I could tell you that my heart was broken by what happened in Wisconsin this week, but in truth that’s not quite accurate.
I grew into political awareness and maturity in the middle of the
1970s. For people my age, then, our entire adult lives have been one
long witness to the dismantling of that which we grew up taking for
granted as a foundation for any further progress that might come. We
lived in the relatively egalitarian country of the New Deal and the
Great Society, with its robust middle class and a measure of earnest
compassion for the poor. Today, that seems like a foreign country, if
not a remote planet.
Over the course of our adult lives:
We watched in shock and horror as the country turned to a Hollywood
washout, who was literally a national joke candidate five years earlier,
and made him president, following him down every path of joyful
self-destruction and absurd deceit.
Our jaws dropped in the 1990s at the visage of New Gingrich, the most
overtly petulant and destructive piece of self-loathing to ever occupy a
human body, as he was elevated to the highest position in the United
States Congress, and pioneered the basest politics and the shattering of
our government that remains our inheritance today. As if that weren’t
shameful enough, at the same time Gingrich’s buddy down at the other end
of Pennsylvania Avenue was destroying the meaning of the Democratic
Party, aping the Republican sell-out to corporate thieves and the
abandonment of the public interest – especially the poor, the first to
be thrown under the bus.
And, despite the fact Bill Clinton deserves to rot in hell for the
damage he did in exchange for his personal joyride in the White House,
we were nevertheless forced to watch in horror the relentless and
destructive lunacy of the president’s impeachment for the high crime of
lying about a blow-job.
We had to endure the travesty of Bush versus Gore, one of the most
egregious tramplings of democratic practice imaginable, then watch the
sickening product of that judicial rape: the swaggering wars based on
lies, the torture, the doubling of the national debt, the environmental
depredations, the economic melt-down, and the raison-d’etre for it all:
the radical shifting of wealth from the 300 million of us to the
one-tenth of one percent who own everything in sight.
Perhaps most emotionally devastating of all – Et tu, Brute? – we’ve
suffered the betrayal these last years of another Democratic sell-out, a
supposedly liberal-if-not-socialist president actually so conservative
and so sold-out that he couldn’t even bear to pursue his own personal
interest sufficiently to produce a successful presidency, but has rather
continued and amplified the worst characteristics of the open sore that
was the Bush presidency, even in the midst of crisis opportunities not
seen since the 1930s.
So, no, by this time, my heart was not really broken when my former
home-state, Wisconsin, voted emphatically to commit suicide this week.
But only because there’s so little of that heart left to break. Shards
here and there were crushed and extinguished, to be sure, but I am
becoming rapidly beyond caring about the country I live in, a place and a
people so determined to get it wrong at every juncture imaginable. At
some point, don’t you just have to stop trying and let the
substance-abuser finish the job on their own?
This country is dying, let’s be clear. It may live yet. It may
survive for decades in slow decline. It may find a way in utter crisis
to throw off, before it is too late, the fat slimy boa which is
squeezing every last cent of value out of it. Its political class may
invent a devastating foreign crisis with massively grim consequences in
order to deflect public attention from its manifest failings. Maybe it
will even be some combination of all of the above.
We just killed the goose ourselves, through a toxic mix of greed, laziness and stupidity.
Who knows? What we can be sure of, however, is that what was once a
great and promising idea as much as a nation is now decrepit to the
core, and rapidly rotting away, and that these wounds are entirely
self-inflicted. That, for me, is the kicker. The Soviets didn’t invade
and take us over. We didn’t succumb to some raging virus like the Black
Plague. A meteor didn’t blast a hole in the middle of North America.
We just killed the goose ourselves, through a toxic mix of greed, laziness and stupidity.
Though Wisconsin managed to only break the few shards of my unbroken
heart still remaining, it’s worth considering the details of the episode
to get a sense of how truly wrecked we are as a people. Much like
George W. Caligula, who campaigned as the compassionate conservative but
governed as a Cheneybot monster, Scott Walker came to office without
mentioning in the campaign any of the scorched earth policies he was
actually hired by the Koch Brothers and their ilk to foist upon his
hapless state. So the first thing he does after his inauguration is give
away hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthy.
Then, lo and behold, there appears a shortfall in the state’s budget of
precisely that amount – almost as if that whole math thing actually
works, after all – and so he declares a crisis which can, of course,
only be solved by draconian burdens being imposed upon non-one
percenters.
That means that the public employee unions are called upon to bear
the burden of massive givebacks of their salary and benefits. But then –
this being America and the 21st century and all – the unions agree to
one hundred percent of these demands. But Walker and his fellow
Koch-class acolytes are not satisfied with having to take yes for an
answer, because their real project is to crush the unions into political
insignificance, if not to terminate them altogether. So the real issue
was never the fiscal crisis, which was entirely fabricated, nor even
finding a solution to it, which the already pathetic unions had readily
agreed to. The real issue was to destroy the labor movement, and the
political party it has (stupidly, in recent decades) supported for so
long.
But when labor and some Democrats and a lot of courageous and
determined ordinary Badgers decided that enough was finally enough, the
question was ultimately presented to the public in the form of a recall
election. Massive amounts of money (Walker outspent the other side by a
ratio of about eight to one) paid for massive amounts of televised lies
about how the brave governor was only fighting special interests on
behalf of the people, and it worked. (Though, let’s be honest here –
lots of Wisconsin voters knew exactly the score, and stupidly and
self-destructively decided to tear down teachers and nurses and park
rangers and the like from their decent middle class living, instead of
drawing a line in the sand demanding that everyone to rise up to that
modest standard.)
They are relentless, they are rich, and they
are talented in ways that would awe and possibly even repulse
Machiavelli himself. Oh, and by the way, they are winning, too. Big
time.
That’s the America of today, and it’s a glimpse of the very near-term
future. The formula is pretty simple, really. Wealthy elites who have
spent the better part of a century chafing under the unbearable burdens
of the New Deal and Great Society (where they are rendered mere
billionaires instead of zillionaires) have finally found a way to steal
back ‘their’ money. Buy whole political parties, buy the media, buy –
therefore – the entire mindset of the country, buy the Supreme Court,
dumb down education, especially the study of history, make college
prohibitively expensive, repress dissent, create distracting enemies
abroad (towel heads) and at home (fags), replace jobs with machines and
cheap overseas workers, squeeze the economy so that money is scarce, and
divide and conquer the 99 percent, so that those who miraculously still
maintain a vestige of decent wages and benefits from an ancient
civilization called 20th century America will be resented and torn-down
by those already drowning.
You gotta hand it to them, it works pretty well. (Being a sociopath
evidently does not correlate at all with poor planning skills. But who
knew there were so many amongst us?) As a measure of the sheer success
of this project, consider how – even in a moment of crisis – there is
nowhere on the horizon a politically viable alternative narrative about
what ails the country and how to solve the problem. Sure, there is the
odd Paul Krugman around, or Dennis Kucinich (whoops, never mind), but
ask yourself this question: Can you name even a single prominent
politician across the entire political landscape who is remotely telling
the truth about the economic holocaust of American kleptocracy? Indeed,
it is truly a measure of the stunning proportions of the overclass’s
victory that even a water-carrier as devoted as Barack Obama is labeled a
socialist, and both he and the ideas he doesn’t even remotely represent
are thoroughly discredited. Even if the answers to the question of what
would fix America weren’t manifestly obvious (as in, just do what we
used to do before the right came along and dismantled everything), this
is a stunning achievement of truly Orwellian proportions: For vast
numbers of Americans, real understanding of the problem and real
consideration of the solution cannot even be thought of.
It will get far worse before it gets better, if it does. The
Wisconsin election was widely and correctly seen as a dry run for
November, but in fact November is already as over as is May or April.
The hapless Obama people may not have gotten the word, but they are as
dead as the unions in Wisconsin that they didn’t bother to support. And
Obama will go down in near-term, right-wing renderings of history as
another Jimmy Carter. Meanwhile, stupid liberals, who slavishly admired a
decidedly right-wing, militarist, ultra-statist, corporate-serving
Democratic president, will sit holding their heads in surprise at the
damage wrought to the president himself, to his party, and to their
cherished liberal principles. Um, sorry, but have y’all been snoozing
through Afghanistan and Pakistan? Did you miss the whole
presidential-ordered assassinations program? Have you not heard what has
happened to whistleblowers? Did you forget the tax cuts and the offer
to dismantle Medicare? Have you been watching Fox and not heard about
the growth of military spending? Did you not know that the health care
bill was co-authored by, and for the benefit of, insurance and
pharmaceutical companies? Have you not heard that our ultra-progressive
president has done nothing whatsoever about the planetary über-crisis of
global warming, other than to open vast new oil drilling fields? Did
you not see in action the joy and wonder of Obamaism in 2010, the most
devastating election for a political party in half a century, and coming
only two years after the total meltdown of the GOP under Bush? Sorry,
but this is the SOB you adored and went to the mat for?
This country’s future looks grim in so many ways. You can just feel
the doors and windows shutting, one by one. Are we really so far off,
given the displays we’ve already seen, from being a corporate-owned
polity, in which oceans of Citizens United sponsored propaganda limits
the cognitive landscape of an entire country, sham elections and a
steady stream of brain-numbing high-def television gruel satisfies most
of the (obese) public enough to keep them stuck on their sofas, while a
massive police state armed with domestic drone aircraft and angry cops
deal swiftly with the few remaining malcontents stupid enough to demand a
return to the better country we once knew? You know, more or less a
carbon copy of Putin’s Russia, here in North America.
I have no interest whatsoever in being a prophet of doom, but I ask
you, is that really so far-fetched? If you look around you honestly
today, is it not fair to say that we are pretty much already there? With
the partial exception of social policy issues, do you really have any
choice at the ballot box? Can anyone say that Democrats in Washington,
including the sitting president and the astonishingly narcissistic whore
that was Bill Clinton, represent corporate interests any less than
Republicans, whatever their pathetic rhetoric? Has US foreign policy
gotten even slightly more enlightened since Obama took over from the
smirking troglodytes? Do Americans have any idea of what is truly
happening to them, as opposed to being fixated on gays, immigrants,
foreign bogeymen and spoon-fed celebrity drivel? And were not Occupy
activists subjected to pepper spray, mass arrests and wholesale street
clearings, even by supposedly liberal mayors and college presidents?
It’s possible, of course, that the end is not nigh after all. Indeed,
I see something of a great historical race transpiring in America. On
the one hand, the powers of greed are rapidly filling in all the puzzle
pieces of their sociopathic conspiracy to own everything, including –
yes, really, I’m not kidding – food, water and our very genes. They are
relentless, they are rich, and they are talented in ways that would awe
and possibly even repulse Machiavelli himself. Oh, and by the way, they
are winning, too. Big time. Even when they lose, they win.
On the other hand, demographics are not so favorable to the
destruction of the nation. Young people are far more progressive than
their scary-stupid and mega-mean grandparents. The good news is that the
latter are dying, and the former are taking their place. Moreover,
demographic trends are also shifting the racial composition of the
electorate. For whatever reason, whites tend to have horrible politics,
so the browning of America is also a very good thing. (If we could pull
off the same stunt with gender, that would be great news, too, since it
indeed turns out that, that’s right, the women are smarter. Better
politics through bioengineering, maybe? Soon to come to your local
supermarket. Or at least obstetrician.)
We have also seen displays across the globe of Basta!-ism which raise
hope. From Russia to Egypt to Israel to Greece to Canada to Wall Street
and Santa Monica College, people are standing up and saying Enough! And
it works. These schoolyard bullies crushing us are like ... well,
schoolyard bullies. Call them out on their blustery braggadocio and
watch them fold in the face of real power. True, it doesn’t always
happen (see “Wisconsin, State of”), but it does often enough. And there
is also the hope that as the plutocrats continue their insatiable
campaign to impoverish the rest of us they will go a bridge too far,
pushing by their own actions a squawking wholesale resistence out the
proverbial birth canal and into being.
Indeed, if there is one bit of transcendent hope left it is that
people in this country still seem non-comatose (or perhaps just
self-interested) enough so as to make regressives their own worst enemy.
Their shit sells well to dummies in campaigns, but it turns out that
while you can lie about everything imaginable – right up to nice bearded
people in the sky who control everything from war and peace to NFL
touchdowns but somehow never seem to appear on Earth – the lies cannot
ultimately withstand the laws of political physics. Those lovely pieties
and viciously divisive tactics that are so successful at separating
idiots from their votes on election day are rather less capable of doing
magic tricks thereafter. Regressives may want very badly for Iraqis to
lay down and accept American imperialism, but that doesn’t make it
happen, and no amount of arrogant bring-it-on blustery by
Vietnam-avoiding chickenhawks can change that. They may want voodoo
economics to balance the budget, but those pesky mathematical equations
keep getting in the damn way. They may tell you that global warming is a
hoax, but nevertheless every day the planet gets relentlessly hotter.
In short, time after time there is no better antidote for regressive
government than regressive government itself. That’s why the right
always and endlessly pays homage to a ridiculously distorted version of
Saint Ronald of Reagan, a guy so long departed from the White House that
he might as well be James Buchanan as far as most contemporary
Americans are concerned. Hmmm. Why not talk about the joys and wonders
of George W. Bush, instead, who after all, was far more Reagan than
Reagan, and who happened only just yesterday? Perhaps for the same
reason that governments pursuing austerity in Europe are falling like
dominoes. And also for the same reason that the sweep of regressive
state governors brought in by the Obama debacle of Election 2010 are
proving so unpopular, including even Scott Walker, who, despite
surviving the vote, is only the third governor in all of American
history to be subjected to a recall.
Thus, as much as it sickens me to say it, perhaps the best thing that
could happen to us could be the election of a Mitt Romney, especially
one, as this one is, so completely straight jacketed by the insane
elements (that is to say, all of them) of his party. Unless Romney turns
out to be very, very lucky, his policies will not only not turn the
economy around, but they will saddle the country with vastly more debt
than the right has managed to do so far already. It’s possible this
could be the tipping point, once and for all, in the race between good
demographics and bad demographics, between sanity and insanity. Maybe
people will finally get what they’re buying, and start looking for a
refund.
On the other hand – and be honest here – wasn’t that just what you
were thinking after eight years of Bush and Cheney, the entire last four
of which spent with the president’s job approval ratings in the toilet?
I sure as hell was, only to see Republicans (with a lot of help from Obama) win a crushing victory only a mere two years later.
In the end, there may be no bottom to the depths of self-destructive stupidity of which Homo Americanus is capable of stooping.
I’m pretty sure we’re gonna be finding out here, real soon.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at
Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers'
reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
