After the Future

The Reasons for my Concern (repost)

[Ed. I'm re-posting this piece from October 2006, which went up a week after the passing of the Military Commissions Act. I think it's worth reading again as a way to provide some historical context concerning the prospect of losing the house and the senate in November, and why that should give us all a big scare. We are peculiarly vulnerable right now. That Glenn Beck and the Teapartiers are such a powerful force on the scene is not a minor nuisance.]

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.  The term is not a slur, it is a technical label. . . . [Decadence] implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense.  On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns but peculiarly restless for it sees no clear lines of advance.  The loss it faces is that of Possibility.  --Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence

The point is that decadence is not a moral term denoting failure; it's a neutral, descriptive one. Decadence occurs when a cultural impulse has grown old and died.  We're in such a period now.  It's much like the dark, chaotic 14th century Barbara Tuchman talks about in her book A Distant Mirror.  The 1300s was a time in Europe during which the medieval impulse, which had reached its high point in the 1100s & 1200s withered.  But in Europe, as bad as the 1300s was, the 1400s was a time of rebirth.  The key to the Renaissance was a rediscovery of what had been lost and forgotten.  My hope lies in that somehow, sooner rather than later, we will be able to effect a similar "remembering" of what was rejected during the modern period as "premodern."  I talk about what I mean by that in more detail here.

So like Barzun, I do not use the term 'decadent' to indicate moral failure.  I see it as a purely descriptive word that describes a culture that has lost its vigor.  It describes an in-between time, a time during which we live with old mental habits for want of others, but which are barely adequate to help us navigate in the new situation we haven't the habits of mind yet to understand. In such a time we need to develop a mental discipline that refuses to panic at the chaos, and  to live in hope that something new will be born. Panic always leads to unnecessary disasters and needless suffering.

And when we feel the energy of the new thing, the zeitgeist changes and it gives the culture a sense of meaning and purpose that it simply does not have now. During a decadent period, because it is a time by definition in which we have lost a sense of future possibility, a culture-wide, future-oriented sense of purpose is absent. But at the beginning of the cycle its presence is strongly felt by the era's great personalities. Artists and poets in Italy felt such an energy in the late 1400s and 1500s. The Protestant reformers of the early modern period felt it. The scientists and explorers who were their contemporaries felt it. It was an exciting time during which anything seemed possible. It was an energy that defined the age, and read Barzun's book if you want a better sense of its biography.  There are no great personalities during a decadent period.  Can you name anyone born after WWI in the developed world who has the stature of  DaVinci, Galileo, Bach, Kant, Beethoven, Dostoyevski, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, to name but just a few? There are famous people, but no truly great ones.

And the optimism that was born during the Renaissance carried through until the end. It was a powerful spiritual impulse toward freedom and individuality that germinated, grew strong and blossomed during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, and started to wither during the 19th century into a desiccated form of Victorian formalism, rationalism, materialism. 

Toward the end of the 19th century and in the runup to the World War I, there was a late-Victorian attempt to resurrect the more soulful. Romantic side of the post-Renaisance impulse, and it was called 'modernism'. It manifested especially in the arts and in progressive politics that we now think of as the early avante-garde. The key to this late modern impulse was its anti-traditionalism; it's belief that all the world's problems were rooted in obsolete, stuffy institutions and worn-out traditions. These early modernists still shared a great sense of optimism about progress and future possibility, an optimism that history is a movement toward a better future for all--if only they could throw off the dead weight of ossified cultural forms that manifested in stodgy Victoriana. 

These modernists were the late-19th/early-20th century impressionists, symbolists, futurists, etc. in the arts, and they were the muckrakers and progressives in politics influenced to varying degrees by Marxist ideas. As such they were usually supportive of anything “revolutionary” or anti-traditional. They saw the great enemy, especially in Europe, as the lingering medieval institutions like the church and the landed aristocracy, the class system, and the bourgeois materialist philistinism that kept progress from progressing.  But that all changed after World War I. Modernism went into a second phase that is really the beginning of what we now think of as the postmodern.

