Ruminations on The Election
This is a silly season in America. Sillier than even by our usually silly standards. We are mired in one of the most peculiar political processes ever. The Republican party is deeply divided between far right social conservatives who want to undo the entire post war era – especially women’s rights, economic conservatives who want to undo the entire social safety net and throw us all to the wolves of market magic, libertarians who simply want to undo America as we now it and re-knit what’s left into a micro-local-Randian-polis style survival of the fittest landscape, and elderly white males who are aghast that the country is becoming more diverse than they are and that even a black person can be president. This toxic brew has served up some of the least fit presidential candidates ever, and has exposed the core of the GOP as being so far to the right that even Reagan and Nixon no longer qualify to serve under its banner.
It is a party committed to obstruction – it won’t even tolerate the benign appointment of Federal judges, and is salivating at undoing all Obama’s efforts no matter how half hearted people like myself find them.
It is hard to describe to anyone not living here just how far to the right our politics have shifted. We live in an era of demonization, cultural division, and outright lunacy. Ignorance is lauded: it was not for nothing that Rick Santorum could say with a straight face that encouraging people to go to college was a bad idea. The far right sees education as its enemy. Education, after all, is likely to lift the veil on the paternalism, authoritarianism, outmoded thinking, and prejudice that haunts great swathes of America. This remains a very parochial electorate where the assertion that is America’s right to consume the world’s resources at an inordinate pace despite the wishes of the rest of the planet garners widespread support. Going to college may expose our young to views from around the globe. That may produce a tolerance for foreigners and foreign things. This in turn may dilute the American Way. And the American Way is not just perfect, it is God given and perfect. To dilute it it is to offend the Almighty as well as to be unpatriotic.
Great chunks of this country live firmly in a time warp. The dissonance is extraordinary. Modernity creeps in everywhere. It is both embraced and is the cause of unease. Technology brings the “other” into every living room where it can be accused of being the cause of all ills. The relative decline of America is overblown by a right wing media in order to stir up political opposition to Obama, but serves also to fuel a desire to reject all things modern. This section of America has not been well served by globalization. It is isolated from the world and wants to stay that way. It wants to retreat in order to recapture the hey day of American unilateral power. It wants to re-embrace Reaganite homilies and simple thinking. It wants to resort to an uncomplicated era when American power was absolute, America made and enforced the rules, and American wealth was sufficient proof that the American Way was also the best way.
This was always an illusion of course. Empires always fade under the weight of their own force. They enfeeble themselves in the name of asserting power, and then scream bloody murder when the walls cave in. It must be someone else’s fault when the end comes. And a prolonged period of internal discussion about whose fault it was inevitably leads to deep and possibly irreparable damage. America can no longer afford it enormous offensive – in every sense of that word – capability, yet is scared of retrenchment. Cutting military spending is viewed as unpatriotic. This is in a country whose longest political tradition was to avoid foreign entanglements and to keep a minimal full time military. How the delusions of empire have twisted America’s view of its own past. At the opposite end of the spectrum there are many who still revile the entire edifice of the New Deal – they see it as an imposition by a tyrannical central authority on the supposed free will of the rugged individuals who founded this place.
Everyone seems to be looking backward. The only question is how far back they want to go.
To have an election in the midst of this brooding self-regarding petulant outburst is never a good idea. The far right always comes out ahead. The progressive wing in our politics has been unable to articulate a globally connected version of the American Way capable of countering the urge to plunge backwards. The Democrats have, by and large, looked weak and divided even whilst holding total control of Congress. The American political system was never established to accommodate deeply divided parliamentary style politics. It assumed a banal centralist consensus held together by common cause – a few white male landowners with similar interests if different views was all we needed to take into account. So watering down central power and preventing the emergence of a bloc capable of dominating politics was essential. Then we could all revert back to the more important business of running our plantations and farmsteads safe in the knowledge that no tyrant would interrupt our sober paternalistic way of life.
The system we have is unsuited to the politics we have. There is no loyal opposition. There is simply obstruction and venom. There is no alternative policy preparation. There is only destructive denial and nihilistic argument. There is no common set of facts subject to different interpretation – there are different facts created to support pre-existing ideas. Most of all there is no common vision of America. Modern and pre-modern are in calamitous conflict. Obama’s election was not a decisive moment of racial healing and social construction. It was a moment of crisis for pre-modern America. It was the moment at which all the sundry aspects of American modernization came together in opposition to America’s darkest past. That it came at a moment of great economic crisis also heightened the threat it represented. A fevered backlash was inevitable. We have lived through almost four years of ugly resurfacing of prejudice, repressed anger, fear, and hatred of advancement.
The result is that the Republican party is now the party of the white working class and the Democrats, by and large, represent those who have benefitted from progress – women, minorities, and the more educated.
It is this decoupling of the mass working class from the progressive cause that is the most disturbing. They are the ones most hurt by the global connection of the economy, their skills, or lack thereof, are the least required. And they are the least easily adapted. Their standard of living has declined relative to those propelled forward by the progressive movement of the 1960’s and then again by the deregulatory impulse of the 1980’s and 1990’s.
This is why, in many ways, the old world division of society – and economics – into classes aligned along labor versus capital versus landownership are ever less relevant or explanatory. Knowledge, education, information flows, and access to a global community are much more explanatory of the way in which American politics has morphed in the last thirty years. Unfortunately our theoretical constructs are still stuck in an industrial world circa mid 1800’s.
There is nothing in our debate this year that suggests we will resolve any of this. Indeed it is almost certain that whoever is elected president in November will face an intractable political system bent on continued obstruction, delay, and regressive argument. Neither major party seems able to modernize sufficiently to develop a global message. Retreat is still the order of the day. The economy is still stuck as a result – we cannot arrive at a consensus on what to do until we have agreed what ails us. The malaise will linger. At the current rate of inadequate progress, and given our mediocre policy responses, our economy will only arrive at a full recovery – defined as full employment – after many more years. That is a hopeless response. Hopeless. It will make politics more acidic and hate filled. It will open up more avenues for extremism. We can expect more Santorum like figures not fewer.
This is not bleak but real. It requires leadership. It requires those currently invested in the success of a globally connected economy to spread the wealth and to understand the pain connection has caused. It requires and acceptance of responsibility rather than a absentee rent seeking on the part of the intelligentsia – in politics, in business, and in academia. It requires continuation towards and not away from modernity. It requires the articulation of a vision of what the new American Way might offer to those currently disenfranchised by progress. For such progress is no progress at all. And that realization is the biggest threat to America.
This is a country founded on progressive ideals. For it to become persistently regressive is not only dangerous to its own historical trajectory, but to people everywhere. For if America can deny its own past and turn on itself, who else could progress? And where else could a similar liberal project succeed?
