I’m hoping and expecting that the combination of George Bush’s hated failures and Barack Obama’s welcome successes will go a long way toward purging the public of this attitude, perhaps once and for all. Other developed democracies don’t have these silly debates. Everyone recognizes that there is a positive role to be played by competent government, same as there is for the private sector. A more grown-up America will do the same, and we can get past this debilitating attitude – bequeathed to us by the predators amongst us for purposes of enhancing their ill-gotten profits – that government is incompetent. An attitude change of that magnitude will open many policy and programmatic doors now shut by America’s brainwashed political culture.
Another sickening development that I expect to be changing profoundly nowadays is American support for an imperialist foreign policy. Of course, we never acknowledge it to be that, but there is simply no question that a country with nearly a thousand military bases around the world, that spends more on its military than all other countries of the world – nearly 200 of them – combined, and that invades countries like Iraq or Panama or Grenada or Nicaragua whenever it damn well feels like it – there can be no question that this is an empire. Americans loved their non-empire empire, and they loved how powerful it made a people who were not finding self-fulfillment elsewhere feel. But empires are expensive, in every way. Even by 2003, and even in the immediate wake of 9/11, Americans didn’t want to go to war in Iraq, despite no doubt believing it would be the cakewalk we were told it would be.
Today, another imperial adventure of this sort would be far harder to sell. The process of Americans weaning themselves away from such lethal foolishness really began earlier, with the last imperial disaster – in Southeast Asia. Already, long before 2003, the government realized that it needed an all ‘volunteer’ military, a coopted and corralled press, hidden fiscal costs, a machine-intensive military force, and a ban on photos of the Dover AFB caskets for those few but inevitable (American) human casualties, in order to continue to prosecute its imperial adventures. My expectation and hope is that this reluctance to engage in militarism will grow manifold, for several reasons.
Chief among them, of course, has to do with Iraq. Let’s give credit where credit is due: no one has given American imperialism a worse name than George W. Bush. But I hope that Obama’s return to multilateral and bilateral diplomacy will also remind Americans that there are better ways than war to do things in most situations, thus further discrediting the very most gruesome form of regressive insanity there is (and that is a very robust competition, indeed). Additionally, as our fiscal situation begins to deteriorate, there will be new pressures on a ‘defense’ budget that is as sure a sign of societal sickness as one can imagine. You’ll know America has changed its stripes when you start hearing the debate about whether we need to spend six or seven hundred billion dollars per year to fund a force arrayed against not a single enemy in the world other than a rag-tag band of guerilla fighters who basically cannot be defeated by military means anyhow. In any case, once again, what we’re talking about here is not so much a specific policy change, but rather a mind-set change, which will lead subsequently to multiple policy changes. That could mean the difference between war in Syria, Iran, Cuba or Venezuela – or not. And it could mean the difference between educating our children or building another useless aircraft carrier.
The destruction of the right’s monopoly in defining what may be discussed in our political discourse will also pay huge but subtle dividends in attitude shifts and what is possible in American politics today. The regressive program is discredited, and whether Obama turns out to be a liberal or a centrist, political space has now been opened up on the left for the first time since the 1970s. Movements to pull the Obama administration and the American public to the left now have a chance to flourish because of a combination of the right’s failures, the public’s desperation, the transparent and hideous idiocy of the Limbaugh-led regressive opposition to Obama, the absence of a necessity for the left to be continually fighting defensive battles against all manner of destructive policies under the Bush administration, and the right’s new preoccupation with blocking Obama and the Democrats in Congress. Those energies can now be transferred in a more positive direction.
That will be especially productive if coupled with a newly politicized youth movement in this country. We already know that young people are registering Democratic in staggering numbers, and we know from past experience that that is likely to mean a lifetime of political allegiance. We can also hope that their mobilization in the 2008 election, and especially at this week’s Power Shift conference and civil disobedience action, are the beginnings of a long-overdue movement toward – in the words of Patti Smith – wrestling the world from fools. Never has a young generation been given such a crappy deal by parents who claim to be devoted to their children but who, because of their astonishingly selfish political choices, in fact have been devoted entirely to themselves, often at the direct expense of their progeny. In any case, whether it comes from younger Americans or their elders, one of the quiet yet powerful consequences of our current political moment is that we can now open up political space on the left to begin making some sense again.