I see these pre-WWI modernists as working from the same impulse as the earlier generations of Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic moderns, but in an industrial-age key.  Their sense of meaning and purpose came from fighting against the entrenched cultural and political establishments in the hope of giving birth to a future utopia imagined in any of a number of ways. This fight against oppressive traditionalism has lingered into the late 20th century in the developed world as seen in the civil rights movements that fought an entrenched apartheid system in the South, and feminists and gays who fought traditionalists ideas about sex roles and sexual behavior. But it's an impulse that is for the most part exhausted in the West.

The forward-looking optimism that characterized earlier generations was mortally wounded by the devastating impact of World War I, and  slowly gave up the ghost as the twentieth century played out. If it flourished, it did so mainly in still premodern, third-world countries which clumsily embraced modernist Marxist ideas as an ideology to throw out their European imperialists and to effect their passage into the modern world.  But in the developed West the left is driving on fumes. There is some vestige of leftist rhetoric, but there is very little coherence, organization, and will to act behind it. 

As suggested above, the post-WWI modernism in the developed West was really the beginning of the postmodern, a new frame of mind defined by its no longer being able to take seriously the optimistic, progressive, Enlightenment rationalist frame of mind. Of course, modernism lingers into the postmodern period, just as the medievalism lingered into the modern, but the postmodern is about the loss of hope in progress, in order, in anything making any objective sense. It’s a loss of common sense. It’s a movement that is shot through with despair and cynicism. It’s a period of “decadence” a la Barzun's definition of it excerpted above. The left has become associated with this decadence, but it's not their fault. 

Because for the left, just as for everyone else, there is no longer a sense of future possibility--no robust sense of common cause.  We're in an era in which nobody--especially on the left--believes the same thing as anybody else. And yet subjective belief is the only thing anybody has, and so almost anything is believable, because what standard is there to evaluate whose beliefs are more truthful than anyone else’s?  It’s all a subjective, surreal dream, and a sense of objectivity, of there being any absolute truth, is considered naïve if not dangerous. It's hard to get organized if that's what you really believe. And if you don't get organized, it's easy to be manipulated by skillful propagandists of the right who don't suffer from the organizational problems of the left, and who have no compunction about telling Big Lies.

Post WWI Modernism (or what I call postmodernism) is about the re-assertion of the irrational—Nietzsche’s will, Heidegger’s pre-ontological worlds, Freud’s libido, Jung’s collective unconscious, Picasso’s dissociated cubism, the subjectivism of Derrida, the relativity and uncertainty principles in physics. It is Romantic subjectivity without the optimism. It’s about fragmentation, disintegration, radical subjectivity, radical individualism, loss of community and of a sense of belonging to something larger.  It’s about living in a world in which nothing is given and everything is chosen, where freedom of choice is the one sacred value about which there is no dispute. And it’s about the panic reaction of people who find they cannot cope with the uncertainty and chaos of all that. W.H. Auden called it the "age of anxiety." And it's this vulnerability to panic, this free-floating anxiety that poses the most significant challenge to those who must live during a decadent period.

Because in such an anxiety-soaked dreamscape the political leader who dominates is the one that weaves the most compelling dream. Hitler/Goebbels were in this sense the first major postmodern political leaders, and WWII was the first postmodern war.  When we look at political figures like Cheney & Rove, let's be clear: they are not conservatives; they are men of the right, and for the right power is the value that trumps all others, and rightists regard the rule of law as a quaint "liberal" nicety for those naive enough to think that law is strong enough to constrain the will of those who possess power. Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld are rank amateurs compared to the founders of postmodern right-wing politics; nevertheless, they are swimming in the same pond.  Men of the right feed on resentment and anxiety, and the endless War on Terror is tailor-made for exploitation by such politicians who seek to weave delusionary, anxiety-driven dreams that provide a screen for their ambitions. 

