Commentary

The current crisis threatening the economy has been called a financial crisis, it has destroyed the entire investment banking industry, led to the nationalization of several major financial businesses, and is now causing a stolidly Republican administration to organize a safety net for banks that may cost $700 billion. This all seems entirely financial, but I want us to focus on a larger issue. The steady loss and decline of American power. Reality is often not revealed by our senses: we know that well enough from our scientific discoveries. So it may seem as if the sun revolves around the earth as it was thought to do for millenia, but now we know the opposite is true. Simple observation is not enough. We need to dig deeper.

Thus it is now with the current crisis. I doubt that we will solve the deeper issues until we understand the causes that lay beyond our cursory observation. I find it simplistic to say that this crisis began with the torrent of mortgages lent to people who had no way to repay them as soon as the economy turned even modestly against them. If we examine beyond this obvious fact we reveal an economy that for two or three decades was unable to deliver wealth growth without debt accumulation. We find an economy built upon the Reaganite illusion that ‘things will work out’ and that America does not have to look at its habits of consumption. Beginning in the 1970’s a section of our population found that the so-called ‘American Dream’ was shifting further and further from their grasp. America had for decades been the world’s undisputed economic giant, leading in all sorts of economic categories, one of which was oil production. Yet ever since the 1950’s America had begun to import oil. Reagan’s response to these early signs of decline was to gloss over them with cream puff oratory that hid his paucity of action. He promised to cut government spending yet he oversaw a huge increase instead. His administration saw the beginning of America’s dependence on foreign goods and the decline of its manufacturing base. He quadrupled the Federal deficit and started the inexorable increase in debt that now bedevils us. Up until Reagan the American national debt had been in steady decline from its World War ll peak. Since Reagan it has mushroomed. And the middle class he enticed with his dreamy promises and allusions to ‘a city on the hill’ has found it ever more difficult to accrete wealth.

It is there somewhere that the malaise started. It is not Reagan that we should blame. It is we who are to blame for having fell for his balm. Instead of falling for the illusion, alluring though it was, we should have heeded Jimmy Carter’s call to look in the mirror and question the values that were even then leading us astray. Carter called for energy independence. He asked us to sacrifice in a grander cause: that of a freedom defined the way the George Washington saw it, where Americans had the independence to pursue their lives unencumbered by concerns or ties abroad. Reaganism has produced the exact opposite. In order to accumulate consumer goods Americans have encumbered themselves, way beyond their means, both with debt and with foreign policy entanglements so that the flow of goods and oil into America can be preserved.

The current crisis is a logical outgrowth of this process. We have defined freedom as the constant acquisition of consumer goods rather than having independence from intrusion. We made freedom an economic rather than a political concept. The consequence is that we bought the Reagan potion when the acquisition process became more difficult. We made our pact with the devil, and just as in Faust we now are facing the demand for payment.

So this is not a crisis of finance. It is a crisis of definition. What does it mean to be the “land of the free”? And what are we to be free from?

As a side note to this: one of the reasons I sincerely hope the current debate over the terms and conditions of the proposed bailout plan takes some time is that every American should be concerned to defend the constitution and the role of oversight it places firmly with Congress. The Bush regime has trashed the constitution and established an imperial presidency that has more in common with a monarchy than it does with a republic. We must draw a line and say that even though this crisis may be deep we will deal with it from within the boundaries of the laws and traditions that pre-date the Bush usurpation of power. Enough is enough!

I think that the right is issuing a dying primal scream. The central question has become [to me!]: why is it that conservatives do not want to conserve, but to change. The answer is found somewhere in the notion that they are deeply frustrated with the failure of their agenda. Don’t forget that theirs has been the dominant ideology for three decades now. Were it to work, it would have done so by now. Yet everywhere they look the conservatives see failure. They have failed to re-assert religious values [evolution; gay rights; abortion]. Markets have failed to deliver health care affordably to all. The government even had to intervene in the housing market [a centerpiece of their “ownership society”] to save its catastrophic collapse. And so on. So with these failures of their agenda so abundant they lash out. And they double up on the ferocity of their beliefs. This is why political discourse is so poisoned. It is why old fashioned compromise is dead [temporarily]. In these extreme moments it is no consequence to lie. Or distort. Or hold many diametrically opposed views at once [is it really possible for social conservatives to embrace a unwed teenage pregnant mother, without abandoning their dogma? Apparently yes!]

