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I got my start in domestic politics in 1988 or 1989. And your piece of writing is rather exactly how I soon realized things were at that time. The good news is: all that isn't as much so now as it used to be.
This country- such as it is now- was founded as a bunch of colonies. People understand what this means in the abstract, but when they look out at the American political scene they prefer not to see how much of that system (social, economic, political) still lies in the behavior of average Americans. Americans pretend they don't have a history, but if they must have a history it can't be about the realities of how Americans really lived and how the wealth was obtained, let alone spread out. It's Beaten Spouse Syndrome of a kind.
It's easy to complain about and hate the elites. But let's point out that a good number of the them, the Roosevelts and the Kennedys for instance and many others more subtly, did have and still in some measure represent the virtues and special capacities of nobility.
What you see in Republicans and in the average colonial elites is the opposite of nobility- small and mean interests winning out over the general good and the greatness of wo/men. They try to achieve greatness by small acts of destruction, and outdo nobility with vulgarity, imagination with vaingloriousness.
We have been living in a political wartime for about fifteen years. We call it the Culture War. Like the Civil War, it is about ending the grotesque excesses that derive from the residues of the colonial order.
The psychological, if not physical, violence starts happening when the side that needs changes in the establishments and institutions gets about 40% of the real power. It ends when it has attained 55%, or maybe 60%. The fighting begins with clever talk, then deceit and treachery, and picking off of the weakest combatants while incompetent armies clash by night. Then there's a tactician's phase, all calculations and training and expertise. But it doesn't work out, so there's a phase where the strategic thinkers rise and the courageous people willing to be secondary and fight the battles of attrition. Facing a competent enemy, the side in the historical wrong pushes morale- the extremism rises to hysteria. And psychotic levels as the 50% mark is crossed, then vicious cunning until it is clearly irreversibly so, and then defiant suicidalness or desertion or exile. It sure looks like fascism, even if it is a whole variety of things on closer inspection. It's the behavior of people who have no tomorrow in a reformed country they claim to possess.
We're in the battles of attrition- taking hard losses, dealing with the other side's overreaching- and subordinating ourselves to the strategic scheme and its generals. We're also over the 50% mark now, faced with wiping out and beating back all the reserves of political support the other side can find, their ambushes and desperate ploys outside the normal rules of engagement. It's been trench warfare. And our side is desperate to see some kind of payoff to the years of bloody fighting- but our opponent is leveraging everything to the max, and (as the defender) more able to shuffle forces to his weak points most of the time. His gamble keeps getting higher, and so we're (both) stuck with an everything-or-nothing situation.
The good news is that their side is near its breaking point, precariously overextended. The numbers say so, even if the newspaper stories don't. So their side must fight on with ever more desperate morale boosters, longer odds, and absurd hopes and claims. When the overextension snaps it snaps badly.
It is all about greed, money, power and influence. And ultimately it is about total control and domination.
Well, if you can't win Nobel prizes or sainthood or improve the world or write The Great American Novel, the rules and values of the relative status game at work in the sandbox are what's left.
While I would like to believe that electing a Democratic President will change things, I now believe that it makes no significant difference.
Well, it's all a matter of what is really at stake.
I like to think that in 1999 and 2000 we felt quite differently about this. Sure, not much of anyone was willing to go to the wall for Gore. But we would have, and to some extent did, do it for Clinton.
The elites are on the whole no more malevolent or degenerate than the commoners in this country, though those who are are outdoing those who are not at present. Yet there are still the few true princes out there, as there ever are. But it is a time of wholesale destruction of a corrupt set of establishments, the defeat on the battlefield of the ignorant and foolish but bloodthirsty armies of the misinvested and mercenary they lead, the burning of their fields and factories to teach them not to inflict war on others in the name of property, and also the sorting out of the imperfect reformers and the wrongheaded compromisers on our side.
Either this war is worth winning or it isn't. No war has ever created utopia- but it has destroyed many of the movements and fallacious beliefs that insisted on utopias contrary to human dignity and desires. There is no road to the life worth living than through the hell other people try to make of it.
Our side is like the Union side of the Civil War in many ways. One of them is that we fight for something fairly diffuse in the positive sense, something abstract that would never have real historical form but enabled that which could not yet be imagined, and against something very concrete and well known and lived with for a long time. But in November 1864 the Union voted for Lincoln and winning the war, rather than McClellan and going back to the old, seemingly liveable, compromises. The nearly 300,000 dead Union soldiers swung that election and thus the outcome; in the end they demanded their due of the living.
So: things do change. They change when we can afford them. The revolution comes when the oppression weakens or its rationale vanishes, not when the suffering ask for it. When the Cold War ended we had a lot of domestic business to deal with- but the power arrangements in place to stifle reforms to a minimum in its name. Almost fifteen years later we're getting to the point where all the Cold Warrior era traumas and agendas are kind of cured or resolved or crushed- because they made people psychotic they took priority. We're now getting to where we're addressing the progressive agenda, the cultural reality of post-Cold War, post-white, post-colonialist America. We're actually on the verge of serious social equality. In twenty or so years we'll even have the last stronghold of the Old Establishment, the corporation, surrendering.
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