AMERICAN PROSPECTS

I’ve just finished reading the September issue of ‘The American Prospect’ (http://www.prospect.org/).

I’m noticing a trend among the Democratic-friendly (or ‘progressive’ or – much less frequently – ‘liberal’) elements of the media: as the election gets nearer, two distinct trends are revealing themselves. One is to unify as many disparate voter-groups as possible by emphasizing themes more broadly based than the usual ‘visions’ and ‘demands’ of the Identities. But the second is for those very same Identities to double-down and claim that this is their ‘moment’ to finally establish everything they’ve ever wanted and demanded. Thus on the one hand there are outreaching emphases on ‘economic’ concerns, say, while on the other there are glory-eyed prophesies of an ‘America’ where this or that Identity’s vision is and/or can be wholly fulfilled, put forth with – you should pardon the expression – a confident intensity usually only seen in history (or ‘herstory’) when in the company of that mother of all slogans: ‘God wills it!’

So on page 6 there is a discussion of the ‘entertainment’ that will be provided at the Democratic convention. Rattling off a list that includes the latest hip-hop hero, much pleasure is derived from pointing out that this truly indicates the “scope of generational change in the Democratic Party”. Oy. Kids are great, but since they can’t even be trusted with a beer in the backyard, I’m not so clear on how it’s good that great attention is being paid to their ‘feelings’ about this or that candidate or just how those feelings are wholly relevant to the grave issues currently bethumping Us. You don’t have to spend more than a few minutes in a theater-full of the blessed young as they watch their favorite new blockbuster to realize that next week or next month their feelings will have moved on and their memories will have ‘deleted’ this present totality of cool awesomeness just as totally as if it had taken place in some distant and irrelevant and useless ‘past’. It’s what kids do.

It’s more disturbing to ponder this and realize that the Dems have yet one more reason for fearing that they are perceived as ‘unmanly’ and ‘weak’. They are not only in thrall to the still-biting mastodons (mastodettes?) of Second-Wave feminist radical agitprop, but they are also desperately seeking the approval of children. And – thanks to that Amendment back in 1972 – these children can – you should again pardon the expression – ‘vote’. Gawd.

Of course, the level of pre-mature cognitive and emotional functioning proper to youth may well be the level of ‘citizen participation’ that the Dems are looking for. Elect in a wave of happy frenzy, and then forget ‘politics’ and go party or Facebook themselves or text-message about their favorite celebrity.

And just how long will We retain the Republic with a citizenry thus limited in its abilities and concerns? And surely both of those tyrannosaurs – the National Security State and the National Nanny State – seek precisely that level of participation. It is the moist-dream of any Beltway pol nowadays, is it not? Get elected by the voters and then have the voters depart for gooey realms of enjoyment while you are left in charge of the checkbook and the arms-locker, free to party and preventively invade, to pander and to pull in the PAC money – although never neglecting to display ‘sensitivity’. It’s the fateful tragedy of “Animal Farm” debauched by liberal doses of bathos.

But the election is an “emergency”, isn’t it? Yet again. No time to think or to get serious; no, just enough time to do what you’re told, say Yes or just keep your mouth shut, and leave the rest to Those Who Know. Ach, ja. That’s worked so well for societies in the past.

Those deep, groaning screams and roars from deep down within? Those aren’t the ‘traditional’ sounds of the hull starting to break up; that’s an ‘old’ story. No, they are the ‘fresh’, ‘unconventional’ sounds of ‘creative destruction’ – and if everybody would just please calm down and accept that, then before long this ship will enter a whole brave new world. Oh, yeah – no doubt about that.

On page 9 Mark Schmitt gushes about “Big-Picture Power”. In doing so, he reveals what a lot of Us didn’t know about Beltway thinking these past couple-four decades. Political power is not just about “who wins a fight” (referring, by the by, to an ‘election’ – who says the Dems aren’t good at ‘war’?) No, it’s also about “Who decides which issues are up for decision and which are not” and “deeper questions about ideology, the definition of problems, and shared assumptions about what is possible”. Ah.

But I gather that none of these matters have been considered with too much reference to relatively indispensable and unavoidable ‘realities’ that are ‘out there’ beyond the Beltway cocktail parties and conference rooms. Funny, that sounds like the same sort of approach that resulted in the current military debacle(s) in the East. Or it that thinking too much?

What Schmitt calls the Big-Picture approach is of itself not at all a bad thing. There has been wayyyyy too much short-term, short-sighted analysis inside the Beltway. Too much one-step-ahead tactical shrewdness and desperately not enough long-term strategic deliberation, replete with consequences, dynamic flow of act-and-response-to-the-act, and means available to initiate and sustain a proposed act.

But the Big-Picture approach hasn’t really been tried. It’s still too small as currently practiced. Thus, while the Republicans and neocons and the rest of the menagerie responsible for the wars in the East only looked at ‘Big’ results and precisely did not try to get a comprehensively ‘big picture’, so for decades the Dems have indulged their Identities in their obsession with the ‘Big’ results of a nation and a society utterly changed in their very fundaments in the twinkling of an eye by politically violent and rapid change unceasingly imposed, and with no thought as to consequences further on down the line, or to the interaction of large and constitutive factors in societal dynamics, or even to the impact of the whole thing on societal and cultural and even national stability.

The Bushist Imperium invaded Iraq. They were so sure of the ‘value’ of their plans and also of their quick success: Was there truth in the reasons for ‘war’? Not necessary because it’s all in a good cause. Was it established – as considered even in the time of Washington and Adams – whether ‘democracy’ is exportable? Not necessary, because we know so much more nowadays. Were there enough troops to get the job done? Not necessary, because the people there will do all the work once we’ve gotten rid of the bad government. Has it been considered what we will do if things don’t go as planned after the government has fallen? Nope. It will all work out because America has been sent there by God, and America is on a mission from God. The Blues Brothers as channeled by the Mayberry Machiavellis.

The Democrats embraced every dream and vision of the Advocacies: They were sure of the ‘value’ of ‘change’ and of the historical inevitability of what the Advocacies wanted to jump-start (thus not only making History but getting one-step ahead of It). Is it certain that gender and identity are more fundamental to societal and national stability than economic well-being for all the citizens? It’s oppressive even to ask the question. Is it certain that ‘female’ characteristics specifically exclusive to that gender exist? And is it certain that if they do exist, those characteristics are better for society and that the so-called male characteristics have been bad for the country? And is it wise to sidestep wide public deliberation and simply impose these initiatives under the not-quite-truthful guise of ‘emergencies’ and ‘crises’? And what happens if – even after all your coercion through legislation and media amplification of not-altogether-accurately reported ‘outrages’ – your many deep changes do not result in a quick and comprehensive societal acceptance of your visions; will you keep society and the citizenry in a state of distracted agitation for decades?

Alas, in Our modern American reality all of these questions merely prove that You just don’t get it, but once we have succeeded you will see that our new world is so much better, and richer.

So now the Republicans are trying to back away from what they have done even as they also try to double-down to recover some or any success from the intensifying situation in the Middle East – and now in the Central Asian region as well. (Even as the Israeli government threatens nuclear war “to send a diplomatic message”.)

And so now the Democrats are trying to ‘look beyond’ what they have been doing for decades in the hopes of lulling enough voters into accepting them as a Party competent to rule and capable of repairing the damage, while simultaneously indulging their ‘base’ in its now frenzied desire to double-down and take this last chance to sweep all opposition from the political table, even as all of those all-too-real realities that were not part of the Identity-story – overwhelming military competence, incomparable manufacturing and financial expertise, unbreakable economic dominance and an unshakeable currency, and ever-expanding national wealth and resources – start to come apart in mid-air. And as those even more immaterial but utterly indispensable realities reveal the extent of their decay : a citizenry individually and communally Grounded in its own maturity and in the rock-like foundations of Ideals worthy of virtuous (though never complete) adherence and free of the terrible distractions of economic insecurity , and united in the confidence of a common achievement and dedicated to a common Project.

