The second acquittal of Donald Trump for his undeniable failure to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States is a painful reminder of where We the People stand at the beginnings of the two hundred forty-fifth year of the American Experiment.
Because We have a series of major issues that We need to either deal with or at least think about dealing with, and in this post I want to lay out those issues, in rough order of criticality. Then, in a series of posts, discuss them, how I think (and hope) we might be able to deal with them, and the obstacles that will have to be overcome in order to do so.
The issues are:
1. Climate change. It's a global, civilization-changing (as in "Long Night of the Anasazi"-type-changing) situation. We solve it, or do our best to solve it, or human civilization - where we live, how we live, whether "we" live - in a century is indescribably different. It's really that simple.
2. National interests. What do We the People want our country (or our various governmental agencies) to do? That, in turn, directs a whole bunch of activities like "what do we buy with our taxes" and "how do we deal with ourselves, and how do we deal with others"? And how do we decide what those interests are? Assuming we have a future past the Late Holocene Thermal MAximum, we're going to need to come up with a good way to figure out what's good for Us.
3. The industrial/post-industrial economy. Once we've handled the climate, and decided what the fundamental objectives we should want to work towards...what about the single biggest part of our daily lives; how we make a living?
This takes in a bunch of related problems, individually so big and complex that they each probably demand a post in themselves.
They include:
2a. Inequity and inequality - let's call this the "the rich/the poor are with us always" problem. Simply put, the question isn't "can extreme inequity and democracy co-exist" because the answer to that is simple; no, they can't. When some people are insanely rich and most are insanely poor, you have a de-facto oligarchy, regardless of the exterior forms. The question really is "how much inequity can we have and still have democracy"? And what can we do about that?
2b. Work. How can you ensure that enough of the citizens in a popular democracy have a life that offers them some sort of meaningful activities to fill their day? Like it or not, we define ourselves largely by what we do, and the loss of paying - decent paying - work has become a big problem. We've forced millions of people into poorly-paying service work or, worse, "gig" jobs that are a sort of indentured servitude. The reason the Founders wanted to restrict the franchise to men of property - not that I'm agreeing that it was a terrific notion, mind - was that they understood that someone who was financially insecure would be politically insecure, as well. That sort of person would be horrifically vulnerable to all sorts of mischief.
Let me add that I'm perfectly willing to entertain suggestions as to additional issues we should be thinking about.
So, to get this over with quickly, here's the Problem With the Right.
1. The Right, in general doesn't really believe, or doesn't want to believe (which comes to the same thing), that things like global heating (or inequity, or lack of decent jobs, or racism...) are really problems. And the reason is the same reason that the Right has no real answers to any of these other problems; because if they did, it would mean that our current mode of social, political, and economic life is part of the problem, and to solve the problem will entail changes to that mode.
It doesn't mean that the changes will be "hurtful" in themselves but they're change. Remember that Bill Buckley said that a true conservative stands athwart history yelling "stop".
But to see the ultimate result of 40 years of nonstop bullshitting you need look no further than the GOP reaction to this week's deep-freeze in Texas.
The failure of the Texas power grid is complex, and much of it is linked to the "market" and the effects of deregulation (a business that spends money for things that happen once a decade is going to be punished by the market, so if government doesn't make it possible for them to spend that money without punishment - i.e., by making EVERYONE spend it so there's no price advantage to skimping - they won't...) as well as a freakishly bad storm that actually froze natural gas lines. The problem suggests that a whole series of political, economic, and technical moves should be made to prevent the recurrance.
But is there anything of that sort of complexity coming from the GQP?
No.
Ted Crux says on Twitter it's Biden, Harris, and AOC's fault. Wingnut Lauren Boebert blames windmills, citing a fake story that uses a faked story that sneaks in 2015 footage from Sweden. Texas governor Abbott is spewing bullshit about the "Green New Deal" which isn't, y'know, an actual thing yet. Fortunately Rush Limbaugh is dead, or you can be sure his mouthy ass would be vomiting some sort of liberal-feminazi crap, too.
It's not affectation. This sort of magical-thinking nonsense has been bred into the GQP bone. It's not that they're faking it. They REALLY don't believe anything but their own nonsense. They're high on their own supply.
2. And, unfortunately, movement conservatism has also become "whatever liberals hate". So if "liberals" are worried about climate change, or inequity, or social justice, or minimum wages, a true "conservative" will automatically reject those things. And, finally, and most intractably,
3. American conservatism has become the unapologetic party of great wealth. Which is not to say that the rest of the American political spectrum isn't eaten up with money - the need for private money in American politics is one of the biggest cancers of the current system - but that only the Right has become unquestioningly, obediently, defiantly the Party of Greed Is Good.
