Just had a very peculiar memory dredged up from fifty-odd years ago.
Over at Nancy Nall's site Nance is talking about Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac dying, and how when she worked in the dead-tree newspaper biz her paper had pre-written obits for various famous or notorious people.
One she recalled was for the former Air Force GEN Curtis LeMay.
And the weird LeMay thing I actually recall is his running as George Wallace’s VP candidate in 1968.
I was eleven, and was just barely aware of US politics, but my Eisenhower-Republican parents were horrified by the Wallace candidacy and that kinda rubbed off on me – not any sort of genuine understanding, just the general sense that there were these two horrible people called “goddamnWallace” and “thatidiotLeMay” who wanted to turn my little suburban piece of Chicago into the Confederacy (not that I understood that, either, except it meant bad things for the eight African-Americans who went to my 500-kid elementary school…)
So after Halloween my kid sister (nine) and I conducted our annual post-Halloween-tradition – taking the jack-o-lanterns out in the back yard, digging our father’s old wooden longbow out of the garage, and feathering the things with arrows (also the lawn, my mother’s hydrangeas, and probably the cat if he’d been stupid enough to hang around, which he wasn’t).
Only the Halloween of 1968 we officially named one of the punkins “Wallace” and the other “LeMay” so we could show the Bad People what we thought of them. Somehow it made the whole process more fun.
What’s kind of even more horrifying to realize about that is that in the 1968 election several weeks later about 13% of the American public voted for those two open and proud segregationists and white nationalists. They took five states: Arkansas, Louisiana, and the heart of Dixie (Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia).
I remember thinking back on that as a young man decade later as some sort of appalling low-point in American politics, the butt-ugly barefaced Ugly American in full poisonous flowering, and thinking how it was good that We the People had beaten that back and were in the process of becoming a Better Nation.
And, yet...here we are...
12 comments:
Here we are indeed.
From the Atlantic:
“Nina Turner, a co-chair of the Sanders campaign, told me she has no appetite for the choice she faces: ‘It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of shit in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still shit.'”
The American political establishment has long mastered the art of snake oil and the half shit sandwich.
Which is insanely ironic given Sanders' political stance as an unreconstructed New Dealer, since the New Deal was an unmitigated exercise in eating the shit to get some bread. FDR made a crap-ton of compromises and left a raft of things he wanted to do on the table to get the ones he did. Because otherwise the sonsofbitches on the Right would have willingly seen this country burn because their constituents would rather go to Hell than share Heaven with a Negro or a woman or a commie.
It's not the "American political establishment"...it's AMERICANS. It's the 13% hardcore racists that voted for Wallace and LeMay in '68, and the 40% - those racists plus the Bible-bangers plus the gun nutters plus the women- and homo-haters...the bitches' brew cooked up by 40 years of Goldwater and Reagan and Gingrich and Limbaugh and Coulter and Tucker Carlson - that voted for Trump.
We've been pulled back from the brink twice in the last century - in the Oughts and Teens by the Reformers and muckrakers and noblesse oblige aristos like TR who beat down the Gilded Age, and then by FDR in the Depression - but there's never been a mass mobilization of the sort of scum that voted for Hoover in 32' (and Hoover got damn near 40% of the popular vote, remember..!) and Wallace in '68 like we're facing today.
I won't disagree that we need better "leadership". But we've had better candidates, and We the People fucked ourselves.
You should read Thomas Franks latest book:
The People, No".
Of course, it may be a bit hard on the ol ticker, but it mostly is stuff you already know.
The linked interview is worth listening to. (All 3 parts).
I'll try. I have a very low tolerance for podcasts/vidcasts - typically I can read and think faster than the people can talk, and I tend to forget what was discussed earlier, whereas with the printed page (or on-screen) I can go back and review what came before.
The history of "populism" in the United States is...not really a happy one. Most of the mass movements have been closer to vigilante actions and Know-Nothingism than to the positive sorts of mass movements like unions. The problem with mass movements is when they get to the point where they actually have to govern; there's no way for everyone to be involved, so the "representatives of the people" are elected or simply nominated...and the whole cycle starts over again as the people's deputies start working for themselves rather than The People.
I want to think it's possible, but I can't think of any polity that has managed to sustain truly popular democracy at any sort of large scale.
I can understand that.
You can read transcripts of the podcasts
But I like listening to the tone of voice.
Also, I am not sure you need to have a sustained truly popular democracy.
What you need is for it to be credible.
This seems to work in most western style democracies.
The ruling elites can't starve the masses too much,
or they get bounced out on their asses.
This seems to work in Canada where our "moderate" liberals and conservatives
(who trade ruling spots) are kept in line by the socialists who sometimes have
a 'balance of power'.
Take for example Covid, the Liberals are spending like drunken sailors to keep the economy afloat and the conservatives are cheering them on. If they weren't doing that, they would face certain extinction at the polls. (And I do mean extinction. I recall our conservative party being knocked down to *two* seats in Parliament after a particularly unpopular Prime Minister left.
Where in the USA, in the middle of a global pandemic where millions are thown out of work, neither party is officially supporting medicare for all. And support payments ended just as the Senate went on a 4 day break.
The elites are clearly not scared of the inevitable torches and pitchforks.
The main problem is "first-past-the-post" voting, which is what our Constitution was designed to produce. Combine that with a presidential system and you tend to get two huge unwieldy parties that tend to marginalize those parts of the party coalition that aren't able to wield power.
Combine that with a toxic culture of "individualism"? And what you get is a bunch of chuckleheads who are willing to sell their own lives down the river in return for some fatheaded notion of "liberty" that's sold to them by the public press that's - surprise! - owned by wealthy people..!
