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Change: The Possible One And The One You Might Get
I happen to agree with both, Malooga’s stirring piece below (which I lifted from a comment), and John B. Judis’ analysis on America the Liberal
If Obama and the Democrats in Congress act boldly, they can not only arrest the downturn, but also lay the basis for an enduring majority. As was the case with Franklin Roosevelt, many of the measures necessary to combat the recession–such as spending money on physical and electronic infrastructure, adopting national health insurance–will also help ensure a Democratic majority. The rural South remained Democrat for generations because of Roosevelt’s rural electrification program; a similar program for bringing broadband to the hinterland could lead these voters back to the Democratic Party. And national health insurance could play the same role in Democrats’ future prospects that Social Security played in the perpetuation of the New Deal majority.
…
The Republican Party will be divided and demoralized after this defeat. Just as the Great Depression took Prohibition and the other great social issues of the 1920s off the popular agenda, this downturn has set aside the culture war of the last decades. It wasn’t a factor in the presidential election. And the business lobbies that blocked national health insurance in 1994 will incur the public’s wrath if they once again try to buy Congress.
If, on the other hand, Obama and the Democrats take the advice of official Washington and go slow–adopting incremental reforms, appeasing adversaries that have lost their clout–they could end up prolonging the downturn and discrediting themselves. What could have been a hard realignment could become not merely a soft realignment, but perhaps even an abortive one. That’s not the kind of change that America needs or wants–and, hopefully, Obama and the Democrats understand that.
—
by Malooga:
Remember those old TV commercials where the unsuspecting housewife
learns that her old brand of laundry detergent has been surreptitiously
replaced with a newer better brand, and she just can’t believe it?
Well, that’s what happened to us. The brand was changed with the
pre-planned financial collapse and the largest transfer of wealth in
human history. We all really know this, but because the corporate press
does not "catapult the propaganda" it still doesn’t seem real.
All we’re seeing now is the paper being peeled back to reveal the
new brand we will be using for the next four years. Sure, we’ll like
the tone and timbre of this new product, but the structural adjustments
were put into place well ahead of time.
A system whereby two corporate controlled images are put before us,
allowed to say whatever they want knowing that they will never be held
accountable (eg. Bush: humble foreign policy), and we are told that
voting for the preferrable image, who will then "represent" us; such a
system whereby the fetish act of voting is intended as a substitute for
actual democratic engagement (something most of us, as structurally
intended, have no time for anyway) is not a Democracy, but a triumph of
totalitarian propaganda.
(I have recently been involved in legislation at the State level,
and just to see how relatively innocuous legislation is taken hold of
by monied interests, how swans are turned into arcane pigs — too
complex for any but the smartest of those professionally involved in
all of this to grasp — given cute names, and foisted upon the
ignorant, prejudiced and fearful public; to see how these bulbous,
heinous, genetically-modified creatures are dumped on the public plate
and called meat is more than discouraging.)
So, what has happened? People have been so scared, so
shock-therapied, that they have endorsed a man who says things they
don’t advocate and cannot be held to his pronouncements anyway. Endless
articles have been written daily, on Counterpunch for one, detailing
those pronouncements, the advisors, where the unprecedented amounts of
moolah where coming from, but all of this counts for nothing for the
True Believers, where belief and hope short-circuit logic and strategy.
I’m sorry that Arthur Silber came up against some unforseen problems,
because his expected but unpublished series on tribalism promised far
more insight into this phenomenon than my poor mind is able to come up
with.
In the end, people are controlled by stimulating them until their
emotions overcome their reason. Resistance falls away and they are
easily lead.
What is so galling to me here is not the expectation that things
will change for the better in spite of all evidence to the contrary,
not this magical thinking, no, but the almost universal belief around
here that strategies for fundamental change come from elections and
that such strategies for fundamental change must necessarily be limited
to single election horizons, even if proved strategies, which could
take a generation to effect deep, meaningful, and life-affirming
change, exist. Obama Tina (There Is No Alternative, as Maggie Thatcher
used to say about the neo-conservative program). Just don’t labor under
any illusions that the elite limits their own plans and machinations to
single election spans. That’s not what think-tanks are for. So who has
the advantage in this contest, this game of chess — the voters, or the
ruling elite?
