Dear Mr. President:
If you’re wondering why your party lost Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in Massachusetts, you should stop listening to what Katie Couric has to say about it, or Fox”News” or even NPR. They’re all going to repeat the same old Beltway bromides that your inner-circle of Clintonites (most of whom you should fire) are already telling you. They are going to tell you the same thing that Scott Brown is saying: the Democrats moved too fast on health care, have created too much debt, have gone too far to the left.
They’re all wrong. The problem is exactly the opposite. You and your party did not move nearly fast enough or boldly enough on health care. You let the bill get watered down and become useless. You compromised with the Republicans and the Blue Dogs. The Republicans, of course, are not now nor will they ever negotiate in good faith. Sure, Olympia Snowe might, but the rest of them are going to shoot at you no matter what you do. If you tack right, they will shoot at you. If you tack left, they will shoot at you. They are not interested in solving the nation’s problems because their base, rich people, are doing fine with the status quo, and their populist voters, the so-called Joe-the-Plumbers, have a long and sad history of voting against their own self-interests. The Republicans are about in gaining and keeping power. You should have moved forcefully ahead with real reform without them while you had the chance.
It’s too late now, of course, or almost too late. But this is an object lesson in American governance, and you’d do well to listen if you don’t want to become a lame duck after your first year.
In Washington DC, they think that if you’re not on the left and not on the right, you must be in the middle. This is idiocy. Some independent voters are actually far left: Greens and Naderites like me. Some are far right of various stripes: John Birchers and black-helicopter loonies. Some are well-meaning but utterly misguided libertarians. But the vast majority of independents, the so-called “swing voters,” simply have no strong political commitments whatsoever. How else can you explain the fact that many of these self-same voters voted for candidates as different as you and your immediate predecessor? This isn’t moderation; it’s mindlessness. In Massachusetts, they voted for Scott Brown even though he tapped into every fake-ass populist cliché in the book: the pickup truck, the open collar, the use of the words “shoved down our throats” and “real reform.” This isn’t change you can believe in; this is change you can’t articulate. The fact that swing voters couldn’t see through such flimsy political cladding means that they simply don’t know what they’re doing.
Granted, they think of themselves as moderates, but so does everybody. The fact that they hold few strong political convictions, however, translates into them supporting candidates who do, or who appear to. George W. Bush talked strong, and swing voters liked that: he made them feel definite, part of something stronger and bigger than themselves. He was a remarkably weak leader, of course, befitting his remarkably weak mind, but he had Dick Cheney around to do the heavy lifting for him. I hate to say this to you, Mr. President, as you are an intelligent and well-educated man and an eloquent one, but the swing voters voted for you not because of what you said on the campaign trail but because of how you said it.
If you’re thinking toward fall and the mid-term elections, and I suspect you are, then you ought to be thinking about how you can appear to be strong. And if you don’t want to get your nose dirty, as I suspect you don’t, send out Joe Biden to speak forcefully in public for you, and send out Rahm Emmanuel to break heads in private.
Above all, use language people can believe in and suggest legislation that will actually help. Don’t let conservatives in your own party get in your way; if they aren’t on board, they should be cut off come the next election cycle. That’s party discipline, and it’s another thing the Republicans do better than you Dems do.
Strong liberal leaders are ones who pushed through reforms that seemed drastic but were actually reasonable reactions to drastic times. Think FDR. They created programs that we all now love, like Medicare and Social Security. You may have noticed that times are drastic. You need to act accordingly if you want to solve real problems and leave an FDR-like legacy.
Oh, and if Scott Brown and John McCain want an open debate on the health care bill, give it to them. But use the old high-school debate technique of requiring them to come up with a better solution. When they can’t, be prepared with hard facts about how your bill is better and exactly who it’ll benefit. Most of you are lawyers, for crying out loud, and you can’t even win a debate with the simpletons on the other side? You can’t stop there, though. Congress may be about debate, but winning the public is about marketing. Hammer that message home again and again and again. I want to see and hear about a viable Democratic agenda as often as I saw and heard those damnable “five-dollar footlong” Subway commercials.
This is no time for compromise. The Republicans have had the ball in the right-wing endzone for so long that even a single yard toward actual reform of health care or banking or environmental policy seems like a victory. It’s too late to think incrementally: we need a touchdown, and, at this point, that will only come in the form of a hail-Mary pass.
Sincerely,
T.S. DeHaviland
In some ways, the American political system is working as intended: the elite, or at least an elite, is making the decisions, just as the proverbial Founding Fathers designed. Sadly, that elite does not comprise the actual representatives we elect—perhaps a blessing, since our electeds tend to be kind of stupid after all. There’s no irony here: candidates are selected by the two parties because they are weak: weak minded and weak-willed. They are therefore more moldable into the electable product. Witness George W. Bush, a blank canvas upon which Karl Rove could paint his masterpiece. Still, a certain level of competence is necessary, as the meltdown of Sarah Palin’s candidacy evinced. This is not to say that, had the press actually scrutinized W. the same way that the same thing couldn’t have happened to him, but they weren’t then in love with Obama, didn’t have the evil temptress of Palin to gird up their loins to resist.
