Our Long National Nightmare Isn't Over, It's Just Beginning

In the 1930s, the only
thing we had to fear was fear, itself.

Today, the main thing
we have to fear is us, ourselves.

Looking out over the
horizon, I'm starting to wonder just how many shades of dark there
are on the pallette. Lately, I get the feeling that we're about
to find out.

I wish I could say that
this society did our best to fight our demons, but that the odds were
simply insurmountable. You know. Like we were just sitting
there by ourselves on our remote little Pacific island, a thousand years
before telephones and radar when - bang - the tsunami hit, no fault
of our own. And we bravely struggled heroically, doing our mightiest
to save as many lives as we could.

I mean, if you've got
to crash and burn, better to go down with a little dignity and honor,
eh?

But, no, not for me,
apparently. I'm an American. I live in a country - nay,
an empire! - that insists on destroying itself. I'm part of
the generation of decline. My people are the fools who perfected
the fine art of committing suicide by stupidity.

It's an astonishing
act, and one of wide participation.

The nightmare of the
right in America edges increasingly close to dragging the country past
the point of no return, over the cliff of violent implosion. At
this point, there is already little that is missing save the jackboots
and broken glass.

The Republican Party
was once a moderately conservative, pro-business outfit, until it was
highjacked by the oligarchy and turned into a full-on predatory machine,
hiding behind the facade of hate mobilizing issues like bogus overseas
threats abroad and uppity brown people and demanding women at home.
Basically, any way that middle class white males could be distracted
from their sinking economic status - through the diversion of a sense
of superiority over others, or the supposed threat to that superior
status - was employed to cover for a party whose true agenda was to
quietly produce the greatest transfer of wealth in all of human history.

Having succeeded dramatically,
they are back at it again. It is now transparent, for anyone who
cares to look, that the ugly tea party movement in America is an invention
of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey and their sick ilk,
once again mobilizing a boatload of fools who are angry, but too stupid
to know quite why. This explains their endless rhetoric about
the evils of the federal government, and their simultaneous desire to
keep their Social Security and Medicare benies. It also explains
their unmatched idiocy in serving as tools for their own destruction.
If they succeed, they fail. If they get their champions elected,
they lose their government-provided (Shhhh!) goodies. Brilliant.

In any case, the takeover
of the GOP by Serious Money is now well into its second stage.
Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it is. Seriously,
what is the next step after this one fails to provide any long-term
solutions to what ails America, as most assuredly will be the case?
For a decade or three now, regressives in America have been showing
that they are capable of anything. Which more or less answers
that question, doesn't it? If you're willing to savage military
icons like John McCain, Max Cleland and John Kerry in order to win elections
- and especially after you get away with it every time - you're
willing to do anything. If you're willing to mock the 9/11 widows
as scheming opportunists, you're willing to do anything. If
you're willing to don a tuxedo and joke about missing WMD at a press
banquet in Washington, just as you're telling the American military's
adversaries in Iraq to "bring it on", you're willing to do anything.

Looking at the rhetoric
the right throws in the direction of our president these days, questioning
his very nationality (oh, did I mention that he's black?), it's
easy to see that they've gone completely over the line. But
what's really out of control is what lies underneath this insanity
generated for the consumption of an ignorant hoi polloi. And what
that is - what you see when you move the slime-infested rock away
- is an unfathomably monstrous greed. Watching these folks in
action, you could easily get the impression that they had been impoverished
their whole lives. That they had been denied everything, right
down to food and water. That they had been deprived through poverty
especially of their dignity. You know, like the real poor people
of this world, the forty or fifty percent of the Earth's population
that survives on less than two dollars per day. Those folks.

Instead, we are talking
about people who are already fantastically rich. And who, despite
this, are absolutely hell-bent on getting richer, even if that means
depriving hundreds of millions of people in the American middle class
of their middle classness, and in many cases, ultimately of their lives.
How do we explain people like this? Are they not essentially sociopathic?
Are they not made of essentially the same stuff as those who can kill
without guilt or remorse? Especially when you consider that even
the greediest among us reach a limit beyond which one can effectively
make use of the next dollar and the one beyond that, so that pushing
others into poverty is no longer even for purposes of your own benefit,
but instead for some kind of sick sport? Aren't these the characters
whose essential sickness preachers and philosophers and shrinks have
been trying to sort out for millennia?

