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Politics is to some extent the art of making the reasonable seem absurd. Take whatever your opponent is doing and tell the voters it is a betrayal of their trust, their intentions and desires and you’ve got the start of a campaign or an ugly television commercial. Some people will always believe what is said, another group will hear the charge and not fully believe it, but not be able to shake the impression. Its called mud slinging. Sling enough and some of it sticks.
We have a long history in America of this and it is not shocking that it continues to this day. What has changed are the words, the willingness of one side to use words like “traitor”, “godless”, “liar” and, heaven forfend, “socialist” (the old communist charge having outlived its usefulness in the age of terrorism). Newt Gingrich recently accused the Democrats of being a “secular, socialist machine”, hitting two fear buttons of middle America and then calling it a “machine” to amp the level, as if it were some non-stop monster hiding in a vast, technological basement.
Words matter. We are witnessing the opening of a schism in America that cannot easily be bridged. Indeed, the open wounds from this election, 2010, threaten to become festering sores, because the harsh and hateful words will not stop on election day. Further, there is a large group of people, perhaps 1/3 of the voters, who believes the words are true, no matter what is said. You can’t go far enough to give voice to their anger about Obama and the Democrats. If you said Obama brought on the bed bug invasion and was behind last summer’s bombing in Uganda, heads would nod in approval.
Today on the radio, Rush Limbaugh was going on about pictures of Obama and, pausing for dramatic effect, he said the pictures “almost look demonic”. So, he is trying to imply, without saying so, that Obama is demonic, that he might be the devil himself or at the very least be inspired by the devil and outright evil. Hey, ain’t this grand? A person with a huge national radio audience is attacking the president of the United States, based on some photos, as, at least, looking demonic, but, in fact, implying in the process that he is demonic. What is the purpose of such talk other than to destroy the Obama presidency?
Where do you go from here? Where does this kind of talk lead? It leads to a dark, dark world where the nation could be fractured beyond repair, where citizen turns against citizen and sees not someone of common values and hopes, but the enemy himself. The religious right started this kind of hyper anger by carefully picking issues on which decent people who disagree with them could be painted as “evil” and working against the laws of god. If you are against everything decent, how can there be any dialog?
The fact is, we have always been one nation divided. We have 50 states, we have huge regional differences and outlooks on life that are formed by life experiences in varied settings. It is just really different growing up in Texas compared with New Jersey or Kansas compared to California. When people came to America, they brought their backgrounds and family training with them. Local conditions shaped the way people see life and those attitudes, in turn, were passed down through the generations. Much has changed across America, but the vitality of local and regional ways of seeing the world has not. We are now in an era where those differences are being emphasized and made worse by politics.
We could, like the rest of the world, be at each other’s throats and shooting from mountain tops at fellow citizens, but, save for the great disaster of the Civil War and a few other events, we have not done so. We have had more than 200 years of something close to peace among ourselves and we have made a nation where one can travel thousands of miles and still feel some commonality and at least minimal friendship with local citizens. There are no true strangers here.
This has happened, in part, because people have been willing to accept that living in a democracy means you don’t get everything your way all the time. Things happen, by the vote of the people and their representatives, on which reasonable people disagree. In some parts of the country, mainly the south, southwest and far west, people have cursed the national government for generations as a kind of birthright. Now, with recession, job loss and foreclosures rampant, that hostility toward the moderating and mediation effect of the government is being turned into a national movement.
The consensus is breaking down and doing so because an army of people, including those on talk radio and right wing television, want it to break down. They want to strip the Federal government of all powers except war and, maybe, international diplomacy. They really don’t want the national government to do anything and the perceived overreaching of the health care legislation, carried out with a backdrop of national recession, they see as their great opportunity. This radical program has, at long last, finally been proclaimed in public by the Tea Party groups.
The ultimate object is to defeat democracy itself. Corporations don’t like democracy and the wealthy find it inconvenient to their aims. It is messy, it interferes with profit taking and causes problems, like sending CEOs to jail occasionally, and requiring certain standards. If democracy could be eliminated, the corporations could easily buy any state government that gets in their way and have a free reign around the nation and world. Capitalist heaven.
Corporations, in fact, would be happy to provide the conditions of government themselves. They can fine us with traffic cameras, impose fees for every thing we do and decide who lives and dies through the health care system, all the while making higher and higher profits. The long fingers of corporate control of American lives, I would argue, are much stronger right now than those of the government, save for the making of war and the corporations have a role in that, too.
Corporate power is not friendly toward democracy itself. Indeed, I would assert that corporations have always been at war with democracy, but now they have taken their campaign into the actual voting booth by paying for and inspiring a movement of rebellion against a president who got one of the biggest electoral victories in modern times. For corporate power and money making, enough is never enough. There is no level of profits which will suffice. They must always go higher, get bigger, expand. The doctrine of eternal growth is running up against the realities of limitations and those in charge don’t like it. Why not defeat the government, dismantle it piece by piece and have a big money party? Let the next generations worry about the environment and global temperatures.