But it isn’t only the content of American politics that will change in unseen but hugely consequential ways. Obama – quietly and subtly, in complete contrast to the bombastic fulminations of his predecessor – allows us to be smart again. If you ever need a barometer of the depth of American insecurity, just take a gander at how so many of us went for Bush and his lies and blunders, all because it made us feel good. Remember that line about how he was the candidate you’d rather have a beer with? Of course, now, because of his policies, the idiots who used criteria such as that one to choose their president can no longer even afford a beer, just at the moment they need it most, but you get the point. Bush and Bushism – AKA regressivism – catered to that sickest little aspect of our mentality, the idea that we could feel better about just how mediocre we are by putting a regular guy in the White House. And his whole ‘govern from the gut’ thing played into that as well, in addition to providing the enormous side benefit (more likely, it was the other way around) of allowing the Bush people to justify as their choice the policy option they had already selected, despite any evidence – often rigorous, scientific evidence – to the contrary.
But smart is the new stupid in Washington. And even though that isn’t in itself a particular policy change, it is the key to reorienting a host of policy changes. More importantly, as Obama returns us to the practice of following the best minds in making policy choices, rather than the overclass-driven gut preferences of a dry drunk former frat boy who got gentlemen’s C’s in college (that’s where you actually got F’s, but your daddy donates a building to the school), people will once again recognize how smart it is to be smart. I don’t expect it to be easy in the future to put another tongue-tied cowboy master of malapropisms in the White House because it makes us feel good about feeling bad about ourselves. My guess is that people have now discovered that being hungry, homeless and jobless only makes feeling bad about being ordinary a whole lot worse.
Perhaps, more than anything, though, it will be changes to the character of our discourse that may provide the most profound effect of all. The single thing that excites me most about the Obama phenomenon is the manner in which he injects a long-missing grown-up maturity into that discourse. Jimmy Carter was probably the last American politician to talk to the public with this degree of honesty and sophistication. We weren’t ready then, but after 30 years of the alternative and its consequences, it strikes me that we may be now.
To which I say, put aside all the legislation, policy discussions and executive orders – this may be the biggest single effect of the Obama years. Because if we can’t talk about politics like adults, we’ll never get an adult politics. If we can’t discuss the massive debt implications to our children of slashing taxes, we’ll just keep getting both. If we can’t recall our own sickening past sins against the people of Iran, we’ll continue to argue over whether it’s best to adopt the really stupid approach to that country, or just the merely idiotic. If we can’t be honest about class politics in America, the middle and working classes will continue to abet the wholesale transfer their own property to the already fabulously wealthy. If we can’t discriminate between real science and junk dogma used to enrich oil companies, we’ll continue to commit planetary suicide in the greatest act of destructive foolishness ever known.
Whatever one feels about Barack Obama’s policies, watching his thoughtful, respectful and intelligent approach to the politics of our time provides a stunning contrast to the faux swagger, willful stupidity, and inherent contempt for the public of his predecessor. Even during the latter years of his own administration, watching tapes of Bush in his earlier years, announcing this or that invasion, threatening this or that adversary, could be a jaw-dropping experience for any mildly sentient creature. Imagine how pathetic they’ll look in a year or two, after experiencing the Obama alternative, especially because the GOP keeps sending out junior versions of Junior (hard to imagine that’s physically possible, isn’t it?) like Limbaugh, Gingrich and Jindal to go up against the president.
I don’t think Americans are ever going to want to go back to that sadly immature politics, any more than most adults ever crave a return to the fun days of adolescence. And this is huge. Make no mistake about it – regressivism not only thrives on an immature, two-dimensional, dumbed-down, bumper-sticker sized politics, it requires it. Creating an America in which the public demands a more intelligent and thoughtful political discourse automatically takes ninety percent of regressive arguments off the table before the discussion even begins – at least outside the hollows of Appalachia, the tabernacles of Utah, or the grubby currency shrines on Wall Street, where they either haven’t gotten the message, or don’t want it. An intelligent people who demand an intelligent politics will have no more interest in the kind of fear-based politics Karl Rove specializes in than they will in Zoroastrianism.
And, really, this may bring us to the best change of all. Anybody with a heart and a brain has spent so much of the last eight years (if not thirty) in a stupefied daze, gazing upon the knuckle-draggers of the right in action, and wondering in befuddled astonishment how this could be happening in twenty-first century America. Particularly for any of us with memories of the Sixties, who could have imagined back then a return to the Fifties, then to the nineteenth century, then to the seventeeth, and then to the thirteenth? It was if something was in the water, and everyone went on a decade(s) long bender, leaving a few of us somehow unaffected by anything other than grief and chagrin at the actions of the rest.