Whatever the explanation
for such illness, the effects of their efforts are certainly plain to
see. We're talking here about a class of Americans who have
been essentially offended by the diminishment of inequality produced
in America during the middle part of the twentieth century, due to the
national policies ranging from the New Deal to the Great Society, Republican
administrations included. America's socio-economic structure
changed dramatically during that time, and almost entirely for the better.
A huge middle class that had never existed before came into being.
Anti-poverty programs took the worst sting out of living conditions
for the poor. And America became the greatest economic dynamo
since the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, by the way, the rich remained
very, very rich.

But that was not enough.
So they have made a concerted effort over the last generation or so
to revert the country back to the bad old days of Herbert Hoover and
Calvin Coolidge. Think about that for a second. What sort
of elevated sickness, what sort parental deprivation in childhood, what
sort of total absence of conscience and consciousness is required to
produce a group of people with that mentality?

I wish I knew.
But I do know that their plan worked. As Robert Kuttner notes
in The American Prospect: "For more than three decades, the
wages of American workers have been close to flat while economic insecurity
has risen massively. Although the productivity of the U.S. economy
has doubled in a generation, most of those gains have not been captured
by workers. And in the decade that began in 2001, inflation-adjusted
wages have fallen for all but the most affluent 3 percent of the population.

"This pattern of deepening
inequality was well entrenched before the financial collapse - which
only made things worse. In 2006, economists at Goldman Sachs, sounding
almost Marxian, reported that 'the most important contributor to higher
profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor's
share of national income.' By 2006, wages as a percentage of
gross domestic product were already at their lowest share - 45 percent
- since government began keeping statistics in 1947. In the
past three years, the decline in worker earnings has only intensified,
as worker bargaining power has been undermined by very high unemployment.
As the economy has stumbled toward a feeble recovery, corporate profits
and executive bonuses have rebounded smartly, but salaries and wages
have not.

"In the 1940s, 1950s,
and 1960s, wages and productivity moved upward in lockstep. Beginning
in the 1970s, as government regulation of labor conditions faltered,
trade with nations that exploited their own workers increased, and corporations
declared open war on unions, the lines diverged. Productivity
kept increasing, while median wages were nearly flat."

This is the successful
agenda of the right in America, though it has been cleverly masked by
the politics of resentment. This has been the real 'class warfare'
in the United States these last decades - not, as pouncing regressives
instantly scream out in an effort to silence truth, the very occasional
and even more feeble attempts by the odd Democratic politician who slips
up and mentions what has actually happened. And, as Warren Buffett
is honest enough to point out, the war is over and his side won.
As Robert Reich noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, the richest
one percent of Americans have gone from taking in nine percent of the
total national income right before the Reagan era began, to nearly one-fourth
of it today. As Reich also reminds us, the last time this happened
was in 1928. I would rush to say, "Hey, remember how that one
turned out?", but it's pretty unnecessary to crack the history books
for that reference, since we're now living it. As just about
the stupidest society that ever was, we've decided to get together
to explore the fun and exciting question, "What would happen if America
had a devastating economic downturn once again, boys and girls?!?!"

There is one big difference
between today and the 1930s, however. Once there was a political
party in America - the one that did the New Deal and the Great Society
- that stood up a bit for the middle class and the poor. But
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have led the Democrats down a different
path. Now the party stands for a slightly weaker version of the
GOP's plutocracy protection service. And, seemingly, for getting
its face bitch-slapped bright red at every possible juncture.
Both aspects of the New Democrats are a puzzle, but particularly the
latter. What sort of psychology of the self-loathing explains
how a Clinton or an Obama can be so passive, even when getting handed
their heads by the most scurrilous of creeps on the political landscape,
pieces of (allegedly) human garbage who could be destroyed with the
slightest show of self-defense, let alone a wee assertion of political
courage?

The current White House
is such a failure that I am sometimes left scratching my head in understanding
why that is the case. The puzzle becomes especially acute if one
considers how transparently intelligent Barack Obama is, and how strategically
clever they were in running their presidential campaign. It's
true, of course, that there are different kinds of smart. Jimmy
Carter understood nuclear physics, but not the presidency. George
W. Bush understood the presidency, but was otherwise as intellectually
vacuous as a mud pie. Still, Obama has shown serious evidence
that he has keen political smarts. Until he became president,
that is.

One obvious explanation
for this puzzle is that the guy, like Clinton before him, is just another
flavor of corporate tool. Ya got yer Republican Wall Street marionettes,
see, and ya got yer Democratic Wall Street marionettes... That
much is clear, but it still doesn't explain why this White House has
been as inept as it has. Another claim that some people make is
that he just wants one term, and will take the money and prestige and
run. The problem with that theory is that he already had the money.
And, quite arguably, he could have done better financially by simply
writing a third book than by sitting in the Oval Office earning a mere
half mil per year. What is absolutely clear, unless there is some
radical and nearly unimaginable change of course, is that he will leave
the presidency as one of history's great losers, which again suggests
to me that he would have been better off just sitting it out.
Not to mention all the stress and ever-present death threats he could
avoid by just hanging on the sidelines.

Whatever the explanation,
the effect could not be clearer. Obama came into his presidency
with more wind in his sails than perhaps anyone since Johnson in 1964,
and this for a black man with an Islamic name, no less. He then
blew it, utterly and completely. The indications of this are everywhere,
starting with all the subsequent by-elections which he has turned into
'bye' elections for candidates from his party. Meanwhile,
there are Democrats running for Congress today who are literally running
TV ads dissing Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. And even those who
are not mostly don't want the president showing up in their districts
before this election.

Now the latest polls
are showing Republicans with a ten percent lead in generic congressional
ballots. This is the biggest they've ever had in the 68 year
history of polling. Meanwhile, half of Republican voters are enthusiastic
about voting this November, while only one-fourth of Democrats are.
On top of everything else, Republicans are doing this well despite offering
nothing in terms of a plan for solving the problems that are upsetting
voters. They will cut taxes on the rich. That's it.
The entirety of the rest of what they stand for is simply "NO!!!"
to all things Demon Obama.

Now, think about this
for a second, and bear in mind that when it comes to the GOP we are
talking about a political party that the very same polls show voters
still hating. How astonishingly inept do you have to be to turn
the world upside down on its axis and hand not only resurrection but
in fact control of Congress to such thugs, and hugely despised ones
at that? What kind of a full-blown multiple-car crash of a politician
do you have to be to make the party of Bush, Cheney, Boehner and McConnell
seem preferable to the public, by a wide margin?

Wait. Don't answer
yet. It gets worse from there. In 2003, the ratio of Democratic
to Republican identifying/leaning voters was about 50 to 40 among young
voters, known as the Millennial generation. By 2008, via a combination
of the effects of both George W. Bush and (candidate) Barack Obama,
that ratio had moved an astonishing distance to provide a whopping gap
of 62 to 30. Now, less than two years into the rule of Mr. We
Are The Ones We've Been Waiting For, it is back to 54 to 40.
These are incredible swings in identities that are usually far more
stable. And they are incredibly important, because there is good
evidence to suggest that voters who select a given party over a series
of elections in the early part of their lives wind up keeping that party
ID for life. In other words, Democrats had an opportunity here
to lock in with an entire generation of voters a hugely disproportionate
preference to continue voting for them. Imagine the difference
this would have made in elections for the next seventy(!) years, especially
over time as these Millennials replaced older, more conservative, voters
in the electorate, and as they themselves came to turn out in larger
proportion each election cycle, as every generation does when it ages.
Democrats could have come close to locking up control of American government
for the coming half-century, just as they essentially did after 1932.
Instead, the party's leaders have alienated this generation so much
that they have returned the identification numbers to the period when
George Bush and his party were highly popular. That's a real
achievement, folks.

Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's
communications director, recently averred that "The public is rightly
frustrated and angry with the economy". So far so good, Dan.
Very perceptive for a guy in the Obama White House. You should
have stopped there, though. Instead, Dan went on to say that,
"There is no small tactical shift we could have made at any point
that would have solved that problem". You know, I don't really
know who Dan Pfeiffer is, but I would say that anyone making this claim
should be removed from office, and fast. Indeed, right now I would
say that anyone who has the title of Obama's communications director
should probably just be taken out back and shot, on account of gross
incompetence and lethal negligence. I'm sorry, but these fools
are so clueless. This could have turned out so differently, and,
moreover, that was obvious in January of 2009 to anyone who had paid
attention to American politics for the last thirty years. This
White House was not praiseworthy for seeking to be bipartisan.
Rather, it was embarrassing for not even knowing who its enemies were.

