Contemplating the Abyss, Part I
David Atkins has a great post up over at Digby’s joint.
The gist:
Suppose you’re a 28-year-old straight white guy who graduated high school as a D student, and now work a blue or pink collar dead-end private-sector job somewhere.
[...]
What does the Democratic Party offer you?
Not much.
[...]
The Democrats keep saying that a college education and universal Pre-K are the golden bullets to solve our economic problems. You don’t believe that and for very good reason, but it doesn’t help you anyway: you have neither the time nor money nor interest to go back to school. And your kid? You’re too worried about keeping her fed to bother about Pre-K. And besides, your school district isn’t great, you have no money to move to a better one, home prices are still far out of reach even as politicians want to drive home prices up, and the school system just seems to a huge money sinkhole that never gets better. You have no problem with the Latinos you went to school with, and you know some really nice undocumented families, but you’re also afraid for your job security. The wars overseas seem to keep going no matter who is in power, which makes the military less than attractive as an option. You’ve got nothing in common with the crazy evangelicals you know, and you have no problem with gay people, but your liberal friends who went to college seem pretty condescending and know-it-all to you, which makes you less than thrilled to be associated with them.
Why should you vote for a Democrat? Good question. Back in 1936, even as recently as in 1966, there was a reason for that guy to vote for a Democrat. Democrats used to have answers for that guy. Democrats used to have a solid economic message for workers without a college degree, and the fire in the belly to call out even the more reasonable conservatives for being the heartless toadies of corporate power they are. Today? I can’t think of a good reason that guy would vote for the modern Democratic Party. It does next to nothing for him.
(Emphasis mine) I think he’s pretty much nailed the basic problem: the New-Deal-to-Great-Society era is a fading memory. The energy behind those initiatives, and the practical considerations animating them, has been allowed to dissipate.
You’ve got a hard-right ideological Republican Party, and (by world and historic standards, at least) a center-right technocratic party in the Dems. There is no real, actual left in this country. The big “progressive victories” are:
1. Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan got passed;
2. Gays can now serve openly in the Imperial Forces;
3. The Main Street results of Wall Street’s Panic of 2008 stopped getting worse.
Nothing in the economic system has been reformed in any substantive way. Wall Street and the Rich have been allowed to go back to earning fat commissions and adding helipads to their yachts while destroying the value of your retirement savings unmolested.
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Andrew Sullivan is onto something here, in describing the current political political divisions in the US as being in a “Cold Civil War”
Money quote:
I read George Will’s retread column from the 1980s today and simply cannot fathom what he is talking about. Except, I fear I can. He is channeling Mitch McConnell. Boehner and McConnell have one goal and it is has nothing to do with the economy. It is destroying this president and this presidency. They are clearly calculating that the economic devastation their vandalism could create will so hurt the economy that it could bring them back to power through the wreckage. And they will use every smear, every lie, every canard possible to advance this goal. The propaganda channel dreamt of by Roger Ailes in the Nixon era will continue to pump poison into the body politic, until they defeat the man whose legitimacy as president they have never truly accepted.
They would rather destroy what’s left of the economy (and then work hard, through a useless and thoroughly corrupt media, to hang the blame on the White House) than let a Democrat be perceived to succeed in any way. If they succeed at this, things will get almost unimaginably dire in the US. The Republican Party has truly gone insane.
What they imagine they’ll do is destroy Obama, get their guy in in 2012, then do the things they refuse to do now (some form of massive stimulus) and use that as proof that “their” ideas work better than Obama’s.
The Wisconsin situation is merely a preview of what they imagine would follow.
I think the Republicans perceive, with plenty of justification, that final victory is within their grasp: with the destruction of the last vestiges of the only institutions capable of diluting the power of their plutocratic constituency (those institutions being unions and the social safety net), the working class (which will consist of everyone but the plutocrats) will be frightened and servile.
…except that was always a pipe dream; the reality is that desperate people do desperate things. Given the paranoiac, violent and apocalyptic character of much of the rank-and-file political right these days, it may take the form of a right-wing authoritarian regime taking power in the United States. (I predict that one of such a regime’s efforts will be to restore the unchallenged dominance of white males in our society, with probably extremely dire consequences for racial and cultural minorities.)
It may take the form of a left-wing revolution of some kind (I consider this extremely unlikely – as I said, there is no functioning, real-actual-left in the United States of any real consequence.)