But I think that’s over now. Welcome to the new American sobriety.
Yet the right still hasn’t figured it out. Which is good. Because now, instead of bucking up our collective fear and insecurity, the sight of Sarah Palin, the rhetoric of John McCain, or the creepy monsters drawn to their political rallies is only enraging voters who were merely disillusioned yesterday, but are fast hurtling toward a furious anger today.
We seem to have reached the moment when the little dictator morphs from Hitler into Charlie Chaplin mocking Hitler.
Impoverished, deceived, broken and isolated, America is finally growing up.
Another sickening development that I expect to be changing profoundly nowadays is American support for an imperialist foreign policy. Of course, we never acknowledge it to be that, but there is simply no question that a country with nearly a thousand military bases around the world, that spends more on its military than all other countries of the world – nearly 200 of them – combined, and that invades countries like Iraq or Panama or Grenada or Nicaragua whenever it damn well feels like it – there can be no question that this is an empire. Americans loved their non-empire empire, and they loved how powerful it made a people who were not finding self-fulfillment elsewhere feel. But empires are expensive, in every way. Even by 2003, and even in the immediate wake of 9/11, Americans didn’t want to go to war in Iraq, despite no doubt believing it would be the cakewalk we were told it would be.
Today, another imperial adventure of this sort would be far harder to sell. The process of Americans weaning themselves away from such lethal foolishness really began earlier, with the last imperial disaster – in Southeast Asia. Already, long before 2003, the government realized that it needed an all ‘volunteer’ military, a coopted and corralled press, hidden fiscal costs, a machine-intensive military force, and a ban on photos of the Dover AFB caskets for those few but inevitable (American) human casualties, in order to continue to prosecute its imperial adventures. My expectation and hope is that this reluctance to engage in militarism will grow manifold, for several reasons.
Chief among them, of course, has to do with Iraq. Let’s give credit where credit is due: no one has given American imperialism a worse name than George W. Bush. But I hope that Obama’s return to multilateral and bilateral diplomacy will also remind Americans that there are better ways than war to do things in most situations, thus further discrediting the very most gruesome form of regressive insanity there is (and that is a very robust competition, indeed). Additionally, as our fiscal situation begins to deteriorate, there will be new pressures on a ‘defense’ budget that is as sure a sign of societal sickness as one can imagine. You’ll know America has changed its stripes when you start hearing the debate about whether we need to spend six or seven hundred billion dollars per year to fund a force arrayed against not a single enemy in the world other than a rag-tag band of guerilla fighters who basically cannot be defeated by military means anyhow. In any case, once again, what we’re talking about here is not so much a specific policy change, but rather a mind-set change, which will lead subsequently to multiple policy changes. That could mean the difference between war in Syria, Iran, Cuba or Venezuela – or not. And it could mean the difference between educating our children or building another useless aircraft carrier.
That will be especially productive if coupled with a newly politicized youth movement in this country. We already know that young people are registering Democratic in staggering numbers, and we know from past experience that that is likely to mean a lifetime of political allegiance. We can also hope that their mobilization in the 2008 election, and especially at this week’s Power Shift conference and civil disobedience action, are the beginnings of a long-overdue movement toward – in the words of Patti Smith – wrestling the world from fools. Never has a young generation been given such a crappy deal by parents who claim to be devoted to their children but who, because of their astonishingly selfish political choices, in fact have been devoted entirely to themselves, often at the direct expense of their progeny. In any case, whether it comes from younger Americans or their elders, one of the quiet yet powerful consequences of our current political moment is that we can now open up political space on the left to begin making some sense again.
But it isn’t only the content of American politics that will change in unseen but hugely consequential ways. Obama – quietly and subtly, in complete contrast to the bombastic fulminations of his predecessor – allows us to be smart again. If you ever need a barometer of the depth of American insecurity, just take a gander at how so many of us went for Bush and his lies and blunders, all because it made us feel good. Remember that line about how he was the candidate you’d rather have a beer with? Of course, now, because of his policies, the idiots who used criteria such as that one to choose their president can no longer even afford a beer, just at the moment they need it most, but you get the point. Bush and Bushism – AKA regressivism – catered to that sickest little aspect of our mentality, the idea that we could feel better about just how mediocre we are by putting a regular guy in the White House. And his whole ‘govern from the gut’ thing played into that as well, in addition to providing the enormous side benefit (more likely, it was the other way around) of allowing the Bush people to justify as their choice the policy option they had already selected, despite any evidence – often rigorous, scientific evidence – to the contrary.