The ruling class has nothing in common with the common man,
indeed cannot have anything in common with him, because their job is to
control you. It’s called the ruling class because it rules. It doesn’t
matter how smiley the face you see and hear daily is — it will be just
as lethal because the beast is a shark and that is its nature. Yes,
crony dollars will now trickle down to the equally dirty democrats now,
but all others in its voracious path will be destroyed.
It was clear for quite some time that a much larger faction of the
ruling elite preferred the Obama image, knowing that USAans have had
their fill of the current public tenor. (If we stop bombing people, we
will go back to bombing water plants and farms. Peasants must be
starved before they will give up their farms and local foods and brands
and incorporated into the wage-slavery system as the new place to open
low-cost factories in the inevitable drive to the bottom. This is how
we won in Vietnam, and how we will inevitably win in Iraq and
Afghanistan. TINA. Starve them into submission, then let the NGO’s come
in and feed them.)
The corporate media could have destroyed Obama as easily as one
brushes away a gnat if they had wanted. No stories about what type of
underwear Obama wears, or whether his ears are too flappy, his suits
too loose, his face too much like Alfred E. Neuman’s. Instead, the
corporate media turned on McCain with a vengeance. The straight-talk
express of eight years ago became a mean, surly cur. The media manufactures consent and the public buys it.
Even those who study and know its rules fall for it. The images of the
two candidates could have been reversed with ease if those who own the
media had wanted it.
All of my research into the mechanics of elections over the past eight years have proven to me that this election could
have been stolen just as easily as the past two, if the elite had
wanted it. That they didn’t does nothing to restore my faith in the
ultimate justice and reliability of the system. Those who spent their
time campaigning may have helped assuage their own feelings of
hopelessness and uselessness, but the fix was in, and in the end they
changed nothing. (We have no idea how many votes were stolen in this
selection to preserve some sense of contest and excitement. (It is hard
to draw people into an inevitable confidence game.)
Well, it’s a new morning in America, or whatever the slogan this
time was. Ah yes, "Change." I advise you all to beware the pernicious
word "reform," which inevitably follows the word "change." Welfare
reform, entitlement reform, social security reform, health care reform.
Beware. Some fool here actually mentioned health care reform as a
reason to support Obama and no one called him out on it. First of all,
peel off the Orwellian use of words. We have no healthcare system in
the US. The rich can afford healthy food and safe working conditions
and less stress and clean air and non-polluted locales and the poor
cannot. What is hoped to be thrust down the gullets of the sheeple is a
catastrophic illness program, which would be well needed, but instead
is a give-away to the insurance industry, as pioneered in Massachusetts
by Mitt Romney (remember him?) whereby one is obligated by law to
purchase health insurance, regardless of your ability to pay, and
regardless of how flea-riddled said insurance proves to be.
Obama will not be a savior. He has no answer to the real structural
problems which are never addressed in elections: the fact that, as
Sheldon Wolin points out, we spend almost as much of our offensive
mlitary in this country as the sum total of all corporate profits
(ponder that and what it says about us as a people), or the fact that,
according to Derrick Jenson, plastic now outweighs phytoplankton in our
oceans by a ratio of six to one.
Change. Remember how seven years ago Shrub was drifting along
aimlessly when suddenly "A New Pearl Harbor" happened and the small
Bush was transformed into a wartime leader while the rest of us had
little option but to follow the piper? Detestable corporate-whore, now
VP Biden, has already informed us that if the protests for genuine
change become too loud we will be treated to a similar enactment. (As
Dr. Johnson said about the purpose of art: Instruct and delight,
instruct and delight.) Beware. We are soon to be instructed and
delighted.
Change never came from an election without social movements, just as love never came from a hand that happened to be your own.
So everyone here now has their candidate; even the casinos where I
live let you win every once in a while so you keep coming back. All of
those who invested time and energy in the campaign; all of those who
supported the duopoly by voting for Obama have every moral right to
take credit for any good they may have helped bring about. But, by the
same logic, every death — whether by bombing or democratic starvation
— that Obama brings about during the next four years, well, some small
part of the responsiblity, the guilt, the violence, the vengence, the
pain caused, and the lives shredded so effortlessly by the machine,
some part of that must also rightly accrue to you and your efforts.
Yes, even my pacifist housemate, whose father was a conscientious
objector during the "Good War," WWII, and later became a minister and
went to France to aid the afflicted, all at great personal cost, even
she voted for Obama and had no answer to my challenge. She does not
believe in killing under any circumstance (the simplified fairy-tale we
are sold about Gandhi), but she voted for a killer, a supporter of
murder, hence a murderer himself. I believe that the oppressed of the
world have the right to defend their lives against those who would
exterminate them — by violence and even by killing. But I could not
bring myself to share in the complicity of being, even in some small
measure, the oppressor of others, the killer, as Martin Luther King
said, "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world."
It’s a deadly game I want no part of, and I just couldn’t do it. I
could not bring myself to feed the machine of oppression, pillage and
murder.
Change. Enjoy. Bask. Even gloat. Your team won this time. The
tribal part of you, the "us against others" deserves to feel good. Hey,
what’s that red stuff on my hands?
@11, exactly. We have to keep people in the game, otherwise they might start looking at some of those very attractive third party candidates and break the duopoly. (Don’t worry there is an answer to that, too.)
No doubt Obama is bright and a very good speaker. (His fake 60’s civil rights era slurring of word endings started to grate on me, completely unlike his authentic accent of several years ago.)
But I see no evidence in either his record or his campaign promises of anything other than a Chicago School, elite-picked, faux activist, Ivy league indoctrinated, self-advancer.
I spent some time in Hyde Park and know many people who knew him back when. In general, he is well liked and respected. But community politics in Chicago are brutal, pitting interest group against interest group — just ask Alinsky — and no one comes out of there with shit that don’t stink.
Obama might stand out from the crowd — so did Clinton, in my opinion — but that does not negate the fact that he was hand-picked by Ford Foundation Rockefeller money.
If he turns out to be other than a slick-talking globalist, I’ll buy everyone here drinks on the house.
As far as African-Americans are concerned, one hopes that he will be better than Colin Powell and Condi Rice, but that is setting the limbo bar so low it would be hard for even one as skeletal and shifty as Obama to shimmy beneath it.
Look for lots of Democratic “humanitarian
interventions.” (The Congo, Zimbabwe?)
And I agree with b that we bombed Syria because we could, because we are the “Exceptional Nation” that can intervene in the affairs of any other nation in ways that they could never do to the US.
Obama has embraced US exceptionalism wholeheartedly. It is the single most destructive, cult-like, belief system on the planet; making “Radical Islam,” “Islamo-fascism,” or whatever the fuck the Bernard Lewis’ of the world are calling it today look like a tame field mouse in comparison.
If the military budget is cut, it will be marginal, a mere pause in the exponential curve to Christian dominion heaven, and principally due to reliance on new generations of weapons: drones piloted by computer from Las Vegas in between gambling binges, and the new genre of “non-lethal” crowd control weapons: tasers (again, see Arthur Silber on this), and microwave beams. How humane empire will become under the Obama regime!
Again, internationally, as nationally, the engineered “financial crisis” has propelled the heretofore moribund IMF to new heights of theft, mendacity, and injustice. Obama’s dirty work is already done for him — like magic — leaving him to play “good cop” to the previous regime’s “bad cop.” It’s so easy to play good cop when you’ve got other nations by the balls and your squeezing hard and twisting at the same time.
Structural adjustment: the rich eat and sleep, while others starve and weep. Flat taxes and lax regulations on business, and privatisation of all government services: water, utilities, health, education, etc. If you can’t pay, it’s because you are irresponsible, according to ralphieboy, or because you can’t compete in the global marketplace, according to Thomas Friedman. Whatever. The poor and dumb should just quietly perish: structural eugenics is what it should be called.
Do we need to go through a primer on the IMF again on this blog? Has Obama spoken out against the new round of “structural reform” affecting the poor of the world; has he distanced hmself in any way? More poor will suffer under “good cop” Obama, than under the “bad cop” regime. Watch and see. (At least until they agree to give up their land for GMO crops and foreign-owned mining.)
