. At least he’s honest about his dishonesty.

It’s sad that its come to this, but here we are. You can only tease a hungry dog for so long before it stops jumping for the treat that’s just out of reach and goes for your leg instead. People are suffering. Suicide, depression, violence, poverty are all endemic, life-or death issues for most Americans, but distant, easily-ignored abstractions for the folks in DC. In these conditions, things fall apart, the center cannot hold — nor should it.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

(from “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats)