The center cannot hold

 Long read by the High Priest of Centerism William Saletan describing the Fall of the House of Reagan.

I'll make it simple and short for you, though.

tl:dr - the Republican Party is a bughouse full of fascist nuts who aren't going to change and who won't back off until they rule the rest of us.

Those inside who aren't bughouse fascist nuts?

Can't and won't change anything because they believe they are 1) safe from the nutcases coming for THEM, and 2) more terrified of taxes, soyboys, feminism, and drag queens that they are of their country becoming a dictatorship.

The nuts - and the nut-complacent - will not change; there's no reason for them to.

They will rule us, or ruin us. They have no interest - zero - in living in a truly democratic, multiracial, multisocial polity. They will have their God, their guns, their "low taxes", their xenophobia and racist Paradise.

Or they'll burn it all down.

Look, if you dare peer into the abyss, at the execrable CNN "Town Hall" the other night, where a braying Tubby blarted his firehose of lies, other lies, and bullshit out into a baying mob of his CHUDs.

THAT's what lies ahead of us. Fuck, that's where we are NOW; what lies ahead may be even worse.

There is no reasoning with that. There's no "compromising" or "negotiating" with it.

There's fighting and destroying it.

Or being destroyed by it.

The implications are, naturally horrifying. The implications are that more than seventy million of our supposed "fellow Americans" are vicious enemies who won't leave us in peace, who will pursue us until their boot is on our necks, or they are utterly defeated.

I have no idea how the hell you solve that. That's the road to Rwanda. That's The Troubles in Ulster. That's the Greek Civil War, or every other Civil War except our own, where the division was more-or-less neatly geographic.

But that's the reality.

If we want to avoid those outcomes, we need to accept that reality, and the need to do what is necessary to burn out the Republican disease before it metastasizes into the sort of civic cancer that tore Ulster and Rwanda and the England of 1642 apart.

But I don't see my country accepting that; either the reality, or the need.

And that, frankly, angers, and scares the living shit out of me.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

 Until now Ael and I have been largely disagreeing in the comments. But our disagreement is so fundamental to the issues we're looking at now - and, particularly, looking at in the light of the coming U.S. election - that I think it's worth taking a post to discuss them.

Portrait of the Artist Losing His Dainty Freshness, John Day, Oregon, 8/18/20

 

Ael summed up his salient point well in this comment on the "Election Eve" thread:

"...a return to Obama style "Hope and Change rhetoric and fuck all else" won't cut it.
There is rising anti-elitist anti-corporate sentiment in the land.
If a populist insurgency fails in the Democratic party, I am afraid of what it might become in the GOP."

 So, first; let me say that I couldn't agree more with his fundamental premise; that the social, economic, and political "playing field" in the current United States is viciously, irremediably skewed against anyone not in a two-yacht family.

The brutal fact is that we are effectively an oligarchy, or a plutocracy, if you will. The "people" - the mass of the citizens - do not, in fact, rule either in and by themselves, or through their elected representatives.

Things that the vast majority of the citizens of this nation like and want to be the things that shape their lives; equal opportunity, freedom from the terror of sudden illness or unemployment rendering them helpless, homeless, and hopeless...a more equitable society, in short...are always put aside in favor of the things that the wealthy citizens of the nation want and like.

The problem is that, right now, there's no way past or through or around that.

First, because the first-past-the-post electoral system always produces two large parties. Unless one of them is dying, as the Whigs did before the Civil War, a third (or more) parties simply splits the vote of that side of the political spectrum and allows the "other side" to win.

Second. because our electoral system is drowned, drenched, soaked in money. You cannot get elected in the U.S. without insanely huge amounts of money.

Which means that either you have to be insanely rich, or you have to court the insanely rich...or you have to mobilize literally millions of un-rich people to pay you and keep paying you.

The result?

The rich have access to political power in a way that everyone else does not.

That's why American politics never bothers to debate the value of tax cuts but has a conniption at the thought of using taxes to reduce inequity.

And that's baked in to the American political system.

Remember these guys?

None of them were poor. None of them were landless. None of them were Black or Asian or Latino or born to the tribes that had lived here before the Vikings (and, obviously, none were women).

They set the system up to over-represent rich white guys. And it's worked well that way ever since.

The story of this nation, the promise of the nation, was that although when they wrote that "all men are created equal" they didn't expect those other men - and women - to take them at their words. And that American history has been a long, hard, fight to make those lofty words reality for those "others".

For much of it's history, though, the United States has been what it is now; an open oligarchy.

Three periods were largely responsible to making some changes in that - the "Progressive" era, from roughly the turn of the 20th Century until the First World War, the New Deal era, from 1932 until the Second World War, and the Civil Rights era, from the 1950s to about 1980.

Right now we're embedded in a Second Gilded Age. The first one was disrupted - not ended, exactly, but broken up and forced to admit some of those "other" people - by the Progressives and the New Dealers. Those left outside by those movements - that is, non-white Americans - had to fight again in the second half of the Twentieth Century to try and gain some of that admission.

But the Empire struck back with the election of Reagan, and the country has been sliding back into economic and political feudalism ever since.

The coalition that frustrated the plutocrats in the first two eras - muckraking journalists, true Leftists - socialists and communists - and labor unions, and noblesse oblige aristos like the Roosevelts - is as gone as the Gibson Girl and the I.W.W.

Instead we're left with a dire dichotomy

The result of the hard graft of the wealthy to own one of the two parties has resulted in a GOP that is, frankly, irredeemable. Just lost. Gone. Entirely given over to everything from embryonic fascism to crony capitalism to really lunatic gabba-gooberosity, stuff like QAnon.

But the other big party is still largely in thrall to it's wealthy donors, and to the fear that if they move to hard to the left they will face the wrath of the now-massively-overpowered financial businesses, big banks, and corporate power.

And, frankly, the problem is that to dismantle the resurrected Gilded Age would, indeed, require what amounts to a revolution.

And that's not a metaphor. It would be, in fact, an economic and social (and political) overturn of the status quo.

Wealth would have to be massively taxed. Capital flight - the ability of large corporate organizations to move their wealth out of the U.S. - would have to first be viciously crushed and then policed with a savage intensity. Financial crimes would have to be investigated and punished with the dispatch and ruthlessness we now use on selling weed or sticking up gas stations. Prisons would have to bulge with banksters and grifters and other financial fraudsters.

In other words, the American public would have to start seeing the wealthy and "business" the way they now see government; as a large, unaccountable, dangerous threat.

And this would have to be done by a million tiny uprisings, tens of thousands of pamphlates, YouTube video after YouTube video, in classrooms and townhalls and community groups. The danger, frankly, is that a "populist" uprising is a fantastic risk of becoming either a dictatorship of the proletariat or a Man on Horseback. There's a reason that the French Revolution produced Napoleon and the Russian, Lenin.

The optimist in me wants to believe that there's a way this can be done. That there's a genuine way for the American people to reclaim those high-flown words written back at the close of the 18th Century.

The realist in me looks around and sees nothing but ignorant armies clashing by night. I don't see the American public as capable of that sort of patient, remorseless, brutally focused action, or as willing to make the sort of sacrifices that action would demand.

And, thus, I'm reminded again why I don't want to write about American politics. The way to political hell is already before us, broad and smooth; a descent into madness on the Right, a timidity and fear of violent revolt on the Left.

The way up is hard and narrow, and requires not simply one person but millions to be willing to walk it, to be willing to work and fight and suffer and, yes, perhaps, die, in that journey.

That's an immense ask.

And I'm not sure - not just if the American people are willing to answer, but - whether I even want to ask if of them for my dread that my worst fears will be horribly confirmed.

For me?

I'll fight.

That's what as a citizen I have to do.

But I fight without much hope.

BASE Jump

I'm trying to give a shit about the "fiscal cliff" but the best I can come up with is a sort of vague irritation that my fellow lefties in D.C. are even considering "compromising" with the GOP on anything about this.

Because "compromise" for the wingtards (which is, functionally, what the modern GOP has become; a windsock for the gales of the unhinged reactionary Right) means "What's mine is mine and what's yours is also mine."

You might be able to compromise with a ravening wolf over a pork chop. You cannot "compromise" with the Congressional GOP; there's just nothing there but a reptile brain full of hateful shit and hunger.

I am pondering a New Year's Message post about the State of the Nation as I see it, but I wanted to take a moment at this point and just marvel that here we are, still mired in the Great Recession, and the Usual Idiots are fulminating and bloviating about deficits and all butt-hurt about raising taxes on the Uberrich.

Yeah, THOSE fuckers;

"That prompted a tall, extremely tanned blonde named Kay, from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to ask Hassett, the co-­author of the 1999 book Dow 36,000, “So what do we do with our money?”

