My Michelle Moment: America Does Itself Proud

Not conservative enough? Are these guys kidding? What is the number of their drug dealer, man? Where do they score such great hallucinogens?!?! I’m jealous, dude. I haven’t been that high since I saw Blue Oyster Cult play in 1973.

Finally, what remains, then, as a third option would likely be viable for the party itself, yet still represents existential suicide. Imagine a dead body propped up in a chair, sitting in the corner, largely ignored except for the increasingly foul smell. The GOP could return to the days of Rockefeller and Ford, end the hijacking by the radical right, and become once again a moderate-conservative party. Of course, this presumes that the radicals in the party who control it so completely – to the extent that there really isn’t a rivalry with moderates anymore, chiefly because there aren’t really moderates left there with whom to fight – that these folks would relinquish the vehicle they’ve commandeered. Fat chance of that happening, Me Bucko. The freaks who have been salivating over Sarah Palin couldn’t even stand John McCain because he was too liberal for them. What can you say about people for whom Mike Huckabee is considered insufficiently right-wing? Do you see these troops lining up to march fervently behind the milquetoast moderation of Dick Lugar? Do you see the twenty-three percent of Texans who still think that Barack Obama is a Muslim skipping a week’s worth of losing Lotto tickets so that they can send a campaign contribution to their new hero, Arlen Specter?

In short, I see nowhere for the GOP to go looking forward. I predicted two years ago that the party could actually cease to exist in rather short order, and I think that is even more likely now.

Finally, in addition to the upsides of improved Democratic Party fortunes and a Republican Party falling to pieces, there are other huge positive developments emanating from what transpired this week and this decade – too many to elaborate on here. But there is one, in particular, that is worthy of mentioning, particularly because it is both general and truly radical – in the literal sense of going to the root – and therefore has the capacity to indirectly affect so many specific issue areas.

The high point of the 2008 campaign, for me, was Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race. I liked the content of his remarks very much, but what I really appreciated most was the tone of the speech. If any politician in my lifetime has spoken to the American public with such intelligence and maturity, or has given remarks that demanded such sophistication and thoughtfulness of his or her listeners, I don’t remember it. Maybe Jimmy Carter did, or Bobby Kennedy – I don’t know. I do know at least that it has been a very, very long time indeed. If Obama can continue, going forward, to do this over and over again, using the bully pulpit that only a president has, and that a charismatic president has especially, he can raise the level of discourse in this country dramatically. Simply by framing and discussing issues in these terms, he will force the press and the opposition and the public to follow along. As was the case with his race speech, this could result in advancing the dismal state of our national dialogue from one which chiefly features two-dimensional dumbed-down cardboard characterizations, to another which is built around more honest representations of our political realities.

The effects this change in tone might have across the board could be remarkable, especially since the entire regressive program is so heavily dependent on ignorant citizens imbibing simplified and emotionalized characterizations of complex, multi-sided and nuanced issues. Imagine, to take just one example, if we could finally talk about the Middle East in terms transcending the white hats (Israel) versus black hats (the rest) paradigm that so readily facilitates our foolish and destructive policymaking there. Imagine if we could be allowed to think seriously and intelligently about America’s place in the world, starting with the realization that we spend more on ‘defense’ than all other countries in the entire world – that’s about 195 of them combined! – despite the absence of any existing serious threat to our security. Imagine if we could talk intelligently and knowledgeably about how our economic system compares to those in Europe, for example, and what our policy choices mean in terms of quality of life for Americans. What if we could acknowledge that the polarization of wealth in this country ranks us down along with banana republics throughout the world?

Sometimes the most powerful and profound political changes in a society are the subtlest and quietest in their evolution. Race relations in America, for example, were clearly changed by civil rights legislation. But they were even more affected by the change in consciousness, often generational, that turned racist attitudes from de rigueur to unacceptable in polite society. Indeed, it is arguable that the legislation and the judicial rulings could never have transpired without the less tangible psychological changes preparing the ground for them. Race relations will again change dramatically with the existence of the first black president, much more in this psychological and cultural sense than in a legislative sense. But I raise the question more as an example of a broader possibility than to focus specifically on race. If Obama’s style of governance can demand more of the media and more of the public in terms of a sophisticated processing of our politics, this can only be good news for progressives in America. The dirty little secret of the right is that a thinking public is a death sentence for their lies. Ten minutes of Limbaugh makes that abundantly clear to anyone with half a brain.

Looking ahead, there are surely some reasons to be wary about what comes next. There are many indicators to suggest that neither boldness nor serious progressivism are part of Barack Obama’s DNA, though there are also numerous others to suggest just as emphatically that they are. But that’s for the months and years to come. The new president will have plenty of opportunities to disappoint us, though hopefully he’ll decline to avail himself of very many.

In the meantime, there is so much to celebrate and for which to be thankful. It starts, of course, with the end of the Reagan/Bush/Cheney/DeLay/Scalia/Rove regressive nightmare, and it would be more than enough, frankly, if it simply ended right there. But it doesn’t. We have a new president coming to office who represents our society’s very best in almost every respect. And this is so because we, the owner’s of this democracy, reached back into our history to remember and locate the best within ourselves in order to make that happen.

Emerging from so many years of political darkness – so many moments of utter astonishment at the evil my country was practicing, so much heartache from the destruction done in our name, so much hopelessness after thirty years of Reaganism-Bushism – emerging from these shadows and tentatively poking my head out into the light, one thought kept recurring to me over and again last Tuesday:

It was a good day to be alive.

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