And that is what, ultimately, makes the Right useless for governing.
Because the wealthy don't need government.
Oh, sure, they like to have it around to keep the lights on and the roads repaired. And, when need be, to police the plebs and keep the markets open.
But rich people can buy pretty much everything that the rest of us need government for.
We need it to do everything from pay armies and fleets and built dams and roads and airports to checking the supermarket scales to make sure the grocer isn't cheating us and inspect the chicken ranch to make sure we're not eating rat meat.
They can buy their own armies, police, build their own roads and power plants. Sure, it's nice for them when they don't have to. But if they had to choose between taxation and buying those things?
They'll take "low taxes", thanks.
So what happens is that the “left” wants to and needs the various levels of government to function. Which means that they can’t go full boogaloo the way the GQP can and does, while the “right” doesn't believe it really needs government to function (except in the grossest sense of “not a howling wilderness of all against all”) because the wealthy that are the core constituency of the Right can buy the things they need without resorting to collective action.
So the logical direction for the wealthy donors who actually matter to the GQP is to continue to stoke the crazy, knowing that what it will do is effectively prevent the various governments from acting in the public interest by reining in oligarchy by regulation and taxation.
(I should add my personal opinion that if they were less loathsome the ultimate fate of the GQP rank-and-file – to become soylent green for the plutocracy – would be pitiable. Because they ARE loathsome, a vile congeries of hatred and stupidity, they are merely pitiful).
So there's really no hope for any sort of useful activity from the Right. It will continue to become a rats-nest of lunacy and anger. It will continue to do everything it can to stymie anything that attempts to "change" the way we live now - unless it's to move to more plutocracy, more theocracy, more open white-supremacy - regardless of how dangerous that inertia may be in even the medium term.
No, if the problems we face are to be solved, We - we, the non-wingnut segment of the U.S. public - are going to have to solve them.
And that's what we're going to talk about, beginning with "the weather".
(Next: Everyone talks of the weather. No one does anything about it!)
12 comments:
Good lead in Chief. Don't disagree with the end concluding point.
Loretta Ross gave an insight into talking to people who don't share your views. She divided them into %, so start with those who share 90% of your views (and disagree on 10%) before moving to 75% shared/25% opposed etc.
Talk anything more than weather with MAGA, it's a waste of your time. The moderate voices on the right are very much in a minority and know it. Not that you have sympathy for them - f*ck those guys and the bed they got into. But will the next gen of moderates join the GOP in full MAGA? Even less reason to go looking in the GOP for allies.
But in a representative democratic republic? That's a REAL problem. If 30% of the country is batshit crazy? No republic can function with that level of DYSfunction.
I mean, look at the example of the Texas blackout I mentioned. It's not "political"; the Texas power commission simply created conditions where failure during an extreme cold weather event was inevitable.
The solutions are simple, too; put regulations in place that require EVERY power agency to harden their equipment to the cold. Make them uniform across the board and followup with inspections to ensure there's no penalty for complying or benefit from skimping.
But the immediate, instinctive, reflexive, across-the-board Republican response it to blame AOC, windmills, and the Green New Deal. Not "let's sit down and solve this." but "OMFG ANTIFA COMMUNISM HIPPIES EEEEEEEK!"
That's 1) complete lunacy, and 2) utterly unworkable-with.
The Reagantots were nasty little idiots, but they could be worked with, provided you treated them like a Goth and an armed one at that. But these nitwits?
They're impossible, and yet there's too many of them to just ignore.
Which is a huge problem...
Here's a horrific example of where the GQP has gone full-gonzo bull-goose looney: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republicans-censure-burr-toomey-trump-impeachment_n_602c19cec5b69176298c624d?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004
“We did not send him there to vote his conscience, we did not send him there to do the right thing, whatever he said he was doing,” Dave Ball, the chairman of the Washington County Republican Party in Pennsylvania, said of Toomey’s vote to convict Trump during a local TV interview Monday night. “We sent him there to represent us, and we feel very strongly that he did not represent us.”
Note that Toomey is a Senator, one of two who are supposed to represent the STATE of Pennsylvania, a state which went for Biden in 2020, and where polling ran strongly in favor of impeachment conviction.