And what can it mean that each Party has a ‘base’ that is actually a radical fringe? Try to imagine the figure geometrically: not a triangular pyramid with a wide base at its bottom, not a rectangle or a square resting on a side large enough to support the weight of the rest of the structure above it, but rather … what? An inverted triangle, resting on its point – hugely unstable. A structure suspended in mid-air, with its largest element at one end of it? Impossible, for how does it support itself up there in the air? But perhaps ‘geometric’ thoughts were considered too ‘masculine’ or too ‘male’ for elite Beltway planning. Sure as hell, the pyramid on the dollar-bill (now worth some few cents) with that symbolic but hardly un-real ‘eye’ seeing all at its tip … sure as hell that might have given them pause. But elites don’t carry such small denominations. And radicals don’t care for economic realities. But there We are again.

So, Schmitt continues, politics is all about “how to put new issues on the agenda and then how to challenge prevailing ideologies and assumptions”. Ummmmmm – not primarily, no. You go to sea in a ship and your first responsibility as captain isn’t to “challenge” prevailing assumptions about navigation, buoyancy and the operational characteristics and dynamics of large vessels afloat in a storm, and to tie up the entire crew and command staff in such activity. Maybe if you’re in an experimental vessel specifically designed to ‘push the envelope’, but not a liner with – oh say - a couple-three hundred million passengers. And in crowded shipping lanes where equally large or larger vessels are also making their way according to their own illuminations.

You’ve got to work your best to keep this baby on a steady keel and on her way. Maybe a little time when things are quiet you can pull everybody into your sea cabin and push some thoughts around, but beyond that – well, if you can’t live with that maybe you really shouldn’t be in the command-at-sea business and ought to pursue some other path to personal excellence. Maybe become a faculty member at Hahvahd or Duke, or run a large newspaper or TV station. Some line where the quality of life of hundreds of millions isn’t going to go down the tubes if your excited illuminations aren’t quite on the mark. Or the physical lives of untold numbers aren’t literally snuffed if you start running into stuff – or, like – you start invading other ships. Geez, this isn’t rocket science. Or is that image too ‘male’?

Schmitt rises (descends?) almost to the level of self-parody: referring to the achievements and exertions of the “progressive” (he never uses the word ‘liberal’) world in the past ten years “has involved understanding the limits of the old approach”. By this he means that “instead of hoping to win elections and lobbying for good bills and against bad ones, progressive organizations are finally becoming more conscious about [sic] setting the agenda and fighting for a worldview”. Oy. Oy gevalt. Oy and frakking frak.

Does it carry you back – to talk about legislators “lobbying for good bills and against bad ones”? I mean, it still doesn’t refer to deliberating about whether a bill really is ‘good’ for the common weal or not, but at least “the old approach” had legislators actually trying to think things through and do the job they were dadblasted elected for. And “fighting for a worldview”?!! Fighting against whom, pray? Other Americans? Turning the entire American societal and constitutional stage into the bar scene from “Star Wars”? Or – worse and ironically so - into a bar brawl scene from one of those disreputable and quintessentially ‘male’ Western movies (oppressive, offensive, macho) against which the Revolutions have deployed themselves for forty long and biblical years?

Well, while everybody has been fighting or trying to avoid the fighting down on the saloon deck – captain and command staff included – the good ship of state seems to have headed into an ice-field, run out of fuel, and placed itself on a collision course with half-a-hundred other vessels. Though perhaps at the Naval Academy these days such a situation would not be allowed to reflect on the ‘competence’ of an aspiring admiral-to-be? It makes the denizens of an ‘American Pie’ movie look like characters out of ancient Greek theatre. Such enlightenment. Such progress. Thus We stagger on.

And for a “worldview”. We’d better get Ourselves a clear-eyed assessment of the ‘world’ pretty damned quick. “Worldviews” are phantasmagorical creatures, on the order of a unicorn. We are facing very real horses, here – and they kick very real kicks. And We have lost the reins. And it’s a mountainous, twisty road. And let me not repeat myself.

And on page 24 Rick Perlstein does his level best to twist and squash the corpse of FDR-era history into the casket currently (and ‘progressively’) fashioned for it. His take is that “presidents have to move quickly to enact progressive reforms before the windows of opportunity close forever.” He uses the examples of FDR and LBJ. His logic leads him sorta to this: if Presidents who have enacted great societal changes have only been able to do so under the pressure of great events, then agitating up enough great pressure will be necessary to get one’s own ‘great event’ enacted.

Such logic. And from a college-man. FDR was faced with the pressure of great events and a great crisis – but he didn’t make the crisis himself. Nobody purposely made it. Yes, Wall Street greed and government hesitation certainly led to the Great Depression, but that isn’t to say that the best way to ensure ‘change’ – progressive or otherwise – is to go and purposely create such huge pressures. As one of the alien characters, Quark, on ‘Deep Space Nine’ incredulously exclaimed of humans when he traveled back in time to America of 1947 and found out about the atomic bomb: “they irradiated their own planet??!!” Fire departments shouldn’t set off huge chemical explosions downtown just to demonstrate that they need a new budget to include chemical-explosion equipment. (We pass over as not completely relevant to the present subject the Israeli government ‘s threatening to start a nuclear war in the Middle East in order to let folks know that they’re unhappy with present arrangements, and as an earnest of their willingness to have their demands met in a conference of some sort.)

Ditto LBJ, who as the article acknowledges, in that Glorious '65 was able to surf a wave created by the assassination of JFK, and successfully rammed through the final success-elements of the Union’s victory in the Civil War. Surely it borders on the essence of imbecility to purposely recreate such a wave of “national emergency”. And haven’t We been through enough nation-wide “emergencies” and “crises” in the past decades? The drug ‘war’, abduction crises, assorted sexual ‘emergencies’, and then suddenly, while all the passengers and crew and command staff were busy with those, somehow nobody was on the bridge to notice 9-11 coming straight at Us, although there was clear notice well in advance. This script is getting repetitive; this ‘story’ needs to be reworked. Even the most empty suit in Hollywood could tell Us that. At this rate, “America” is going to become a movie with no ‘hero’. And that never sells.

But also: Perlstein says out loud what hasn’t really been allowed to see the light of day for decades. “During the span of just a few weeks in the summer of 1965, Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri [home of Harry Truman, HST] to sign Medicare – the reform JFK had run on in 1960 – and to Washington to sign the Voting Rights Act.” It was a Glorious summer indeed, the culmination of a struggle that not only extended back into and beyond the Civil War, but also in then-recent American experience to the awesome vision and exertions of Martin Luther King and his associates – white as well as black, male and female together – grounded both in scripture and the best ideals of a common American history.

And then, suddenly: “Five days later, on Aug. 11, the Watts Riots brought down the curtain on the liberal hour. After that he couldn’t even get Congress to approve $60 million for rodent control in the slums.”

It has not been sufficiently appreciated, how much that ‘liberal hour’ (that classic Democratic liberalism, to great extent) was cut short, undercut, by the riots in Watts, brought into every American home in color and often live. This is not to say that ‘the negoes’ themselves were responsible for the riots; nor is it the purpose here to ascribe blame. But the fact remains: before ‘racism’ ever had a chance to rear its head in response to the Glorious ’65, the actions in Watts so awesomely destroyed a Moment in American history, and through the riots a great event’s ‘wave’ of pressure, naturally generated, dissolved into a ripple.

