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.

Hyacinthum hora

"The sun has set, but night has not yet fallen. It’s the suspended hour… The hour when one finally finds oneself in renewed harmony with the world and the light," (Guerlain)

The sun has set on the brightest promises of the American Experiment.

Night has not yet fallen, but the darkness is visible in the person of Tom Cotton, the Republican Prince of Darkness that Charlie Pierce likes to call the "bobbleheaded slapdick from Arkansas" whose editorial in Wednesday's New York Times went full Nazi. He is the competent fuhrer that the GOP thought they had in Trump only to find that, while the Leader can be capricious and inane He cannot be too openly a buffoon.

Cotton is not a buffoon.

Dangerous. Unprincipled. Rapacious. Vicious.

But not a buffoon.

But here's why I think we're done, a dead republic walking; the current protests.

It shouldn't take genius-level civics to understand that a land where the state is openly run by and for the wealthy, where a substantial portion of the "citizenry" are obviously not citizens but subjects, bound by the law but not protected, liable to be arrested, injured, or killed by the state at any time, is not, in fact, a democratic republic ruled by "equal justice under law".

It should be painfully obvious to even the stupidest of inhabitants that if "they" can do to "them" what police regularly do to "them" that there is no legal reason "they" cannot do it to you.

No. The only reason "you" are safe is structural, and that structure is founded on oligarchy and built of racism.

We the comfortable, largely white, majority have never been willing to honestly see - much less actively tear out - the dark pillar of race and the ugly beam of plutocracy that support our house.

To do so would have required long and painful years and even decades of sacrifice and humility to tear down and rebuild our nation without those things. Humans have never been good at that; it's not like we're some sort of uniquely awful nation.

But that remains a uniquely difficult task.

To do the things the protestors are demanding; to rebuild the large police forces (and courts and legal codes...) across the country to provide that actual equal justice, to rejigger the national economy to provide true equality of opportunity, would require an M9-seismic-event level of change.

In a sensible nation, in a true democratic republic, dedicated to ensuring that all people are "We the People" these protests would have caused a massive national reflection, would have sparked a balefire of action, of decision, to make the sorts of changes that would provide and rejigger and do all those things.

Instead, this is a nation where roughly four out of ten "citizens" - who were just weeks ago prancing around with military rifle knock-offs claiming that having to wear a surgical mask and order pizza to go was the most horrific tyranny since the rule of the tsars, mind you - are at best silent and, at worst, prepared to use those rifles on the others of their own fellow citizens who are now in the streets demanding that equal justice.

That part of the People who are huge Tom Cotton fanbois and fangirls.

And because we are in fact a house divided there has been, after nearly a week of nightly protests across the nation, no serious discussion, much less action, about the changes in our nation and in our laws and how they are enforced, that would address what these thousands of people are in the streets demanding.

So it's not so much the line of armed and armored police that stand across the road the protests are trying to open.

Behind them stands Tom Cotton like a colossus and around his feet all the little Cottons who refuse those changes.

And around them...all of those people, like me, who are unwilling or unable to make the sacrifice to bumrush the line and risk ourselves and our lives to make them change.

We the People cannot even force our government to act sensibly about the Plague. We know better, we know how we can save lives, but to do so would require some of us to make sacrifices, to act with humility and patience, to spend money we have in excess but are unwilling to part with.

We won't, because enough of us won't, because enough of us are Tom Cotton and refuse to accept any alternative but a full-on charge through the minefield, because waiting for the engineers and the flail tanks is for cowards and pussies.

If we can't do that - in the face of a pathogen that can kill or maim any one of us - how will we take an even harder and more difficult path to equity when inequity only harms some of us, and those largely "them", the people the Tom Cottons despise?

Here's what I wrote thirteen years ago:

A nation grown suddenly great, enlarged by war, troubled by disturbance abroad and contention at home.
A people divided, made complacent by wealth and power yet enervated by political strife and economic uncertainty.
A government given over to the wealthy, whose vicious infighting consumes their ability to make sound choices for the betterment of the People, or the nation.
A military made hard, and indifferent to democratic ideals, by decades of professionalism and unremitting war.
An economy dominated by great corporations, relentlessly pressing down the opportunities for the individual and the small company.

Even the very structures of civilization itself crumble as, it seems, the nation both implodes and explodes.

So.

No.

It's been a long time fading but now the light seems to be failing fast. The darkness just seems all the more threatening loured by teargas smoke and backlit by the light of the flares and the flash-bangs and the burning barricades.

While we are still suspended in this blue hour it is difficult for me to see anything but darkness in the falling night ahead.

United Failed State(s)

The Republican Party no longer even pretends to adhere to, or even respect, republican principles.

