“The United States has
entered a new historical era marked by a growing disinvestment in the social
state, public goods, and civic morality.”
Henry Giroux
I can’t bear to watch the
Republican National Convention, and when I heard Ralph Reed spinning a fable
about thousands of nuclear centrifuges in Iran on Democracy Now on the radio
this morning, I immediately switched the channel.
I’ve heard enough lies. The
Republican Party is a monstrosity, full of zealots with zero respect for facts,
science, history or rational inquiry. Their kit bag is loaded with tired and
failed prescriptions, from tax cuts as a job generator to blind support of
Israel, from deranged hostility to the public sector to opposition to abortion
under any circumstances. Their belief in fairy tales is absolute and no amount
of reason, data, or experience can sway them. If it would further their
political power, they would happily run our ship of state aground.
The obstructionist GOP will
nominate the human cipher, Mitt Romney, and his running mate, Paul Ryan. Romney
seems to believe that his enormous personal wealth entitles him to the
presidency, that his experience in the private sector makes him an expert in
macroeconomics, and that the sprawling federal government can be run like IBM
or Exxon-Mobil. Ryan is touted as a federal budget prodigy, but as Paul Krugman
and others have pointed out, Ryan’s math is fuzzy. Given his way, Ryan would
shred what little remains of the American social safety net and hand even
larger tax breaks to people who least need them. Under Ryan’s prescriptions, the
rich would become richer, the poor more so, and the gap between the two even
wider than it is today.
Romney is the wind-up
candidate, a politician who offers whatever audience he appears before whatever
he thinks they want in the moment. Tonight he’s for marriage equality, tomorrow
morning he’s against it. Looking in at Romney one sees no hint of soul or
character, and he can hardly be regarded as a mirror of who the majority of us
are.
I imagine the word
“socialist” will be heard frequently this week in heavily guarded, Homeland
Security-occupied Tampa. That the Right has affixed this label to Obama is a
signature propaganda achievement since by no objective measure can any of
Obama’s policy initiatives be called socialist.
The Right will never admit the
truth, but in Obama the status quo has had a devoted servant.
As Thomas Frank writes in
the September issue of Harper’s:
“What Barack Obama has saved
is a bankrupt elite that by all rights should have met its end in 2009. He came
to the White House amid circumstances similar to 1933, but proceeded to rule
like Herbert Hoover.”
I admit to drinking several
pints of Obama’s Kool-Aid in 2008. Exhausted after eight years of the Bush-Cheney
junta, I fell for the rhetoric of hope and change and fully suspended my
critical faculties. Only after Obama surrounded himself with a posse of
Clinton-era operatives did I realize how completely I had been duped. In my
mind, the trip has been all down hill from there. Obama frittered away the
first half of his term when he had majorities in Congress, allowed the right to
take control of the national narrative, and failed to use his bully pulpit to
advance policies that might have benefitted the middle class and working poor.
The country needed a fighter with a tough chin; what we got was a compulsive
compromiser.
I won’t watch the Democratic
National Convention either, since the contemporary Democratic Party doesn’t
represent my interests. As a matter of conscience I might not vote at all come
November.
I don’t think I’m alone in
feeling that it really makes no difference.
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