Regarding General Motors, Frogs, and Scorpians

That our current president is a liar and a fool is, at this point, established common knowledge. More than half the people who voted for him knew this in November 2016. Many of them still see trimp as the “lesser evil” or a “Hail Mary pass”.

And why not? The failure of our political system has been bruited by talk radio and corporate-funded whispering campaigns which long predate electronic social media. But this failure is much more than vague or feverish perceptions.

The many genuine failures of our political system are also much more complicated than the agonizing frustrations inherent in even a well-functioning democracy if one were ever to exist.

Somehow enough voters in Ohio thought it was worth taking a chance on trimp. Some of them actually believed there was some way he could bribe, order, cajole, intimidate, or shame the monster corporations to provide and protect their job opportunities.

Of course, this was just the most recent of a long chain of conservative Republican tax cuts for the rich and for the corporations. This giveaway was designed to trickle down through the economy to create and preserve “good jobs”. And just like every other conservative Republican tax cut in US history, it merely lined the pockets of the rich and emboldened policies and attitudes that foment more misery and hopelessness among the rest of us. This is our political system.

This is dysfunction.

Now trimp and many communities in the Midwest have been again betrayed by General Motors. This is a corporation which would likely not exist today except for a taxpayer bailout. It still receives subsidies today. The plants GM is closing are built on the ruins of neighborhoods purchased with taxpayer money. These plants were built on the crushed and scorned memories of the working poor who lived and loved and died in those bulldozed and buried neighborhoods. Like a scorpion on a frog's back GM is a corporation which cannot stop itself from repeatedly stabbing the communities which support it with poison sting after poison sting.

Maybe trimp will launch a justly deserved presidential campaign of vilification against this predatory corporation. Maybe a frightened GM will buy him off with vague promises to reopen these plants in return for further sweeteners and subsidies. Maybe trimp will find a way to blame the poor and the brown and immigrant for GM's troubles. Maybe our president* will distract us with some new and terrorizing conflict where we will feel obliged to support our troops. Maybe trimp will soon be paralyzed by revelations from the Mueller investigation and inquests into associated scandals.

Maybe, along with the voters of Ohio, we will be fooled again. And again. And again.

Maybe we are all nothing but crash test dummies for an idiotic, though very mighty, corporate elite.

Whatever happens with (or to) trimp, this is the time to focus more attention on the role of corporations in our economy and our society. As more and more jobs are replaced by automation or are exported to terror regimes which know how to keep wages low, Americans who care about the future need to re-examine old prejudices, ideas, and beliefs.

The original corporations were entities created to serve some public "good". They were projects to build cathedrals. They were universities. They were towns and cities. Later on, more mercenary corporations were chartered, but even then it was understood that corporate privileges and independence were granted in return for some benefit to the sovereign. This started happening right about the same time in history as the idea that the people were sovereign began to be realized. And not long after this came the idea that by their very nature "corporations are people too" began to be insinuated into our common law system of precedents.

These immortal undemocratic zombie-like "people" often sit on piles of accumulated wealth that would overwhelm and embarrass the neediest greediest dragon of any self-respecting fantasy world. These unsleeping profit-motivated entities glide shark-like through human communities taking as much value as they can and giving back as little as they can get away with. They buy, sell, and trade our politicians and lawmakers the way 11-year-olds used to swap bubblegum scented baseball cards. And too much of our economy, our education system, our hopes, and our dreams are all based on the idea of our selling our days and talents to them in return for a living wage.

A scorpion cannot stop itself from stinging. The profit motive overwhelms all scruples. But we can change our laws and our incentives to reinforce other motives and other responsibilities. We cannot erase or outgrow greed, but we can nurture and protect better motivators. We can certainly punish scofflaws and promise breakers.

The death penalty for a corporation is the revocation of its charter. GM may or may not deserve the ultimate sanction. But for our economy and politics to become functional, we have to start changing the terms by which corporations are chartered and governed. We also have to make them and their all too human chief decision makers more subject to the rule of law. We have to make them accountable to democracy instead of its destroyers.

Maybe the failing (oh so sad!) trimp administration can make itself slightly useful. Maybe it can draw attention to the way corporations and their billionaire owners have betrayed our gullible trust. And maybe it could do some clumsy and unintentional service to the centuries-old efforts to extend and establish a meaningful “rule by the people.”