This is, as I see it, our predicament. If there is an alternative to the right-wing nightmare, it hasn’t emerged yet. Leftist politics are too much a function of discredited pre-WWI modernist optimism, and in this country just seems flaky. I am amused when I read conservatives and right-of-center moderates fulminating against the threat posed by the Left. Please, as if the Left has any political power these days. The great red peril is part of the fabricated nightmare woven by the right-wing dream machine.  The chaos and confusion is real, but they are not caused by the left; they are the natural consequence of the dying of the age. The cosmopolitans on the cultural left are  better adapted to navigating in a decadent culture, but that does not mean that they caused it, and that does not mean they have much political power or any robust vision for the future. That's why they are so weak.

And that's why the threat posed by the right is so much more potent. The nostalgia- and anxiety-driven right wing faces no vigorous opposition anymore,  and won’t until some sense of plausible future possibility can be imagined and a broad consensus developed around it.  The reasons for my concern lie in the peculiar vulnerability of decadent societies like ours to the seductions of the right. If it is not possible to dream of a better future, we are seduced by those who tell us we must return to the social norms of the past. But this is a fantasy past animated by an unwholesome zombie traditionalism I referred to in yesterday's post.

We are more vulnerable to authoritarianism than most people think.  Things seem stable because the economy, although fragile and increasingly stressed, is still supporting most people who vote to maintain their habitual lifestyles. So most Americans don't feel the effects of the changes already made by the rightists in power at this time. But if the economy breaks down, or if we are hit again by a serious terrorist attack, we should expect things to change dramatically. It won't be just taking off our shoes in the airport anymore. The definition of security threat and enemy combatant will be expanded significantly, and you won't have to be brown-skinned with a name like Maher Arar to have your human rights trampled upon.

If the last six years have proved anything, it's that the resiliency of the American electorate and the system of checks and balances is a myth. The latter is there in form, but not in substance. And the former is as easy to manipulate as any frightened population in the history of politicians manipulating their populations. Authoritarians in the future will have as little resistance to jettisoning the constitution article by article "for reasons of national security" as they had in jettisoning Geneva article 3 and habeas corpus last week. There are always good reasons for doing the wrong thing, and those moderates in the middle, whom I define as "lacking conviction," are too likely to see merit in those reasons. And the country needs them to stop being coopted by being in their own imaginations of themselves so grownup and reasonable.  They need to learn what it means to resist.

And so we must all be vigilant and not give way to any of the fear mongering fomented by the right. We must hold fast to everything we have gained, and fight every attempt by the right to take it away. The Military Commissions Act passed last week was a devastating, shocking defeat for America during this vulnerable time, and we must fight to have this legislation reversed. But in the meantime we muddle through as best we can and do what we can to prevent the crazies on the right from doing too much damage. It’s not looking good right now.  But I have an un-extinguishable faith in the human spirit and in the mysterious working of grace.  This too shall pass.

Followup Feistiness from Obama (Updates 1, 2)

Maybe the SOTU was in fact a turning point.  Maybe he has in fact pivoted to fight off the hyenas:

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UPDATE: One of the most interesting things about Obama's comments was his calling out Republicans on their "the president won't work with us" trope.  He made it clear that he knows, as they do, that Republicans can't compromise with the president because they cannot be seen to compromise, even if they want to.

Republican politics is dominated by a purist right which brooks no compromise, and most Republicans' futures in politics depend on their not compromising. So Obama's message today to Republicans (and to everybody watching): 'Please, stop with this we-want-to-work-with-you b.s. You know you can't work with me, or that the only way you can is if you get 100% of what you want. That's not how democracy works."

I don't know if any of this makes a difference, but it's what I've been waiting for. I do think taking on his opponents like this affords him his best chance of becoming the president so many of us hoped he would be. He needs to show that he's reasonable, but that he simply won't be pushed around by bullies.