To me cultural wars are a foolish exercise anyway. There is the way of reason: science, learning, and diversity of opinion; and there is the way of faith: dogma, resistance, reaction, authoritarianism and closed minds. Societies can go in either direction. The trajectory is not determined by economic conditions so much as by educational standards. The clash in America is between local, family, parochial tribal thinking and global, open, diverse and expansive thinking. Neither party stands clearly on the globalist side [trade restrictions are a mantra of the democrats]. But the GOP is more clearly on the parochial side. But the world is opening up. they are on the wrong side of history at the moment. Which feeds their anger.

America has always suffered from bouts of religious fervency. This last bout coincided with a reaction to the social “depravity” of the 1960’s. For many folks back then the educated elite [the anti-war protesters etc] represented an anti-American movement away fro values like patriotism and family. Their counter movement was embodied in the increasingly extreme religious and racial underpinnings of the modern post-Reagan GOP. That fervency is now abating. Other issues have become more important: inequality that includes white people as well as minorities; the weakening of the “American Dream”; the rising cost of living compared with the falling rate of wage increases etc. So the social agenda has slipped in importance. The social conservative alliance with big business and the libertarians has fractured. Libertarians think that the social conservatives have gone too far and are invasive; corporate America is pragmatic and needs quiet and a global reach within which to earn profits. So the Reagan coalition is falling apart. Only the zealots are left. But they are more dangerous for being alone: they are not mitigated by those other factions. Now they can set the entire GOP direction unhindered by those partners.

Couple the global influence eroding the meaning of locality and the shift in basic issue importance [the two are related of course], and the GOP’s ideological grip is loosened. I don’t think the country realizes this explicitly, but I do think the anger we see in the right is explained by this: they came close to victory. This era was theirs and yet they failed to cement their victory. This election is their last chance before Reaganism fades away. They have to win at all costs. I have described them elsewhere as Leninist. They are willing to destroy everything to save it. They have become the Taliban.

Hence the lying, the negativity, and the total lack of agenda.

The conservatives want to change: they want to change the current course of history. [Note to self: this is not a Hegelian position; there is no logic to history!]

As you can see from the posting timeline I took most of this year off from maintaining this commentary. But with summer fading and the election underway I have decided to get back to work, even if only for a short time. Let’s see what happens between now and November.

This discussion, now raging in Washington, about the efficacy and legality of waterboarding sickens me. There should be no discussion. The moral lines are drawn clearly for all to see: torture such as waterboarding is repugnant and totally antithetical to any norm of civilized behaviour. Countries, and individuals, who stoop to torture define themselves as belonging to that group who hold humanity, dignity, and decency in contempt.

Arguments based upon specious expediency are simply signs of weakness. To argue, as some do, that if a large number of lives depended upon the immediate extraction of information from a single suspect, then torture is justified, try to absolve themselves of immorality. They identify themselves with the supposed perpetrator. They become indistiguishable from their enemies. They adopt the pose of tired and tarnished protectors who, despite sacrficing their own moral standing, somehow recoup that standing by saving the lives of an unidentified mass of otherwise helpless and doomed citizens. How heroic they must feel.

But they are merely torturers. They join a long line of barbarians leading back to the Jesuits of the Inquisition who used torture to protect a vision. Besides, as the Jesuits found out, the information gleaned from a victim of torture is highly suspect. By the standards of their own morally challenged world view torture should fail as an instrument of state.

I suspect something else is at work. Within the desparation of those who torture it is weakness and craven insufficiency that drives them to any length to demonstrate their false power. They can claim to those they seek to protect that they are taking all steps deemed necesary to provide that protection. Yes even steps that some call immoral. Their claim extends to include the equally false argument that times are now different, that the threat is now somehow so magnified that it justifies even immoral countermeasures. They do this evil work on our behalf. So it we who are demeaned, just as they are. It is the protected who now inhabit the same gutter of immorality. We too are sullied by their actions.

The debate rages on and I am driven to ask: why? Where are is moral majority? Where is the voice of religion? Where are our philosophers? Our thinkers? Who will defend our principles? Do we even aspire to those same principles anymore? We need to hear from the hearts of those who seek to stand for something rather than simply stand against something. We need to expose the soul of America to an examination to a simple question: are you really a nation that tortures? We need not ten, not a hundred, nor even a thousand Americans to answer. We need a million. We need them now to step forward and stop this debate.

No America does not torture. Where are those million souls?