Or, it could be that things will just collapse into disorder. A slow, grinding descent into anarchy and dissolution of the United States as a united, functioning political entity. This is the more likely possibility, in my view – and I believe that this is the choice the tea-addled Republican Right is offering: Give us the country we want or we’ll destroy the country we have.
I’ve always kind of wondered what it was like to live in the Mediterranean region in Late Antiquity. I believe I am now getting a pretty clear sense of the experience. We may be facing the equivalent of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, except with thousands of hydrogen bombs up for grabs.
Geesh.
Or, just possibly, an [actual!] center-left, New-Deal-Like approach to these problems could be tried. It has worked before, and it would just as surely work again.
Comments are closed.
The permanent restoration of white males to dominance in our society would definitely need to be contingent upon the prior installation of a totalitarian police state. Caucasians will not much longer be a majority in this nation. The super-rich don’t care. This is “Atlas Shrugged” being played out for real. The super-rich are multinational, having no allegiance other than to their wealth, which is portable. They will withdraw to their compounds, behind the protection of private armies, and live the good life, while the former members of the middle class divide the land mass up into multiple new political configurations. These will be warring over access to resources. I don’t want to think about what happens to the millions currently incarcerated, or living on government cheese. It will be ugly. The only possible good outcome would have to involve divine intervention and a nearly universal conversion of the hearts of men to the power of love.
So how do you compete with surging China unless you have the money-grubbing Wall Street exec run the whole show? They’re the only thing holding back the Great Wall Street of China. The democrats are powerless because they know if they squeeze the balloon in the west, it will expand in the east.
The problem runs much deeper than just America. Welcome to the perils of global greed.
Maybe we need some sort of Global Labor to deal with Global Capital at that, Dan.
It’s inevitable. But the only institution big enough and global enough to make that happen is… oh wait.
…that’s right – Facebook!
lulwut?
Is this the new pro-captialist talking point. If China wants Wall Street, let them have it.
Then they take your jobs too.
I don’t have a job now. Fuck ‘em.
[Let's watch the F-bombs - Matt]
Actually, wages are rising in China, and since American workers are dramatically more productive than Chinese workers, its quite possible that American labor will be able to compete with Chinese labor in the future. Or so I heard somewhere recently.
Even if they can compete, there will be no reward for their successful competition, if recent history is any guide. No reward for them, that is.
The flaw in that argument is that it assumes everything will be as it is today. It is true that American workers are currently more productive than their Chinese counterparts. But it won’t always be that way.
Power = Population x Natural Resources x Infrastructure (education being seen as part of infrastructure). China has almost 4x the population of the USA, and roughly the same volume of natural resources. Their challenge has always been infrastructure. That’s changing fast. They are already an economic superpower, and they haven’t even scratched the surface of what they can achieve if they educate and mobilize their population.
The Chinese schools aren’t nearly as good as ours, but they’re training Ph. D’s here and recruiting them back to China (I know because I had one working for me that got offered a package under a Chinese government program to move back to China and set up an R&D shop over there).
It’s only a matter of time. The only way to ensure American’s continued relevance is to ensure that they have their hand on the throttle of global finance. Wall Street must run the country, or the country will fade into irrelevance sooner than we know. The politicians know this.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that people are now utterly and wholly interdependent on the global economy. Local democracies are essentially toothless against the world economic powerhouses. Despite the best intentions of the democrats, you can’t change the system anymore. It’s too late.
Case in point – “too big to fail” isn’t just political spin; it’s very much true – a lot of people don’t realize that if AIG actually went down, the world as we know it would have ground to a halt. Why? They insured all the airlines. If they failed, planes would immediately be grounded. Packages would not ship. Inventory would not arrive. And it couldn’t be fixed in any kind of reasonable timeframe – it’s not like American Airlines could just waltz into their local insurance broker and take out a $1trillion policy. Businesses would go under overnight. People would immediately be out of work. It really would have been armageddon.
Regulation is absolutely necessary to prevent this dependency. But herein lies the problem; China has no such regulations. Go ahead and break up the big American banks and insurance brokers to protect American society, but it would be suicide; American Airlines would need to go overseas for their insurance needs. There goes a lot of jobs and revenue. Furthermore, since China would now have all the competitive contracts, Investors would no longer look to invest in America, but would put their money in China. And there begins the downfall of the west…
Greed rules in the free market. And such greed in a global market has no limits. We’re pretty much all screwed unless a worldwide regulatory body is instilled to balance the world economy. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
Thanks for stating this so succinctly. We are all living on crumbs now. We need a change of focus and a “revaluation” of what should be seen as comprising a successful life.
