One of the peculiar characteristics of the time in which we live is that on one level everything seems to be normal. Life goes on pretty much the way it always has for the last fifty years—adults go to work, children go to school, we get around in cars and watch a lot of TV—there are continuities, for sure. But something is different. Things don’t feel quite right. There's relative calm on the outside, but there's barely controlled panic on the inside. People are scared, and they don't quite know about what. It’s not just the heightened level of anxiety that the nation feels following 9/11. It’s been going on longer than that—at least since the sixties, because that’s when Americans began to have a palpable sense that we were no longer who we thought we were.
I think it comes from a feeling of the country having lost its anchor. There's a directionless drift that makes people very anxious, and it comes from a sense that there's no "normal" anymore. This sense of the country losing its norms has accelerated in the last forty years, and much has been written about just getting used to a world where normal means constant change. All kinds of self-help books have come on to the scene instructing their readers how to thrive in chaos or how to ride the rapids of change. And that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t really cut to the heart of the matter, which is that living with constant change is stressful. People need stability. They need to have a feeling of some control over their lives, and when they don’t, they cannot help but feel that they are lost and that their lives are spinning out of control.
So they vote Republican. The Democrats have become identified with the forces of normless chaos, the Republicans with the forces of what used to be thought of as "normal." For many people it's that simple and that primitive. It has hardly anything to do with the specific issues. It's all a matter of who they believe at an unconscious level will be more effective at maintaining and promoting the feeling of order and security that comes from the world being normal again.
But as I've been arguing for the last couple of weeks, voting Republican doesn't slow down the change. It just gives people the illusion of control. It gives people a feeling that their vote is all about trying to bring back the old, normal America. This is a politics of nostalgia and it's just shot through with delusion. It's a politics that refuses to deal with the world as it is.
The fact is that change and social chaos will continue to be the norm no matter whom we elect. And the kind of people we need in political leadership positions are not those who promise to make the anxiety and discomfort go away, but those who will help us to develop the skills that will enable us to adapt. A lot of people I know would say: Well that's what the GOP stands for. The Dems are for giving everybody a fish, to use the old cliche, and the GOP is for teaching every body how to catch his own fish.
My response would be that's what Republicans say, but that's not really what Republicans are for. They're primary motivation is to establish a political and adminsitrative infrastructure that will defend a minority of elites from what they fear is a mob that will use their numbers to push them aside. All the traditional-values talk is window dressing. It's a tool that the Big Money people use cynically to keep the Indians on the GOP reservation.
As I have said before, and I will no doubt say again, a vote for Democrats is not a vote for change. It's simply a vote to apply the brakes. It's the truly conservative vote. It's a vote to return to a politics that is more mainstream. There's nothing particularly exciting about that or about Obama. But he represents a political approach that is more in touch with the reality of a changing America. For real change originates in the cultural sphere, and is eventually reflected in the political sphere. The GOP simply represents a politics of nostalgia, and this politics of nostalgia is a very conveniennt cover for Big Money to push the country into electing people who will do what they need to protect their long-term interests.
I know. Big Money owns the Dems, too. But the Dems in the short run are all we've got–not to promote a sane, progressive agenda, but to restrain a Social Darwinist one. The national Dems, as a group, are callow and short-sighted, but they are at least vulnerable to pressure from below, if such pressure ever materializes.
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