I've started several posts in the last couple of weeks, but I've not
finished them. They didn't really seem to add much, or they seem to be
my repeating things I've written about so often.
In any event, I'm swearing off getting frustrated with Obama or the
Democrats. They are what they are, and regardless of their limitations
and their myopia, their inability to see the big picture or to
understand the significance of the moment, they're the best we're going
to get until we have our "clarifying moment".
In the meanwhile, the "system" has a mind and will of its own, and it gets what
it wants no matter who's in office. At the moment, there is no mind or will that comes
even close to being able to resist or counterbalance it. So things will play
out the way they play out. Until we have our clarifying moment, I think that we have to accept that the underlying structure of American society is reverted to the historical oligarchical norm, and life goes on. There's not much that can be done except to do what we can to mitigate the negative effects.
***
And there's a very good chance that things will get worse. Chris Hedges lays out my fears in an article he wrote for Adbusters–and maybe that's all they are, fears. This is the worst-case scenario, and there are good reasons (see below) to believe
that we can avoid such dramatic social and political deterioration, but we should never be so complacent as to think we
are immune from it:
When a culture lives within an illusion it perpetuates a state of
permanent infantilism or childishness. As the gap widens between the
illusion and reality, as we suddenly grasp that it is our home being
foreclosed or our job that is not coming back, we react like children.
We scream and yell for a savior, someone who promises us revenge, moral
renewal and new glory. It is not a new story. A furious and sustained
backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared
intellectually, emotionally and psychologically for collapse, will sweep
aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans and will usher America
into a new dark age. It was the economic collapse in Yugoslavia that
gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the Weimar Republic that vomited up
Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in Tsarist Russia that opened the
door for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits,
from Christian demagogues to loudmouth talk show hosts, whom we naïvely
dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and
moral renewal. And as in all totalitarian societies, those who do not
pay fealty to the illusions imposed by the state become the outcasts,
the persecuted. . . .As the pressure mounts, as the despair and desperation reach into larger and larger segments of the populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. The emergence of the corporate state always means the emergence of the security state. This is why the Bush White House pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. The motive behind these measures is not to fight terrorism or to bolster national security. It is to seize and maintain internal control. It is about controlling us. (Chris Hedges)
Can the erosion of our civil liberties over the last decade be about anything else? Can there be a better explanation why even a Democratic administration has made it clear it has no intention of rolling back Bush-era encroachments on our civil liberties? It may not be what Obama personally wants; it's what the system wants, and Obama now as a creature of the system must give the system what it demands. I doubt he has much choice about it.
Anybody familiar with the history of the last one hundred years of the Roman Republic, from the assassination of the "progressive" Gracchus brothers to the assassination of Julius Caesar and the civil war that followed cannot but be struck with how once a line was crossed, there seemed no turning back. Once certain agreed-upon rules were discarded, the inevitable barbarism followed–it was every one out for himself. Nobody with any influence seemed to be able to see the big picture or cared about understanding it; every one was too concerned about his own fantasies and ambitions, key players became willing to use any tactic to advance their agenda: obstruct, obstruct, obstruct; tell any kind of lie or promote any baseless slander; manipulate the uninformed masses; bribe those who won't be fooled; proscribe and purge those who refuse to be manipulated or bought, and in the end probably get purged yourself.
This is the way it plays out time and time again throughout history, and
so what we're seeing now in America fits that norm. What we used to think of
as "American normal" was possible only before we became too rich and too powerful. Once wealth, power and the ambition to have more of both become the raison d'etre of politics, we became like every one else–an insatiable system that needs to be fed, no matter what violence, what injustices and imbalances are committed to keep feeding it. Because the main driver of world history in a fallen world,
and American history as a part of it, is patricians versus the plebes–those who are the mouths of the system and those whom they consume. Nothing matters to the mouths except that they be fed.
The Roman Republic was destroyed in the end by the system's insatiable greed and lust for power. It got too big and too wealthy and its elites lost any sense of balance, any healthy sense of what was needed for a society that could function with a measure of equity and justice. It was ruined by its system-serving senatorial oligarchs who didn't have the foresight to understand that they had to cut a deal with the plebes, that they had to share the wealth. Why should they? Why should they give up what they have? They're entitled, and the others are losers. It's not about what's good for the whole; it's about what's good for me; it's about how much I can grab for myself–let the whole take care of itself. And so the whole collapses, and the society looks only to be delivered from the chaos that ensues, and if a strong man promises to restore order, he will be embraced. Julius Caesar, btw, was aligned with the plebes. After his assassination the plebes rioted. He was assassinated not by freedom-loving republicans, but by jealous oligarchs who made a Caesar an inevitability.
***
There are factors that make our situation somewhat different from the historical norm, and I'm not without hope that those differences can help us to avoid what otherwise seems inevitable. Even if they are relatively invisible, a much larger proportion of the the citizenry than has been historically typical is well informed and not easily manipulated. We don't have a situation where there are only the super rich and their dependents on the one hand and the destitute masses on the other–at least not yet. And maybe we'll find a way to muddle through with some moderate adjustments here and there, but I doubt it.
I'd say a third of the American citizenry composes this healthy middle segment. They are the educated, relatively affluent Whiggish center, those found neither among the super wealthy or that crazed right-wing segment of the middle class allied with the super-wealthy, some more conservative some more liberal, but both basically decent and sane. While the media and the current elites running things have lost their moral and civic compass in their compulsion to serve the system, leaders from this center group might emerge at some point to restore sanity and pilot us toward some sensible solutions.
We'll need to have our clarifying moment first, though. The Great Depression was the last time we had such a clarifying moment; the Civil War the moment before that. In both a central group of educated, public spirited middle-income citizens in alliance with public-spirited elites was able to move the country forward. I'm hopeful something similar will happen again in the next decade or two, but it won't be happening during the Obama administration, unless during it we have a clarifying moment that will force him to become the leader I still believe he has the potential to become. I think it's clear that he cannot choose to do the right thing, even if he wants to. Circumstances have to force a crisis of confidence in the system to clear an opening for a different course of action.
It's the Whiggish middle group of white and blue collars from which a stabilizing, enduring solution can emerge. I don't believe a destitute, mob-driven revolt will lead to an improvement. But it may come to that if a solution doesn't emerge from the middle group first. Let's hope it does.
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