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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 5/29/11

Dispatches From The End Of Empire

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So that's the premise. No one who isn't as regressive as The Inquisition and as caustic as sulphuric acid will emerge with the Republican presidential nomination. The much beloved (in hagiographic form, at least) Ronald Reagan could never satisfy these monsters, so tame was he in comparison. So the question then becomes, can such a person hope to win the presidency in the general election? And that is the aforementioned test of American sanity.

The last decade -- and really, the last three -- have not been so good in that respect. I confess that I have spent most of the last dozen years or so with my jaw firmly attached to the floor, incredulous at the idiocy of which Americans are capable. From impeachment, to Election 2000, to the tax cuts, to Iraq, torture and beyond, I have just been stunned at how unenlightened a people we are capable of being. And it's not a simple matter of policy preference discrepancies, either. It isn't just that I prefer Path A while others prefer the equally legitimate Path B. I'm sorry, but this is about national hallucination. And, worse, we have mostly been doing this tripping during times of relative prosperity, which raises the question of what the country is capable of when things get worse. Like now, for instance.

It's hard to get a good reading on America these days. We are, more than anything, in an extended period of political oscillation which reflects, I think, a fairly profound fundamental dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. In 2002, the electorate went strongly for the Republicans and their fear-mongering campaign against the same foreign bogeymen GOP administrations had just gotten done ignoring or, earlier, even supporting. By 2004, this bit was already getting so tedious that a pair of turds like the Johns Kerry and Edwards could almost win the election (and actually may well have, but for the theft of Ohio) against an incumbent president fighting two wars, bathing in the "heroic' glow of 9/11 and presiding over a decent economy. The floodgates then opened in 2006 and 2008, with crushing defeats of Bushism. But these were then quickly followed by the Democratic train wreck of 2010, which seemed a century removed from the election of just two years earlier.

What this represents, I think, is a sort of bratty toddler of an American body politic, badly in need of a diaper change. The little bastard knows that it is unhappy, though it can't quite discern why. It is agitated and acting up in the name of change, but it wants somebody else to take care of the matter. This country is fighting three or four wars at the moment (or is it more? -- I'm a professor of international relations, and I can't even keep an accurate count), suffering through the worst and most prolonged economic crisis since the Great Depression, is plunged heavily into debt, and is (not) grappling with the à ¼ber-crisis of global warming -- and that's all just for starters -- and yet there were more votes cast recently for American Idol than there were in the 2008 presidential election. Need we say more?

Apparently people are angry, but not angry enough to roll their obese American physiques off the couch, turn off the TV's latest episode of "This Or That Cloned Breathless Police Drama!", and actually take ownership of their democracy to the extent necessary to learn about issues and demand credible solutions. Such a combination of angry petulance and a lazy desire to have someone else wave a magic wand and solve the problem is, history has made emphatically clear, quite a fine prescription for disaster. Can you say, "Man on horseback"?

This is the main reason -- among very, very many -- that the Democratic Party generally and Barack Obama particularly are so disastrous. If no one provides real, constructive solutions, the scary monsters of the right will gladly offer the fake, catastrophic ones. The most charitable reading of Obama is that he seems to believe that affability is what people want in their president. Maybe in the era when Leave It To Beaver was the top show on national television that was true, but certainly not today. People want solutions to personal and national problems, and they want security above all, which has been rapidly eroding under their feet. Hence the electoral oscillations of the last decade, and hence the danger of the present moment.

Very few people will be voting for Obama in 2012, even though he'll get lots of votes. Many of those will be much more against his embarrassingly lame opponent than for his embarrassingly lame self. His two greatest assets in that election will be the Republicans of yesterday and the Republicans of today. Even in a society as politically immature as is America, there does still seem to be some residual memory of the former, in the form of the national horror show known as Bush/Cheney, though still not enough to prevent the remarkable amnesia/dementia of Election 2010.

As to the present, the only folks on the planet capable of making Obama look like a political giant just happen to be the same folks going for the Republican Party presidential nomination. Gingrich? Palin? Romney? These are like the rejected extras for the midget riot scene from "Banana Republic II: The Empire Strikes Out". You know you're talking about a real stinker of a party when everyone's lamenting the fact that Mitch Daniels has decided not to run for president. Apart from the fact that he's bald, has bad skin, is about five foot five, and his wife ditched him to run off with some other guy, who she then later dumped to return to Mitch, somebody was bound to mention during the campaign the slightly inconvenient fact that the guy who would have been leading "the party of fiscal responsibility' happened to previously preside over a full doubling of the national debt as George W. Bush's Director of the Office of Management and Budget. If a loser like this creates a massive vacuum at the top of the GOP by choosing not run, you know you're looking at a sad sack of a party, indeed. And you are.

I don't think Obama's prospects are great for 2012, though they are probably good for precisely this reason of the nature of his opposition. But I'd say the thing to fear is not so much 2012 as what comes after. Obama is not about solutions, unless, of course, you happen to be a partner at Goldman Sachs. So the oscillations will continue. People will vote for the party not in power -- even if they just were a mere two years ago, and even if their solutions are laughable -- to try for yet another cheap fix. But it won't work, of course, and each round will breed further desperation. Which will breed further willingness to accept radical and radically destructive "solutions'. If you think I'm exaggerating about this, just look at the progression within the Republican Party from Gerry Ford to Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin. Trust me, you don't wanna know what comes after that.

But the choices are all merely relative when the empire's in decline. An Obama victory over the forces of madness would represent a mere postponement of the reckoning definitively headed our way, and it's a very angry fellow indeed. The bad news is that even if the GOP loses, it still wins. Only it's called the Democratic Party instead.

It may be the Wisconsin and New York's 26th represent a liberal spring in America, or a long-delayed realization that regressives are not the friends of the middle class. I doubt it. More likely, certain stupid and selfish voters simply revolted from the mantra of slashing government spending when it became their turn to face the meat axe themselves.

But at this point in the history of what has now become a rapidly sinking kleptocracy of a polity, I'd happily settle for even the pathetic politics of self-interest.

Anything that could slow the national pillaging by America's oligarchs would represent a step in the right (that is to say, left) direction.

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David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.  He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. His website is (more...)
 
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