It's increasingly clear that:
1) The current GOP - aside from being a fairly open cult of Trumpism - has absolutely no interest in anything but holding on to it's power to further its plutocratic and theocratic and neoimperial creed.
2) The actual demographics suggest that fewer than about 40% of the people in the United States want that.
3) Therefore the GOP must depend on destroying actual republican governance and the means and methods of popular voting.
4) If one faction will not accept political defeat and go into opposition (actual opposition, instead of simply destroying the functions of governance if those functions will not produce the results the opposition wants) then the political mechanism of a republic is broken.
5) Therefore the United States is effectively no longer a functioning republic.
6) And yet, it is not officially something else; it exists in a sort of free-fall, with the notional trappings of republicanism intact but nonfunctional. With no actual working replacement for this nullity the statutory "government" of the United States is not, in fact, "governing" in any way other than as a gimmick to benefit the predatory minority.
7) That is the definition of a failed state.

I cannot imagine anything more depressing than that, other than it's happening in the Plague Year. Which is, in turn, exposing every one of the most vicious aspects of the GOP Project.

And the solution?

How do you reject something that's adored by four of ten of your countrymen? How does that not break the nation?

We are, in fact, in the midst of a Cold Civil War.

And there is no solution...other than even worse options, like turning it into a HOT Civil War...other than reaching some sort of compromise that both sides can live with.

But how do you "compromise" with a faction that will destroy the social, political, and economic fabric of a nation rather than give up low tax rates for the Kardashians, be willing to listen to Drag Queen Story Hour, consider the possibility that someone, somewhere, for some reason may terminate a pregnancy, or accept a national co-existence with the refugee cleaning their swimming pool or the immigrant cleaning chicken at poverty wages?

How do you "compromise" with someone that considers your ideas and ideals not just undesirable but unacceptably toxic and treasonous?

Tell me.

How?

Update 4/10: It's worth noting here that in Wisconsin the "republic" canary just plummeted headfirst off its perch. Despite the fact that something like 60% of the subjects citizens voted some sort of blue the gerrymandering and court-lock ensure that the red faction is now the ruler of America's Dairyland, and the SCOTUS is juuuuust fine with that.

I know it's hard for the Damn U.S. Public to wrap its head around the reality that about two-fifths of their neighbors want a hard-right dictatorship...but that's what they want.

This isn't simple, like the first Civil War was, simply because it's not geographic. The Confederates aren't all bunched up in the southeastern part of the continent. They're all over; here in ORegon they're out in Clackamas County and down outside of Burns. They're scattered about in the hustings of the Tualatin Valley.

There's no way to "win" that war.

And yet...the alternative is to let this band of red-capped jackals devour the Republic to slake their appetite for tax cuts and knuckling the liberals.

And I see no way out other than bloody-handed war.

The end of the American Experiment

I know I said I was done wirting about American politics, but this is so ridiculously central to all of our lives that I'll have some thoughts on the United States Senate's decision to transform the office of Chief Executive into an unaccountably sovereign neo-autocrat early next week.

Suffice for now to say that the one thing that never entered my mind, when as a young man I watched the committee hearings on Nixon’s criming that summer of ‘74 - my mother, good American that she was, refused to let me shirk observing a critical moment in our nation's political existence - was that I’d live to see the remake of that picture where the bad guy wins and walks out of the courtroom grinning. If Trumpy had any sense of history he’d pose on the steps of Marine One with both arms raised flashing double “V” signs.

It’s kind of shocking to watch how easy it is for a president to become a king.

It’s just revolting to watch that happen with this fucking guy. Caesar? Sure. Brilliant bastard with a string of Big Wins. Trump? Seriously? We’re gonna pimp our our republic for this low-rent orange shitgibbon? Say what you want about Lenin or Hitler, at least there was some dark genius about them. We’re taking a dump on the 200-plus years of the experiment in republican governence for this sleazy spray-tanned used-car-salesman?

Assuming it will be legal to write honestly about these times future historians won’t have a clue how to present this without pages of baffled speculation and disbelief.

What's really weird about this is how it's all taking place as if it were just any other day.

Friday, while 3,000 miles away the republic I have made my home for more than sixty years, the republic whose uniform I wore, the republic I always assumed was immutable, is being turned into an autocracy by a cabal of venal and cynical men.

And I was driving to work like any other day.

Just seemed like there should have been something more...ominous.

Rain of blood.

Earthquake.

Dead rising from the grave.

Not merely light traffic congestion passing through the Woodburn interchange.

Live Free or Die

Well, there you have it.

All I can say at this point is that if all those idiots who bayed about "Second Amendment Solutions" aren't storming Capitol Hill right now then they can just STFU forever after.

In a true democracy this would result in pitchforks and torches and the Swiss Guard dead at the gates of the Tuileries.

Which is another way of saying that we must destroy the GOP or bow before our New Plutocratic Masters.