In response to which, as can be seen just beneath the surface of this article, the Democrats were profoundly baffled as a political force, and in their weakness, allowed themselves to be seduced by radical elements that felt it only right and proper to ‘create’ such pressures again by any means necessary. And the Dems let themselves be drawn along by it. And as the shock of Watts was soon joined by the shock of increasing failure in Vietnam, the Democrats embraced a ‘liberalism’ that was now actually a radicalism in content but even more so in method, a radicalism impatient and even dismissive of a democratic politics and of the capacity of The People to deliberate and choose well for the country. And then other groups – that Second Wave of feminism first among them – quickly sought to grasp its opportunity, to make its own Moment, and enforce its own huge and untested visions onto the country and The People, by whatever means necessary. And other groups followed.

And here We are. If the champagne flutes are starting to tip in the first-class saloon, then you can be sure that the water is rising in the bunkrooms of third-class and steerage. Are issues of race or of gender more important, asks the ship’s newspaper?

I think that such questions aren’t really in touch with a certain monstrous reality. They ‘just don’t get it’.

Perhaps they never will.

CAN’T TELL YOUR PLAYERS

Where does a year go? We’re closer to an election, our national situation has gotten far worse as the economy – perhaps even the dollar itself – has joined the ‘war’ as a source of serious concern, and all of the foregoing on top of a shrinking manufacturing base, shrinking jobs at decent wages, and a general sense that the whole USA thing, the proposition called ‘the United States’, is in trouble as a political society and culture and as a viable economy and an unbeatable military power. And as a decent member and good citizen and good neighbor among the community of nations.

We the People are going to need to do some very careful navigating to avoid this batch of rocks and make such repairs as can be made to the ship of state. But to do that We’ll need some good maps, and in that respect We are presently in the position of the poor schmuck who brings a knife to a gunfight.

‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’ are hugely inadequate to describe the nature of the two Parties today, hence of the options available to Us. Indeed, rather than a ‘classic’ American politics, the current situation seems far more European, in a queasy sort of way. The Republican Party as it is currently constituted is hell-and-gone from being conservative. It is a Rightist/Nationalist party, bolstered by a Fundamentalist religion long known for hallowing the nation and “the powers that be”, worshipful of a world-straddling military and a wealthy uberclass, Power and Wealth both being fantasized as indicators of God’s special Providence and Election. The Democratic Party as it is currently constituted is a balkanized assemblage of Identities whose members by definition cannot be allowed to view themselves as ‘Americans’ first, and its politicians decades ago gave up on the idea of satisfying all of its implacably aggrieved sub-parts, content to pander to the most demanding while quietly getting themselves on the donation-rosters of the ominously swollen multinational corporations and their uberwealthy managers.

Both Parties have been debauched by the introduction of ‘revolutionary’ politics in the late 1960s; indeed, Our entire national politics has been – along with the country’s core economic soundness – going down the tubes these past 40 years. Where once politics was a matter of adults coming together to discuss, deliberate, reason together and – yes, inevitably – horse-trade and compromise to some sufficiently acceptable arrangement, politics is now a matter of the pols seeking to be seen as sensitive to the loudest ‘outrage’, inevitably orchestrated with professional-level skill by advocacy groups that have morphed into lobbyists as competent as those of the corporations. At this point, after 40 years, there are almost no pols who have not spent their careers pandering, except perhaps those as old as Byrd and Kennedy – and Kennedy helped this whole mess get started.

When emotion (‘outrage’ or – as the feminist influence waxed – ‘grief’) trumps public deliberation, when ‘feeling’ demands that We dispense with ‘facts’ and thoughts, when ‘facts’ and ‘truth’ are subordinated to the one desired Outcome, then a democratic politics, the core heritage of ‘America’, is no longer possible.

And so this country has not had a robust, working democratic politics for going on 40 years.

