What's interesting about this election is that both candidates represent the very worst aspects of their respective parties. On the Democratic side, you have Hillary Clinton, who helped bring about and implement the Third Way brand of politics that the Democrats have been following for the last twenty-five years. On paper the strategy seeks to build a "compromise" position between the fringes of Republicans and Leftist Democrats so laws could have the most sensible, best-of-both-worlds type of approach. What this led to in practice, of course, were things like NAFTA and the repealing of the Glass-Steagall Act, two things which directly contributed to both the middle classes stagnant wages and the economic crisis that we still haven't fully recovered from. There was also things like the Defense of Marriage Act, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", and the 1994 Crime Bill that's contributed to us having the highest prison population in the world.
And that's just the stuff the Clintons were directly responsible for. On the whole, the Democrats did nothing to stop the Iraq War or the rampant civil liberties abuses racked up by Baby Bush after 9/11. Sure, they were happy to use those things and how awful they were as cudgels to win the 2006 midterms, but once they were in a position to actually do something about those issues then well, government is a process, you know? It's hard to change things for the better, especially when you're not all that interested in doing so. So cut them slack, all right? I mean, Obama made a huge deal about protecting whistle-blowers like it was a sacred duty before he prosecuted more of them than any other President in history. After all, it's one thing to protect people who rat out the bullshit acts of other Presidents, but when they were spilling his, well, he just can't have that, can he?
There's also been a lot of crowing about the newest Census data showing a 5% bump for middle class incomes last year, which Obama is all too happy to take the credit for and is a "trend" Hillary is promising to continue. All this glad handing is so people don't remember that way back in 2009 Obama set up a mortgage relief program for victims of the subprime loan programs so they wouldn't get evicted under the terms of their bullshit loans. Spoiler alert: the program was purposefully neglected and hasn't achieved much of anything. One can forgive Obama for doing so, seeing how busy he was pumping trillions of dollars into the banking and financial industries while doing an epic press tour saying that sure, they crashed the world economy, but no, they weren't criminals, and no, they shouldn't face any accountability in any way shape or form. We must look forward, after all. It was in this instance that Obama, and his super-majority Democratic Congress, displayed a quality that isn't usually associated with Democrats: bravery. See, Dems are usually seen as weak, mealy-mouthed, pansies without a backbone, but that's not really fair. When the chips are down and backs are against the wall, Democrats always find it within themselves to take a stand for the rich donors who sign their campaign donation checks and who will later sign their personal paychecks in the face of the angry voters who actually elected them. It's a bravery born out of greed and corruption, sure, but still, it's a quality they never get proper credit for.
To her credit, Hillary has promised to reverse all of these positions she's held for decades. Honest. If we could all just do her the favor of forgetting how she spent all of last year and most of this one dismissing and disparaging Bernie Sanders agenda before largely adopting it as her own, that'd be great. Also, if we could stop asking questions about how receiving reams of money from Wall Street will affect her (reluctant and recent) support of things like a $15 minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich, and tougher Wall Street regulation, she'd greatly appreciate it. And, remember how she disappeared for a few weeks after the Convention because it turned out she was having secret fundraisers with rich people? Don't, please. Really, it makes her look bad. On the plus side, we won't have to forget whatever she said to Goldman Sachs that made her worth $200,000 a pop, because we'll never actually know. Oh, one last thing, if we could just blank out that she bragged about hiring people to go online and get into fights with people who said mean things about her. If people keep bringing that up it just delegitimizes any positive thing people say about me and makes it seem like the only reason people will say they want her to be President is it's their literal job to do so.
In contrast to the Democrats strategy of bending every which way to make it look like they actually stand for something, Republicans took a more direct and straight forward approach to being the worst thing that happened to the people they governed.
The story on this side starts in the 1960's after Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights act. As many, many Republicans are fond of pointing out these days, it was the support of the northern Republicans who made the passing of the Civil Rights Act possible. That point will usually be followed by a rapid and breathless recitation that it was actually the Democrats who kept blacks as slaves and instituted the Jim Crow laws and started the Klan and so, obviously, black people should vote Republican know because they were on the right side of the Civil War and legislating away the abuses that came afterwards. Of course, it never crosses these peoples minds that it's odd to celebrate their Confederate heritage in one breath and than condemn the practices of said heritage in another. And, naturally, it never seems all that weird to them that the only thing that they can name check as Republicans doing good things for black people happened fifty-fucking-years ago and maybe there should be some recent examples if they cared so much about the plight of the oppressed? Here in the real world, of course, we know that the signing of the Civil Rights Act basically made the Republicans in the North who supported it and the DixieCrats in the South who fought against it switch their party registrations and that switch has stayed permanent until this day. And we can thank Tricky Dick Nixon for that.
