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Some Questions
by DeAnander in the last open thread:
I’m not feeling real hopeful — reading the latest Adbusters always seems to send me into a pit of despair, even when they’re trying to be inspiring — as with the current year end issue.
However I will wave a modestly hopeful questioning essay (typesetters tip: scroll down to read it) by Greg Bates, on the issues of monoculture, diversity, and punctuated equilibrium.
Bates suggests that in the complete, incompetent meltdown of the Dem Party in the US, its inability to distinguish itself from its ‘competitor’ the Repubs, may be the moment of opportunity for the formation of diverse new political parties. He argues, as I read the text, that only the meltdown and utter failure of the Dems will create this window of opportunity.
I think this has a lot to do with what’s called "the investment trap" in games theory and investment jargon — where the individual or consortium cannot abandon a losing strategy because they are unwilling to let go of the investment they already have in it. They are throwing good money after bad, as the saying goes, because they cannot bear to admit that the bad money is already lost. They can’t cut their losses and get over it. They probably have to lose N times the original investment (I’m sure someone has written papers on this!) before, finally, painfully, they admit that it was a mistake in the first place.
I fear that progressives in the US have got to this point with the Dem Party. Three terms’ worth of betrayal so far and counting. Open question — and my mind is not firmly made up on this — is it really beyond repair? Can it be salvaged? Is there any hope of a massive reform of the party, or is it doomed as Bates suggests to drift further and further to the right, chasing the Nuovos Fascistas into the sunset?
One other question for gambling types. If the economic crash predicted by our pessimists (and I’m more or less one of ’em) comes to pass, then what will the reaction of the US populace be? An ugly ethnic/nationalist fascist reaction, blaming everyone in sight — Arabs, Jews, enviros, Blacks, Asians, women, China, the EU — for the disaster? Or a Game Over, Reset moment, a re-evaluation, and a New New Deal? Both?
@kat: clinton era, kosovo, sanctions — part of the “betrayal” I was talking about, though heaven knows it goes further back than just three terms. and I’m depressed too 🙁
the “hope” I was suggesting was not hope for the revival of the Dem Party — though if anyone would like to suggest that, I suppose it’s a possibility. personally I think the US political system has reached the point of comic opera, but no significant change is likely to come about without either (a) a major crash and restructuring, or (b) a massive movement for reform — and (b) may never happen without (a) to motivate people.
lately it’s been seeming to me that human institutions — countries, companies, organisations, sports teams, theatre groups, newspapers — every kind of karass and granfalloon 🙂 they all have a life-cycle. there’s a startup phase and a growth phase and a “peak phase” and then a kind of apoptosis, a falling-away or overripeness or gradual dissolution. at some point the freshness of purpose is lost and the activity the group was formed to pursue either becomes ritualised and uninteresting, or a front for some completely different agenda.
the quality of the product declines if it’s a company. the quality of the art declines if it’s a theatre group or a band. if it’s a charity or NGO, then it starts to devote more energy to its own internal politics and self-maintenance than to the cause it was supposed to be upholding. it gets rotten inside, like old wood — until there isn’t any “there” there, and the whole thing becomes a shell or worse, a perversion, a negation and betrayal, of its original purpose.
unions that start out breathing fire, based on worker’s circles and grassroots organising, taking on Goliath and winning — become professionalised and “managed”, turn into big business, end up in bed with the mafia and politicians, get chummy with management, become Goliath, start suppressing dissent among the workers. the underground, humble and radical faith of the early Christians gets co-opted into a State religion, and eventually the Church becomes the playground of Medicis and Borgias and similar “purse-proud prelates”. really great movies have lousy sequels 🙂 novelists turn out a few good novels and then a string of potboilers.
and empires I suspect “fall” partly because of overstretch and hubris, but also partly because purpose and competence and coherence evaporate over time… anyway I have this strange feeling that American domestic politics — once lively, loud, and a lot of the time very sincere — has reached this watershed where the purpose and coherence has gone out of it (most people find it meaningless and boring), and it has become deeply corrupted (probably the corruption and the incoherence/boredom are mutually reinforcing in a chicken/egg dynamic). it’s as if politics has become a ritual, instead of the original and real activity of which the ritual is a commemoration…? (certainly the culture of Madison Avenue and Big Media with their conversion of everything into spectacle, and spectacle into commodity, is not helping).
in a theatre group or collective or small business, when this point of boredom and incipient failure (or embezzlement) is reached, usually there’s a huge blow-up, a lot of shouting, some people are never on speaking terms again and either the whole enterprise folds up, or it fragments into smaller units that go forth and make a fresh start.
so by analogy I wonder whether American politics as we know it is on the verge of fragmentation. the violent disagreement of the “red/blue” state model, with people talking about physically relocating in order to get closer to those they agree with and further from those they dislike — the rumblings about progressives becoming states’ rights advocates to protect their hard-earned gains regionally — suggests Balkanisation.
I’m not a huge fan of Balkanisation for all the obvious reasons, but a bit more Balkanisation of US politics might arguably be a good thing if it stirred up real enthusiasm and some will to make structural changes. my personal wish list: proportional representation, IRV, parliamentary process. any takers? and what would it take to get there? what’s the alternative? one-Party rule in some weird-ass Orwellian future?
Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 21 2004 6:51 utc | 17
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