And neither Party has practiced such a robust, working democratic politics for going on 40 years. The Left has been rough-riding over public deliberation and consensus in the desperate effort to woo the votes of its freshly-hatched Identities, each with its own ‘emergency’ that demanded redress far too urgently for the ‘slow’ processes of democratic consensus building. The Outcomes demanded by this and that Identity have been allowed to take precedence over the politics that would ground such redress; and when Outcome trumps Process one is confronted – in an ominous irony – with a dynamic both revolutionary and militaristic. Each Identity’s ‘emergency’ (or, more accurately, ever-replicating sequence of ‘emergencies’) has led for all practical purposes to a government-by-emergency; everybody knows what a bad deal that turned out to be back in the 20th century.

Each ‘emergency’ came handily but insistently provided with an ‘Outcome’ demanded by its parent Identity. Doubt and discussion could not be tolerated, either from citizens or politicians. Indeed – in a regressive raising-up of classically immature thought processes – doubters and discussers were tarred as obstructors and oppressors and oppressors-of-sufferers twice over. Politicians would be judged by their adherence to the agenda and support for the Outcome of this or that Identity, the members of which by definition had to see themselves not as Americans first but as members of their Identity, because of course ‘America’ was their problem and oppressor, according to the general script. Politician or citizen, one was either with the revolution or one was against it – an eerily familiar formulation whose brassy bray was the death-knell for democratic politics in Russia, in Italy, in Germany, in Japan, and half a hundred smaller nations. It has happened here.

And this government-by-emergency – anti-democratic and anti-maturity - first developed from the so-called Left, which is by now hell-and-gone from FDR’s Left. And which abandoned FDR’s vision and his promises decades ago.

It cannot be surprising that with the approaching election the Democratic elements are trying to slide past their own history. Most recently, Mark Schmitt in the “American Prospect” has tried to tar the Republicans as the initiators of Identity Politics http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=can_identity_politics_save_the_right.

Schmitt’s article raises – bravely enough – the issue of “identity politics” (“IP”). But he approaches it as a phenomenon primarily concerned with the Republicans. This sort of thing has become par for the course lately, and I suppose it should not be unexpected. Current ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ comment rightly goes on about the numerous pressing problems facing the American people, such as Constitutional balance and civil liberties.

But the sources of these ongoing problems are almost always traced either to the current Administration’s treacherous skullduggery since 9-11 or to Reagan-era programs such as the drug-war. This leaves, among other things, a 15-20 year gap in our national political history. Measures introduced in the Clinton era, even granted that the Gingrich ascendancy coexisted with the Democratic presidency, are never discussed. Yet many of the distortions that were introduced in the flood of domestic violence and sex-offender legislation of that era paved the way in public consciousness and in statute and in jurisprudence for a dangerously unleashed government police power; they are still hugely influential, and they were already in place well before 9-11 and all that has followed from it.

Ignoring the Democratic Party’s role in all of this would make a great deal of sense from the point of view of political tactics. Since the upcoming election is an either-or affair, Democrats or Republicans, then the Democrats would clearly not want to complicate their ‘packaging’, their ‘spinning’, or their ‘branding’ by raising any but ‘good’ points about their record.

But the truth is more complicated than that. And the truth – or rather the avoidance of it – is precisely what is at the base of the current crises that confront the American people.
Schmitt notes that the “very conventional wisdom” defines IP as the “Democratic coalition’s caucuses, interest groups, and competitive claims of wrongs to be righted and rights to be granted”; further that “this very conventional wisdom opened the door to an alternative politics of national identity on the right”. Thus, that once upon a time the Democrats were just doing their traditional, nice Democratic thing, and that suddenly the Republicans were the ones to turn IP to the dark side, and that it wasn’t the Democrats’ fault, and that any idea of the Democrats actually having let a monstrous genie out of the bottle are not true, or at least not nice. But he’s being far too easy on the Democrats here, to the point of untruth. ‘Identity politics’ as embraced, developed, and deployed by the Democrats for 40 years was and still is far more damaging a force, far more lethal to a national democratic politics.