He's shown he can do that these last three days. It's such a breath of fresh air.  It's been ridiculous that these Republicans have been able to get away with as much as they have, and it's just so nice to watch them get schooled. I hope he keeps pushing. Every sane American will rally behind him--even lots of Republicans.

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UPDATE 2 : Digby's take is that it's a sign of weakness for Obama to go to the Republicans rather than insisting that the Republicans come to him.  Maybe. Maybe that's the way they think in governmental and corporate corridors of power.  But is that the way the typical American sees it?  The politics is that it was televised confrontation with one man against several who frequently took cheap shots, and he made them look ridiculous when they were ridiculous and smart and decent when they were smart and decent.  He came across as sane, down to earth, and reality based, compared to a bunch of rigid ideologues married to their talking points.

Again, I don't know if this single event will have much of an impact.  It only matters if it's more evidence of a changed approach by the White House toward its Republican opposition. In another post Digby correctly describes what bi-partisanship means to the average voter:

[The Democrats] need to recognize that nobody really cares about bipartisanship per se. Voters just think that the reason that nothing gets done is because bipartisanship is required. If the Democrats can get something done without it there is absolutely no reason for them not to do it. Results are what matters, not process.

Unfortunately, I suspect the only reason the Democrats are so insistent on perpetuating the bipartisanship trope is because they lack the courage of their convictions and want to be able to share the blame if their plan doesn't work. And I would guess that weakness is something that average people just sense in their bones. 

We saw yesterday a guy who was not looking for cover, but someone who came into a very hostile environment and took on all comers and walked away unscratched. That's more important than whatever the power protocol requires. It's just so encouraging. He's defining bi-partisanship on his terms.  He's putting it to these people that if they want to be taken seriously as responsible grownups, they need to act like grownups.  He knows they can't or won't, so in effect he's calling them out for what they are--a pack of middle school bullies.

With great relief I take back my comment from a couple of days ago that he's running scared. He's not. And at this point I don't think it's all that important what he's fighting for.  The only important thing is that he's pushing back against the right. If nothing else, we're getting a break from the conventional wisdom that the Left is his real problem.

P.S. A lot of people have commented on how in the U.K. the prime minister routinely appears before parliament to field and rebut questions from members. Why shouldn't the American president do the same. In this case Obama responded to an invitation from the Republicans, but why shouldn't he work with Congressional leaders to begin a new tradition of appearing before Congress to field questions from both sides of the aisle. It would be far more interesting than a press conference--presidents would get challenged by the left as well as the right.  He'd get asked questions that get beyond the the parochial interests of media editors and others among the media courtier class.

Institutional Corruption

SOTU (Updated)

I liked the feisty tone, but let's see if there's walk behind the talk.  Otherwise, who cares?

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UPDATE:  Maddow and Olbermann are trying to make a big deal about how the Republicans are allowing themselves to be painted into a corner by their sitting on their hands when Obama struck anti-bank and pro-jobs themes. I don't know.  Seems way too subtle to make a difference. If you don't get that all the Republicans have to offer is obstructionism by now, I doubt you're even watching this speech, must less caring about how often Republicans applaud or stand.

I agree, however, with the conventional wisdom that Obama helped himself with this speech. But it won't make a difference in November unless he continues in this smiling feistiness to attack Republicans for their irresponsibility and knocks some heads in his own party to get something done for the public good.

In other words, a speech is more than leadership.

Better Angels of Our Nature

It's always interested me how the country was riven from the beginning by two different but fundamental political values constellations, the first, a static, rural, agrarian populist values of the 19th Century Democrats, and the other the dynamic, economic growth values of the Federalists, Whigs, and eventually the Republicans. Following Mark Twain we could call the two parties that took shape around these values constellations Finnians and Sawyerans, but let's keep it in the political sphere and call the first group Jeffersonians and the second Hamiltonians.

As with all things human, these kinds of values constellations, insofar as they live in individuals and groups, have both a light or ideal side, and a dark, shadow side, and too often the dark side drives an agenda that uses the rhetoric of its ideal side as a cover. So first let's take a look at what this means for both groups.