Uncle $cam said I should post again about the difference between left and right. Read James Petras if you are interested in the difference between faux-left politico-speak and independant leftist policy, and how the elite-instituted austerity is already impinging upon the poor in “independent” Latin America. Yes, it’s a long, complex, often dry, and discouraging article, a far cry from tearing up when Obama intones “Change!!!!!!!!!” — but if you want to understand the way the world works, why there is poverty and injustice, suffering and heartache, in unprecedented amounts and percentages worldwide, (along with unprecedented wealth and privilege), and why humans appear to be structurally unable to do other than destroy the planet at as rapid a pace as possible — if you want to combat injustice — then one must dig beneath the thin crust of campaign political rhetoric to gain understanding and guidance in right action.
Remember, those who own and run things do not have our interests at heart. They will find ways to co-opt all manner of dissent and render it powerless. Obama is only one of the ways.
Posted by: Malooga | Nov 5 2008 20:26 utc | 19
While I don’t disagree with much of what Malooga wrote I don’t see a lot of point in it either. In the world of individual absorption that most ‘civilised’ people live, divide and rule isn’t even that necessary, so Obamageddon’s rationale for the current farce hasn’t got legs.
Why then the farce? Most likely because while we may draw the ruling elite with uniformly black hearts, that isn’t how they see themselves, and secondly because creatures of habit that most humans are, the election just ‘happened’.
The religious type movement we saw wasn’t a deliberate construct it grew outta the unique cultural climate that developed during the shrub years.
It has been obvious since at least 2006 that the rethug construct was no longer salable and the proverbial drover’s dog could have beaten anything put up by that half of the empire war party.
C’mon cast yer minds back to the start of this circus!
Anyone who ran an appraising eye over the repug line-up of hopefuls saw the biggest collection of misfits since mondale and ferraro. Why?
Because everyone apart from the desperate has beens and wanna-bes who had thrown their hat in the repug ring saw the task was hopeless, and since winning the nomination and losing the election is certain political suicide, up and coming rethugs stayed right away.
But that doesn’t address my opening statement about the pointlessness of this discussion. Apart from granting oneself the opportunity to say “I told you so” in a few months, this line of discussion is essentially purposeless probably destructive to the ends it aspires to.
If as Malooga said, and many agree, that real change isn’t gonna come out of an election, can’t come out of an election, cause that possibility was negated sometime time very early in the life of this ‘republic’, why even discuss this stuff?
Change in amerika cannot possibly arise out of some reasoned debate by the ‘enlightened’ either, because those bases were covered long ago as well.
The only time that real transformational change (to steal an a la mode hackneyed phrase) could occur in amerika will be when the mobs bust loose, breaking up the structure in a display of raw emotional energy.
That is unlikely to get sufficient momentum up while the oppressive infrastructure remains intact.
Not for nothing has the domestic military option which Uncle $cam has been drawing our attention to, been put in place.
That infrastructure will be able to withstand anything that locals can throw at it until the empire’s foreign adventures drain it to the point where reinforcing them becomes such a priority that the rulers forget their need for domestic vigilance. Or more likely gamble that the domestic vigilance won’t be tested while they sort out whatever corner of a foreign field they are bombing ‘back to the stoneage’ that particular week. We know this because that is the way other empires died.
It is the rest of the world, those of us who live outside amerika who are going to have to create the opportunity for real change, an opportunity that will only be taken up when the masses inside amerika have had their hopes dashed so many times they can see the mirages of jingoism and exceptionalism for what they are.
As this election has demonstrated amerikans are nowhere near that point yet, but this election and the disillusionment that will inevitably follow is a vital part of the process of getting amerikans to the point of insurrection.
Some sort of reasoned debate about the worthlessness of yesterday’s events is not part of that process. Not only because the real change, when it comes, won’t be the result of intellectual discourse. It will be the result of ordinary people deciding they aren’t gonna take it any more, and talking this talk harms ordinary peeps more than it hurts the greed heads. It is exactly the type of discussion that turns most humans away from exploring real possibilities for change.
Who wants to listen to wowsers who won’t let a victory be celebrated? So what if the victory does turn out to be Pyrrhic? All the more reason to have fun now while we still can. As for the wowsers, always there to tip a bucket of water on our fun, what use are their ideas gonna be to the 95% of the population who like to feel more than they think?