He recommended investing in real estate in another country, maybe in Central America somewhere. A woman to Kay’s right wrinkled her nose: How about a Western country? “Okay, if Europe is what you want, go to Poland,” he said optimistically. “Go to Krakow, buy a house for $50,000, and it’s going to be like Paris in a few years.”

The unchanged and unchanging reality is that while there are probably several truly wealthy Americans who are deeply committed to this nation and its democracy that the vast majority have no structural reason to be so.

The Rich have always been able to afford their own Nation.

The rest of us need some semblance of a functional polity to have a decent, non-Hobbsean existence. We need police and firefighters and we need to know that they are relatively honest and devoted to our community as a whole and not to its oligarchs. We need a relatively square deal from the legal system and its arbiters; we need to believe that when we come before a judge that what will weigh will be the matters of our case and not our origins or the contents of our purse (although this is already well in doubt - you needn't look hard at the U.S. judicial system to recognize that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor).

We need a government that cares whether we eat clean food, drink clean water, and breathe clean air because we have neither the breadth of information nor the depth of wealth to fight back those who would befoul all three.

For the wealthy all this is a frippery. They don't need this "government"; they can purchase access to safety, to health, to cleanliness. They are free to roam the wide Earth in search of places to make their monies; we are, most of us, tied to where we live now. If that place goes to hell we are trapped in Hell; our plutocratic Lords can flit away as easily as a camel may leap through the eye of a needle.

So I gaze with scorn and loathing upon the gyrations of the Powers that Be along the Potomac now so fretfully aquiver over the notion that our domestic satrapy might be forced to wring another penny or three from their bulging moneybags.

Whilst in the streets the jobless stand in endless lines and below the overhangs and beneath the bridges the women and children stare with empty eyes at the pitiless rain that washes their future away before it.

Go over the "cliff", then, goddamn it.

Let us leap out into the unknown before we "compromise" so much as one more wretched cent to the grasping Midases we have already so wrenchingly enriched.

A Nation of Men

Noted in passing: today is the "60th day" since the formal announcement that U.S. armed forces were involved in the civil war in Libya. Other than a handful of GOP senators neither the Congress nor the White House appears to be concerned about missing the deadline for a Congressional approval of the escapade required under 50 U.S.C. 1541-1548.

The U.S. right has always scorned the "War Powers Resolution". Now the circle is complete, and the U.S. "left" (whatever there is of it represented in the corridors of power) shows its disregard that the People in Congress have any business interfering in foreign military policy.

What was that? A nation of laws?

Whereever did you hear THAT nonsense..?

Petty Men

With the Senate's refusal to repeal the anti-homosexual "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule covering the U.S. armed forces I think it's about time to seriously consider whether it's time to stick a fork in the Obama Presidency.

You may remember that I never bought the whole "change" rhetoric. Obama was and is a product of the same politics that has brought us to this, the most egregious imbalance in wealth since the Great Depression, the accelerating erosion of whatever remained of the perilous cease-fire between Wealth and the rest of the nation that held from 1932 to about 1966 but has now failed, is failing, and shows no vital signs whatsoever.

Adding this to the ridiculous "compromise" on the Bush tax giveaway, in which Obama's people gave away 200 billion in tax breaks for the two-yacht family in return for 25 billion in unemployment benefits (and set the stage for making the iniquitous Bush budget-breaking scheme permanent) and I think it has become obvious that, far from representing any sort of "change", the former junior Senator from Illinois is virtually captive to the oligarchy that has reestablished its firm control over the legislative and executive process within the Beltway.

But Christ Jesus! How simple was this? To end the nonsensical prejudice against honest men and women who simply want to risk their lives in their nation's service, consider the contrast between Obama's pusillanimous actions and the hard graft of Truman sixty-two years earlier.

The U.S. in 1948 was a violently, openly racist nation. Most states had de jure segregation, all had some form of de facto discrimination against blacks and other minorities. The white majority largely hated and feared their fellow black Americans where they didn't simply hold them in contempt. As recently at 1946 six black men had been lynched by white mobs. The laws forbidding blacks and whites to marry would remain in place for another twenty years. My father can remember going to Dodger games in the Fifties where white men would throw shoe polish tins at Jackie Robinson and scream "Shine!" and "Nigger!" until their voices broke.

