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Hope and no money has got to be better than no money and no hope... I hope
"The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge"Mr Obama's laudable ambitions to extend health insurance to all Americans, to refurbish the country's failing infrastructure, to make a college education affordable and to cut nearly everybody's taxes will run up against the amazing demands that the rescue will place on present and future taxpayers. The fiscal mess left behind by the Bush administration makes the problem much worse.(...) Circumstances will force the next president to be a fiscal conservative on matters other than temporary stimulus and financial stability. Clive Crook - Financial Times
Jeremiah 31:29
George W. Bush with his wars, with his tax cuts, with his incompetent profligacy, and now with the measures he is taking to save our toxic financial system, is leaving behind him a weight, a legacy, so poisonous that any major change of direction in American social policies looks impossible in this generation. A death trap for social democracy.
America, of all the developed countries, is probably one with the least safety net. Already many Americans are suffering for lack of health insurance or adequate schools and lacking other programs that citizens of most rich and advanced countries take for granted.
This lack of a basic welfare state means that in any economic downturn poorer Americans suffer much more than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.
To be sick and to be hungry is always bad anywhere. To be sick and hungry in "the greatest country in the world" is to add insult to injury.
We have thus laid out before us many of the classic ingredients of fascism.
According to Wikipedia:
(Fascism) is primarily concerned with perceived problems associated with cultural, economic, political, and social decline or decadence, and which seeks to solve such problems by achieving a millenarian national rebirth by exalting the nation, as well as promoting cults of unity, strength and purity.The same article quotes Robert O. Paxton, the author of "The Anatomy of Fascism", who defines it as:
A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.It is easy to see that this is the direction that the Republican party has been taking since Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and which we are now seeing in full flower today. Joe Sixpack's, the evangelical's and the rural poor's "uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites" has proven a remarkably effective strategy in good times.
Now with a deep and long recession on the menu and the prospect of a Democratic government despite solid legislative majorities, impotent, without money to institute wide, sweeping social reform, while at the same time America's influence in world affairs steadily declines, is an invitation to classical nativist paranoia of the grossest kind.
And not just for Republicans.
Barack Obama himself succinctly explained the yeast culture of American fascism in a few candid words that brought him much pain:
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."The present crisis may very quickly turn heretofore prosperous suburbs all over America into "small towns in the Midwest," where the jobs have all gone, leaving bitterness and "clinging" in those whose educational attainments might have previously made them immune to those vapors.
With a weight of present and future debt so heavy that social policies to ameliorate the lot of suffering citizens will be nigh impossible; in a moment of dreamlike gravity, at the end of some unmarked line, leaden footed, molasses blooded and peering into an abyss of clinging bitterness and rage: the American people find themselves at the point of handing a blank check to an unknown quantity who has until now announced the vaguest of recipes for how to solve the situation... and now there is no other viable choice left.
At this point, Unless (God forbid) Osama bin Laden intervenes, that is what there is.
The idea that Obama's inexperience might be important has always been considered irrelevant by the millenarians who cling to him. Those with experience of experience would say that inexperience is only a virtue in young, marriageable girls; and only then in traditional societies, but today, many of America's most hopeful, in the aching audacity of their hope, apparently see some sort of political or administrative virginity to be as essential to redeeming America. Much as the Taliban see value in the hymens of their future wives.
Not only poor Midwesterners "cling" it seems.
I hope they all are right for their sake, for my sake, and for the world's sake.
Surely it is better to hope than to despair
We can only wish President Barack Obama and ourselves Godspeed.
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Nasty extremism in the form of paranoid hate-speech.
From an arrogant and predictably small mind.
October 14, 2008 3:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
More simplistic and naive bullshit from the cheap seats in Spain.
The very first problem with your "analysis" is that only Millennials support Obama. His support is from all four generation currently able to vote, all of whom are among the most well educated generations in American history, despite the failing of our schools in some areas.
The second, that he lacks experience. You have clearly never read Barack's resume and have no idea what his experience and education means if you have. His experience is exactly the type of experience we need right now - state level law making with a constitutional law background and a history of driving successful grassroots efforts for ordinary people.
Further, we have had the most "experienced" administration in decades for the last eight years and they completely fucked up everything they laid hands on. Experience in doing things the wrong way is no kind of experience.
When are you going to get tired of being so wrong?
October 14, 2008 6:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hey, David, there's a cool new feature where you can leave the first couple paragraphs of your post displayed and put the rest after the jump. Would you mind using it?
October 14, 2008 9:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
David - it seems an unfortunate fact of discourse today that so many -isms are thrown about without much considered to their actual history and meaning. We have now seen Obama, his campaign, his supporters, and so on associated with: fascism, socialism, communism, millenarianism, corporatism...
Did you happen to read the rest of the Wiki article on fascism you cite? The immediately following paragraph is certainly relevant. And you might also have seen Griffith's quote, calling it the "most misused, and over-used word of our times," or Orwell's:
Would you care to elaborate on your thesis of millenarianism and Obama?
October 14, 2008 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Gee, nobody seems to notice that I am conceding the election to Obama and even "endorsing" him.
I think he or whoever could have gotten elected this year is going to fall flat on their face... failure is going to make people "cling" to guns or religion or even cling to Obama. It is very sad to see so many people getting their hopes up.
October 14, 2008 11:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
I guess we should all just move to Europe since it is so hopeless. Oh, wait, everything else will fail as America goes down, so no where is safe. This whole blog is what is known as a Backhanded Compliment.
October 14, 2008 11:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
No everything will not fail if America goes down.... slowly. And yes, if you could, I really would recommend living in Europe... the quality of life is fantastic here.
October 14, 2008 11:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
A little harder to do now than it was when you moved. I guess I will stick around and see if we can't actually turn this thing around and then I will go check out Europe.
October 14, 2008 12:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps that's where we differ the most. I think it's sad to see so many people who have no hope at all.
October 14, 2008 11:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, it all depends on what you hope for.
To hope for understanding is good.
To hope for peace of mind is good.
To hope for a soft and supple heart is good.
In hoping for all of these things we depend entirely on ourselves.
To put hope in the tired old whores who make up America's political class is sad indeed.
October 14, 2008 12:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
And another thing.
If I lived in the USA I would probably be an enthusiastic supporter of Obama, but living over here and especially in the last few years, I have become very pessimistic about the US system in general and the way its leaders are selected in particular.
October 14, 2008 11:23 AM | Reply | Permalink