Republicans have a couple of problems. I am not referring to that party’s lack of popularity or the public’s taste for solutions and candidates offered by the Democratic Party. Rather they have a couple of fundamental problems that probably won’t go away—and which have shaped their contemporary political fortunes.
The first problem is that the better-educated or smarter you are, the more likely you are to vote Democratic. The second is that in so very solicitously serving the interests of the wealthy, they have, by definition, made the middle class their enemy.
Republicans realized a long time ago that smart people see through the b.s. with which they paper over their sluttish obedience to wealthy special interests. Rather than change their allegiance to that of the people they would govern, they doubled down by doing everything they could to destroy public education. The minute Reagan became Governor of California, the first thing he did was to set about destroying the independence, accessibility and success of the U.C. system, once the crown jewel of American public education. From vouchers to opposition to Pell Grants and student aid, Republicans do everything they can to dismantle, destroy, and disable American public education, increase its cost, and discredit the academics which staff it. They do this in a cold calculation that ignorant people without pronounced analytical skills will be easier to dupe. That’s it. They want you stupid so that they can hoodwink you easier.
The second issue is that the Republican Party, when it aligns itself with the wealthy, by definition aligns itself against the middle-class. It doesn’t want the rich to have to pay taxes, so it shifts the tax burden to the middle-class and to future generations. It doesn’t want the rich to have to pay fair wages, so it does everything it can to destroy, disable and dismantle the effectiveness of unions. This has two effects. The first the Republicans like—unions contribute and their members overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. Damaging unions thus helps Republicans by weakening part of the Democratic Party base. By driving down wages and shifting the tax burden, you slowly destroy the middle-class, and this leads to the second effect, destruction of American prosperity and concomitantly, its economic and military might. It is not an historical secret that only the advent of a prosperous middle class makes a nation truly potent economically, and that a potent economy is the only sustainable way to finance a potent military. And in today’s U.S., the effect has been amplified by the degradation of public education, and the increasing inability to compete in a progressively more technical and sophisticated world economy.
So when I say W has accomplished his mission, it has very little to do with Iraq. What he has accomplished is the only possible outcome of Republican governance: near-destruction of the middle-class, America’s economy on the brink of disaster, and its military might imperiled.
These problems come into confluence with another effect of governance by prostitution: the slavish devotion to the whims of the oil industry has brought the world to the brink of an environmental disaster from which civilization may not recover. This is the single most important issue facing the human race. Either we wise up or we auto-extinct. It’s that simple.
(A note: I’m not absolving the Democrats of complicity here: they are whores too, but more often they come out more nearly on the side of progressive politics, and they do not have the fundamental problems from which I posit the Republican Party suffers.)
So now we have a perfect storm: the American economy teetering on the brink, apparently beyond the reach of merely monetary measures, and the world on the brink of environmental disaster that may prove fatal to its ability to support human life.
Of course, the solution to both problems may be the same. The American economy can be rescued by a fiscal stimulus of sufficient breadth to convince the capital and credit markets that increased demand is sufficiently palpable to justify the extension of credit and investment in productive capacity, which will in turn increase the demand for those goods and services. At the same time, to blunt the effects of global warming, we need to develop new technologies and infrastructure for transportation and energy which leave a small fraction of the footprint which current technologies and infrastructure necessitate. The obvious solution to both problems is that the U.S. use a tremendous fiscal stimulus to build alternative energy and transportation technologies and infrastructure. The side-effect of course, is to put in U.S. hands the innovative technology that the entire world is going to need to adopt—read, buy from us.
And in this regard, as spiritually laudable as “post-partisanship” might be, I think we need to abandon it. The Republicans are the enemies of the middle-class and have proven in the Great Depression and again today that any time they are allowed to operate the levers of government, they will screw it up almost beyond the point of redemption. Even now, witless deficit hawks spouting long-discredited financial Darwinism are questioning the size of the stimulus. Obama’s desire to be “post-partisan” led him to include a huge tax-cut component in his initial stimulus plan, even though that will not purchase the new infrastructure that the recovery of America’s economy and the health of the Earth requires. It is time, metaphorically, not just to kick the Republicans while they are down, but to send them the bill for having our shoes cleaned afterwards. The looming environmental disaster has moved offstage as the mainstream media narrative has moved its focus to the economy, even though, as proposed here, the solution to both is identical.
We have about one chance left to get it right. And it won’t happen if we don’t keep an intolerable level of pressure on the prostiticians representing us in the Congress and the Senate.