Responsibility and Conservatism

In the wake of articles like this from the Guardian and this one from NBC news, it seems like a good idea to pull back and look at the bigger picture. Because while the Democratic leadership seems to fight with the Democratic base and so much gets lost in the day to day chaff of speculation and misinformation the wolves of fascism are inside the nation's hen house. Just because the republicans suffered some momentary setbacks recently does not mean that the resistance has actually won anything. "We" the non-fascist majority, have basically been lucky that this cult that has brainwashed so many into supporting them has turned out to be rather incompetent. The other shoe will drop soon, whether a Reichstag fire event or a breakthrough by governmental or non-governmental investigation into the Russian ties. So in this momentary reprieve there should be strategy meetings going on all over the place. But between whom? For what? What is all of this conflict between the establishment or Democratic leadership and the grassroots? Two ideas need attention: responsibility and conservatism, and they need to be addressed if anything like a coherent message can be presented to the public.

I wish I knew how to be involved in even the basics of finding out who the players are. As I wrote recently, I don't really want to take marching orders from Shaun King but I guess he's actually trying. How much there really is to the schism between the Clinton camp and not Clinton camp that was first Barack Obama's and now Bernie Sanders' is up for interpretation. There isn't room in our system for three parties though. And that is the problem. The American federal government has always been this hodge-podge of formal rules, traditions, shifting coalitions, organic institutions outside of but attached to government; but one thing has always stayed the same, two liberal, capitalist parties. "What?!?" I can already hear the objections and will concede that this is not the case today.

Liberalism as it was originally conceived was rooted in  things: individual rights, limited government, and a freely operating economy. This is what the so-called neoliberalism harkens back to, it was only later that liberalism grew to accommodate industrialism, this was the world of Adam Smith, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill among many others. Conservatism was not a really existing ideology until Edmund Burke articulated a vision in contrast to the French Revolution. The Republican Party began as the left liberal party in America after the gray zone of early Nineteenth Century republicanism gave us the Democrats as champions of slavery. Conservatism is amorphous, but one thing it always has in common is an alignment with power and hierarchy.

The kind of conservatism that exists in America has always been the tenuous connection with responsibility, of maintaining the system of power but also a stable society. America has always been a contradiction and therefore has always had conflict beneath the surface. We have our massive shifts, the revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and minor ones that accompany wars and other depressions. Generally, the party that was in charge leading up to those cataclysmic events and the ideology they espouse is discredited and rejected. Then the forces of reform are supposed to get a turn at bat, sometimes it works out as in the case of the New Deal, and sometimes it fails.

It is now apparent that the Democratic Party has failed, the Clinton administration could not subdue the forces of reaction and neither could the Obama administration. For all of the political turmoil of the Obama years, America itself was actually fairly stable and that is something like progress. At least a kind of truce where you could at least take a breath and get yourself together, now, that is gone too. Every day could bring catastrophe. We, Democrats and independents, had a sense that a grown up was in charge, someone who felt responsible for the nation and society. And the elected Democrats, though their numbers dwindled against the growing polarization and extremism, still seemed like they shared that sense of responsibility to maintain the system and order that was the legacy of the New Deal.

To conserve, if you will, the basic premise that the rich should pay more than the poor in taxes, that work should provide a decent life, that business needs restraint through regulation, that everyone is entitled to an education, that there needs to be a safety net in place for when life gets turned upside down. Though these ideals have been chipped away to almost non-existence under the weight of business power, though the defenders of those ideals have grown weary and sclerotic at the government level, and through the rise of right-wing extremism Democrats have been responsible. Unfortunately responsibility and the desire to conserve tradition and formality also often looks like overly cautious weakness and out-of-touch drifting. Therefore Democrats dithered while George W. Bush and the Republicans launched wars and vandalized government, unable to summon the will to impeach or even investigate all of the illegal and immoral behavior of those awful years. Therefore the old guns who helped Clinton peel away banking regulations in preparation for the limitless future of financial innovation could not bring themselves to face the flood of devastation they collaborated with Wall Street to unleash when called back to duty by Barack Obama. And now the Democratic party leadership could not believe either the depth of depravity and ignorance of the white Republican electorate, which was willing and eager to run into the arms of a con man who pretended to share their hatred of minorities and cosmopolitanism, nor the lengths Republican leadership would go in colluding with Russia and suppressing Democratic voters.

Therefore, to put it bluntly, the Democratic Party is the actual conservative force in America and the Republicans have completely left the reservation of what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called "the Vital Center" of of democratic politics for at best reactionary authoritarianism and more likely outright fascism. However the base of the Democratic Party remains liberal and committed to reform and a social democracy. It couldn't hold, partisanship has become too intense and politically aware people are too polarized to view compromise or serving the national interest as anything other than weakness. So Hillary Clinton tried to appeal to the better angels of voters to no avail. People who shouldn't be trusted to play with matches were fascinated by the flamboyant game show host and couldn't wait to vote for him out of sheer nihilism. The Clinton campaign was too calcified in the way things were, or should be, or out of the desire to keep their moral integrity, and whatever else restrains otherwise intelligent, experienced people from doing what needs to be done. I suspect it was an outmoded sense of responsibility to the institutions of our government and nation.

Democrats are forever worried about the response anything they say or do will draw from their enemies. They cannot face the fact that a significant number of people born in this country have completely abdicated their responsibility as citizens to uphold American ideals. That deceit and misinformation are equal to truth and reality. Hillary Clinton was restrained in what she could do and how she could campaign due to this sense of responsibility as much as being the first women to head a major party ticket and the self-censorship professional women all over the country must don to succeed. Whereas the Berniebros and Jill Stein supporters had no such restraint, they felt no responsibility to pragmatism or the really-existing forces that any reasonable leader would have to work with. They were free to snipe responsible Democrats, free to believe and promulgate fantastic conspiracy theories and project any malicious ideas onto Hillary Clinton they wanted. Schlesinger had a name for such individuals who could build utopia in their minds and speak only to each other; "wailers". I recognized Glenn Greenwald as one of these aloof intellectuals a few years ago, his brand of detached from reality ideological purity has only metastasized since then and I definitely do not recommend that the Democratic Party turn over the reins to them but it is time to slaughter some sacred cows.