Nixon implemented the Southern Strategy in his election bid in 1968 and 1972. The whole point of the strategy is to votes by stroking the racial resentments of white people. I'll let Lee Atwater explain it a bit deeper:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger"You'll recognize the similarities between that and Romney's 47% of people don't pay taxes bullshit and Paul Ryan's comment "Urban Voters" cost their ticket the election. The goal of the strategy has always been to coach the same racist ideologies and prejudices in more mundane language. And it's worked so well that there isn't a Republican talking point that doesn't include them, even leading to things like this idiot in Maine who actually said on camera that racism wasn't a thing until Obama became President. (She's since resigned, because even in a Trump America some shit is still too stupid to say and walk away from.) The danger with this, though, is the more you do it, the more you edge closer and closer to the white power movement that you know, is decent enough to be openly racist and not pretend otherwise. And that thin line of separation has finally given way, with even David Duke feeling like the Republican platform has extended low enough for him to comfortably stand on it and run on its ticket for a state senate job. Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment drew a lot of flack, but seriously, non-racist Republicans, isn't at least a little worrying to you that your nominee has brought so many white supremacists into the tent, and doesn't it worry you even more that once inside they fit in so comfortably?
There are some conservatives trying, vainly, to act they're going to take a principled stand and "take their party back" from the clutches of Trump and his raging repulsiveness. Jennifer Rubin, a columnist at The Washington Post, is one of them. She just wrote a column saying that more moderate Republicans must take back the soul of the party because a party that is willing to have something as vile as Trump and his bitherism represent the party doesn't deserve to succeed. The thesis is true, but the impact of of Rubin's sudden principled conservatism is somewhat lessened by the fact that she was a major supporter of Rick Perry in both the 2011 and 2015 primaries. Apparently, his birther lunacy was fine, but Trump's is just beyond the pale.
Perry is also an exemplar of another strategy that dragged Republicans off into la-la land, the Christian Right. The influx of evangelical Christians and their dogmatic, Biblical literalism slowly transformed political positions into religious tenets. These days, if you're a Republican that says anything against free-market, tax cutting, no regulation economic policy, than you were no Republican at all. Being pro-choice is to aide and abet the American Holocaust, LGBT rights are merely the first steps toward all Christianity being outlawed. And God help you if you're caught admitting that climate change and evolution are actual things. The marriage of political ideology with the ignorance and fanaticism of religious fundamentalism has made being a "true conservative" into being an enemy of reality. That's why they still believe that tax cuts lead to prosperity even in the face of a bankrupt Kansas, and why shutting down Planned Parenthood in Texas still counts as pro-life even though Texas now has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. The righteousness of the positions is what's important, the results are immaterial.
Which brings us to Trump. There isn't actually anything daring or original in his strategy to be as bigoted as possible and riding that to success in the Republican primary; rather, he's a political remora fish getting fat in the shitstream of bigotry and ignorance that conservative elite and media have been feeding their viewers for decades now. He also benefits from the iron bubble conservatives have created for themselves to close them off from any contradictory information; he's the biggest liar on the campaign trail? That's just the usual liberal lamestream media bullshit. His tax cuts will cost $10 trillion? That's just the same educated "expert" bullshit talk that they all get paid by the liberal conspiracy to justify the government taking money out of our pockets! His whole image of being a tough guy is also dependent on people ignoring literally everything else that happens in the world. When Trump went to Mexico last month Enrique Pena-Nieto told him flat out that Mexico would not pay for his proposed border wall. In Mexico, Trump lays down and accepts it, and can't even admit that they even discussed the issue to the press. But a couple hours later in Arizona, in front of a friendly crowd, Trump is strutting about like a WWE performer saying Mexico will pay for the wall no matter what. Just recently, in Flint, Michigan, Trump was cut off by a pastor in a black church before he went on one of his patented rambling rants. In the church, Trump backed down, looking like a meek little school boy, and kept his mouth shut. But later, on Fox and Friends, he was back in full fire mode, railing against the pastor as a hysteric woman who could barely control herself. The point of all this is, when Trump is in front of a friendly, approving audience, he struts around like he's the big dick on campus and nothing and no one can stop him. But, put him in front of literally anyone who doesn't already agree with him, he shrivels up like the worthless prick that he is.
But for all the political foolishness and chicanery, the real blame for all this bullshit lies with the voters. See, we were the ones who let the parties get away with all this bullshit in the first place. It was voters who show up in force during presidential elections and than barely remember that the midterms even exist. And it was voters who never bothered to write, call, or have any interaction with their Congress people on any level once the elections were over. Governments represent the people who show up, the people who put the effort into making things work for them. If voting is the only thing that you ever did and than just left it at that, than you can't really be surprised that the government you elected doesn't give a fuck about your opinions or wishes. After all, if you're not going to spend the time and effort making your issues known, why should they do anything to find out? America is where it is because we, as a people, stood by on the sidelines because we assumed we were worthless and didn't matter. So, naturally, our politicians treated us as such. If we want this country to be anything that we think it should or want to become, we have to put in the work.
Most importantly, we need to kill the narrative of the lesser evil. That whole idea is built on voter resignation that we can't do any better than two piles of shit, so might as well pick the smaller one to swallow. Fuck that. If all you have is two bad options, than yes, you go with least terrible one. But after they win, you hound them and pester them until they have no choice but to be something better or maybe worthwhile. If we're ever going to have a country worth living in, we'll have to make it that way. And the more we just bemoan how shitty everything is, the longer it'll stay that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment