It's worth reminding ourselves from time to time that when any of us blames one party or the other for election strategy, atmospherics, and organizing models, we're rearranging and polishing the deck chairs on the Titanic. Isn't the real issue that the economic model has changed to something decidedly post-industrial and that nobody knows what to do about it? The way the political parties talk about this shift doesn't even come close to capturing its complexity. Neither political party addresses the facts on the ground, and to that extent, their proposals and our criticisms fall short
Even a rotting capitalist order can keep the chickens from coming home to roost for a while -- an economic system can be perpetuated for a surprisingly long time even though an ever-shrinking percentage of people benefit from it because everything is stacked in the winners' favor. They constitute a charmed circle, those "shiny happy people holding hands," don't they? But such a situation can't continue forever -- ordinary citizens won't tolerate misery without hope of relief, especially when hope has been held out to them for so long, as it has been in western industrialized societies.
Here's where I think we stand -- a change has come over the economic life of the nation, and we don't know how to deal with it. I still think it's much better to have Democrats in power than Republicans, but there's no easy way out of our difficulties. That's why, I suggest, those (especially progressives or liberals) who are always reproaching "Obummer" and the Dems are missing the point – he and they are running up against a murderer's row of what Allen Ginsberg called "the Drunken Taxicabs of Absolute Reality." Those things tend to swerve as cannily as Democritus's atoms right in your direction, just when you think you've outsmarted and evaded them all.
David Kennedy writing in today's NYTimes addresses some of the issues you bring up.
ReplyDeleteHere are the points that I thought were relevant:
"What’s instructive to us now is the similarity between the Gilded Age’s combination of extraordinary social and economic dynamism and abject political paralysis. We face a no-less-formidable array of issues, and there is little mystery about their nature. Some have a familiar face: unemployment, sadly, as well as immigration and the quest for an appropriate national security strategy and foreign policy.
Others are almost wholly novel: the passage to a post-industrial information age; mounting competition in virtually all the world’s marketplaces; worsening educational achievement; giddily levitating health costs; a looming fiscal apocalypse in entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid; environmental degradation and climate change; and the search for sustainable energy supplies.
In the face of all those challenges, like our Gilded Age forebears, we have a political system that manages to be both volatile and gridlocked — indeed, it may be gridlocked not least because it is so volatile. And, like their 19th-century forebears, today’s politicians have great difficulty gaining traction on any of those challenges. Now as then, it’s hard to lead citizens who are so eager to “throw the bums out” at every opportunity.
Yet the Gilded Age was but a chapter in American history, and we are permitted to hope that the sorry spectacle of our own time may well come to a similar conclusion. The pent-up demand for some kind of meaningful approach to the great issues that hung so heavily on the land more than a century ago eventually produced the Progressive Era."
Dare we hope?
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ReplyDeleteShaw,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the David Kennedy material. We can always hope; I suppose the old reader of Marx in me can't help but think that the era Kennedy references was an earlier phase of capitalist development, even if certain of its quandaries resembled those of the present. I recall Marx writing that no order gives way until it has exploited all its resources (ideological and otherwise); the worry that prompted my somewhat eeyorish post is that we might be getting towards the end of that process.
Dino, I think you've hit the nail on the head. We are trying to deal with a very much changed economic reality using the tools of yesterday. I love the metaphor of the deck chairs on the Titanic; it aptly sums up our current ineffective policies. Of course the firs step in solving a problem is identifying the problem. I don't think that either the Democrats or Republicans have done so, and neither have the various factions from far right to far left. However, like you, I am more comfortable with the Democrats in power as we search for a new approach to deal with a new reality.
ReplyDeleteThank you for stirring the muddy waters. What characterized our last election the most was reaction, and a not very intelligent one. The Bush administration left us with a fiscal mess which the reactionaries are now blaming on Obama. Almost all analytical thinking, if one can call it that, about our current state of Capitalism is surely left over from an obsolete chapter and whether our future is capitalism, socialism or a combination it can only come about from rational thinking the likes of which we haven't seen much of lately, and a determination to stop ruining each other's careers.
ReplyDeleteDB
bloggingdino: "The way the political parties talk about this shift doesn't even come close to capturing its complexity."
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of the Sufi parable attributed to Rumi, the 13th Century Persian poet, who wrote: "The Elephant in the Dark," also known to us as Aesop's fable about the blindfolded men and the elephant. It is a parable about appearance and reality and patterns of delusion and deception.
American politics is about appearances and reality and patterns of delusion and deception. If we feel adrift and bewildered, it is because partisanship has left us with atomized impressions of truth. The blindfolded man who touches the tail says it is a rope. The one who touches the leg says it is column. Not one of the blindfolded men perceives or communicates the whole experience of the elephant.
Meanwhile, there are strategists in back rooms and conference rooms of thinks tanks who want it this way. They overwhelm public meeting places with the appearances of grassroots insurrection and disorder to obfuscate the issues and confuse the media and the voter. This is how one takes control. This is how the plutocracy employs PR to rule over us.
DB,
ReplyDeleteAn allosaurus is always ready and willing to stir the muddy waters. Heck, we even have fun stomping up and down in the watering hole just to see the look on the other dinosaurs' faces. "Priceless," as the commercial says. But seriously, yes, the good analytic sites are too few -- though there are some highly articulate voices out there, genuine progressives who understand economics and don't think Karl Marx was one of the brothers along with Harpo, Chico, and Groucho.
Octo,
Love Rumi -- his poetry, which I know only through the thick veil of translation, is fine and thoughtful stuff. As for the elephant and the blindfolded men, yes indeed. But I also think the trouble isn't only with "how one takes control," it's that over which one is taking control -- there hasn't been nearly enough thinking and bethinking about that. That elephant could a heffalump or a woozle by this point. But beware, beware! -- he's here, he's there, he's everywhere!
You are a voice of reason in the wilderness of WTF, and I thank you.
ReplyDeleteThe Kennedy material is excellent, but the picture is bigger and wider than that. If we had written a science fiction novel in which the imaginary planet simultaneously faced indisputably dwindling resources, frightening climate change, undeniable overpopulation, widely available weapons of mass destruction, apparent cultural incompatibilities, and an explosion of technologies that forced each to rub elbows with all, what would we predict for the populace?
And we cannot say we were not warned. It is the failure of reactionaries (who disguise themselves as conservatives) to acknowledge many aspects of the prevailing conditions that concerns me most. Our economic upheaval is a symptom of larger and unavoidable planet-wide change. Which finger fits best in the dike?