Our Impoverished Politics

The other day I went
looking for a quote from a civil rights speech that John Kennedy had
given during a critical moment of American history, as the National
Guard was called out to escort two black students enrolling at the University
of Alabama. I found the passage I wanted and then went ahead and
read the entire speech. It was fairly stunning.

Consider some of the
following excerpts:

The first thing that's
striking about this rhetoric - and a fact which makes the second observation
all the more notable - is that it comes from a president who was just
barely decent on civil rights issues. Kennedy was young, handsome,
eloquent, witty, martyred and canonized by his camp after his assassination,
and Americans therefore remember him as a much more successful president
than he actually was. More importantly, we give him more credit
than is due for his moral courage on issues like civil rights, perhaps
the single most important domestic question of the era. (In this
respect, it must also be said that two other less-than altruistic motivations
leap off the page as you read this speech: the national elite's
concern, in the context of the Cold War, about how racism was hurting
American efforts to win over hearts and minds in the Third World;
and white America's palpable fear of black violence boiling over in
response to unyielding racism.)

Kennedy was in fact behind
the curve of history in many respects. Brown versus the Board
and the Montgomery bus strike had already occurred seven years before
his inauguration. And yet he was reluctant to move anywhere on
this issue much past where events on the ground pushed him. This
is understandable in crass political terms, given that the Solid (white,
racist) South at that time was still a huge chunk of the Democratic
Party's coalition, and given that Kennedy had won election in 1960
by the barest of margins (in fact, it took the generosity of a whole
lot of people in Illinois - who, despite being dead, nevertheless
voted for him - to put him over the top).

But that's just it
- Kennedy's reticence on civil rights is understandable in crass
political terms, but only in those terms. Nobody in our political
class likes to hear blunt truth, especially on matters of character,
but let's boil this one down to just that: JFK was, in his political
calculus, balancing the prospect of a second presidential term for one
very privileged single American, on the one hand, versus the equality,
aspirations and dignity of one-tenth of the country's population,
plus the moral and Constitutional integrity of the entire nation, on
the other. And, by and large, he was too often choosing to put
his own interests over the country's.

All that said, look again
at his words. The second reason they are striking - and my real
point here - has to do with the moral power and eloquent clarity of
his call to Americans to form a more perfect union. Yes, Kennedy
was a flawed president (which, of course, makes him part of a mighty
big club), and yes his deeds frequently failed to match the power of
his words. But that in fact underscores my argument even more
emphatically: Back in the day, even weak presidents could articulate
a national vision that was vastly larger and more appealing than anything
we remotely aspire to today.

Think about it.
Since Jimmy Carter was in the White House, America has been a captive
of regressive politics, including that of Democratic presidents and
congressional majorities. The only passionate rhetoric you are
ever likely to hear in our political discourse nowadays is some bald-faced
lies about the urgent need to go to war or to slash taxes on the wealthy.
When was the last time anyone spoke out with a moral vision about the
environment, civil rights, the American addiction to war, economic justice,
or the due process of civil liberties?

It happens, but it is
rare in our rhetoric generally, and even more rare amongst our political
class. Remember when Robert Byrd denounced the Iraq invasion in
passionate moral terms? That episode sticks out precisely because
it was such an unusual act. And even that was not done by a president,
congressional leader, cabinet member or senior statesman. The
speaker was just a senator. Not that senators aren't prominent
figures in American politics, of course. But at any given time
there are a hundred of them. And that just covers one half of
one branch, constituting one-third of the American government.

The truth is that American
political discourse in our time has been dumbed down, cheapened, emasculated
and impoverished. It is Exhibit A in the case arguing that, if
America was ever once a great country, it is not now. We are instead,
today, a crouched and fearful giant. We don't lead in the world,
other than to lead the regressive opposition (along with countries like
Somalia and Libya) to virtually every form of international law and
morality. At home, we have two political factions: those
who emphatically and aggressively seek to turn the clock back on every
form of progress achieved these last decades, centuries and even millennia,
and those who sheepishly and timidly defend the status quo, or perhaps
favor regressing a bit more slowly. You can see this clearly in
the contrast between take-no-prisoner presidents of our time like Reagan
and Lil' Bush, versus the hopelessly cowardly Clinton or Obama.
You can see it on the Supreme Court. The regressive faction is
bold and aggressive. The others on the Court are milquetoast moderates,
merely trying to hold the line on existing policy. And, despite
all the bullshit rhetoric about balance and fairness and yadda-yadda,
Neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama would dare nominate a true Warren
Court-style progressive to the bench, giving the Court even a single
liberal, up against five reactionaries.

No wonder our politics
are so bereft of stirring moral rhetoric. We are consumed with
the smallest politics of the most narrow self-interest. Our electorate
hasn't had a generous tendency in ages, and our political class is
populated by careerists, on a good day.