The Jeffersonian constellation in its ideal form celebrates rural, traditional values and the simple pleasures of family, community, nature. Jeffersonians comprise both hippies and rednecks in that sense. They compose the equality party.That this group historically also justified and fought for the preservation of a slave society and the segregationism that followed upon its destruction by the Civil War is a contradiction to be explained another time. But the basic essence of the Jeffersonians from the beginning was to represent the the common man  vs. a financial elite. It was the party that represented the yeoman farmer, the Jacksonian redneck, the  Irish immigrant, the turn-of-the-century unionist against the bankers and industrialists whose power increased as the country's history unfolded.

Spending Freeze (Updated)

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level....

...it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008.  Krugman

Oh, well.  So much for my moment of optimism that because things have gone so bad for Obama he would be forced to pivot and fight.

Obama's running scared now. Too bad for him--and for all the rest of us. 

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UPDATE: Digby--

As we know, Democrats are always rewarded for being fiscally responsible. If he's lucky they'll only censure him instead of impeach him.

The hyenas will chase him down now and eat him alive. His only chance is to turn and fight. Will he figure this out?

Dude, Look at Your Pay Stub

Hey you. You there in the Glenn Beck T-shirt headed off to the Tea Party Patriot rally.

Stop shouting for a moment, please, I want to explain to you why you're so very angry.

You should be angry. You're getting screwed.

I think you know that. But you don't seem to know that it doesn't have to be that way. You can stop it. You can stop it easily because the system that's screwing you over can only keep screwing you over if you keep demanding that it do so. (Slactivist)

Read on for a very good-point-by point argument that would be very interesting to hear the typical teabagger respond to.  Bottom line--health insurance premiums are growing, not taxes. So why are you so upset about health care reform designed to control rapidly increasing withholding amounts on your pay stub?  Connect the dots, dude...

Quote(s) of the Day: Junot Diaz (Update: & Frank Rich)

I’ve been an Obama man all the way. I voted for him in 2008 and I’ll vote for him again in 2012, with far less enthusiasm. But it would help me out so much if he could give me some kind of story to hang onto. At this stage, a scrap would suffice. A President can have all the vision in the world, be an extraordinary orator and a superb politician, have courage and foresight and a willingness to make painful choices, have a bold progressive plan for his nation—but none of these things will matter a wit if the President cannot couch his vision, his policies, his courage, his will, his plan in the idiom of story. It is hard to feel invested in a terrible story or a confused story or, in the case of the current Administration, no story at all. Obama needs to craft a strong story, and fast, if he expects to be able to accomplish anything in the three years that remain. His opponents are hard at work smithing their stories, and Obama soon might find himself surrounded on all sides by crude powerful tales that no amount of ratiocination will be able to dispel. The President needs to remember his post’s true vocation: that of the Storyteller-in-Chief. (Source)

In the short run, a lot depends on whether he can figure this out.

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UPDATE: From Frank Rich Sunday column:

Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”

Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain. Sure, a president needs political wiggle room as legislative sausage is made, but Scott Brown could and did drive his truck through the wide, wobbly parameters set by Obama.

I'm feeling better about Obama today.  Maybe I'm delusional, but I'm hopeful that the events of the past week, which marked his one-year anniversary, so dramatically refuted his m.o. to date, that he will be forced to dramatically change direction.  And maybe, just maybe, he will become the one we elected him to be rather than just the insider he thought he had to be to be effective. He has to be both if he's to avoid disaster. So let's chalk up the first year to his learning a hard lesson, and we'll see in the second if it will make a difference.

P.S. The one thing Obama should avoid is trying to appear populist now. It looks way too reactive and calculating and as such is unbelievable. He's got to find another way. Rich points to it in the example of JFK:

Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”

Greenwald's Response to the "Citizen's United" ruling

Greenwald is making the Libertarian defense of this ruling arguing that money is, in fact, speech, and he's being, IMO, absolutist about the First Amendment. No constitutional right is an absolute, and it's one thing to defend a principle; it's another to go rigidly fundamentalist about it. 