And this line of thinking is more likely to cause division and dissension amongst the people that hate the empire, far more than any discomfort for those who lead and profit from it.
And no I am not proposing a ‘noble lie’ more a compassionate silence if needed, but really a little participation in the celebration is even better. Laughing, crying and dancing in the streets doesn’t kill, at best it re-enervates, at worst it gives everyone practice at acting out on their streets.
There is one more issue which has been skirted past here but which really pisses me off. I wrote the other day about how it feels to me that even humanist whitefellas in the North seem to be able to ignore the horrors of colonial imperialism. Act as though that is all back long ago. History.
It is easy for us, (the almost 100% pure whitefellas who inhabit this board) to say that the struggle is purely a class struggle and that race is a distraction, an irrelevancy, but go and say that to an unwhite especially an amerikan unwhite descendant of slaves.
For an african american who has seen time and time again that the ‘class struggle’ becomes a race struggle when the so called lefties he/she has voted into power makes some small concession to economic disparity while they perpetuate or exacerbate racial oppression. George Wallace wasn’t an aberration of the democrat party, he was a representative of a significant chunk of the party, one that still dominates today.
The sheriff’s deputies of Gretna sent out after Katrina to stop the ‘n….rs’ from leaving New Orleans through their white with a redneck stripe burg, weren’t sent there by shrub or any rethug assholes, they were there courtesy of the dem administration which has dominated louisiana politics since eighteen sixty whenever.
Even if Jesse was crying crocodiles last night, many african amerikans were not, and for middle class whitefellas to turn around the next day and tell them they are a mob of idiots who just got sucked in again is neither helpful nor true, but it is likely to perpetuate the wrongs that most MoA-ites believe they oppose.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 5 2008 21:05 utc | 20
A friend of mine is working with an international scientist who is close to proving that all cancers are caused by viruses, and expects a series of vaccines to follow. I’ve always believed cervical and prostrate cancers were viral, and they’ve admitted at least one is, cervical, but they’ll never admit prostate is.
It wouldn’t be good for, ummm, business, if you know what I mean. So,…to Obama.
I’ve known a lot of people from all different walks of life, some racially blind,
some racially cautious as you have to be at street level, but some pugna-racist.
Like the international biochemist, I’m convinced overt racism (hate to color) is
a mental illness, and I think the proof of that is how it pushes out sideways in situations like the ’08 election, where that hate can’t be overtly expressed, and appears instead as a Reductivist Epistle of Malooga, for example.
I’m not a psychologist, but I believe the term is transference, a general malaise,
bordering on psychosis, transferred from the inner mental illness of racism, not the ‘oh, you can’t go out with him, he’s ____”, but the “better dead than ____”, that the Israeli security force demonstrates, for example.
Or the US military, (as b well knows):
[Repost from US military internal spam]
“A Day That Will Live in Infamy
Tuesday, 4 November 2008, is a date which will live in infamy. While most presidential elections are followed with calls for unity by both candidates, Barack Obama issued no such call in his speech last night, with the possible exception of his observation, “I may not have won your vote tonight, but … I will be your president, too.”
Of course, none was expected — liberals have elected a Socialist with deep ties to cultural and ethnocentric radicalism, and his executive and legislative agenda poses a greater threat to American liberty (sic) than that of any president in the history of our great republic.
Obama has twice taken an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” He has never honored that oath, and, based on his policy proposals and objectives, he has no intention to honor it after again reciting that oath on 20 January 2009. Obama seeks to, in his own words, “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”
Today, at least 55,805,197 Americans are concerned for the future of our nation’s great tradition of liberty. Some 63,007,791 Americans have been lulled, under the aegis of “hope and change,” into a state of what is best described as “cult worship” and all its attendant deception.
One of our editors, a Marine now working in the private sector, summed up our circumstances with this situation report. It aptly captured the sentiments around our office: “It’s been tough, fellow Patriots; tough to stomach the idea that more than half of my fellow citizens who vote, have booted a genuine American hero to the curb for a rudderless charlatan. What a sad indictment on our citizenry that some are so eager to overlook his myriad flaws — his radical roots, his extreme liberalism, his utter lack of experience or achievement. Barack Obama is the antithesis of King’s dream: He’s a man judged by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character. If it’s God’s will that Barack Obama is our next president, then so be it. We Patriots will pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and wade back to the war front, intent on liberty or death.