But parties are cognizant of the need to kowtow to their masters, the much maligned “special interests,” by which we can read “wealthy businesses interests.” The Right may complain about the Sierra Club or the ACLU, but those entities take to the courts because they can’t afford to run candidates; only the really loaded can finance a campaign. The open-secrets of the senators from coal country or the representatives from Boeing wouldn’t seem so tired conceptually if they weren’t actually just that. In the biggest coup (all puns intended) yet, we have just passed an era in which the president and vice president were wholly owned subsidiaries of the oil and gas industries. This worn path, however, leads us to the gates of our true masters.
By doing so, we follow the money too, and even after the recent collapse, the top 5% still control almost half of all there is. And just as the feudal lords’ powers ebbed or flowed depending on their relationship with the Holy See, so too do the current elites see their wealth enhanced or degraded by political patronage. Boeing never missed a major government contract when the powerful triumvirate of Nancy Kassebaum, Bob Dole, and Dan Glickman represented Kansas, where Boeing has a major plant. But when these were replaced by the relatively weak and ineffectual Brownback/Roberts/Tiahrt delegation, Boeing lost a major bid, and to an overseas company to boot.
It doesn’t help that this delegation is at least 2/3 intellectually dim either; the downside of being able to control a politician is simply that he or she lacks personal power. In this, George W. Bush seems to have won the day for Big Oil but lost the war, as America’s global position was weakened vis-a-vis OPEC, its relationship with Russia shot, and its access to Iraqi oil fields remains doubtful. In the short term, the almost unimaginable boon of oil prices at $120 a barrel last year have come back to haunt a wrecked economy and Venezuela and Russia renationalizing their supply.
The American people, of course, hardly even enter the picture. Even during election years, they are so docile and suggestible, so apathetic, that it’s nearly certain they’ll fail to surprise. The election of Barack Obama reinforces this idea. He may be black, but he’s also unrelentingly centrist, even conservative, in times that call for bold and progressive action. No puns intended, in Obama the electorate did not back a dark horse, as that would have been a Kucinich or a Nader. The American people have failed to riot in the streets or even calmly protest even in the face of eight years of obvious incompetence, a quarter century of declining wages, and complete economic meltdown. George Orwell, it turns out, was wrong about this: the proles need not be poorly educated. In fact, despite increasing numbers of college degrees, we’re now less likely to agitate than we were when things were going relatively well. The system that we purportedly love, that we send our kids to die in order to supposedly protect, has broken down, been hijacked by the same people who have cynically outsourced our jobs and dismantled the industry we worked so hard to create, and in order to “show them” we elected a man who packs his group of economic advisors and regulators with them.
It’s as if, along with middle-class expectations and middle-class educations, we’ve also adopted bourgeois conservatism, even if it makes our actual lives less certain, less wealthy, less satisfying overall. The middle class that, in its ascendancy, demanded more freedom is now, in its senility, demanding less.
I suppose we get what we deserve, but it is hardly meaningful politically to exist so, with half of us living up to our expectations to vote one way and half the other and neither way promising actual change. What has happened in this country over the past 30 years is the largest voluntary handover of power in history, with literally a hundred million of us not even participating in any election and tens of millions more not demanding that their parties do better. We fail to question the party lines that, inevitably, fail to improve our lives.
There is something of the mindset of war about this, and much of that egged on by the Right wing media and the Republican Revolutionaries who took over congress in 1994 but whose first major victory was the Reagan-Bush regime from 1980-1992. We still fight on their battlefields; they have long held the high ground in the minds of most Americans and even the mainstream media so often touted as leftist. The latter are all solidly in the realms of the wealthy, after all, and are still more worried about their investments than the plight of the poor. The Right determines the language–”taxpayers” instead of “citizens,”–and projects the power relationships—the supposed control of the “intellectual elite” and the threat to freedom that is the ACLU. The lack of push-back and redefinition from the Democrats is an indication that they, too buy this language to some degree. This is also why universal single-payer health care, the only system that actually makes sense, is an impossibility in this country.
They manage to do this by false dilemmas: the system we have or socialism, the vagaries of the market or the “rationing” of health care, and that feeds into the scorched-earth politics of a two-party state wherein winning is the point, governing is secondary. And the only way to win such costly campaigns is to enlist the power, and thereby pledge fealty to, the rich.
The question history will have to ask, and the answer is not exactly clear, is why such a powerful and hopeful and active people gave up on their democracy, why we decided that solutions that actually work were too ideologically scary to try, why making our public servants actually serve the public was too much to bother with after all.
The degree to which poetry is about itself is the measure of its irrelevance.
