There have been several thought-provoking diaries that have attempted to understand and explain the sheer irrationality and intensity of the opposition to President Obama and everything he is trying to accomplish. MinistryofTruth got it rolling with Just call him a N****** and get it over with, Republicans. We ALL KNOW that's what you mean. Racism is one factor. Vyan takes it a bit further with It's not (just) because he's Black... he's something worse (w/Video) In other words, he's a Liberal. msblucow adds another dimension with The Public Option: A Promise Kept or a Promise Broken, looking at how passsionless Centrism is betraying the promises of the campaign.
I think it goes even deeper. It's about Change We Can/Can Not Believe In.
From a certain angle of view, American Politics is and has almost always been the Politics of Denial - an inability to look at the world; not seeing the problems that are out there, not seeing our own shortcomings as a country, and not seeing how great the real costs of dealing effectively with any of them are until we are absolutely forced to by circumstances beyond our control. We've managed to rise to the occasion and mostly scrape by time and time again, but we could and should have done better. There's a quote attributed to Winston Churchill which goes something like "You can always count on the Americans to do the Right Thing - once they've exhausted the alternatives. We've been running on a mythology of complacency, that Americans will always (magically) find a way, that we have have a 'special destiny' watching over us.
In the past, America has been able to get by because of conditions that no longer apply. The oceans are no longer the great defensive barrier that once allowed us to ignore the rest of the world when it suited us. Terrorist attacks, emerging diseases, more and more countries acquiring nuclear technology and the missiles to use it at a distance; all of these and more mean nowhere in America is beyond the reach of the rest of the world.
We're running out of room and resources. The Civil War broke out because expansion to the West only let us put off settling the matter of slavery for so long. We haven't been self-sufficient in oil for a long time, even though we were the country that started the industry. The population of the U.S. has approximately doubled within my lifetime - and most of the rest of the world isn't slowing down either. It's been estimated we'll need at least 4 more planets like Earth just to provide the raw materials if the rest of the world tries to match our standard of living. Even if we had them, we'd still be drowning in the garbage that goes with it - which is another way of looking at the causes of global climate change.
So, IMHO here's what's driving the growing irrationality on one hand and the seemingly impotent response to it. At some level there is a growing awareness - largely unacknowledged - that the systems, traditions, and beliefs we use to deal with the world are approaching the end of their effectiveness.
Some are dealing with it through outright denial: global warming is a myth; getting government off our backs will solve everything; the power of the free markets will let us grow our way out of trouble, seeking consensus and building on political centrism, relying on traditional institutions....
And those are the less crazy options. Sarah Robinson has been making the case the the Lights Are About To Go Out. In three articles, she looks at the signs that America is perilously close to collapsing into Fascism. Fascist America: Are We There Yet? Fascist America II: The Last Turnoff Fascist America III: Resistance for the Long Haul. All three are must-reads for anyone who hopes to find a better way forward.
One of the defining characteristics of Fascism is that it is essentially irrational at the core. (Dave Niewert and Sarah Robinson have been doing an incredible job tracking this at Orcinus for years.) When people are afraid, when they don't understand or like what they see happening, the way Fascism appeals directly to strong emotional needs in humans bypasses the brain entirely. Racism, anti-liberalism are A) ways to identify external elements as the enemy which B) provides scapegoats to 'explain' why things are going wrong. They're not root causes - they're symptoms of a deeper problem.
The Republican party abandoned any pretense at governing on the basis of rational thought a long time ago; their arguments are all framed in ways to generate strong emotions, not solutions for the real world. But Obama's seeking of bipartisan consensus is no more rational than a belief in death panels; it's another form of denial and msblucow does a great job of explaining why it is not working against the Republican fear-fest.
The media that used to attempt to inform and educate the American people is hardly better. Under corporate ownership, the role of the press to serve the people means serving them up to those corporations and their interests. Not the public interest. For a good example, one need look no farther than a New York Times editorial supposedly defending the President's speech to school children next week:
...The common refrain is that Mr. Obama will offer a socialist message — although nobody said what they meant by that.
There is, of course, nothing socialist in any of Mr. Obama’s policies, as anyone with a passing knowledge of socialism and its evil history knows. But in this country, unlike actual socialist countries, nobody can be compelled to listen to the president....
emphasis added
Even as the editorial tries to support Obama, it reinforces the very frame it is trying to counter - that Socialism is inherently evil and un-American (and so is Obama). From the way it is described, it sounds like Socialism should be lumped right in there with Communism, Fascism, and every other totalitarian 'ism'. It's hard to say which possibility is more discouraging - that the anonymous editorialist is so ignorant of what Socialism really is, or that he/she has such a simplistic world view.
It's another example of Denialism at work - the rejection of anything that challenges the status quo in American politics. The wikipedia article on Socialism contains one sentence worthy of particular examination:
Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through exploitation, creates an unequal society, does not provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximize their potentialities and does not utilize technology and resources to their maximum potential nor in the interests of the public.
In a world where capitalism seems to be going off the rails and failing to deliver on its promises for the majority of Americans these days, the idea that maybe it's time to change how we regard Capitalism is too much change for some. And it's especially true for those who have concentrated that wealth and power - and ownership of the media. We end up excluding from consideration many alternatives that just might be a better fit for the new world we're in when the mainstream news is really about preserving revenue streams. There are new information channels opening up, but the public dialog is less informed by the glut of changing media channels than drowned out by the increasing levels of noise in the system.