This battle is lost, but the war is not. Let’s roll.”
—
Bears a shocking resemblance to b’s and Malooga’s brooding think-speak, desu ney?
Posted by: Cha Gall | Nov 6 2008 4:58 utc | 61
Original link to “Ratchet Effect” post
Actual link to “Ratchet Effect” post
The American political system, since at least 1968, has been operating like a ratchet, and both parties — Republicans and Democrats — play crucial, mutually reinforcing roles in its operation.
The electoral ratchet permits movement only in the rightward direction. The Republican role is fairly clear; the Republicans apply the torque that rotates the thing rightward.
The Democrats’ role is a little less obvious. The Democrats are the pawl. They don’t resist the rightward movement — they let it happen — but whenever the rightward force slackens momentarily, for whatever reason, the Democrats click into place and keep the machine from rotating back to the left.
Here’s how it works. In every election year, the Democrats come and tell us that the country has moved to the right, and so the Democratic Party has to move right too in the name of realism and electability. Gotta keep these right-wing madmen out of the White House, no matter what it takes.
(Actually, they don’t say they’re going to move to the right; they say they’re going to move to the center. But of course it amounts to the same thing, if you’re supposed to be left of center. It’s the same direction of movement.)
So now the Democrats have moved to the “center.” But of course this has the effect of shifting the “center” farther to the right.
Now, as a consequence, the Republicans suddenly don’t seem so crazy anymore — they’re closer to the center, through no effort of their own, because the center has shifted closer to them. So they can move even further right, and still end up no farther from the “center” than they were four years ago.
In fact, the Democrats’ rightward shift not only enables the Republicans to move farther right themselves; it actually compels them to do so, if they want to maintain their identity as the angry-white-guy party par excellence. (A great part of the Republicans’ hysterical hatred of Bill Clinton arose from this cause: with Democrats like Clinton, who needs Republicans?)
The ratchet clicks: Nixon. The pawl holds: Carter. Click again: Reagan. And again: Bush Senior (and Iraq War I). The pawl holds: Clinton. Click: Bush Junior and Iraq War II; then another click, and it’s Bush Junior triumphant, and God knows what to come.
Has the phrase “conspiracy theory” crept into your mind yet? Let me exorcize it. This is not a vast conspiracy. Nobody planned it out. What I am offering here is a structural explanation, not a conspiracy theory. There is a very important difference. Perhaps an analogy will help.
I assume that most people reading this book believe in the Darwinian theory of evolution. We often speak of the “function” or “purpose” of anatomical structures — like your liver, or your thumb, or the hammerhead shark’s odd cranium. But this way of talking doesn’t commit us to believing that somebody planned these structures out. They were not contrived; they evolved.
The same holds true for the rightward ratchet in contemporary American politics. No Machiavelli schemed it into existence; it evolved. And it evolved for the same reason that anything evolves: it was useful. But useful to whom?
Not useful, certainly, to the millions of slightly, or more-than-slightly, left-of-center Americans who troop glumly to the polls every four years, hold their noses, and vote for the “lesser evil,” even though they expect nothing from their candidate. Nor is it useful to the forty to fifty percent of Americans who don’t bother to vote at all because neither candidate has managed to say anything that seems relevant to their lives,
I have a somewhat unlikely friend, a rich man in Chicago — let’s call him Al. Politics is not Al’s profession, or even his first interest in life, but he is a well-connected, intelligent guy who has some pet political causes. I happened to ask him one year, during a Senatorial campaign, which candidate he and his friends were contributing to. Both candidates were quite friendly to his cause, and I thought he might have had a hard time deciding between them. Al looked at me as if I had just revealed unsuspected depths of idiocy. “Both, of course,” he replied.
“Both?”
“Well, we’re giving a little more to X [the Republican], naturally, ’cause he’s got a better chance of winning. But we’ve given a lot to Y [the Democrat], too. In fact, I think we may be his biggest single bloc of support.”