Why should there be such a radical reaction to a president who is largely moderate? It part, because of his race and because the hardcore Republicans have convinced themselves that no Democrat should ever occupy the White House. Millions of people reacted with a kind of visceral fear when Obama won. This set the stage for a national panic, which then led to the Tea Party groups.
The overheated talk has been going on for years, but 2010 represents a kind of new, unfortunate peak. One of two things is likely to happen after the mid-term elections: if the Republicans win control of Congress, they will proclaim the Obama administration over and dead in its tracks or, if they fail to gain a majority, the far right will once again step up its attacks and increase their viciousness. Neither one is a happy prospect.
Democracy requires counter balancing forces to thrive. Intact power bases, groups with a strong interest in the outcome of debates, are part of the dynamic of a functioning, breathing democracy. Compromise, now turned into a dirty word by the right, is the bread and butter of democracy, because no one group can have everything it wants without harming others. The goal of the far right is to remove whatever counter balancing forces remain and replace them with nothing save corporate power. The virtual death of unions, the submersion of young people’s lives in careerism and premature debt, and the gradual evolution of a Supreme Court that will do corporate biding is not enough.
The TerryReport has been around for seven years and its predecessors for four years before that, back when the Internet was young and a more happy place. In all that time, I have never felt that our country’s survival was seriously threatened and certainly never threatened by mere political rhetoric . Now, I do.
The last time American democracy was under such a sustained attack was during the anti-war years of from the late 1960s on to about 1975. Millions of people concluded that the US was involved in an evil war in Vietnam that was motivated by little more than a desire to show military power and pick-up where the French colonists left off.
During the anti-war period, impressionable young people were told that democracy could not work, that the government was in the hands of big business and the military-industrial complex and that their parents generation, enthralled with the success of the United States in world war two and trained to defer to “authorities”, just didn’t care. There was a real threat of all this tipping over in an actual civil war with the forces of “order” attacking the demonstrators. The nation came very close to disaster, closer than anyone at the time imagined. Instead, the anti-war movement, under attack from within by paid informers and deliberate agents provacateur and in the public mind by staged counter violence by groups of union members, ran out of energy and steam and was relegated to the back pages of the nation’s newspapers. Deprived of the shock force of a universal draft after 1972, it simply blew away with the autumn winds. Gone.
The current wave of right wing attacks on the stability, and thus the survival, of the national government is different in kind and scope. The right has hundreds of radio stations from coast-to-coast broadcasting its message. They have an entire news channel, Fox, playing its tune day and night and then scarring the public at night with loosely reasoned and poorly sourced apocalyptic visions of Beck and O’Reilly (forget Hannity, he doesn’t count). Plus, they have all the newspaper outlets they had previously, which, now, are not counter balanced by other media because most, if not all, are afraid of being called biased in favor of the left.
On top of this ugly stew sits the Internet and a group of very rich Republicans who, unlike previous generations, have learned to put their money in places where they can get some snap from it. It should be remembered, too, that the United States is not out of the woods on the issue of survival of the international banking system, its auto makers and from terrorism from the middle east and elsewhere. History shows that a dramatic break in one crucial area, at a time of general tension, can lead to disaster that then feeds on itself. If such a break should occur, the response could be swift and nearly impossible to reverse.
Those who call themselves members of Tea Party groups and who are far right Republicans should remember more of our national history. They are attacking a government that is one of the most successful the world has ever known. Somehow, for generations we have managed to keep a nation together and resolve long standing, deep problems, like the mistreatment of African-Americans over a 300+ year period. This nation is a wonderful example of people from different backgrounds and outlooks finding a way to live peaceably together, one of the most outstanding examples in history. Indeed, world history would indicate it could never be done, that you could not meld a nation out of such a variety of peoples. Clashes in recent decades have shown the stark, brutal power of ethnic and cultural differences in creating killing fields around the planet. (Yogoslavia, Bosnia, Serbia, Uganda, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Dafur, Iraq, Lebanon, Kurdistan, Columbia, Peru and others.)
Our collective work in creating and maintaining the United States could come to an end. There is no universal law that says we must live together. We don’t have to go on as a united group of fifty states. The glue that has held us together to this point consists, in part, in a belief in collective justice and the idea that, in the end, we can work things out. All of that is threatened by the escalation of talk that the national government is the enemy and those who support it are traitors and evil in intent and action.
The problem the right has, which they are passing on to all of us, is that they are practicing the language of no return, no surrender. Nothing less than total victory will satisfy their increasingly rabid followers. If they manage to defeat this president during his term and destroy what the voters elected him to do, where would that leave the rest of us?
Should the rest of the country, literally, remain unarmed while the right is arming itself and sweeping ammunition out of every gun shop? The nation is being led into a destructive dead end street by people who apparently don’t have any respect for the achievements of the United States over the last 230 years nor do they respect the results of the democratic elections of 2008. It is all a waste because it did not come out the way they wanted.
The purpose of the right is nullification. They want to nullify the results of the last presidential election and, notwithstanding the victories Obama had in getting many programs passed, they are succeeding. Two weeks from tonight we will learn just how much.
Doug Terry, 10.19.10
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