The failure of Soviet communism will be, I think, recalled by history (if there IS a history to recall it) one of the great tragedies of the 20th Century. Because it took down with it the hard Left in many of the Western nations, poisoned the well of socialism so badly that there is now in many places no socialist left to seriously pull the politics past the "moderate liberal" corporatist redline.
So without ranked choice voting, or some sort of parliamentary system (and I should note that the Senate is a grossly antidemocratic institution) it's immensely difficult to pry political power out of the hands of the wealthy in the US. When you think of it - that the Constitution was written by a group of mostly wealthy landowners - that's a feature, not a bug.
I am unconvinced that you can hang it all on first past the post.
Rather, I suspect it has more to do with the domination of incumbents.
Incumbents can then collude (either actively, or more often passively) to perpetuate
their incumbency. Thus you get all sorts of corrupt electoral practices which benefit
the incumbents.
In other words, it isn't a matter of which *party* is currently on top of the greasy pole, it is the fact that all the folks near the top manage to keep everyone else from starting the climb.
Incumbency has always had it's benefits; it isn't even "corruption". It's name-recognition, constituent service, patronage. Old as Rome.
But frankly, if you think "it doesn't matter which "party" is currently on top" you are fucking out of your fucking mind. Have you not been paying attention as the Trump and the Senate majority kill thousands of people and impoverish and immiserate millions more? The House majority passed a 3 trillion dollar COVID relief bill TWO FUCKING MONTHS AGO.
The Senate Republicans responded by beating their collective dicks.
There is a revolting lack of concern for the common people on both sides.
One is wretched but fixable.
The other is a fucking insane death cult.
So is IS a matter, a huge matter, and it is standing in the way of everything else.
The GOP has to be destroyed first before the "folks near the top" can start being gently herded towards the guillotines. You need to destroy the Wehrmacht before you can kill Hitler.
Yes, Obama was simply misguided when he gave an inadequate stimulus to Americans and ensured that no bankers went to jail during the great financial crisis a decade ago. This while democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of congress.
Biden really favours medicare for all and ending student debt, but is waiting for the right time to announce it.
Also, do you want to buy this nice bridge I have? Special price!
The way to fix both parties is identical. Get ordinary people used to giving small donations for the candidate of their choice and beat the incumbent corporatists one primary at a time.
The open warfare in the Democratic party is there for all to see. However, there is a budding insurgency in the GOP as well. When Trump is gone, it will devolve into outright rebellion. If the Dem's don't swing hard left economically, the GOP will pick up vast swathes of the working class (including segments of latino and other minority voters).
Yeah, yeah, the Democrats are class traitors. Blah, blah, blah, horseshit.
There's a huge difference between a glass of piss and a glass of poison. The Democratic party has been in thrall of the big donors for far too long, but the Sanders insurgency at least suggests there's hope for change there. But "a budding insurgency in the GOP"? Are you kidding me? Who, the fucking NeverTrumpers? The same people like Max Fucking Boot and Michael Gerson and the "Lincoln Project"? That's an "insurgency" of the kind that the SA ran into on the Night of the Long Knives.
There's no genuine "populism" in the GOP, there's nothing for the "working class" outside the poor whites who fear the Darkness more than they fear the Vampire Squid. I mean...fuckadoo, the nation is collapsing under the weight of the Plague and fucking McConnell sits there grinning his turtle grin and saying "nope". It's just plutocracy and lies and racism and trickle-down fantasy all the way down. There's no sanity left anymore.
I'm all for We the People working to beat the shit out of the plutocracy. But I'm not going to kid myself that letting Republicans win because Democrats haven't been socialists enough is gonna do that. Christ, man...their "budding insurgency" is goddamn open fascism, oh, hi, Tom Cotton!
I'm perfectly happy to discuss how the Democratic Party needs to be better. But if that doesn't begin with "The GOP must be destroyed" then we're wasting our time. Geopolitics 101: you kill the Near Enemy first. Then you can fiddle around with how you want to deal with the Far Enemy.
Here's an excellent explanation of EXACTLY why there's no "insurgency in the GOP" and how it is functionally impossible for the current Republican Party to appeal to anyone who's not in the two-yacht class or possess a functioning hindbrain (https://crookedtimber.org/2020/08/04/jacob-hacker-and-paul-pierson-let-them-eat-tweets/):
"Together such feedback loops are leading the Republican party to focus on catering for extremists and plutocrats rather than redefining itself to attract new constituencies. The Republican party could have attracted Latinos, if its commitments to the political extremes, and to its plutocratic funders had not made it effectively impossible to do so. The fundamental problem of the Republican party is that its electoral strategy, policy commitments and core support are both mutually supportive and politically pathological – they mean that its response to the Conservative Dilemma will become increasingly ineffective over time. The economic agenda of the Republican party is becoming ever more unattractive to voters, and ever more difficult to push through by using fear and outrage as a mobilizing strategy."
And part of the problem is that as the GOP does this, the danger of an opening and unbridgeable rift between their voters and the rest of the US public becomes ominously large...and makes a Democratic move to the left desperately dangerous. The Republican base ALREADY sees us as crazy commies. When we BECOME crazy commies - or, to use real political goals, when we re-institute the 90% top marginal rate, start jailing criminal banksters, craft genuine controls on vulture capitalism - we're talking a potential Second Civil War.
So the problem is that you've got two colliding problems; shedding the DLC/blue dog corporatism from inside the Democratic Party, while on the Right you have complete and utter plutocratic QAnon bugnuttery rampaging around the walls threatening to burn the place down. Well...pardon me if I'm more worried about the barbarians at the gates before I get excited about whether my Congressperson is lefty enough.
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