“But… which one do you want to win?”
He laughed. “It doesn’t matter. We own ’em both.”
The ratchet works really well for people like Al: and that’s what keeps it in operation. It’s not that he’s an especially right-wing guy himself; in fact, he thinks of himself as a liberal. But the ratchet has lowered his taxes, gotten the unions out of his plant, fattened the budget of his wealthy suburban school district (and correspondingly starved the urban districts where his employees live). He thinks Bush is a contemptible idiot, and may even have voted for Kerry himself (though he’s very reluctant to talk about it). But what’s beyond question is that the ratchet has operated to his benefit.
Absent some countervailing pressure from what we’ll call, for short, the Left, it’s a foregone conclusion that the political system will evolve in a way that responds to the desires of the wealthy and powerful.
Over time, the Democratic Party has assumed the role of ensuring that the countervailing pressure from the Left doesn’t happen. The party contains and neutralizes the Left, or what there is of it. Left voters are supposed to support the Democrat, come what may — and it’s amazing how many of us have internalized this supposed obligation — but they are not allowed to have any influence on the party’s policies, either during the campaign or during the Republicans’ infrequent holidays in opposition. Al’s employees mostly vote Democratic. They get nothing for their pains, but the Clinton years were as good for Al as the Reagan years.
But that’s not the worst of it. The reluctant-Democrat voters — like my neighbor Annie — don’t realize that their votes are not just wasted: they are positively helping drive the ratchet. The fact that these captive lefties can be counted on not to bolt enables the James Carvilles and the Al Froms and the other DLC “triangulators” to pursue their rightward course without fear of any consequences. Annie and all the other well-meaning dependable Democrats are supplying an essential part of the fuel that keeps the machine going.
Again: Nobody planned this. The Democratic Party fell into its role in the ratchet for historical reasons, which we will explore in the next chapter. But now that the machine is up and running and delivering the goods for the wealthy and powerful, there is certainly no reason for the wealthy and powerful to interfere with it. And there is no means by which the less wealthy, whose power is only in their numbers, can affect it at all — except by depriving it of their support.
Over the decades since the ratchet started operating, each party has developed a story, a narrative, or less politely, a scam, that depends crucially on predictable behavior by the other party. Those Republicans, say the Democrats, they’re crazy extremists; last year it was Iraq, next year it’ll be Iran. We have to stop them by any means necessary, even if it means wearing their clothes.
The Republicans reply: Where do you get off calling us crazy? You voted for the Iraq war. And you’re defending Iran now?
Oh no, say the Democrats, those Iranians, they’re terrible. Somebody really needs to do something about them. Why haven’t you guys done it?
At this point Annie gets upset and calls her Democratic congressman. “Ted! Are you advocating war with Iran?”
“Naaah, naah, Annie,” Ted coos, “That’s just to get our guy elected. Gotta keep those crazies out of the White House.”
Annie hangs up the phone, trying to feel reassured, and tomorrow’s New York Times will announce that war with Iran is a matter of bipartisan consensus.
The Democrats depend on the Republicans to frighten their constituencies and keep them in the Democratic corral. It’s not too strong to say that in effect, they encourage the Republicans to play the bad cop. The Republicans, conversely, need a bogeyman to energize their activist base — a Godless, urban, liberal bogeyman who will tempt good Christian boys into sodomitical vice and take away people’s guns. So far, the relationship between the party narratives is symmetrical: each is Bad Cop to the other’s Good Cop. But there are some crucial asymmetries, and it’s these asymmetries that drive the ratchet effect.
One of the most important asymmetries is that while the Republicans can be as ferocious as they please on matters relating to culture — sex, religion, and so on — the Democrats are not prepared to be ferocious on the only possible counterweight to culture, which is… class. In fact, not only are the Democrats unwilling to be ferocious, they’re unwilling to raise the topic at all. It’s the Great Unmentionable of American politics.
It was not always thus. Class politics was one of the pillars of the Democratic party of Roosevelt — the party that Annie is remembering when she pulls the donkey lever. How we got from there to here is the subject of the next chapter.
Posted by: Malooga | Nov 8 2008 12:30 utc | 100
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