So again, no value, no matter how sacred, is absolute, and when it comes to "liberty" rights, they have to be held in a kind of tension with "equality" rights. It's one thing to say that we're all free to say our piece; it's another to say that people with enormous resources should be allowed to buy a monster megaphone to say theirs. It basically reinforces the idea that some people are more free than others, and that should never be true in the political sphere, where, I would argue, equality should be the dominant principle. (Liberty, the way I think about it, is the dominant principle in the cultural sphere, not the political or economic spheres, but that's argument for another day.)

If money equals speech, the power of the rich to buy a greater amount of speech creates a fundamental inequality problem, and it diminishes the free speech of citizens with modest means. There's an injury there that ordinary citizens should be able to seek a remedy for, but after today's ruling it would seem impossible to do so.

To argue that laws like McCain-Feingold were ineffective is one thing, but to ban forevermore, as a matter of constitutional precedent, any attempt to limit money spent to influence events in the political sphere by the mega-wealthy is horrifyingly undemocratic. It's another hard slap at the equality principle, which lately always seems to lose in its tug-'o-war with the liberty principle. 

Look, I get there are problems, as for instance with media corporations' ability to use their megaphones in a way that other non-media corporations cannot, but the remedy is not to empower other corporations, but rather to get the media out of the hands of profit-driven corporations.  We need to find a way empower, through subsidies, a more diverse, robust, and non-profit press. A subsidized, non-profit free press sector would lead to a healthier exercise of the First Amendment than our current corporate-owned system.  But that, too, is an argument for another day.

Supreme Court on Free Speech (Updated)

It's becoming clearer now that there are essentially three political realities--Beltway corporate insiders, a broad swath of educated people who care about the public interest, and the populist right.  Any hope for the country lies with the middle group, but the people in it are not well-organized nor are they well funded.  That's always been true relative to the power and funding of corporations.  Today it just got worse for them. The supreme court ruling today, ostensibly in the name of free speech, is just another milestone for the corporate insiders and their agenda to consolidate the enormous power they already possess.

I just read the story and haven't read any commentary on this yet, so maybe someone can talk me down, or maybe I'll get some perspective on this when the dust settles, but this ruling at first glance seems to be so insanely un-democratic, so egregiously unbalancing, that it's really kind of awesome in its crudeness and cynicism.  This decision is near as corrupting and consequential as was Dred Scott--like Scott it is a cynical defense of the liberty and rights of the already powerful that disregards precedent and dramatically diminishes the rights and liberties of everyone else.

OK, Dred Scott was more consequential, but I exaggerate to make a point: this is a great day for those who desire the kind of authoritarian capitalism toward which we are moving--if we're not there already.  It's a great day for those who think equality is bunk, and social and economic stratification are our most desirable future.

When are we going to hear some good news for a change?

The Kennedy Seat (Updates I, II)

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that one of the critical questions about the direction of the country concerns whether the left or the right captures and channels growing populist rage. One election doesn't constitute a trend, but this election for Kennedy's senate seat is a disheartening indicator that the teaparty right has the advantage so far.

It's quite disturbing that even blue states are not immune from teaparty dynamics regarding a major elective office, but when the Dems put up a candidate who is so easily caricatured as an out-of-touch yuppie elitist so loathsome to a blue collar electorate (and any normal person), it shouldn't be all that surprising. The obtuseness of the Democratic establishment in resisting being painted in a corner like this is a thing one can only stand before in slack-jawed amazement.

UPDATE: Evan Bayh's "lesson" is exactly wrong, but his is the narrative that will be picked up in the media and become political reality.  People (outside the 25% teaparty group) are angry at Democrats not because they over-reached with healthcare, but because they came up so miserably short and because rank-and-file Dems are disgusted by corporatist yuppies like Evan Bayh. This is the biggest scam yet--that Bayh's corporatism represents the moderate, sane center. This bill is unpopular precisely because it represents what so-called centrists like Bayh and Lieberman wanted, not what the left wanted.

