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After the Future

On Political Disappointment (Updated)

A point of clarification about my recent posts regarding my disappointment with Barack Obama. I think that a lot of it is not so much disappointment with him as a…

A point of clarification about my recent posts regarding my disappointment with Barack Obama. I think that a lot of it is not so much disappointment with him as a politician, but that for awhile his candidacy gave me some hope that we might reverse the damage done to us over the last thirty years. It seemed that things were aligning in such a way that a significant shift was a possibility. I didn't think effecting such a shift would be easy; I didn't expect successes across the board, but I did expect at least an effort.  I did not expect this complete cave in, especially when it comes to the Justice Dept., Treasury, and Defense. It's the lack of even a gesture toward an effort that is most disturbing and most disappointing. Not because I have big utopian dreams, but because I fear where we're headed.

If Obama, a guy who at least intellectually gets it, and a two-house Dem majority can't put a halt to the regressive track we're on, then my worst fears are confirmed:  the system at a fundamental level has become incapable of balancing and responding to the broad public interest, regardless which party is in power. I'm ok with a cyclical movement from more or less conservative to more or less liberal, but that's not what's happening to us.  We're moving aggressively to the Right whenever Republicans are in power, and when Democrats are in power, the Right consolidates its gains–there's no real shift leftward toward the center to balance things out. The center keep on being defined further and further to the Right.

So it's not the performance or lack of it from an individual politician. It's the general complacency about the status quo exhibited by him and his appointees, and the cynicism exhibited by by those who just accept the fact that there's nothing more should be expected from mainstream politicians. We are in a serious crisis concerning where power and wealth are aggregated in our country. The balances that were accepted as consensus reality forty years ago no longer exist. For most of us, if we're still employed, it's an abstract issue that we don't feel in an everyday way, so it's easy to shrug our shoulders and think about it as someone else's problem. But it's not.

We don't feel it yet, but we will. In the meantime, it's easy to think about our disappointments with our politicians in the same way we might think about our disappointment with the failure of our local NFL team to make the playoffs. Politics is after all for most of us just an entertainment, something to take sides on, to get our blood up–and like sports, sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Nothing grownups should get too worked up about. Life goes on, and there are more important, closer-to-home problems to worry about.

Life does indeed go on. Americans and the world will find a way to live with an America that has reverted to the historical oligarchical norm. No big deal. This whole idea that America was capable of being more than that was idealistic nonsense all along, right? Most people are sheep who want to be ruled; so they vote for the Big Daddies who promise to keep them safe. Why should I or anyone expect more from the majority of our fellow Americans? We shouldn't be disappointed in Obama; it's Americans who so docilely accept this state of affairs who should disappoint us.

I wanted to resist being forced to accept this as the truth about who we are, and Obama's candidacy gave me reason to hope I could resist it, that we would find a way to realize the better part of our national character, rather than the fearful, brutish side that our embrace of the Right represents . Yes, power and greed have always composed a significant part of our national character, but that's true of everyone. We were that, but we were also something more than that. I no longer believe it, and that's the deeper reason for my disappointment. I'm resigned to America's regression to the historical oligarchical norm, with no pretense that we stand for anything more. And yes, life goes on. It goes on everywhere, and no matter how bad it gets here, most of us will have enough cognitive dissonance to insist we have the best country that ever existed.

What else is there but resignation? We don't have any way to feel the significance of it, so there's no impetus or motivation for collective resistance. People who do feel we are in a significant crisis are dismissed as alarmists or extremists, and we don't want others to think of us that way. But even if we don't care about being branded alarmist, what can we do?  Sign petitions? Take to the streets? Send money to MoveOn or Organizing for America? For what, to get people like Barack Obama elected? To support people who can't get anything done because the system is simply no longer responsive to the public interest?  We don't want to believe that, so we settle into a complacent, moderate point of view–like Obama models for us. Everything is basically OK. Everything that can be done realistically is being done. Life goes on. Go shopping; mow the lawn.

And we do it while round and round we go, circling the drain before inevitably we get pulled down into it.

UPDATE: John Coles:

Look, I understand that things are not moving the way many people want them to and with the speed that some desire, but as far as I am concerned things are a HELLUVA lot better than last year. I think in all the doom and gloom, we forget that our President can now speak in full sentences, has not invaded Russia, and is not ducking shoes everywhere he goes.

Yes, things are better, and if they stayed the way they are now, I'd be relatively ok with it.  The problem lies in that the Obama administration is ok with the status quo and has no interest in redressing the fundamental imbalances effected by the Far-right faction of the power elite. With Obama in the oval office, we're holding steady far to the right where Cheney and his gang drove us; we're not moving things back to a center in which a decent balance was effected from 1932-1980. We're simply marking time until the GOP takes over again, and it will.  Then we will jolt further to the right again.

Comments

5 responses

  1. Bobby C. Avatar
    Bobby C.

    You’ve articulated my despair most cogently.

    Reply
  2. John Ortbal Avatar
    John Ortbal

    Jack: I’ve been following your posts for many months and share your disappointment and despair. Yet, I’m admonished by author Douglas Rushkoff to look at what’s happended from another prespective. He says,
    “In our current position, when disconnection from the real world is itself a cause for concern, movements only serve to disconnect us further from the actionable. They give us content for websites, language for our bumper stickers, and faces to put on our ideals. But they distract us from the matter at hand, and worse, turn our attention upward toward brand mythologies instead of immediately before us to the people and problems that need our time and energy. In the place of real connections to other people, we get the highly charged but ultimately fake connection to an image.
    This is why progressives are so disillusioned by President Obama. He was never anything other than a centrist Democrat. But “brand Obama” gave his supporters—a movement in the fullest sense of the word—an abstracted ideal on which to focus. At least until his election. Meanwhile, the real requirements of progressive activists to contribute to their neighborhoods, promote local business and agriculture, invigorate failing public schools, were again left to someone else. This is not the failure of a president, but the flawed functionality of movements themselves.”
    He suggests that we look to our own local neighbors and community to focus our energies and efforts…
    “Activists would do more to fight Big Agra simply by subscribing to their local Community Supported Agriculture groups. We’d more effectively pull the rug out from under a corrupt financial sector by simply investing in one another’s businesses—our own town restaurants and drug stores—instead of outsourcing our retirement savings to Wall Street. We could more easily re-invent public schools by volunteering our time to them directly, instead of sending our kids to private schools while we sign petitions for government to re-prioritize. And even in health care, we’d end up cutting everyone’s costs by commuting less, smoking less, landscaping less, and, yes, hating less. For each of these actions triggers different responses, undermines industries, requires new legal structures, and so on. It’s tiny, but it’s almost fractal in its impact.
    For as the alternative is now teaching us, one size does not fit all. Americans, in particular, have been living under the premise that there’s something to buy, vote for, or believe in that will simply change everything. And it’s certainly still possible that government could develop the single payer system that pretty much everybody knows deep down would bring the best of industrial health care to the most people.
    But just as we are learning that industrially produced food is not ultimately nutritious, a top-down, passionately executed, and highly branded movement is not ultimately effective.
    In fact, by creating and branding a movement, even the most well-meaning activitsts are disconnecting from terra firma, and instead entering the world of marketing, public opinion, and language selection. Potential participants, meanwhile, are distracted from whatever on-the-ground, constructive and purposeful activity they might do. They get to join an abstracted movement, and participate by belonging instead of doing, or blogging instead of acting.”

    Reply
  3. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    John–
    Ultimately it’s about changes in the culture and changes effected by grass-roots movement politics, not by MoveOn or people like me bloviating. But that isn’t happening and won’t happen until it’s too late, until the structural changes achieved by the far-right power elite start to take their toll in pushing more people out of middle income into poverty.
    That’s where we’re headed, but we’re so accustomed to things being relatively good, we don’t really believe it, and won’t believe it until it gets really bad, then we have the sixties again.
    But when we protest we’ll find that our civil liberties and privacy rights have been so eroded that those protests could be and probably will be ruthlessly suppressed in ways that will be perfectly legal under current and future anti-terrorism laws that we know now the Dems won’t roll back. It would be nice if we could be more grown up and proactive, before we got to that point of pain, and I hoped our election of Obama was a sign that might happen, but it’s clear now that it will not.

    Reply
  4. John Ortbal Avatar
    John Ortbal

    I think the pain of crisis is real for most Americans, and has been building up for some time. But our institutional leaders and politicians seem only to be looking to an idealized past to try and recover some kind of status quo, while the pundits on the right spin populist anger to their own advantage and personal gain.
    We are at the mercy of institutional and corporate systems that no longer contribute to our prosperity or well-being…and in many cases don’t even pretend to work for us any longer. They’ve become largely self-serving (or elite power-serving) in keeping with a pervasive consumerist ethic and lifestyle in America, along with the media facilitating an unbridled narcissism that blots out civic engagement or discourse. Thus politics becomes not about governance or debate among equals but “selling” a point of view or “brand” and manipulating opinion. Poll numbers have become our civic currency in a carnival contest of “winners” and “losers”.
    We’ve forsaken our social and civic associations in favor of individual self interest and accumulation of “wealth” in the form of material goods. My fear is that a younger generation (my own step children for example) don’t really have a strong sense of “civil liberties” or “privacy rights” in an Internet age where every aspect of private life is instantly available and accessible, and often deliberately promoted to gain fame and noteriety.
    Most older family members and friends I know are in a state of profound doubt about their most fundamental assumptions. As Leonard Cohen sings, “There’s a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong.”

    Reply
  5. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Thank you, John. Well said.
    I think that your remarks about twenty-somethings is an interesting one, and I will think about that some more. It could be they don’t care because their parents don’t care. I have a 19 year old, and he cares because I do, and he’s well aware of my freak outs about this and he gets why. But he would probably agree with you that most of his peers don’t see this as a critical issue.
    So your main point is right on. Whatever the reason concern about protecting traditional rights is not in the air; it’s an abstraction that doesn’t seem worth getting worked up about, it’s just a concern of the left, and and some on the libertarian right, but not enough to influence mainstream thinking, and that’s pretty scary.

    Reply

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