Elena Kagan is a good
example. So is Barack Obama, or John Edwards or Harry Reid or
Dick Gephardt (now a leading lobbyist) and so many others. (I
don't even bother to mention figures from the right, including those
like John McCain, once dolled-up by the media and his own campaign rhetoric
as some sort of patriot who places country before self.) Look
across the political landscape and see if you can spot a Daniel Ellsberg
or a Paul Wellstone or even a Lyndon Johnson anywhere on the horizon
of our political class - somebody who (even with the enormous other
flaws in the latter's case) takes a principled stand on any great
issue of our time, and who is willing to risk something of personal
value to do so. You won't. It's as rare today as the
Catholic Church doing the right thing about pedophilia.

What's perhaps most
astonishing about all this is we live in a moment where even self-interest
could simultaneously be both the right thing to pursue and politically
popular. Even if politicians can't transcend their own bloated
cravings for money, power and attention to stand up for repressed gays
or shrinking glaciers, couldn't they find it within themselves to
look out for the interests of tens of millions of Americans (who just
happen also to be voters) suffering under tremendous economic anxiety
and worse? What the hell is wrong with Barack Obama - as a politician
and as a person - that he doesn't savagely excoriate the sickening
monsters of the GOP who oppose extending unemployment rights to "lazy"
Americans living on the very edge of survival, and thereby along the
way also earn some much-needed moral and political credit for doing
so?

This week saw the ignominy
of the Shirley Sherrod case, in which regressive hitman Andrew Breitbart
blasted across the media a doctored up video of a speech the black former
director of the Agriculture Department's Georgia state office gave,
decades ago, talking about how she transcended her own impulses to discriminate
on the basis of race. Transcended, I say again. But that
was the part that got edited out. It was as if you lost your job
because you said publicly that "I am not a terrorist", but some
right-wing freak (whose parents evidently neglected him as an infant
and we're all paying for it still to this day) took out the third
word of the sentence and gave the rest to your boss and wife and kids
and everyone else, and now you've lost your marriage and family and
home and job and no one will talk to you anymore. All because
maybe you voted Democratic or something.

What this illustrates
for the umpteenth time (as if the Brooks Brothers Riot, or what Saxby
Chambliss did to Vietnam vet Max Cleland, or the character assassination
of the Swiftboat thugs didn't make this crystal clear already) is
that the scum that is today the American right will absolutely say and
do anything in order to score political points, while so-called progressives
say and do nothing even to stop their crimes, let alone to advance a
positive agenda. They do nothing, that is, unless crumpling up
like frightened kittens in a thunderstorm counts as doing something.

The distance traveled
from Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King (or even John Kennedy) to
Barack Obama represents a stunning collapse of empire. Once a
powerful country that could, with partial justification, boast of leadership
in the moral sphere, we have today shrunken, literally and figuratively,
to a nation of Newts looking for some kind of cheap Rush.

For better and, unfortunately,
sometimes for worse, this is a country that used to have big aspirations.
Now we're like a two-bit drunken banana republic, thrashing about
in the gutter of history as we implode from the toxic combination of
greed, stupidity, indolence and hubris.

We once used to conduct
a war on poverty. Now we just incarcerate the impoverished.
In privately-owned, for-profit, jails, no less.

We once used to take
care of our aged and elderly. Now our big social programs legislation
does little more than redirect huge masses of taxpayer funds to corporations.

We once cared about promoting
equality. Now when Oliver Stone makes the movie Wall Street in
order to offer a cautionary tale about the perils of greed, a hundred
thousand new stock trader careers are launched instead, in proud emulation
of Gordon Gekko.

We used to be serious
about protecting the air we breath, the water we drink and the land
we live on from the ravages of pollution. Now we standby and watch
with our hands in our pockets as we toast an entire planet to a lethal
crisp.

We once used to explore
the boundaries of what civil liberties could be sustained in sprawling
industrialized democracy. Now we race to legislate them away as
fast as we can, while the state ignores "guaranteed" protections
of privacy or due process whenever it wants to, anyhow.

We once used to race
to the moon, pushing ourselves to do the impossible. Now we just
stick dynastic disasters of DNA dice like George W. Bush before a podium
to haplessly call for a yawn-inducing, focus-group scripted, mission
to Mars.

We once used to care
about how we were perceived internationally, even as we nevertheless
too often displayed the belligerence of our power. Now we don't
even bother with the former, while we've raised the latter to a high
art.

We once used to come
together as a whole country to address threats and shared national concerns,
all of us making enormous sacrifices toward a common purpose.
Today, our presidents encourage us to go shopping.

Is it any wonder that
our political rhetoric is so uninspired today? It's the perfect
representation of our impoverished moral spirit.

And it's likely to
bite us hard in the not-too-distant future, if it isn't doing so already.

It's been nearly half
a century since JFK so aptly reminded us, "Those who do nothing are
inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing
right as well as reality."