UPDATE II: Greenwald on the same subject:

For better or worse, the Democratic strategy has long been and still is to steer clear of their leftist base and instead govern as "pragmatists" and centrists -- which means keeping the permanent Washington factions pleased.  That strategy may or not be politically shrewd, but it is just a fact that the dreaded "Left" has gotten very little of what it wanted the entire year.  Is there anyone who actually believes that "The Left" is in control of anything, let alone the Democratic Party?  The fact that Lanny Davis -- to prove the Left's dominance -- has to cite one provision that was jettisoned (the public option) and another which the Left hates (the mandate) reflects how false that claim is.  What are all of the Far Left policies the Democrats have been enacting and Obama has been advocating?  I'd honestly love to know.

Me too. The only silver lining here is that this ridiculous corporatist = centrist narrative will be exposed and rejected once and for all as too stupid even for CNN types to utter. I know, dream on.

Quote of the Day: Patrick Deneen

Without the advantage of a crystal ball, I suspect we will be looking at a New World Order within a decade. Writing at the eve of 2020, we will look back on the first score of the 21st century and see more clearly than we do now that "regime change" was afoot - albeit not the sort we might have imagined when that phrase entered the common parlance. The massing evidence that still requires a conclusion suggests that the 21st century will signal the end of the arrangement of the past 150 or so years. The marriage of Stratification and Equality will unravel, and I fear that it will not be a friendly parting. As is often the case in ugly divorces, those of us - friends of each spouse - will be forced to choose which we will remain our friend, for the other will finally brook no communication with the other. And all the evidence to date suggests that the choice will be difficult: we will not want to choose either, loving aspects of both while fearful of offending the other. We will try to remain friends of each until the bitter end, and - predictably - will end up driving both away.

I missed this interesting piece posted by conservative thinker Patrick Patrick Deneen in late December. The whole piece is worth reading.

I'm working on another essay, and I'm going to try to tie it in with this piece by Deneen as I have the time to do it. It relates to this important balance between Liberty and Equality that I've been harping on.  Stratification results when a society is heavily weighted toward liberty Liberty to the detriment of equality.  When restrictions are few, the greedy take advantage and aggregate power to themselves, and equality falls by the wayside.  Because only the rich and powerful are free in a stratified society. I think Deneen is right that we've allowed the egregious stratification of especially the last thirty years because there was the illusion of continuous growth and improvement, an ever expanding pie, the endlessly rising tide that lifts all boats, and most of us haven't felt the consequences yet of that illusion having been burst.

I also agree with Deneen that this divorce with all the ugly consequences is inevitable if we can't find a political solution to keep the two in balance. The greater we allow the imbalance to develop, the longer and more painful the ordeal to find that balance again.

As readers here know, I was hopeful that Obama and a Democratic congress would be able to effect at least the beginning of a counterbalancing movement, but it's clear that they either don't understand the stakes, or if they do, they don't care or  are powerless to do anything about it. The result is that we're evolving into something very different from what we have been--we're becoming, as Deneen call it, an "authoritarian capitalist" society. We've become a ceremonial democracy; the people still vote, but they have virtually no power to effect policies in their legitimate interests.

I honestly believe we have lost our way, but also that it's not impossible to find it again. And the least we can do in the meanwhile is keep the memory alive of what the best among us have hoped we might become.  And one of those is whose day we celebrate today.

Chis Hayes & "System Failure"

Chris Hayes of the Nation has a very nice piece that sums up our predicament.  It's the kind of thing you can give somebody who just doesn't get it because its tone is irenic and its analogies apt. There are several excerptable grafs, but I'll limit myself to a few near the end:

... one thing the Obama campaign got right was its faith in America's history of continually and fruitfully tilling the soil of democracy, struggling against odds until, at certain moments of profound progressive change, a new treasure is improbably found.