The worst, though, is
what is to come. Obama and the Democrats will get slaughtered
in November. This will happen not so much because of the socialist
crimes they are alleged by the right to have committed - which are
of course utter nonsense - but simply because of what they have not
done, which is to solve the country's problems. Yet, because
of the socialist, big-spending, freedom-crushing narrative that regressives
have successfully fomented and that the administration (including -
Hello! - paging COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR DAN PFEIFFER!!) has been completely
inept about countering, and because the other post-election option of
actually getting it right would appear to be (and would be vociferously
made to appear to be, by Republicans) an act of spiteful spitting in
the public's eye, the administration will have no option after the
election but to tack yet further to the right in the ensuing two years.

That will be disastrous
for Obama, for Democrats and for the country. (I could care less
about the first two, who deserve it, and frankly I'm leaning that
same way for number three on the list as well.) Like Clinton before
him, Obama will try to placate voters and Republican monsters with their
sponsoring oligarchy by moving to the right. Of course, there
is absolutely nothing there except tax cuts for the wealthy (he is already
proposing tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent). The Republicans
have no other solutions for the economy (or anything else, for that
matter), though these dam-busting boondoggles for the fiscally obese
are, of course, no solution either. And, like Clinton before him,
Obama will be relentlessly hounded by congressional investigations into
every manner of bogus scandal that the fevered minds of the closeted
perverts on the right can dream up to keep the administration reeling.

Unlike Clinton, however,
there will be one big difference. I often said, back in the day,
that the only thing that kept the American public from immolating Wild
Bill, and the only thing that kept the Senate from convicting him in
his impeachment trial, was that the economy was jumping at the time
and Americans were therefore fat, dumb and happy. Today, however,
they're merely fat and dumb, and even the fat part isn't a good
thing in this case. The public could not possibly be more surly
- apart that is, from how surly they'll be in a year or two.
Obama has been as idiotic a president as could be created if you sat
down with the intention of making one, and they will be happy to watch
him get savaged him when they have a chance. By bringing timidity
and compromise with criminals to bear against multiple severe crises,
and by refusing to fight for anything, he has launched a vicious cycle
that is sucking him inexorably down, and us with him: He fails
to solve the problems, the public gets angry and frustrated, his party
loses elections, the right accuses him of everything from being a socialist
to a fascist, he says nothing in response, the public gets angrier and
more frustrated, his party loses more elections, they are then even
more unable to govern than before, the public is about to explode in
anger and frustration, he moves to the right and thereby offers even
less of a solution to these crises than the non-solutions already on
display, and ... so on. And so on, again. Rinse and repeat.

Obama and the rest of
the cowardly and corrupt members of his party have guaranteed their
own destruction, that's for sure, but that is likely the least unkind
thing that history will say about them. If we think about where
this all goes next, it becomes clear what these shallow punks are trading
away for their pathetic self-interest and unwillingness to fight against
treasonous criminals. Democrats will be smashed in the next two
elections, and the right will gain full control of the government and
full responsibility for the state of the country. At that point,
Republicans will have to put up or shut up. Since they will have
no remotely viable way to solve the problems people face - since,
indeed, their real mission is to make those problems worse, because
that is necessary to further enrich their sponsors - they will reach
for ever greater means of distraction to keep the public's attention
elsewhere. All I can say is, "Watch out, third world countries
everywhere".

We know what these people
are capable of, though Cheneyism has only hinted at how bad it could
ultimately get.

History will record -
if there are historians left to record it - that this was a moment
of monsters, cowards and indolents: those being the right, the
supposed left, and the public, respectively.

It's the worst of all
worlds, and the combination is likely to be catastrophic.

Given the magnitude of
the crises we face and the ability of those who would govern us -
and those who would be governed by them - to do anything whatsoever
in pursuit of their own, narrow, short-term interest, it could well
be far worse than catastrophic.