In content, IP consisted of a large number of solutions and resolutions to crises real or imagined or exaggerated, for which no prior public consensus existed (which was not the case with the establishment of black civil rights capped by the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of ’64 and ’65).

And in method, IP sought not to introduce wide public deliberation about its assorted programmes, but rather to ram through huge changes in policy and law, to establish – similar to the Israeli government playbook – so called ‘facts on the ground’, which once established by political force majeure, must simply be accepted with no possibility of deliberation or any possible dissent. The ramming through of these programmes by side-stepping, indeed quashing, public deliberation is the basis not of a democratic politics, but of a revolutionary politics. And revolutionary politics are not at all compatible with democratic politics, or with democracy.

As early as Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ we saw that there were a huge number of citizens who did not agree with the post-’65 gambits deployed by a Democratic party desperate to raise up voter-blocs to replace the Southerners opposed to integration and the blue-collar industrial males considered by feminist theory as obsolescent and – though fellow Americans – dangerous if not downright evil. Nixon didn’t invent the ‘silent majority’ out of whole cloth; he simply gave it a name and – if we may – an identity. And Reagan wasn’t ‘teflon’; that was the explanatory quasi-magical monniker given by a press that didn’t want to explore the actual political realities that really fueled the stubborn and pervasive public tolerance of his often-corrosive Administration.

It is something of a gambit on Schmitt’s part to try to pre-empt a discussion of the Democratic record of IP by calling it “this very conventional wisdom”. I haven’t heard or read or seen very much discussion at all seeking to examine how 40 years of the Democrats’ support for IP have so weakened and corrupted the public’s capacity for recognizing and examining and determining the truth of serious public matters that the Republican Party was then able to simply co-opt the proven methodologies of ‘political correctness’ and the proven methods for bamboozling and stampeding public opinion, and simply deploy that toxic array in the service of a fundamentalist-nationalist-rightist revolution of its own. The effect of Schmitt’s legerdemain is to remove that Democratic record from examination by weaving the illusion that the record has already been thoroughly examined and deliberated upon by a well-informed public opinion; and that the theory of Democratic responsibility for the evils of IP is old news, outmoded … quaint even. This is not true. And worse than not true.

And it's hardly unexpected. I've been watching for quite some time, thinking that sooner or later this divisive party the Democrats started will have to be paid for; an electoral majority will have to be put together, and they will somehow have to patch up what they had so vigorously shredded. Now we're seeing the turkeys come home to roost, as they try to put lipstick on the pig (I couldn't resist). Rather than apologize to the general run of the citizenry (and anger their still insufficiently numerous Identities), they'll just to try to forget history, or maybe spin it a bit in their favor. Sorta like many of the Bushista apparatchiks are doing now, trying to salvage a place on the A-list for themselves in case the election, on top of the war they started, does not go well.

Yes, there’s an election coming up and numerous, grave public issues are at stake. But the issues are so numerous and so grave precisely because for almost 40 years now the public has been deliberately locked out of its role, and harnessed like cattle to the wagons of first the one and then the other Party. And with the neutering of the People, then the debauching of the three Branches raised up by the People’s Constitution was bound to follow. And while the People were distracted by the societal complexities consequent upon first the Democrats’ IP and then the Republicans’ version of IP, the ancient monsters of voracious government power and the unsleeping lust for wealth escaped from their unguarded, unregulated cages and began battening upon the Constitution and the economy, the foundations of America’s very being. And security. And – the hot ironies! – identity.

The Republicans were not long (by Nixon’s administration certainly) in harnessing this type of politics to its own anti-democratic politics: a Rightist/nationalist politics, blessed and buttressed by a Fundamentalism that hallowed as God’s will both aggressive national Power and shameless personal Wealth. They evolved a hardly-novel authoritarian politics, as Outcome-driven as the Democrats’ revolutionary politics of Identities, and equally as averse to the People’s being fully and truly informed and to the People’s deliberation, and both Parties equally as eager for increasing control of the public and of public opinion.

