And it pains me to see it.
It pains me to see that you can actually get away with running a political program for decades on end, in a democracy where everyone can vote no less, that is all about transferring the wealth of working people to the rich.
It pains me that the public is so dumb that you can steal their money and their quality of life, for decades on end, and successfully hide what you're doing behind attacks on gays, or minorities, or immigrants, or tin-pot dictators abroad.
It pains me that (alleged) people ranging from Joe McCarthy to Newt Gingrich to Glenn Beck to Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh could infect American politics with their endless stream of venom, bringing it to its knees, and the public's reaction to that is to decide that American politics is too angry and vitriolic in general. As though these folks had their lefty equivalent in -- who? -- Rachel Maddow? As though the vitriol were coming from both sides of the aisle.
And as though there even are two sides of the aisle, anymore.
In truth, there is. Kinda. Sorta. And peripherally. I do think there is a qualitative difference between Democrats and Republicans on issues of civil rights. And I think it highly unlikely that a Democrat would have plunged the country into the folly of Iraq in 2003. Even though it was America's most liberal president on domestic politics -- Lyndon Johnson -- who lied the country into its most debilitating war, I think it's fair to say that those days are over. Democrats are hardly different from Republicans on, say, "defense" spending or the Palestinian conflict, but I don't think they're as overtly war-hungry as the chickenhawks of the GOP, plain and simple.
But the defining issue of our times is not civil rights or a stupid-ass war in Iraq. Rather, it is instead the question of the distribution of wealth in our society. And on these matters, there is almost no difference anymore between the two parties.
Consider the first paragraph of the Times' "G.E. Chairman" article referenced above. It goes like this: "President Obama, sending another strong signal that he intends to make the White House more business-friendly, named a high-profile corporate executive on Friday as his chief outside economic adviser, continuing his efforts to show more focus on job creation and reclaim the political center."
I'm sorry. I must need to get my hearing-aid batteries checked. For a minute there it sounded like you said "make the White House more business-friendly"? You mean the White House of Larry Summers, the nice man whose policies in the last Democratic White House brought us a massive global recession? Do you mean the White House that bailed out Wall Street, one hundred cents on the dollar, from their outrageous scams but has left the rest of us hanging, losing our jobs, our houses and our unemployment safety net? Do you mean the White House that drafted a ridiculous health care legislative monstrosity in order to placate insurance companies, forcibly driving 35-million brand-new customers into their arms? That White House? You want to make those guys more business-friendly?
There's been only one issue that really matters in the thirty years since Ronald Reagan came to Washington, and that is the highly successful effort by the plutocracy to enrich themselves further by destroying the standard of living of the middle, working and poorest classes. All the debates concerning taxes and trade and labor rights and spending and regulation policy have been precisely about this single theme. And all the other debates about gay rights and Iraq and immigration and putting Christ back into Christmas have been peripheral matters to this core initiative, if not intentional distractions.
Astonishingly, this campaign has produced enormous success. And, since policies have consequences, these policies have had the consequence of directing almost every penny of the considerable growth in GDP sustained over the last thirty years into the hands of the rich, while everyone else slips into economic despair, or uses credit cards with usurious interest rates to barely keep their noses above water. I say "astonishingly," because you'd think that this development was the product of a non-democracy, because in a real democracy people would never stand for it. But in fact, that's exactly what's happened, with the compliance of the victims in this crime. We do get to actually vote for the people who make policy in this country, but we don't in fact choose candidates with our best interests at heart. In the most recent go-round, we picked a group of feral dog Republicans for our Congress even more obscene than the McCain-Boehner variety who impoverished the country only two years earlier.
So, no doubt Republicans are talking about civility in politics today. First, after Tucson their invective is unpopular even with astonishingly dumbed-down American voters. Second, they realize that bullets are now flying towards members of Congress and that they are, um, members of Congress themselves. But most importantly, there's hardly anything left to loot. As Warren Buffet so eloquently put it, after noting that he pays a lower percentage of his income in taxes than does his receptionist, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
Yeah, I'm all for civility in politics. But not if it's a mask for capitulation. And that's more or less what I see in the American politics of the last generation or so. One "side" is just absolutely crazed-to-the-wall, seemingly unencumbered by any notion of civility, and absolutely destructive of democratic institutions and even government itself, in pursuit of its predatory agenda. Meanwhile, the other "side" pursues the almost identical set of economic politics, only with a nicer face and the endearing big toothy smile of a Barack Obama. But the outcomes are the same.
Those of us distraught at seeing the president punt on first down in his negotiations with the GOP thugs are making the fundamental error of seeing these conversations as actual negotiations. They are such only in the sense that one self-defining tribal faction wants to be the folks who get the perks from actually holding office and doing the bidding of the overclass, rather than allowing the other faction to perform that role. But substantively? Nah. Obama's not "folding" in "negotiations" because he is not starting out anywhere fundamentally different than his "opponents" in these conversations. They both want the same outcome, give or take a dollar or two here and there. They both have to manage their public images in order to appeal to their respective voting bases, while in reality simultaneously serving the same puppet-masters.
In this context, the current blah-blah over civility is just another side show, just another diversion.
And, in any case, civility is over-rated. While I agree that it is rarely necessary to employ the sort of ugly ad hominem attacks out of which the likes of Limbaugh have spun an entire career and a small fortune, what is truly lacking in our politics in not civility, but in fact passion. And honesty.
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