It would get worse, of course – much worse. Like (the now gone native) John McCain before them, war heroes John Kerry and Max Cleland would be savaged by a smear machine for which conscience was an entirely foreign (and undoubtedly Gallic) concept. It wasn’t that long ago that the wearing of Band-Aids mocking Purple Heart recipients would have been unheard of, even among the Reagan crowd. Next, in an act of what can only be called treason, an undercover CIA agent would be outed in order to destroy her husband, whose crime was to expose one of the myriad lies told to sell a completely fabricated national security crisis. Anyone who disagreed with this most disagreeable of foreign policies had their patriotism publicly questioned, and were accused of abetting the enemy. Historic allies – some dating to the very beginning of America itself, and all only a year earlier fully supporting the Afghan invasion – were ridiculed, mocked and alienated. Longstanding keystone treaties and international laws were shredded. And there is much, much more. What is scary is that this could happen in America, but what is scarier still is that it could receive significant public support.
What happened here? What trauma occurred during these decades, so extensive that it transformed these people and their party into something no longer recognizable even for the likes of former Republican senator Jim Jeffords?
As an upstanding social scientist trained to empirical caution, I’d want to see loads of data before I’d proffer any definitive answers to that question. But as a reckless armchair social theorist, I can’t help but be struck by four highly significant macro trends that have been temporally coterminous with this turn to the mean-spirited right in the United States.
The first of these is economic stagnation. Or, at least, for some of us. The hourly wage of the median American worker has risen only 9 percent from 1979 to 2005. Not too good, eh? Well, more precisely, not too good for the middle class. Certain other folks did just fine, thank you very much. In 1982, CEOs made 42 times more in salary than the average worker at their company. By 2001, that ratio had grown to 525 to 1, meaning that a CEO today makes, over the course of eighteen holes and two beers, what the average worker pulls down in an entire year. Overall, the share of total national income going to the richest ten percent of Americans has returned – after holding steady from the 1930s through the 1960s at about one-third – to pre-New Deal levels of close to one-half, thus bequeathing to our happy country levels of economic inequality only the Third World can match (welcome to Managua, my friends).
The upshot of this stagnation is that people have had to work harder and longer just to tread water. Today’s household typically requires two breadwinners to sustain what a single one could a generation prior. And even that pathetic income is not exactly leaving exhausted workers feeling content. Between globalization, layoffs, outsourcing, and the corporate shedding of healthcare and pension benefits, Americans feel the ground shifting beneath their feet every day. It isn’t inevitable that such conditions would produce a meaner politics, but it certainly provides fertile ground for the purveyors of cheap scapegoats (e.g., welfare queens, ‘the government’, immigrants) and cheaper-still solutions (reckless tax cuts, beating up punky countries, etc.).
Meanwhile, if falling economic standards are a first causal factor, almost certainly a second one driving such politics is the unprecedented rise of social equality America has experienced since the 1960s. In most circles, it is no longer acceptable to be racist, sexist or, increasingly, homophobic. ‘Worse’ yet, for America’s Archie Bunkers, not only can such outgroups no longer be dominated and disparaged, but they have now become officially privileged, winning jobs and other opportunities on the basis of these classifications, the product of a remedial equality program based on reverse discrimination.
Third among these likely explanatory factors, it must be noted that the driving cohort in American politics (and economics) these last decades has been the Baby Boomers. Stereotypes are just that, and generalizations should be understood, by definition, to be riddled with exceptions. That said, groups do sometimes have tendencies, and the tendencies of this group have (well-)earned it sobriquets like the Me Generation. Boomers have done a lot of good in their life span, I’d argue, as well as a lot of bad. What seems to unite it all is a certain pronounced self-absorption, selfishness and self-reverence. What, you disagree? Well, if you’ve got a problem with that, we can gladly toss in a healthy slathering of self-righteousness too, as we disabuse you of your foolish misconceptions.
Finally, all of these factors have arisen against the backdrop of a fourth development, which sets a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, context for the others. That is the crossing of the imperial watershed. Even if Americans, with their short attention spans and their profound ignorance of history, can’t see it, it is nevertheless pretty clear that the ‘American Century’ actually only lasted about twenty-five years, and the empire is today seriously in decline – not only in a relative sense, but now also in an absolute sense. (It is true that this four-to-one projected to actual life span ratio is considerably better than the one percent of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich he actually managed to realize, but then surely there’s no better sign of your empire’s sorry demise than having to take solace in favorable comparisons to Nazi Germany, eh?)