It was the possibility of such a democratic unearthing that gave Obama for America its moral force. The most inspiring thing about the campaign had nothing to do with the candidate and everything to do with average citizens from Dubuque to Atlanta who were taking the time and energy to search for a small piece of that treasure. Likewise, the message of the Obama campaign was as much about empowerment, reinvigorating democracy and changing the ways of Washington as it was about the central planks of his agenda. It's for this reason that the greatest disappointment of his first year is the White House's abandonment of this small-d democratic impulse in favor of a strategy almost wholly focused on insider politics.

What the country needs more than higher growth and lower unemployment, greater income equality, a new energy economy and drastically reduced carbon emissions is a redistribution of power, a society-wide epidemic of re-democratization.

Couldn't agree more, and yet what will such a re-democratization look like?  First step toward solving the problem is to understand its nature. Earlier in the piece Hayes asks, "So what, exactly, is it that ails us?"

In pondering the answer, it's useful to distinguish between two separate categories of problems we face. The first are the human, economic and ecological disasters that demand immediate action: a grossly inefficient healthcare sector, millions un- or underinsured, 10 percent unemployment, a planet that's warming, soaring personal bankruptcies, 12 million immigrants working in legal limbo, the list goes on. But the deeper problem, the ultimate cause of many of the first-order problems, is the perverse maldistribution of power in the country: too much in too few hands.

This maldistribution of power is the foundation of all our problems, and it's got significantly worse in the last thirty years because of the dismantlement of the New Deal compromise. The New Deal system wasn't perfect by any means, but it was good insofar as it established a rough balance between capital and the public interest. That balance no longer exists for complex reasons, among them being that enough Americans bought into the Reaganite propaganda that government taxes and regulation were fetters on the American spirit. The result was to create a public mood that permitted the dismantlement by both Republicans (and Dems like Clinton) of many of the public interest protections hard won in the period from the 1930s through 60s.

Defining Sanity

Slim Postings

Lots of family stuff going on so not much time--and not much to say, except to belabor the obvious. But a happy new year to you all. 

I'm reevaluating the value and purpose of this site.  I'm not sure it's worth the time and effort and whether my energies couldn't be spent more productively on other endeavors.  I find I can't bring myself to read most of the blogs I've been reading regularly for years.  Most of the time I know what they are going to say before I read them, and I fear the same may be true for what I'm posting here. So I'm groping around right now to see if there's a better way to move forward.

This time last year I didn't have much to write either. I called it slack tide because it was an in-between time waiting to see what shape Obama would give his presidency.  But now we know, and knowing now that Obama is someone who has no intention to change the rules and that he has aligned himself with the interests and agenda of the corporate New Democrats makes it difficult for me to care anymore about the success of his presidency. Obama was only interesting so long as there was some hope that he could find a way of rising above the mediocre norm. 

He had some magic for awhile; too bad he didn't know how to or want to exploit it for the public interest. I'm feeling now pretty much the way I felt in the last part Clinton's first term: Politics is such a predicatable bore. Why should any sane person care about what these morally mediocrities do in a game determined by the lowest common denominator?  Nevertheless, we have to care about Obama's presidency because the alternatives to it are so much worse.

But it has been sobering to be confronted with how crudely power- and greed-driven our politics is and how diminished the role the public interest plays in shaping policy. Greed and power are always a factor, but I think I reserved some hope that with the right people in place it could be countered and balanced, but I no longer reserve such hope. The system is rigged so that the right people are never in place or if they are, they are coopted. To be an effective politician means simply to play the game skillfully where the greed and power sharks set the rules and dominate. The public interest is no longer a player in this game; it's just one greed-and-power faction competing against another. Some are less awful, and so we root for them if we bother to root at all.

So I'm resigned that it's just going to be politics as usual until something happens that forces a change. And sooner or later that will happen. Until then, there really isn't much interesting to say about politics--it's all so drearily predictable--but there are other areas to explore. So we'll see.