And yet Truman signed Executive Order 9981 in July of 1948.

Truman knew perfectly well that the racist bastards in his Congress would have prevented any legal attempt to end segregation, because they already had. And the people he had to fear were in his own party, the Dixiecrats, remnants of the Klan Era of Counterreconstruction. But he understood that prejudice and bias are despicable in person, anathema in governing. So he went ahead and ended the wrong.

Obama, by contrast, would have the support of a majority of the nation, and of the armed forces themselves. He would be acting in accordance with the will of the People. An executive order ending the official prohibition against homosexuals serving openly would be far easier to enact, far easier to enforce, than Truman's was. A black man cannot be anything but black; he cannot simple stand there and be anything else. You cannot tell from an arm's length away which gender the man or woman beside you finds desirable. And his enemies are the damn Republicans, who no longer even pretend to be anything but the Party of God, Guns, Tax Breaks, and Hatin' Us Some Ragheads; intellectually bankrupt, still fellating the shrivelled corpse of Ronald Reagan in hopes of one last magic moment, the Party of Tom DeLay, Christine O'Donnell, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh - bloated, complacent, sneering, toadying, fiscally insane and socially medieval. The Congressional Repubs are hated by more people in the U.S. than hate crab lice, tax audits, cold floors, and raw beets combined.

And yet, here we are. Still clinging to this ridiculous and childish official prejudice, like a grade schooler who finds kissing yuckky. With a Chief Executive who appears to have Johnson & Johnson cotton balls; 100% sterile. Who is utterly in thrall to the banksters and wealthy and influential.

And yet...what else have we?

The GOP is worse. Awfully, moronically, terrifyingly, appallingly worse. If Obama is a house servant to the Malefactors of Great Wealth, the GOP is the leather slave, complete with ball gag and ballet boots. Those Republicans who aren't complete idiots are either lying - they know the truth of their economic policies but are unwilling to clue the rubes - or self-deluding fools who believe that they can sup with the oligarchs and not end up an oligarchy.

The United States has always been a place where some men are more equal than others. But the failure of Obama to even pretend to hold to any sort of liberal principles shows that we have failed to retain what equality we gained after the plutocrats last screwed the pooch back in 1929. The pendulum has swung back, and I see no one, nothing, in the American political scene that shows any promise of reclaiming any measure of that power for the working and lower middle classes.

So while Obama's failure is despicable in its reflection on the man himself, it is also a judgment on us. We have given up on the promise of the United States. We have become little better than a Russia or a Zimbabwe, run by and for the oligarchs for their own benefit; we are content with the crumbs that fall from their tables. As has our President, we have chosen the easy lies of borrowed wealth over the hard truths of fiscal responsibility, the conservative falsehoods of conventional prejudice and frivolous entertainment over the hard work of integration and sacrificing for the public weal, the slothful ease of vicarious democracy over the chastening vigor of active republicanism, and now little remains but to find ourselves dishonorable graves.

Civis Romanus Sum

This was so pertinent that I had to make it a post in itself. My man Pluto commented down the thread of the preceding post regarding what this election year says about the dysfunction of the American political process:"Over time the natural distrust between groups that are allied by distrust builds to the point where they fear each other more than they fear the opponent and they stop cooperating and nothing gets done."

Pluto has just won the "Revolting Gracchi" Award for Figuring Out Why I Always Bring Up The Fall Of Republican Rome when I talk about the U.S., circa 2008. Because it was JUST this problem that choked the life out of the old Res Publica. The proles were disenfranchised and didn't care and the very people who SHOULD have been circling around the republican institutions like slavering guard dogs, the senatorial and equestrian classes, were divided and paralyzed by internal division and partisan rancor. The state was decaying, or at least that's how it seemed to many of the Roman citizens, and finally they were just sick of the mindless, meaningless Senatorial chatter. They wanted a Man on Horseback and, boy howdy, did they fucking get him.Now, I don't think we'll see that. Our fundamental distrust of each other, and the disarray of our society is such that not even a military hero would be capable of uniting the nation behind him. At least, not now. Mind you, let the current economic doldrums slide into true Depression, and kick in something like a 1970's "Oil Crisis"...well, maybe you've got something there...

Nope. I predict that each successive Administration will grow progressively less capable of addressing the fundamental contradictions within the system, each will become less effective, more fractious and more strident. Our end won't come with a Caesarian bang but with a Castilian whimper.