But...Chief MAGAt Ball doesn't believe that liberal bullshit. Toomey was "sent...there to represent us..." That's US; us white Republicans, not those darkies in Philadelphia or those Main Line lib'rul faggots. US. US Real Americans.
Again...how do you "talk" to that? To Ball, a liberal "talking" about stuff like Green New Deals, like reining in the oligarchs by ending capital flight and offshoring and automating, like dealing with inequity by returning to reasonable levels of upper-income bracket and corporate taxation, like ending racist policing would be like a dog "talking" to him. He'd probably find it amusing at first, but then he'd just ignore it and eventually he'd get angry and try and whip the dog back to kennel.
That's a huge, huge problem.
The Left can come up and SHOULD come up with better ideas beyond the market-based "ideas" that we loosely call "neoliberalism". But there's nothing short of full-throated wingnut fascism that's gonna get Bell and his MAGAt buddies to budge a millimeter. That's not "talk", that's just surrender and that's simply not an option.
Thomas Frank says that the wealthy elites have abandoned the Republican party to the crazies. They now support Biden.
Doesn't this dramatically change the analysis?
Will American politics reshape itself as a triple party play ("true left", "moderate elitist", "crazy fascists").
Not familiar with young Mr. Frank's body of work, but if he truly believes that he's utterly full of shit.
The wealthy have ALWAYS bankrolled politicians from the center to the right who promise them what they want; freedom from taxation and regulation. They don't give a rat's ass about political labels; they work with what they have to get them what they want, and the Right has ALWAYS been the most reliable conduit for those goods, well ahead of the centerists.
IF there has been a flight of wealthy donors from the GQP it's not because they "support Biden". It's because they fear that the crazies may make the GQP unelectable. But Trump, and the persistence of Trumpism, makes that an easily disprovable trope. That's kind of my point; there's no real hope for any sort of sane accommodation with the Right. It's loonies all the way down.
And I don't know how long it's going to take for me to hammer this into you, but I'll try again.
First-past-the-post voting rules and the structures, rules, and traditions of American legislatures mean that you ONLY. GET. TWO. BIG. PARTIES.
Period.
The only times in U.S. history that third parties have emerged and succeeded is when one of the two is dying, as the Republicans replaced the Whigs in the mid-19th Century.
Otherwise what happens is that the emergence of that third party divides the votes with the party nearest its platform and allows the remaining party to slide in with a plurality.
So if your suggestion occurred what'd happen is that the "true left" party would get about 25% of the vote, the "moderate elite" would grab about 35%, and the "crazy fascists" would ride to power with the remaining 40%.
Or if it was the other way around (the Republicans split between moderates and wingnuts) the "Left" would get the 40% as the "GOP" got 30% and the "GQP" got 30%.
That's it. That's how US legislative politics work. That's how they HAVE to work, given the priors.
But my point is that the Right is hopeless. They've never really had any policies or ideas other than "hate on whatever the Democrats want". If we're ever going to break out of our current depressingly circling-the-drain spiral the ideas will HAVE to come from the Left, and they'll have to be bigger and more ambitious than we've seen so far.
So that's what we're going to talk about.
Re: my comment about the parties, the best illustration of that is the run at the presidency that La Follette made in 1924 as a "Progressive" (which meant "socialist").
I love La Follette; he is a truly great politician, great man, and great American. His attempt to turn Wilson back from ramming the U.S. dick into the WW1 meatgrinder should be taught as a "profile in courage" to every American schoolkid (and if Kennedy had really been all that he'd have profiled LaFollette rather than those fucksticks Lamar and Taft...).
But all he did in '24 was peel the left end of the vote away from the shitty Democratic candidate (Davis) who probably would have been hammered anyway, but La Follette's 16% is the second biggest percentage of the vote ever bagged by a third party candidate in the 20th Century (TR got something like 27% in 1912, but he's a weird outlier; there were also a couple of 19th Century candidates who got up into the teens in the 1856-1860 elections)
But that was it, and all it did was toss the presidency to the useless drone Coolidge.
No, the way forward for the Left is to take over the Democratic Party the way the QANuts took the GQP from the teabaggers who first took it back in the Oughts.
You should read some of Thomas Frank's books. He has done some marvelous work on the history of progressives.
The central problem the modern Republican party faces is that the Trumpist crazies control the nomination outcome, but there isn't near enough of them to win a general election. Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't a competitive candidate most districts.
Thus, the donor class has moved over to the Democrats whose leadership gleefully welcomed them.
This leaves the "left" squealing in powerless outrage inside the Democratic party and the crazies squealing in powerless rage in the rump of the Republican party.
