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[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Back by Popular Demand

Since the election, I’ve made a point of keeping my mouth mostly shut about politics, both for my sanity and that of my friends and family. But as we’re now past the half time show for this first year of the Trump administration, I find that my sanity is more endangered by my silence than by my engagement. The maddening bit, though, is that it is not the Donald’s performance as the nation’s executive which is driving me insane, but rather the general failure of the Democrats to provide any sort of organized, motivated and effective opposition.

As I repeatedly pointed out during the 2016 primary season, there has been a general sea-change in the political, economic and social values of these United States. This coincides, unsurprisingly, with the massive impact of economic globalization and the emergence of the Millennial Generation as the newest, fastest growing and soon-to-be-if-not-already largest voting block in the United States. In a great many ways, Millennials reflect the energy and attitudes of their Boomer grandparents, who are currently fighting them tooth-and-nail for both political and economic power. But the real irony of this, is that the Boomers, are fundamentally doing the same thing; they, however, are now taking the role of intransigent elders determined to forestall the socio-economic evolution of the country. One might now entertain an energy-policy based on harnessing the speed and torque of the Kennedy Brothers in their graves.

Of course, the parallels are not exact. Most prominent in it’s absence is the character of a genuine, external existential threat to the American way of life, or just American life, despite the continued saber-rattling of North Korea. There’s also the greatly diminished (though not extinct) role of institutional racism and sexism, although these two insidious evils remain and continue to adapt for survival in an increasingly egalitarian society. And the struggle for justice and social enfranchisement of the LGBT+ alliance has added new dimensions as well. But perhaps the single most important difference between the second decade of the 21st Century and the sixth decade of the 20th, is that we find ourselves confronted by the same evils which threatened to consume the nation all through the first half of the last century. These are evils which cross all boundaries of race, religion, sex, gender and ethnicity. These are the evils of economic concentration and fashionable ignorance.

The antitrust and antimonopoly laws of the early 20th Century, combined with the economic reforms and regulations instituted during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration created the framework for the expansion of the greatest economic power in the history of the world: the American Middle Class. Living wages, guaranteed retirement benefits in old age, restraint of market speculation by commercial deposit banks; all these things, and more, made it possible for American citizens to invest in their own futures. Home ownership, which really should be thought of as investment in a community, became a reality for most citizens. So did the expectation that their children would due do better than their parents. People could afford to buy the sort of manufactured goods the fueled general economy, and as a result kept more-or-less everybody employed. The odds that very many people were going to get rich this way were nil, but for people who lived through the chaos of the late 19th Century, the deplorable income disparity of the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and two World Wars, stabile, moderate economic growth and prosperity was Heaven on Earth.

Of course the capital interests of Wall Street and big business across the country were universally opposed to anything that seemed to cut into their profit margins. This isn’t anything new today, nor was it in 1902, when the coal miners of the country went on strike, threatening to not only halt the machinery of American Industry, but to literally freeze the country to death for want of heating fuel that winter. The tide of power between capital and labor, or more correctly private and public interest, has shifted back and forth for centuries. But the post-Industrial world has seen that balance of power shift almost exclusively into the hands of private interest. FDR worked hard to create economic circumstances that engaged as much of the population as possible in participating in both the productivity and prosperity of the nation. Since then, private interests have worked long and hard to shift as much of that prosperity to themselves as they can. It isn’t practical to make moral judgements about this fact, it is simply a natural law of human behavior: given the opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of strangers, with whom they have no personal ties or empathy, and expecting no social consequences, a significant number of people will do it.

Birds sing, grass grows, and Wall Street makes money.

The problem with this lies in that the balance has been shifted too far towards private interest, for too long. We can say this because we can observe conditions that closely parallel those of the aforementioned periods of economic turmoil. Debt-to-earnings ratios are entirely out of control, large amounts of public money are being used to subsidize extremely high-risk private business decisions, income disparity is close the same levels as the Gilded Age and roughly half of the US economy is now focused on trading paper instead of building goods. And just to put the cherry on top we’re already starting another mortgage bubble, because people have been taught to see their house as a commodity to be traded, rather than a roof over their heads. We have people working more hours, earning fewer dollars, that are worth less, while the price of the basic goods and services they need are climbing, because lax interest rates have driven inflation. And behind it all are the very wealthy private interests which invest billions in buying political campaigns, in order to promote more of the same policies.

Of course, while this is happening, we somehow have an electorate which paradoxically has the greatest access to information, and the lowest levels of education and comprehension, in history. It is tempting to point fingers at the national media organizations, but the real culprits are the voters.

Yes, the voters. Us.

Over the last twenty-some-odd years we have gotten into the comfortable habit of ignoring public discourse and conflicting views which challenge our assertions and assumptions, in favor of conveniently prepackaged, pre-analysed and above all demographically targeted infotainment. It began with the Cable News Network (for those of you too young to remember CNN’s origins) and and spiraled completely out of control since then. There are now just six corporations which completely control all of the information available via the mainstream media, and this gives them the power to control what the content of our national discourse is.

Ah hah, some of you are now saying, I don’t have to rely on the Big Six, I can use the internet! Bravo, you; now take a quick turn around your browser of choice and take a look at what the most prominent search results for current events are. You will notice that, baring your particular local news, they are all covering the same dozen or so stories, from one of approximately five points of view: far left outsider, left insider, centrist/moderate, right insider or far right outsider.

Viewed another way: HuffPo, MSNBC, CNN, FOXNews and Breitbart.

And you are perfectly fine with this, because you can look at that list and pick one of them out, saying to yourself, well, those guys get it mostly right. Damn near every single voter in this country (and most non-voters) are convinced that their particular view of public policy is unambiguously Right. As a result, we don’t take the time to hear what each other are saying, and so we have no idea about the frustrations, fears and needs of our fellow citizens. We are complicit in our atomization and alienation from one another, and the absolute worst part of this is that we are proud of it.

It doesn’t matter if the discussion is about climate change or confederate statues. One half of this country simply assumes that their prejudicial caricature of the other is all there is to them. Does anyone really believe that the overwhelming majority of angry white men who tried to start a riot in Charlottesville, Virginia were actually upset over the removal of a statue that most of them had probably never known was there a week earlier? Of course not. Most of those guys are worried about their jobs, their homes, their families and their economic stability in general. But those issues aren’t being discussed, and when someone brings up those realities, they get dismissed with words like ‘privilege’. As if, somehow, being white and male makes any given person immune to the exact same economic turmoil that has ravaged everyone else in this country for the last thirty-some-odd years.

Yes, the statistics matter. Yes, white males are as a group less likely to have been damaged by globalization, the mortgage bubble, student debt, etc. But that only means that the number of those who’ve been damaged is smaller, not that they are each less damaged as individuals. And why does that fact matter? Because when lump all white males in a box, and ignore their individual circumstances, you are alienating them. You are saying that their needs and fears don’t matter and denying them a stake in society. And as a result, you turn them into an enemy. Worse, the very small number of actual reactionaries can them recruit these people. This is exactly how ISIS does it.

This is exactly how the Nazis did, and still do, as demonstrated in Charlottesville. These guys listen to and sympathize with the genuine racists and Nazis, because nobody else is listening to them or giving them a stake. And the same is absolutely true of women, Millennials, Latinos, Christians and every other demographic subset in the United States. You can’t just try and sweep them up into a bloc and hang a two word label them. You can’t just speak to people’s identity; you must address their actual, concrete needs.

Women are more than a set of reproductive organs; they need jobs that pay a living wage. African-Americans are more than the descendents of slaves; they need comprehensive health care, now. Latinos are more than exploited migrant labor; they need education to provide their children better opportunities. And literally everyone needs us to stop sending our sons and daughters to kill and die in foreign countries.

All this means we have to actually step outside our echo chambers, leave our social media bubbles, and make the effort to hear what someone is saying, rather than what we’re assuming about them. We have to work, hard, at correcting our ignorance of our fellow citizens, and stop being proud of it.

Both of these two points, about the corruption and imbalance of economic power and the atomization of the electorate, form the foundation of my tremendous frustration with the Democratic Party in the wake of the Trump Presidency. I would have thought that the general decline in party membership as a percentage of population should have indicated that they needed to make a serious course correction in their policy positions and agenda. I cannot avoid pointing out not only their inability to defeat a narcissistic reality television personality with all the vocabulary and maturity of a cranky five year old, but the fact that they lost the faith and loyalty of the working class voter in three of the states hardest hit by forty years of Republican economic policies.

And so, I return to the fight in earnest. The concept of ‘the resistance’, as it it spoken of by the current Democratic Leadership, is laughable at best. Have we forgotten that the Republicans were ’the resistance’ during the eight years of the previous administration? This accomplished little, and now they’ve swept into power again, we can see how much work they actually put into developing eventive policies to put into the legislative process. For the Democrats to follow this exact same playbook at this point isn’t just insufficient, it is positively counterproductive. The fact that instead of developing a platform oriented around the clearly Progressive push in modern American politics, they want to attempt to garner votes with a rebranding campaign, does nothing to inspire enthusiasm for them. It seems, in fact to fly in the face of Chuck Schumer’s New York Times piece. He started signaling that the Party was ready to change tack and move in line with the now more left leaning electorate, but such an agenda, with definable, concrete objectives, has yet to manifest.

The new slogan for the new brand (A Better Deal) is vague, undefined and is very obviously the product of a corporate focus group trying to evoke the legacy of FDR without committing to the actual policies he put in place. Aside from wondering how much they had to pay Papa John’s Pizza to forego legal action, the first question that any reasoning American citizen should ask is, ‘Better than what?’

Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?