But smart is the new stupid in Washington. And even though that isn’t in itself a particular policy change, it is the key to reorienting a host of policy changes. More importantly, as Obama returns us to the practice of following the best minds in making policy choices, rather than the overclass-driven gut preferences of a dry drunk former frat boy who got gentlemen’s C’s in college (that’s where you actually got F’s, but your daddy donates a building to the school), people will once again recognize how smart it is to be smart. I don’t expect it to be easy in the future to put another tongue-tied cowboy master of malapropisms in the White House because it makes us feel good about feeling bad about ourselves. My guess is that people have now discovered that being hungry, homeless and jobless only makes feeling bad about being ordinary a whole lot worse.
Perhaps, more than anything, though, it will be changes to the character of our discourse that may provide the most profound effect of all. The single thing that excites me most about the Obama phenomenon is the manner in which he injects a long-missing grown-up maturity into that discourse. Jimmy Carter was probably the last American politician to talk to the public with this degree of honesty and sophistication. We weren’t ready then, but after 30 years of the alternative and its consequences, it strikes me that we may be now.
To which I say, put aside all the legislation, policy discussions and executive orders – this may be the biggest single effect of the Obama years. Because if we can’t talk about politics like adults, we’ll never get an adult politics. If we can’t discuss the massive debt implications to our children of slashing taxes, we’ll just keep getting both. If we can’t recall our own sickening past sins against the people of Iran, we’ll continue to argue over whether it’s best to adopt the really stupid approach to that country, or just the merely idiotic. If we can’t be honest about class politics in America, the middle and working classes will continue to abet the wholesale transfer their own property to the already fabulously wealthy. If we can’t discriminate between real science and junk dogma used to enrich oil companies, we’ll continue to commit planetary suicide in the greatest act of destructive foolishness ever known.
Whatever one feels about Barack Obama’s policies, watching his thoughtful, respectful and intelligent approach to the politics of our time provides a stunning contrast to the faux swagger, willful stupidity, and inherent contempt for the public of his predecessor. Even during the latter years of his own administration, watching tapes of Bush in his earlier years, announcing this or that invasion, threatening this or that adversary, could be a jaw-dropping experience for any mildly sentient creature. Imagine how pathetic they’ll look in a year or two, after experiencing the Obama alternative, especially because the GOP keeps sending out junior versions of Junior (hard to imagine that’s physically possible, isn’t it?) like Limbaugh, Gingrich and Jindal to go up against the president.
I don’t think Americans are ever going to want to go back to that sadly immature politics, any more than most adults ever crave a return to the fun days of adolescence. And this is huge. Make no mistake about it – regressivism not only thrives on an immature, two-dimensional, dumbed-down, bumper-sticker sized politics, it requires it. Creating an America in which the public demands a more intelligent and thoughtful political discourse automatically takes ninety percent of regressive arguments off the table before the discussion even begins – at least outside the hollows of Appalachia, the tabernacles of Utah, or the grubby currency shrines on Wall Street, where they either haven’t gotten the message, or don’t want it. An intelligent people who demand an intelligent politics will have no more interest in the kind of fear-based politics Karl Rove specializes in than they will in Zoroastrianism.
And, really, this may bring us to the best change of all. Anybody with a heart and a brain has spent so much of the last eight years (if not thirty) in a stupefied daze, gazing upon the knuckle-draggers of the right in action, and wondering in befuddled astonishment how this could be happening in twenty-first century America. Particularly for any of us with memories of the Sixties, who could have imagined back then a return to the Fifties, then to the nineteenth century, then to the seventeeth, and then to the thirteenth? It was if something was in the water, and everyone went on a decade(s) long bender, leaving a few of us somehow unaffected by anything other than grief and chagrin at the actions of the rest.
But I think that’s over now. Welcome to the new American sobriety.
Yet the right still hasn’t figured it out. Which is good. Because now, instead of bucking up our collective fear and insecurity, the sight of Sarah Palin, the rhetoric of John McCain, or the creepy monsters drawn to their political rallies is only enraging voters who were merely disillusioned yesterday, but are fast hurtling toward a furious anger today.
We seem to have reached the moment when the little dictator morphs from Hitler into Charlie Chaplin mocking Hitler.
Impoverished, deceived, broken and isolated, America is finally growing up.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