In any case, the signs are all there. The crumbling of Bretton Woods in the early 70s, the vulnerability to oil blackmail that decade, the superpower’s drubbing by an impoverished Third World guerilla army clad in pajamas, and now a latter day repeat of the same disaster, the feel-good beating of collective chests represented by politicians like Ronald Reagan and George H. W. ("By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!") Bush, and their yellow-ribbon-bedecked wars against such pathetically outgunned ‘enemies’ as Panama, Grenada and Iraq.
The list of such signs of imperial apocalypse is endless. It would certainly include the current insanity of our debt levels, the rapaciousness of our predatory elites that seems to know no bounds, the inability of the richest country in the world to provide basic services for millions of its citizens, and the near-monarchical dynastic tendencies of a polity that has produced the likes of George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton as its leading political figures. And don’t even get me started on American Idol! You don’t have to be Hamlet to know there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Put all these factors together and it’s easy to explain (though not excuse) America’s turn to the ugly right. Opportunities are diminishing, foundations are eroding, empire is fading. All this is happening especially to a generation of walking ids, used as they are to wanting what they want when they want it, and then getting it. And it has been happening most, and longest, to middle- and working-class straight white males.
The pinch is not inconsiderable. And gone are the socially-acceptable psychological safety-valve releases of yore which long provided coping mechanisms to these dispossessed. Back then, you might have been poor white trash, but you could at least feel better about yourself every time you asserted your superiority to blacks. No more. You might have been dealt some crummy cards in life, but at least your woman knew who was boss, especially when you brought home the sole paycheck. No more. And even when elites humiliated you with their power, you could always reassert your tenuous manhood by stomping a few queers here or there while the cops looked away (or assisted). Nowadays you’ll draw thirty years for committing a hate crime.
These people – these discarded and existentially exposed denizens of a dying empire – were walking targets for an angry ideology of greed, selfishness and violence. Like so many wandering San Francisco street kids seduced into attending a Moonie retreat, you could see them walking through the door. Mix in a little 9/11 fear and unfocused hatred at this or that brown-skinned foreign race, and these dudes were fully locked and loaded, ready to rumble. If you had to design a set of circumstances in order to sell tax cuts, war, repression and the permanent rule of Wall Street in America, you could hardly engineer a better program. And, to a certain extent, that is exactly how it went down.
The political figureheads, at the behest of their cynically clever marketing gurus, like to mask it as a cool and efficient resolve. But you don’t exactly need magnetic resonance imaging to pick up on the sheer self-loathing fury raging just below the surface of a guy like Newt Gingrich or George W. Bush. And just below that lies (and lies often) what is really the operative emotion, a deep, essential and defining terror. Without question, these politicians resonate with our bedraggled Boomers not only for their jejune policy prescriptions of belligerence abroad and selfishness at home, but most especially because such voters recognize in them a kindred spirit. One which hates Hillary Clinton profoundly and viscerally, without really being able to explain why. One which thinks blacks and Hispanics have gotten to be more than a little uppity and are stealing ‘our’ jobs. One which thinks that kicking some Arab ass might be a pretty good idea just on general principles.
Maybe you’ve also gathered from personal experience, as I have, that for many such ordinary folk this has become a faith-based politics, in more than one sense of the term. Regressives have nowadays become post- (actually, pre-) empirical. It’s as if the Enlightenment and the Founders and all of the last two centuries never happened (though, somehow, they seem to like their SUVs and their atomic bombs just fine). Rationality, as the primary cognitive system for comprehending our world, has been rejected in favor of unyielding dogmatic belief. For example, there exists today plenty of evidence to clearly prove without question that the administration willfully and purposefully lied about Iraq to sell a war the American public didn’t otherwise want. The Downing Street Memos alone are enough to make that case, but there is also plenty more. (Just imagine if there was this much proof against Bill Clinton how the right would have responded.) But try presenting a regressive you know with this evidence, or with the overwhelming evidence for global warming, and watch how they put up the blinders and start quoting from the Limbaugh gospels or the New Fox Testament. They can’t hear of it, and so they don’t.
Given the prevalence of such attitudes, it is no small miracle that we appear to have survived our era’s toxic cocktail of regressive bile. We are, of course, not out of the woods yet, and it is possible that a new, new Pearl Harbor, or yet another Middle East war would rally the persuadable middle of the American electorate back to the flag of the Boy King. (Don’t forget he had 90 percent job approval ratings right after 9/11 – despite the fact that he had gone off hiding in Nebraska.) But I tend to think that is probably no longer possible. I also tend to think that the fact that they haven’t already done this suggests that they’re probably not going to, though you never know what they’re capable of once the impeachment process kicks in.
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