CBS Sunday Morning is celebrating 30 years on the air today - and there's an interesting piece how the media has changed radically in just the 5 years since Jeff Greenfield first looked back on the 25th anniversary.
The title story looking back at the last 30 years is a reminder of just how much change has taken place in the last three decades alone. It also starts by reminding us what happened to the last president who tried to look at the world as it actually is, and respond to it in a rational way: Jimmy Carter. Nobody wants to hear bad news; Ronald Reagan followed Carter, and launched the thirty years of Denial we're reaping the harvest of now. Reagan was not a leader as much as he was a salesman with a feel-good message. Politics has been market-driven ever since. (And as might be expected, the looking back at Sunday Morning is all framed within a vaguely optimistic style that elides the darker implications to be seen.)
Just as supermarkets are full of junk food and eating healthy is a struggle, so politics has become filled with empty calories. Substantive policies have been replaced by magical thinking; if we only shout loud enough and keep repeating the magical phrases, miracles will happen. And the people who know better are not being heard or heeded.
Everybody wants Change for the better but that means different things to different people. Obama campaigned on a promise of Change We Can Believe In. But what DO we believe in? What has the White House given us?
It sounded like a good thing, because a majority of Americans did not like what had been happening and wanted Change. For most people, that means they want bad stuff to stop happening, and good stuff to start - as long as they don't have to change anything else in their lives.
For Republicans/Conservatives, Change means going backward - to simpler times when the world worked the way it was supposed to. (It never did, not for far too many people - and it's gone in any case.)
For Democrats/Liberals "Change" means returning to some golden ideal of government where the system works again and Hope is a thing that happens automatically from that system. (Except it doesn't and can't - because the system is based on assumptions that no longer apply.)
For a certain fraction of America, Change is something to be feared and fought at all costs - because it has never been good for them. (And a lot of the time, they've been right - if for the wrong reasons. Populism and Fascism can end up in bed together because they are both susceptible to irrationality and manipulation.)
The point is this: Change happens. As water runs downhill to the sea, as the sun rises and sets every day, Change happens. Directing it, defining it, channeling it is integral to governing. Obama was elected in large part because he promised he would take control of the changes we all know are coming. So what happened?
Right now people are doing crazy things because we have a shitload of change coming at us and none of it looks good. To meet it, we are going to have to change what we are doing - and that's seldom comfortable. For all that Obama promised Change, he's only been pursuing it at a superficial level. He's attempted to farm it out to Congress, with the results we've seen. He's tried to accommodate change to the desires of those with every incentive to send it in the wrong direction in exchange for their support, instead of mobilizing the American people behind him.
He's spent more time embracing Washington institutions than shaking them up - and both Liberals and Conservatives know at some fundamental level those institutions are broken. Even if they were repaired, they would not give us the answers we need - because after all they are what got us where we are today.
And we're stressed because at some fundamental level we know we have to get it right and the margins for error are shrinking faster every day that we don't. It's not just about our city, our state, or even our country. Things are not looking good for the entire planet unless we get some Changes in the right direction real soon now. If people are doing crazy things and acting incredibly stupidly - terror has something to do with that.
Make no mistake: there are large numbers of people terrified of change and Conservative politicians ready to feed that fear and use it to build their own power while blocking any change that doesn't fit their agenda. President Obama's long slide on ambitious Health Care Reform has demonstrated that when real, major change is needed, it is a tactical and strategic mistake to try to pursue gradualism and consensus with forces who have gone to a war footing to resist him every step of the way. The White House message has been muddled and watered down to avoid frightening people. Too late - they're already scared but of the wrong things.
Rahm Emanuel is supposed to have said a crisis is a terrible thing to waste - yet that's exactly what has happened. The Centrists in the administration have no real commitment to change other than locking down their control of the system. That's why there have been so many Devil's bargains committed with the major players at the expense of change that will really work. Like Reagan, they don't care if a policy actually works as long as it appears to work. What they forget is that Reagan and every Republican since has had a largely uncritical media filled with cheerleaders plus a vast army of talk radio propagandists and the like pushing the Conservative message 24/7. Obama will be a one term wonder if he doesn't move to take control of the message and mobilize his own forces. If he was naive enough to think winning the election was enough, you'd think the Republicans would have disabused him by now. They have conceded nothing and will concede nothing. They are at war with Obama - no matter that he refuses to acknowledge it. Denialism.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to Change by changing the game. He created new institutions and discarded old ones where necessary. He found answers for his time, reshaped not just America but the world as well - and was able to capture the public imagination in a way that Obama has been failing to do. FDR had devout enemies, but they didn't have the stranglehold on media that we suffer under today. FDR was not shy about naming them and challenging them either. Obama has shown he can break through when he tries (which is why the wing nuts are in hysterics about his coming address to school children) but he has to try - and dare.
The world is changing. America MUST change or be left as one more failed experiment in the judgment of History. Until Obama begins to realize his promise as an Agent of Change who is succeeding, the nonsense is only going to get worse and the opposition will harden. Compromise, capitulation, and concession will not do it.
Hope is not enough; it also takes courage and conviction. The Republicans know this; that is why Obama can not afford half measures. Toujours l'audace.
UPDATE: Thanks for the rescue! The time between now and Obama's speech on Wednesday is going to be excruciating. Like it or not, it's probably all going to come down to what he says. One way or another we'll be finding out just what kind of Change he's willing to fight for. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.