Where the Democrats’ focus was in regimenting domestic culture to a new, ever-expanding Political Correctness, even to the point of deforming jurisprudence and criminal law and Constitutional theory, the Republicans came to focus on imposing the national will outward, into and onto foreign nations and cultures, even at the cost of weakening the Constitutional balance of power and the international legal and political order purchased at such awefull cost by the dead of World Wars 1 and 2, that ‘modern Thirty Years’ War’ as Churchill put it.

Both revolutionary and authoritarian politics, and thus at this point both the Democratic and Republican models, consider the citizenry at best as useful idiots to be manipulated and at worst as hostile obstructions to be removed. And ‘obstructing’ is widely defined to include doubt, skepticism, dissent, and even the simple, quintessentially American instinct to kick the tires of any novel proposal.

Both a revolutionary and an authoritarian politics permit only immediate assent and submission from citizens; after all, in either instance the elite has already determined ‘the truth’ so as to save the citizenry from any heavy-lifting or incorrect thinking (thus, neatly, the elite deserves special privileges). Neither revolutionary nor authoritarian politics have any room for The People; indeed, both consider The People as a rival to be eliminated. Given that the Constitution begins with the constitutive phrase “We, the People …”; can there be any real surprise at our recent national travails about the Constitution?

We’re in a bit of bind: election year politics are accorded a certain freedom from strict truth, but it is precisely the ‘freedom from truth’ that has rendered this election as desperately urgent as it is. The Identities claim a revolutionary warrant to define or simply ignore truth (“facts don’t matter”, as one university professor at Duke trumpeted during the late, profoundly disturbing sex-offense brouhaha there); or, more recently, the ‘warrant’ stemming from some ultimate mandate to relive ‘pain’ wherever they see fit, at home and abroad, however they see fit. The Republicans claim a Biblical warrant to do the same, as well as reasons of ‘national security’ that somehow work out to an erosion of civil liberty and a national foreign policy of pre-emptive war and occupation. And in either the Democratic or the Republican case, invasions domestic and foreign have been the result.

We need more truth, not less. The People are not cattle to be stampeded, not even in a ‘good’ cause; the IP presumption that the citizenry cannot be trusted to judge wisely or rightly is toxic and constitutes a tremendous and now decades-long treachery on the part of both Parties.

Let Truth be done. Truth first, Justice after. Justice without Truth cannot be Justice, but merely the summary exercise of police or military power, whether its pretext be ‘the victim’ or the ‘national interest’, for ‘the children’ or for oil.

Further, it is in exercising Our ability to discern Truth and to determine Our opinion accordingly that We fulfill Our role as We, the People. Government, manhandled by the Left or the Right, wields the raw police and military power to exercise ‘justice’. It is We, the People who bear the responsibility and the authority to make police and military power correspond to Truth. Unfettered by Truth, as best The People can discern it, police and military power become unhinged, like a huge ferris wheel released from its moorings, and will inevitably crush the weakest in its path, until declining momentum and weakened structural integrity collapse the tottering monster itself.

So to the choice posed to Us by the upcoming election. It is not simply a question of which of the individual candidates has the more attractive program or – oy! – personality. It is a question of which, if either, of them will be able to actually effect the changes that have now so long and deeply deformed his Party’s politics and Our country’s politics. We’ll have to think a lot more, and thus to know a lot more, before We can answer so momentous a question. Not that the mainstream media have retained much interest in helping Us in discharging this task. But perhaps they haven’t been asked loudly enough and often enough lately.

Let Truth be done. Justice and Freedom cannot exist without it. Let Truth be done by the People, and let the power of Truth be imposed by the People on the government which was designed to be of them, by them, and for them.

Let Truth be done; no Justice can be done without it. Otherwise this election will simply be one more rearrangement of the furniture on a ship of state with far more urgent problems.