Idiot Wind

Nobody knows what it means to be human, but the sensation of “empty spaces in our hearts” is apparently a core element of whatever passes for our “essence”.  It is part of the creative force which (sometimes mercilessly) drives us onward, inward, or outward to transcend our condition and our “selves”

So yes.  We know we must do better.  

And that starts by trying to see our situation(s) clearly even if that also is a Sisyphean struggle. 

No. Loneliness is NOT tearing America apart.

No. Empty spaces in our “hearts” are NOT causing angry and divisive politics.

Nobody knows the secret to happiness, fulfillment, or the formation of a “beloved community”.

But deep down we know we are only as safe as the most threatened and marginalized among us. And deep down we know that “among us” does NOT just refer to people of the same skin color or who live in the same nation state jurisdiction.

The empty spaces in our hearts may not be CAUSED by a tiny idiotic (0.1%) elite hoovering up more and more of the wealth of our society. But the anxious hateful greed that drives a minority to preserve and expand its control over our institutions IS the major cause of divisive, fearful, confused, and hate-filled politics.

Our politics are so dysfunctional we cannot even take baby steps toward a humane inclusive healthcare system without creating a boondoggle for useless insurance corporations and multiple opportunities to divide us further by race and class and geography.

Our economy is so dysfunctional it depends ever more on a growing “underclass” of decent, honest, hard working “illegals” whom we oppress and torture in all sorts of ways and do not even quail at ripping their babies from their mothers’ breasts.

And then there’s Arthur C. Brooks. . . What the hell is he talking about?

The Progessive Curse

“Elite hysteria about the depravity of the American people makes even less sense in 2018 than it did in 2016. This election was, absolutely, a mass repudiation of Trump and his foul agenda. Republicans lost the popular contest for Congress by millions of votes and over seven percentage points. The true power behind Trump’s throne, we should know by now, is not an irresistible army of zombie racists in the heartland, but the historical structures and top-down tactics that sustain Republican minority rule.” — Matt Karp

Matt Karp is a historian, and his hope filled comment is a preface to some profound concerns regarding the Democratic Party. Yes, the Democrats have swept Republicans out of ancestral strongholds like Orange County, CA. But as richer more suburban areas grow bluer, some poorer more rural areas are getting redder.

My worry is that post trimp, many suburban whites will resort to voting Republican. Perhaps this will be impossible though if GOP politicians continue to energize their “base” by hoisting the obsidian standards of racial hatred, class resentment, and testosterone chauvinism.

But that evokes the most profound worries.

Karp’s worry is that the Democrats will pursue policies that widen the financial and cultural divides between workers who labor with their hands and those who labor with information, systems, and persuasion.

Karp is also someone who quite stirringly writes:

“Democrats may disdain, subordinate, or proscribe vast swathes of the working class, but socialists — if the idea of socialism means anything at all — never can.”

As someone who votes Democratically, I have to wince at this because it is so hard not to disdain anyone who cheers for trimp and who falls for the types of authoritarian populist politicians whom trimp emboldens. trimp himself may fall, but the gleaming dark standards of incipient fascism will still be borne by others either up towards high places of triumph or down into low corners of skulking.

I’m forced to remember the majority of workers without higher education do not sympathize with trimp and the darkness he represents. It may often seem otherwise because racism and sexism are such pervasive forces, affecting all our thinking in subtle but damaging ways. It’s so easy to conflate “white working class men without college” with the working class as a whole. Yes, only a minority of white working class men without college reject trimpulism, but it is a large minority. Bullies and fascists can seize power, this never happens solely because of working class support.

We must also remember that trimp enthusiasm is significant among the more educated, prosperous, and privileged sectors of the professional classes. And here again, this is mostly a phenomenon among the older and the “whiter”.

“Whites” as a whole will soon no longer be the majority in US politics. Some, no doubt, will fiercely cling to strange ideas regarding privilege and exceptionalism. Their delusions and resentments will be exploited by others seeking to maintain a plutocratic minority rule via the GOP - or other more emblematic organizations. 

The fragile institutions that support democracy and rule of law will continue to be tested.

But they have been tested before.

Karp concludes by comparing circumstances of today with that of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.