Apply this idea at will and with the necessary substitutions to fit your situation.
Ehud Olmert spoke today about the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip as if the Israelis genuinely didn’t want to be there and didn’t want to cause disruption and loss of life, but that it was somehow necessary, and as if he actually believes that his state’s recent acts are going to crush Hamas and thereby solve all of Israel’s troubles.
If he really does believe this, he is utterly deluded. There is nothing in the past forty years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict to suggest that doing it exactly as they’ve always done it is going to somehow lead to a cessation of hostilities—just the opposite. It is certainly possible that he is indeed deluded, of course, as the past eight years of US history show that achieving high office in a democracy is no guarantee of sanity. It is possible that, being at the heart of the conflict, he and the rest of Israel are unable to see anything particularly clearly. But it’s just as likely that the leaders of Israel and Hamas are going after one another for purposes of reinforcing their power among their own constituents as that they really think they’re gaining any ground with one another. Clearly, Hamas rockets won‘t bring down the modern, nuclear-armed, US-backed state of Israel, and just as clearly, violent incursions in the face of an asymmetric opposition just leads to an entrenchment of the opposition, in this case Hamas or some party even more extreme that will form to fill its vacuum. You can’t crush a guerilla opposition short of genocide, or at least extreme and open brutality—public drawing and quartering, heads on stakes, that sort of thing—and Israel has managed not to go so far.
We must take into account, though, that when Olmert claims that Hamas is “an existential threat” to Israel, he’s not entirely wrong. After all, how would a largely secular but ethnically Jewish state define itself if it didn’t have an Other to define itself as not? The Palestinians, despite their current condition, suffer from the same potential problem. Recall what a statement it was for Arafat to don a business suit when he negotiated the Dayton Accords. There would have been no statement had his Westernized sartorial choices not been controversial at home.
Palestinians and Israelis have just as much trouble trying to define themselves as distinct from the other: they eat the same food and ostensibly worship the same god (when they worship) and have many of the same concerns, namely how to make a living in a barren landscape with few natural resources and a history of violence. If we in the West spoke truly, we’d acknowledge that nobody except the locals would be interested in the Israel-Palestine issue if it weren’t the home to the three major monotheistic religions: the area has no oil, no good farmland, few beautiful vistas. If not for the religious significance, the conflict there would be sort of like Sri Lanka’s problem with the Tamil Tigers: a minor sort of tragedy when we hear about it, the hearing of which we follow by an immediate return to the spreadsheet or caramel latte that calls for our immediate attention.
In back of this, there is also the fact that both Israel and Palestine have far right minorities that must be appeased. In Palestine, that is Hamas, and it was only after decades of oppression that the moderates of Palestine decided to give their extremists a chance to govern. Hamas was already acting as a de facto government, building schools and soup kitchens, and taking care of people when the more conciliatory but utterly corrupt Fata was just filling its own pockets with foreign-aid cash. Likewise, moderate governments in Israel are usually only able to govern by making parliamentary coalitions with the ultra-orthodox, whose settlement-building and zero-tolerance fundamentalism pulls the moderates’ puppet-strings if they wish to maintain power, and it is always the first order of business for any political party to gain and keep power.
But for religious moderates, there is always a niggling sense of having compromised one’s core principles for the sake of getting along with Modernity. I have witnessed this with Mennonites, most of whom speak and think of the Amish with reverence, even though they’d never actually wish to live the way the Amish do. Contemporary Mennonites think with one part of their minds that the Amish are somehow more “pure,” closer to the way God intended people to live, even though the Amish lifestyle was one adopted long after the founding of the faith—a faith that developed as a reaction by theologically sophisticated, university educated city-dwellers to the corruption of the existing church. It’s likely the Israelis and Palestinians view their own fundamentalists the same way and kowtow to them not only because of their political power but because, on some level, they think it somehow more “pure” and “godly” to do so.
Seeing the world in terms of a continuum of purity leads to the desire to protect those you think are more pure and destroy those you think are less pure. Since nobody’s position is at either terminus, relatively minor differences take on amplified importance: if I’m much like the Palestinian, and the Palestinian is not pure, I must prove my relative worth by destroying the Palestinian. This also leads to the “existential threat” as outlined above since it is definitional, but we see the phenomenon over and over again, from the “Holy” Land to otherwise reasonable people aggrandizing the small-town “values voter” in the US, even though few of us live in small towns, and even in small towns few, if any, of us ever live by those values we vote to uphold. This was exactly the destructive power unleashed in the witch hunts in Salem and the pogroms in Europe.
Sadly, none of the religions involved in the conflict at issue insist on the kind of purity that drives the current troubles. Judaism has its Jubilee and Christianity its forgiveness. Islam has its jihad—the internal struggle to follow the path the Prophet describes. If we were perfect, we humans wouldn’t need religion at all. The least we could ask of ourselves is that we privilege the moderation of our faith
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