I think I'm supposed to be writing something pithy about Netroots Nation. That's what I try to do nearly every year, anyway; usually they're abstract mumblings about nothing in particular, mostly introspective in odd ways, while trying to make some larger point about the mood, or thoughts about the future of the netroots movement, and on some occasions they contain extended insults directed at Donald Trump, which are the ones I like best.
Ouroboros, an ancient symbol
of renewal and painful indigestion
Yeah, I got none of that this time around. Not a damn thing.
So instead, I would like to talk about the end of the republic.
We as Americans often confuse technological progress with societal progress. Whether this is more pronounced in America than in other countries I have no idea, but it is difficult to sit in a state-of-the-art convention center and imagine a Roman-style collapse of the republic. We have HDTVs, damn it. We have iPhones. Surely we have advanced far beyond those past civilizations, yes? Surely we are better than any current country could be without those things? We have stealth bombers, you primitive bastards. That makes us better.
But people do not progress as fast as their tools, and societies do not even progress at the pace a single person might. Countries might have prodigious technology, and yet still harbor virulent racism. No matter what progress is made, we are still all subject to the self-inflicted effects of war. The environment itself still overwhelms our every invented protection, and easily, with a single tornado, flood, or earthquake, or volcano, or with a slight mutation to a random virus that has always been there, or with changes to the very climate of the planet. In the end we are the stuff of our biology, and harbor the same tribal suspicions and hatreds, the same greed and jealousies, and the same rough ambitions.
There is nothing that declares with (ahem) certitude that our society will always progress, and never regress. Or even collapse. There is no country that is immune to going batshit crazy, from time to time. We do it ourselves rather often: generationally, mostly. Each generation either repeats the same damn mistakes or, overcorrecting, repeats the mistakes from four or five cycles back. I expect we could mostly render history books as generic documents: During the year Y, an overwhelming fear of X assisted in Z's rise to power, after which all went to hell in a handbasket before the countering B movement succeeded in reversing the trend in year Y+N. Cut and paste, kids, cut and paste. All the rest can be done with footnotes.
Where was I? Oh, right. Progress.
Anyone interested in advancing societal progress quickly finds themselves facing modern efforts of the conservative movement to regress – not conserve, but regress – what once were perceived as core values and roles of government. Much of it is nonsensical, such as the sudden discovery of the Deficit Monster, after spending the last decade gleefully creating said Deficit Monster. There are likely to be further regressions, most based not on an urgent purported need to hide from said monster but on the notion that certain people enjoy too many rights. And at the moment, certain people is defined as nearly everyone who does not have a high six-figure income.
I am more bothered by the notion of conservative legislators that we as a nation do not need to make progress than by any specific successes or failures in actually progressing. The conservative plan for the end of readily available oil is either to ignore it or demand we drill the remaining stuff out faster: there is no plan B. The conservative plan for creating jobs is not "tax cuts", because we now have all lived through an unimpeachable real-world demonstration that those tax cuts didn't create any damn jobs, but to tell us all that we need to suck it up and expect nothing better. The plan for health care is to have less health care. The plan for our infrastructure is to not have a plan, because that costs money. There is no vision of a future America that does anything any better than we do right now: instead, there is an active hunger to do each thing slightly worse.
That said, they seem to get most starry-eyed and visionary when it comes to stripping away rights of the common folk. At the state level, their efforts to strip workers of collective bargaining rights seem more fervently pushed than any other issue, with aggressive restrictions against "certain" voters, "certain" immigrants, and "certain" women close behind. At the national level, it is taken as universal truth that of course all cuts to government will be placed squarely on the backs of the poor. It's not even a question – there are no substantive proposals that the rich share the pain. Not a damn one. The gap between rich and poor in America, and how it has expanded dramatically post-Reagan, is common knowledge – but it won't make a difference. Money is not just seen as equivalent to free speech, but is seen as equivalent to morality. If you are poor, you are immoral. If you are rich, it is because you have been blessed. Or are a Randian producer, and not a parasite.
Are any of us surprised? No, not really. The 1980's gave us a nice big helping of the same, under the label greed is good. Now we're just doubling down, saying no – greed is literally good. And as corollary, poverty is immoral. And as further corollary, helping people who are in poverty is Wrong. All of this is fine and good and espoused by people who declare themselves to be the bestest kind of Christians, and wear prominent crosses, and argue that the black fellow in the White House does not really love Jesus.
The end result is a rear-guard action just to defend basic premises of the American experience. Yet again. We did it all throughout the Bush years, saying pesky things like Iraq was not linked to al Qaeda or torture is still bad or espionage against wide swaths of American citizens is illegal or you aren't allowed to leak the identity of a CIA agent just because her husband said mean things about you. All those fights were about excesses or abuses of administrative power. These new fights are about government and industry trying to blatantly steal things from the rest of us.
There's nothing fun about that. It is excruciating to have the same fights as past generations, for the same reasons, sponsored by the same moneyed interests. And it's excruciating to see how eagerly we ignore the lessons of all those past generations (on the contrary, we can't even learn lessons from the last decade.) We vote our politicians in and out of office, which is an improvement over much of history, which saw rulers and petty politicians alike getting their heads lopped off if the gap between the powerful and the common rabble got intolerably large. Regardless of party, however, our own gap gets steadily bigger.
And, in this recession, it accelerates. And the laws get changed so that the rich have more power, and the poor have less. And the very serious financial gurus declare that the rich need their losses to be financed by the rest of us, but the rest of us will be getting no such help from the rich. Tax cuts for them; belt-tightening for everyone else.
And a large part of the population laps this up, and dresses up in revolutionary war garb, and waves flags, and celebrates every damn bit of it. Then they take buses provided by the lobbyists arguing for the rich to go to conferences sponsored by lobbyists for the rich, where they all vow to take their country back, learn how to edit videotape, and feel patriotic as all get out.
It is exhausting, mostly because it is stupid. There are no common facts able to bridge that divide, and no common history that can be at least recognized as true. If someone wants to say that the Founding Fathers freed the slaves, then by God, the Founding Fathers freed the slaves, and you're a hateful liberal elitist book-learning snob if you think otherwise.
Even more, it is exhausting because it just keeps going. There's no end to it. What started as ideological battle descends time and time again into a celebration of rote idiocracy – talking points that are made up of nothing but nonsense, budget "plans" that ignore basic math, and the thundering belly-flop of politicians into whatever new preposterous notion is demanded – demanded! – by the most fearful parts of their base during any given week. I long believed George W. Bush was our least intelligent modern president; the other side apparently took that as a dare.
Any number of works of fiction have explored what it would be like if a nation were to be put in the hands of pathological liars or abject morons: those stories generally do not go well, probably because they were authored by intellectuals and book-learners. I do not think we are at that point, mind you. But what worries me is that if we ever did eventually get to such a point, it could only be because we as a society had grown too dumb to even notice.