Yes, today’s Democratic Party is dominated by upscale professionals, many of whom are subordinate to the billionaire class.

Yes, today’s Democratic Party is dominated by upper middle class concerns about property values and exclusive educational opportunities for our children.

But the Democratic Party of today, thanks to its progressive wing and LBJ, has largely unfreighted itself of the necessity to appeal to ignorance and racism.

This is progress. This is real world progress which is achieved via collective efforts on historical and institutional scales. Its uncertain pace and often abstract nature are often disappointing and frustrating to us whose perspectives are defined by stages mostly confined to a single lifespan. It’s also frustrating to recognize that progress can be reversed as it is constantly being tested by the forces of greed, privilege, and the darker angels of our nature.

At this point billionaires have nothing to fear from those who call ourselves socialists - at least until miners and farmers and steelworkers and teachers and retail clerks start reading Jacobin. But who billionaires hate and fear the most are progressive democrats, the ones who do the grunt work of political campaigns while pressing steadily for universal dignity and justice.

Jihad

Yes. I do believe Nazis have a right to free speech.  I agree hate speech should be constitutionally protected.  But as demonstrated by the Boston Police on the Common in the weeks following Charlottesville, no one has any right to a megaphone.

Natalie Wynn pushes forcefully into the shrapneled edges where paranoia blends with all the ways liberal democratic values can be turned piercingly against themselves by deceitful malefactors and . . . most alarming of all . . . the clueless.

Us.

Yes, we are all a bit racist. We are all a bit fascist. We are all a bit Nazi . . . little Hitlers lurk inside us all. And this brings up the importance what the Muslims call “jihad”.

I’m not familiar with an equivalent term in Christian or Jewish theology - or at least none come to mind. ( . . . ? . . .)

Some Marxists groups talk about “self criticism”, but Wynn is, to my mind, engaging in what even atheists might recognize as a ”spiritual struggle” where there are no sure certainties except this very dangerous and very necessary “warfare”.

What’s portrayed in this video is a chilling struggle which leads one on towards an infinity of snares and pitfalls. And as frightening as is all this grappling with self, identity, agency, and essence, what can be more loathsome and horrifying than an identity based on hatred, superiority, or the crushing of human hope? Because that‘s what racism and fascism and Nazism is about: the crushing of human hope.

The “Luck” of the Democrats????

“One of the interesting features of this election cycle has been the gulf, often vast, between the hysteria of liberals who write about politics for a living and the relative calm of Democrats who practice it.” — Ross Douthat

The rest of Douthat’s essay is worth a read, but that lead sentence points to an essential difference between the two parties. Republican politicians and legislators are (on the whole) doing their best to stay ahead of the emotionalists in their base when they are not actively pandering to or even recklessly inciting the most loathsome forms of divisive triumphalisms.

Democratic legislators and politicians, being politicians after all, are not above pandering with occasional bursts of incitements. But on the whole they lag far behind the emotionalists in their base. (I use the word “emotionalists” to avoid the word “extremists” because so much of the lather on both sides is less related to actual policy than it is to sentiments and affinities.)

What’s behind this disparity is less of a moral distinction than a practical one (although this disparity has grave moral consequences). Democratic leaders and politicians are, on the whole, much more interested in actual governing. And they are much more interested in governing through the forging of majorities and compromises between various factions - whether those factions are part of a working majority or not. Republicans are currently feverishly striving to preserve and institutionalize minority rule.

In the long run, if the Democrats can sustain it, theirs is the only workable attitude that provides hope for a peaceful and (at least somewhat) democratic future. . . . meaning a future for a republican form of government. In the long run, the Republicans will either have to revert to a more inclusive, serious and sober approach to governing or risk destroying themselves as a party - or devastating the democratic republic as a workable set of institutions in the US of A.

But the short term is very frightening even if there is some semblance of a Blue Wave tomorrow.

Right now the Democratic leadership are hoping voters will put practical considerations like decent, affordable healthcare ahead of tribalist emotionalism.  But tribalist emotionalism recoils from the healthcare debate because a serious look at the world today reminds us that only government can ensure a fair and sustainable healthcare system - whether that is through the direct provision of services or through the planned structuring of "the market".

And the song of the Rhinoceros grows stronger and sweeter.