Contemplating the Abyss, Part I

Last updated on: July 26, 2011 at 2:29 pm by Matt Talbot

Contemplating the Abyss, Part I 2011-07-26T14:29:12-05:00 Matt Talbot

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David Atkins has a great post up over at Digby’s joint.

The gist:

Suppose you’re a 28-year-old straight white guy who graduated high school as a D student, and now work a blue or pink collar dead-end private-sector job somewhere.

[…]

What does the Democratic Party offer you?

Not much.

[…]

The Democrats keep saying that a college education and universal Pre-K are the golden bullets to solve our economic problems. You don’t believe that and for very good reason, but it doesn’t help you anyway: you have neither the time nor money nor interest to go back to school. And your kid? You’re too worried about keeping her fed to bother about Pre-K. And besides, your school district isn’t great, you have no money to move to a better one, home prices are still far out of reach even as politicians want to drive home prices up, and the school system just seems to a huge money sinkhole that never gets better. You have no problem with the Latinos you went to school with, and you know some really nice undocumented families, but you’re also afraid for your job security. The wars overseas seem to keep going no matter who is in power, which makes the military less than attractive as an option. You’ve got nothing in common with the crazy evangelicals you know, and you have no problem with gay people, but your liberal friends who went to college seem pretty condescending and know-it-all to you, which makes you less than thrilled to be associated with them.

Why should you vote for a Democrat? Good question. Back in 1936, even as recently as in 1966, there was a reason for that guy to vote for a Democrat. Democrats used to have answers for that guy. Democrats used to have a solid economic message for workers without a college degree, and the fire in the belly to call out even the more reasonable conservatives for being the heartless toadies of corporate power they are. Today? I can’t think of a good reason that guy would vote for the modern Democratic Party. It does next to nothing for him.

(Emphasis mine) I think he’s pretty much nailed the basic problem: the New-Deal-to-Great-Society era is a fading memory. The energy behind those initiatives, and the practical considerations animating them, has been allowed to dissipate.

You’ve got a hard-right ideological Republican Party, and (by world and historic standards, at least) a center-right technocratic party in the Dems. There is no real, actual left in this country. The big “progressive victories” are:

1. Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan got passed;
2. Gays can now serve openly in the Imperial Forces;
3. The Main Street results of Wall Street’s Panic of 2008 stopped getting worse.

Nothing in the economic system has been reformed in any substantive way. Wall Street and the Rich have been allowed to go back to earning fat commissions and adding helipads to their yachts while destroying the value of your retirement savings unmolested.

————————————————————————————————-

Andrew Sullivan is onto something here, in describing the current political political divisions in the US as being in a “Cold Civil War”

Money quote:

I read George Will’s retread column from the 1980s today and simply cannot fathom what he is talking about. Except, I fear I can. He is channeling Mitch McConnell. Boehner and McConnell have one goal and it is has nothing to do with the economy. It is destroying this president and this presidency. They are clearly calculating that the economic devastation their vandalism could create will so hurt the economy that it could bring them back to power through the wreckage. And they will use every smear, every lie, every canard possible to advance this goal. The propaganda channel dreamt of by Roger Ailes in the Nixon era will continue to pump poison into the body politic, until they defeat the man whose legitimacy as president they have never truly accepted.

They would rather destroy what’s left of the economy (and then work hard, through a useless and thoroughly corrupt media, to hang the blame on the White House) than let a Democrat be perceived to succeed in any way. If they succeed at this, things will get almost unimaginably dire in the US. The Republican Party has truly gone insane.

What they imagine they’ll do is destroy Obama, get their guy in in 2012, then do the things they refuse to do now (some form of massive stimulus) and use that as proof that “their” ideas work better than Obama’s.

The Wisconsin situation is merely a preview of what they imagine would follow.

I think the Republicans perceive, with plenty of justification, that final victory is within their grasp: with the destruction of the last vestiges of the only institutions capable of diluting the power of their plutocratic constituency (those institutions being unions and the social safety net), the working class (which will consist of everyone but the plutocrats) will be frightened and servile.

…except that was always a pipe dream; the reality is that desperate people do desperate things. Given the paranoiac, violent and apocalyptic character of much of the rank-and-file political right these days, it may take the form of a right-wing authoritarian regime taking power in the United States. (I predict that one of such a regime’s efforts will be to restore the unchallenged dominance of white males in our society, with probably extremely dire consequences for racial and cultural minorities.)

It may take the form of a left-wing revolution of some kind (I consider this extremely unlikely – as I said, there is no functioning, real-actual-left in the United States of any real consequence.)

Or, it could be that things will just collapse into disorder. A slow, grinding descent into anarchy and dissolution of the United States as a united, functioning political entity. This is the more likely possibility, in my view – and I believe that this is the choice the tea-addled Republican Right is offering: Give us the country we want or we’ll destroy the country we have.

I’ve always kind of wondered what it was like to live in the Mediterranean region in Late Antiquity. I believe I am now getting a pretty clear sense of the experience. We may be facing the equivalent of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, except with thousands of hydrogen bombs up for grabs.

Geesh.

Or, just possibly, an [actual!] center-left, New-Deal-Like approach to these problems could be tried. It has worked before, and it would just as surely work again.

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