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
Why no one is calling the Paulson/Bernanke plan to bail out Wall Street a massive power grab by these two men is beyond me, but historians may see it for what it is. They gain power by dealing directly with those holding our nation’s economy hostage, the Wall Street elite we have allowed to take control, instead of giving this power to our elected representatives. This is appeasement of the investor class on a scale not seen since the days of the danegeld. That Congress is fighting back is a good thing in theory, but may be ruinous in practice: we are all subject to the fragile psychology of the investment class and its representatives on the trading floor.
Our nation is prepared to spend nearly a trillion dollars in order, not to shore up the actual balance of credits and debits of our financial system, but to cure the “jitters” of those whose hands are on the money. Almost everyone in Congress agrees this is “necessary.” What this shows us is that bank executives, traders, investors, are “super citizens,” capable of wielding immense power simply by acting on their disordered states of mind. Maybe more accurately, they’re the real citizens of this country, the genuine aristocracy that must be appeased so the king’s men, Paulson and Bernanke, can keep their heads on their shoulders.
I say that it’s not about actual balances between debits and credits, but what would be even more accurate is to say that the balances of debits and credits that are being weeped over are not actual in the common sense of the word; they are a fiction every bit as real, and every bit as revealing, as a character in some broad national drama, mythological numbers whose significance looms as real as Gilgamesh in the mind of a Babylonian. What we have is a crisis of values in both senses: the values of things and how we value things. The value of an object is what those negotiating over it, or potentially negotiating over it, agree that it is. This is true whether or not it’s a stock in a company or a home on the range. Thus when home values are “artificially” inflated and then that value collapses, the event is more a story we tell about ourselves to ourselves than it is anything inherent about the home. The home does not change; our attitude about it does. When that attitude is held by the investment class, we all lose money, since the investors are the ones whose actions infuse money with their magic, fictive power.
None of these observations are particularly new, but stating them broadly would no doubt cause our system to collapse, again, for the very reasons stated above. All cultures need these stories about themselves to define themselves, and without them we turn to the Ghost Shirt Dance and the Boxer rebellion. Cultures survive such identity crises, but rarely without war, chaos, and starvation that are very, very real—a process we still see playing out in post-colonial Africa.
Another illusion muddying the picture and causing the media and even those involved in solving the problem from seeing it clearly is revealed by the fact that nobody called the president on his statement that we practice a system of “democratic capitalism” in his recent speech about our financial crisis. I generally don’t nitpick about such things, but we practice democracy in only very limited ways: we’re a republic, for the most part, in which people choose their representatives. The idea was that this setup avoided the messiness of mob rule that true democracy was prone to, gave legislators time to travel to the capital and stay there during sessions, and allowed the lay citizen to elect someone perhaps more able to do the job of ruling than himself. The representative was meant to be aligned with the interests of the citizen who elected him, and the competing interests of the various representatives in congress were meant to lead to deliberations, negotiations, compromise—in other words, reasonable solutions. That our Congress is rarely able to actually reach those things says more about our failure as an electorate to do the job of an informed citizen than it says about the relative incompetence of the men and women there. But because elections cost a lot to run, those able to afford to hold office are frequently of or aligned with the investor class, and so they see why bills like the Bernanke/Paulson bill must pass, but they also know that the bill is highly unpopular with the wage-slaves back home. An actual compromise must be reached or the peasants—like you and me—may revolt.
Part of the problem we have seeing this clearly is that we also practice capitalism, a system that is in many ways fundamentally opposed to democracy: where democracy thrives on equality and an informed and interested public, capitalism thrives on the inequality of investors and those they invest with and an ignorant and docile consumer. We get confused because capitalism and democracy share a features: both require a certain amount of liberty to succeed. The investor must be free to invest as she sees fit, and the citizen must be free in body and mind in order to make civic decisions without interference. Capitalism must keep information from competitors in order not to reveal its trade secrets and from consumers in order not to reveal that it serves the bottom line and not them. This is part of the reason that free-market theorists’ “rational agent” notions are total crap—or rather a cynical ploy: basic business practices preclude the transparency the consumer needs to act in a rational way when making buying decisions. The pushers of subprime loans in this latest meltdown provide millions of cases-in-point since they basically ran a confidence game on the poor, creditless fools they duped into buying their variable-rate loans. Added to this is the fact that consumers rarely act rationally when making purchasing decisions anyhow; because most products are equally bad due to the excesses of corporate corner-cutting; consumers buy instead based on what they feel about a product or what they think the product says about them. More basically, industrialization thrives on overproduction, and so capitalism has created consumers, a class of people who define themselves by what they buy and the need to collect more of it, needed or not. Thus the president–with a straight face and perhaps genuinely believing it—told us to go out and buy things as our patriotic duty after 9-11-2001. The investment class was already firmly in control.
As legislators and presidents ceded more and more power to the investment class over the past 25 years capitalism was kept healthy but at the detriment of the real-world values (in both senses) of the citizen; the market became more opaque as it became more free, and its concerns became, de faco, the most important concerns the nation has. It has gotten to the point now that, when asked to define “freedom,” or “democracy,” nine out of ten of my students will equate it with consumer choice, the ability to go to Wal-Mart in the middle of the night and choose between fifty different Chinese-built clock radios.
Democracies, certainly, can tolerate a certain amount of capitalism, but capitalism must be seen for what it is: a way of doing certain economic functions, not a way to run a country.
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