Well-said, Rodak. The end of cheap energy and the era of American dominance that undergirded it will be a good thing for all of us. In his book, “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization,” Thomas Homer Dixon makes the point that our lives in the future will be poorer, more local, more physical, more dependent on community, and in the long run far happier.
Greed rules in the free market. And such greed in a global market has no limits. We’re pretty much all screwed unless a worldwide regulatory body is instilled to balance the world economy. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
A world-wide regulatory body would be portrayed as the dreaded “One-World Government” by the propaganda of the American plutocracy – one thing I can say about them is, they are very good chess players; they’ve been preparing that argument for decades.
As I said, though, Dan – desperate people tend to do desperate things. Somehow I can’t see the American People submitting quietly to their own economic slavery at the hands of oligarchs. Bread and circuses only work until the pain gets non-ignorable.
Completely agree. It’s gonna get messy. The problem is that I don’t think there is any solution. Go ahead and revolt; overthrow your government and install a new one. But guess what, they’re not going to do any better. Who do you fight against when your oppressors are global?
How about denying global capital access to the US market?
Or, conditioning it on good behavior / fair play?
A more general point, Dan: If the system is structurally unjust, it is incumbent upon us as Catholics to resist those structures through any just means necessary, agreed?
I don’t really have a well formed answer to that question. On the one hand, my instincts say yes, but on the other hand, Jesus didn’t spend any of his energy trying to change the corrupt political systems of his time, and in doing so effected more change for the world than he could have ever done had he brought down the Romans.
Overthrow a government and it works for a generation. Change the heart of one man and get him to do the same, and it changes the world forever.
Dr. King had the right idea — confront injustice with agape love – non-violent resistance and non-cooperation with an evil system (and that’s really what we’re talking about – a system of oppression by an over-class that has broken its restraints and is now rampant, drunk on greed and its own power.)
So how would such resistance work in practice? Would nobody drive their cars to resist the evil of oil company greed? Then how do you get to work? Or how does your business get its inventory?
I really hate to be a downer, but life as we know it depends on the mega-corporations and the greed of the wealthy; they really have us all over a barrel. That is, unless we’re prepared to walk away from life as we know it and all become hippies again. But we all know how that worked out. :)
I would say a good starting point is remembering that God is bigger than any sin.
There is nothing more feared by evil than hope, because there is nothing more subversive of injustice.
Ezekiel 7:19
Yep:
Jesus dropped out of the system.
This country is clearly polarized. I think that’s why something about this interpretation of our present situation rings false to me: I’ve seen too much polemics going on to believe that it’s really that one-sided (not that our two-dimensional political sphere – or should I say plane? – is much better). To be sure, the Tea Party catchphrases about “taking our country back” reveal some blatantly self-serving bigotry, but if there is no real left then who is freaking out about the right?
I’ll stick with Lonergan:
“There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists. There is bound to be formed a scattered left, captivated by now this, now that new development, exploring now this and now that new possibility. But what will count is a perhaps not numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait.”
if there is no real left then who is freaking out about the right?
Pretty much anyone with his or her head screwed on straight?
There is no real, actual left in the US – for all the accusations of “socialism” and “marxism” thrown around by the political right, there is nothing Obama and/or the Dems have done, nothing they’ve proposed to do, and nothing they have any inkling of proposing, that is within a 12-hour plane ride of anything a genuine leftist would recognize as his own.
Julie, do me a favor: Go to the Business section of your local paper. Got it? Great. Now, turn to the Labor section. I will wait as long as it takes.
Pretty much anyone with his or her head screwed on straight?
I would echo this. I own a high-tech company and take home a six figure salary, and I am literally terrified of the right. I’d rather be taxed out the anus than let those people into power.
We are now learning why the Founding Fathers never intended to let the rabble have the vote.
These discussions are always carried on as though there were some hope that if the current system could just be tweaked a bit, this way and that, everything would suddenly be better. The whole thing is rotten. Jesus taught that the whole thing is rotten. Every interpretation of what Jesus taught that attempts to reconcile His teachings to “business as usual” is an infernally inspired interpretation. The Son of Man had neither a steady job, nor a place to lay His head. When He said “Let the dead bury the dead,” He meant what He said. And He was talking to YOU–not to “the other guy.” You won’t find this in the Business Section of your paper.