I don't think the oligarchs are scared enough to let someone like FDR make any serious policy changes. Maybe the outraged masses will find some neo-Trump who can unify them. Vice President Harris has already demonstrated that she is a poor campaigner and President Biden does not look well.
You are right, you don't waste your time and energy on a 3rd party, you infiltrate and take over the running of one of the existing ones. Trump did it in one term with no significant support within the GOP, by throwing red meat to his base every day on twitter & regular monster truck rallies. So it's entirely doable.
The challenge with driving the Dems from the left is holding the coalition together, and getting the centrists to wake up and smell the coffee. Naturally, the centrists don't want to give up power, they don't support objectives that the left want, and don't appear to have given much thought as to the enormous changes they need to do (now) to unscrew the system which the GOP have spent decades using to cement them in power. You don't get to hold the house and senate long in politics, it was won by a whisker and all you need to lose them is a lack of enthusiasm by Dem voters.
Christ where to start!
Ael: The crazies ARE the GQP. They're anything but powerless inside, but as you note the question we don't know the answer to is whether they're too toxic for the normies to win in statewide general elections. "Most districts" is doin' a shitload of work here - they don't need to be competitive in "most" districts, just enough to throw wrenches in the works. I'm not kidding - the wealthy don't need governance outside navies and the occasional interstate highway, so they're fine with the Right getting enough loonies in Congress to just fuck things up. Can they? We'll find out in '22, but I'm not really hopeful.
I'm not sure where this "the richie-riches moved over to the Democrats" thing comes from. If it's your guy Frank then, historian of the Left or no, he's smoking crack. The plutocrats don't NEED parties; they're bipartisan, looking for vulnerable pols on both sides who need the money and the propping up and are craven enough to suck up the plutocrat agenda in return. The vast majority of those are wingnuts, and still are. You think the oligarchs want Bernie as chairman of Finance?
I'm not worried about Biden and Harris, tho. I'm worried about the US public. They've had the chance to swarm onto the progressive bandwagon. They had the chance to adopt Occupy, they had the chance to elect Bernie, they had the chance to side with BLM this summer. Every time they've chosen to sit on their collective dead asses and let the oligarchs and their wingnut footsoldiers piss in the punch. The frightful energy of the Teens and Twenties and Thirties that frightened the fatcats just isn't there. I don't know why - lack of viable True Left options? Electronic media? Hostess Twinkies?
But the bottom line is that everytime in recent history We the People have been offered a genuinely Progressive option the public reaction has been a massive collective yawn.
DF: We'll talk about that when we get to climate, but...yeah. The problem is that there's a big chunk of the sorta-left-of-center that's 1) scared of the culture war shit - Manchin is going to quiver in fear that some wingnut will accuse him of getting behind Drag Queen Story Hour - and being labeled "socialist", and 2) unwilling to face the fact that the 27-percenters are going to do that anyway and are their mortal enemies.
The nutballs have won the GQP because they have the relentless energy of the true worst. To fight that we of the Left need to find the sort of pitiless distrust of the wealthy that animated the labor activists and socialists in the first half of the 20th Century. We need to convince the Manchins that the fatcats will NEVER be their friends, that they will only use them until they can find someone more wingnutty to replace them.
And, yeah; that's a Herculean task.
But the bottom line is that everytime in recent history We the People have been offered a genuinely Progressive option the public reaction has been a massive collective yawn.
And we've bloody well run out of time.
The climate change issue isn't theoretical any more.
It's right here, spewing toxic smoke and ash across the US Pacific seaboard, and killing noticeably more people in exposed places like Phoenix every year. While COVID-19, which may very well be simply a biological bow shock of global warming, is now hammering the economy harder than anything we've seen since 1929.
The thing about our present mess that truly frightens me is that the entity you refer to as the GQP simply seems to get more numerous and influential with each new catastrophe, rather than less so. It's a positive feedback, and it doesn't have to go very much further before it capsizes what's left of representative government. Which isn't very much.
What it reminds me of most closely, is the state of the German polity in the decade after WW I. That didn't work out well for anybody, and most particularly not for the Germans.
Sorry to comment so late but I noticed something that bugged me: "The thing about our present mess that truly frightens me is that the entity you refer to as the GQP simply seems to get more numerous and influential with each new catastrophe, rather than less so." Not really, Trump left office with the lowest polling numbers of his entire Presidency. Even if you think the polls are completely useless that final drop was extreme and almost entirely related to his little auto-coup he tried to pull off.
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