We'll slowly fall behind polities like China and the EU and Russia that have spent the early and will spend the middle 21st Century fighting, not fabulous wars with inflated Islamic boogeymen, but rural poverty, infrastructure shortcomings and economic improvements. Finally we'll look around and see ourselves the 2050 equivalent of the impoverished, clapped-out Aragonese peasants, exhausted by wars, bankrupted and screwed by our own rentier classes, benighted by religious ignorance and beset by a host of troubles spawned by a decaying national hardscape and a fraying social fabric.But at least we'll have 245 channels on digital cable!

Of course, 216 of them will be either Ultimate Fighting, infomercials for male enhancement, cooking shows or pay-per-view porn.

Quis custodes ipsos custodies?

My comrade Phil Carter opens a discussion of the opinion piece in today's Washington Post website authored by a group of junior officers with Iraq service questioning the worth of expending more American blood and treasure in that benighted land. Former CPT Carter asks - as do the officers writing to the post - whether it is possible for us to continue to fight a war that the American public has neither stake nor serious interest in while maintaining our "volunteer Army".
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While this is a worthwhile question, I would opine that it is much less than the question we should be asking. For the continuation of this pointless venture calls into question the very health of our country's democracy.
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It seems to me that this sorry imperial war shows as plainly as a bloated corpse lying in the public square that, having chosen to follow a clearly dysfunctional "leader" and his coterie of bobos, yes-men and connivers, America will do nothing to save itself.
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American subjects - oh, sorry, we haven't acknowledged that truth yet, have we? - I mean citizens might have, at any time in the past several years when the public happy face of "compassionate conservatism" peeled off and exposed the people presently running the country as a pack of greedy, self-interested, neoimperial boobs more concerned about the possibility that Americans might want their kids to have health care provided by government than that their foreign policy was a faith-based fantasy and their domestic policy a Peter Principle-based attempt to prove that when Republicans said that "government is the problem" it wasn't a philosophy but a statement of intent, taken the opportunity presented them by the Founders (whose contempt for, and designs to prevent the seizure of power by, such partisan scumbags was written into the very Constitution those scumbags are presently ignoring) to defenestrate the canaille and reclaim their country.
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They have not.
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No more will the American people attempt to stop this train wreck. The Deciderer and his smoke-and-mirrors, executive-privilege-loving Veep will have driven the Army I loved and the country they hold in contempt into a ditch rather than admit that they were wrong.
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I honestly believe that history will look back on the past half-decade as a watershed. This will be America's equivalent of what the Revolt of the Gracchi was for Republican Rome, the Dutch Wars were for Imperial Spain and the First World War was for Imperial Britian - the sign that the days of youth and vigor were past, that decline had set in and political senescence fast approaching.
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We have chosen, like those historical powers, to follow the quicksilver lies and glittering promises of a mendacious few rather than make the hard choices and take the pain required to preserve the soverignty of the many. We have chosen our path, and will now begin to recieve the "blessings" of the government, and the policies of that government as typified by the futile sacrifices of these young officers, that we deserve.
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If you have the stomach for it. tonight's "Frontline" adds a post-mortem to Mr. Cheney's contribution to poisoning the Tree of Liberty. This sneaky, lying, power-mad prick knows perfectly well that outside of the bugfuck fascist 25% of the American public that is willing to accept a red-white-and-blue Fuhrer who will protect their widdle bottoms from the eeeeevil Islamofascist meanies that he couldn't sell his vision of Pax Americana and a revived Imperial Presidency to the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the world. Hence the whole "Cheneybunker" thing, where he and his diligent crew of cheese-eating GOP rats burrow under, nibble away at and defecate on in night and fog the Constitution they swore in the daylight to protect and defend.
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I can't say I regret the passing of the "Parson Weems" school of American history. But I do regret that we as a people do not learn more of the kinds of people who have historically betrayed this country and its ideals - the Arnolds, Burrs, Fisks, Goulds, Oaks Ameses, the Ohio Gangs, and now Cheney and his cabal - so as to develop a more sensitive nose for this sort of praetorian treason. Perhaps we might be more willing to get out of our cozy recliners and drag this scum down to their proper place, hanging as fruit from that Liberty Tree.
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But we won't. And in consequence we will live see that tree uprooted and burned.
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Not a bonfire, though, just a cheery and subtle glow to warm the torturer's cell and heat the Star Chamber.