Several years ago, I wrote...The Five Stages of Grief for the Party of FDR (and caught an immense amount of grief for writing it). Consider this diary as the announcement of my arrival into the "acceptance" stage.
----
I had gotten to the point where the mental gymnastics of trying to pretend that this country's government is still "on the level" was paralyzing my thinking. So its time to cut the Gordian knot:
This country is not a democracy anymore; its a plutocracy, well on its way to implementing corporate feudalism. We don't have elections anymore; we have auctions, legalized bribery and corruption. Thanks to the SCOTUS and David Addington's shop in the GWB WH, we have the rule of men, not laws. We don't have a free press anymore; we have a corporate propaganda and censorship machine. We don't have civil rights; we have a growing police state, greenlighted by the SCOTUS, complete with out of control cops and massive domestic surveillance. We don't try to conserve the environment; we try to rape it. The plutocrats think money will protect them from environmental collapse; their useful idiot followers think CO2 is the harbinger of the rapture.
One of our political parties, the GOP, is a collection of every rotten element of our society. All you have to do join the GOP is "make your bones" by attacking liberals, women, minorities, gays, etc. The GOP is a "Big Tent" for gangsters. This simple idea explains all the seeming inconsistency that troubles honest and serious people, like Thomas Frank (What's the Matter with Kansas?)
If you follow my diaries at all, you know that this has all happened before. Let's see what my personal hero had to say about it. In fact, she had an entire sub-chapter about it, entitled:
The Temporary Alliance between the Mob and the Elite
NOTE: When Ms. Arendt speaks of the "elite", she is referring to the intellectual elite - a class that had some independent power in early twentieth century Europe, a time of amazing advances in technology which created an atmosphere of genius-worship. Hard to believe these days, but it was true then.
Today's intellectual "elite" consists of the pseudo-intellectual corporate media mouthpieces of the 0.01%. People like Charles Murray, Dinesh D'Souza, George Will - polite reactionaries giving cover to the reactionary assault on our Constitution, our middle class, and our environment.
The 0.01% has used deindustrialization/offshoring to create the economic equivalent of Weimar Germany, and hired pseudo-intellecutals to blame it all on the liberals and big government. They have ginned up "the mob" (cf. below) to destroy the oppressive "status quo", i.e., regulated capitalism based on scientific and statistical evidence.
1. The mob
The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes is represented. This makes it easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society...
Like the mob men...the leaders of totalitarian movements had... been outside the class and national systems of respectable European society even before this system broke down.
This breakdown, when the smugness of spurious respectability gave way to anarchic despair, seemed the first great opportunity for the elite as well as the mob. This is obvious for the new mass leaders whose careers reproduce the features of earlier mob leaders: failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life. The fact that their lives prior to their political careers had been failures, naively held against them by the more respectable leaders of the old parties, was the strongest factor in their mass appeal.
- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
The crackpot right that is driving the GOP bus used to be "outside the class system of respectable American society". John Birchers and rabid fundamentalists were denounced by both political parties - Barry Goldwater couldn't stand them.
But, as I watch a crop of Tea Party lunatics - miserable ignoramuses, racists, and perverts - trash our national and state governments, it seems clearer than ever that GOP politicians are nothing more than Arendt's "the mob" - the worst scum of all classes, bound together by avarice, envy, and hatred.
2. The Elites
The temporary alliance between the (intellectual) elite and the mob rested largely on the genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability...there is no doubt the elite was pleased whenever the underworld frightened respectable society into accepting it on an equal footing. The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.
Boy, was Hannah on target here. The pseudo-intellectuals trash climate science and want bogus hacks treated as the intellectual equals of respected scientists. This is a microcosm of the general right-wing effort to attack academia for having a "bias against stupid". Quite clearly, educated ideologues like Will, Krauthammer, et al are willing to pervert academia and murder the planet for the satisfaction of watching their intellectual
superiors brought down.
The (intellectual) elite went to war with an exultant hope that everything they knew, the whole culture and texture of life, might go down in its "storms of steel"....
Simply to brand as outbursts of nihilism (cf. my diary on GOP nihilism) this violent dissatisfaction with the prewar age...is to overlook how justified disgust can be be in a society totally permeated with the ideological outlook and moral standards of (the Victorian Era)...the "front generation"...were completely absorbed by their desire to see the ruin of this whole world of fake security, fake culture, and fake life...Destruction without mitigation, chaos and ruin as such assumed the dignity of supreme values.
The genuineness of these feelings can be seen in the fact that very few of this generation were cured of their war enthusiasm by actual experience of its horrors. The survivors of the trenches did not become pacifists...
Heiden shows how consistently Hitler sided with catastrophe in the early days of the movement, how he feared a possible recovery of Germany.
- H. Arendt, OOT
When you read this quote, you have to appreciate the power of the "media bubble" and the "movement conservative" - the power to deny reality, to hate people who are trying to create prosperity and equality.
The only people for whom America in 1980 looked oppressive was the right wing. They had been living under the New Deal for 50 years, the Great Society for 15 years. The South felt occupied. Wall St. felt imprisoned. The movement conservative had the same attitude towards a functioning representative democracy that 1910s ideologues had against monarchies: that the government was completely illegitimate and should be brought down by any means.
And, the far right had the money to make this happen. They created the media bubble and the movement conservative and the pseudo-intellectual pundit class.
To the right-wing pseudo-elites, the New Deal looks like the Treaty of Versailles - an onerous burden that the super-rich want removed. To the mob, the Great Society looks like the Treaty of Versailles - a border-busting exercise in displacing people and ruining society. Its like the right wing lost two wars to the left wing, but they are still out for blood. Liberals, like the inter-war British and French, prepared to fight the last war; but the war we just lost was fought by computerized finance, regulatory evasion, outsourcing, union-busting, fundamentalist intimidation, racism, and misogyny. This undeclared class war was over five years ago, and the liberals are just realizing now how screwed they are.
They are clueless because, like 1920s Germany, the 0.01% took their secret rearmament operation to their former blood enemy. The Germans made the CORRECTION:secret Rapallo Pact with the Russians to secretly and jointly develop weapons forbidden under the Treaty of Paris. America's neoliberal elites made the same dishonest deal with China. While the 0.01% pretended to honor the laws of America, they, and the neoliberal Chinese leadership, created a slave labor society in China.
Today, the 0.01% are using that slave-labor weapon to grab more and more "territory" in America. This is the same way the Nazis grabbed the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. And, just like then, it is only the cowardice of corporate Democratic politicians that allows this land-grab. But, all that is recent history. By these power grabs, the right-wing politicos have won great victories without firing a shot. If the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party ever has the balls to declare open war on the GOP, it has already given away the store.
----
The above reasoning is why I say that the first American republic is over. What comes next is unknown, and we progressives have some input to it. But, the outlines of our future will be defined by the global corporate coup d'etat, and the reaction to it by oppressed people in the First through the Fifth Worlds.
I have reached "acceptance"; and I can now move forward. Please let me know where you are on this.