Last Stand of The Vital Center?

Political factions have been unraveling the United States for more than thirty years and any consensus of how the republic should be governed that may have existed during the Cold War has long since vanished. Big questions of war and peace, guns or butter, honest and accountable officials in government and business or corruption, and the simple acceptance of a uniform set of facts went out the window little by little after the demise of the Soviet Union. Monstrous as it was, the Soviet Union kept American elites in check and anchored in reality. Foreign interventions, exploitation of workers at home and abroad, and discrimination by race or creed became difficult during the Cold War to sustain, if only in trying to counter Soviet propaganda.

Correlation or causation? It matters less than the results, nothing needs to be efficient or just in the US anymore. As long as organized money gets what it wants, the larger society can collapse. Elite abandonment of the public good has given rise to extremists to the double detriment of American freedom.

Not long after the end of World War II, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. published a prophetic work entitled The Vital Center where he argued among other things that the non-communist left would have to work with the non-fascist right to maintain freedom in the republic if the United States was to survive the new modernity. It is one of those odd facts of history that the idea of freedom must be explained. Schlesinger's freedom was not the flag-waving, swaggering definition that has come to dominate discourse in contemporary America. That perversion of thought should be obvious as privilege because the maniacs espousing this brand of freedom recoil in horror at the thought of granting the same "freedom" to anyone outside of their little tribe.

While this version of freedom is appallingly embraced by most American "conservatives", there are a number of fanatics on the left who have also jumped aboard this crazy train to hell. Schlesinger referred to writers and intellectuals who shoot themselves in the foot by embracing "pie-in-the-sky idealism" without keeping the other foot grounded in the real world of the possible within American politics as "wailers." Wailers used to be confined to a few left-wing journals of dissent, one could live their entire lives without encountering one. One problem with wailers was their frequent embrace of theoretical Marxist ideas without practical, real world application. This led idealists of the left to crusade for economic and social policies without regard for how they would work for a society that did not share their values. Another problem was that communism was a real, going concern in those days. Agents of communist countries often found the wailers receptive to ideas more conducive to strengthening the eastern bloc than creating a more just western world. With real espionage going on, it was hard to tell what was a genuine appeal for a better America, and what was a cynical ploy to stir up unrest for the benefit of the Soviet Union.

These things were real, not in the McCarthyesque cartoon of communists everywhere, but there was a real Cold War and spies on both sides played the game. Our side probably played the game better by offering material comforts to a broad swath of communist society, or at least the illusion of our higher standard of living. Embittering the regular people with evidence of their own deprivation is probably a more effective strategy than winning over converts to theoretical systems. Today, the situation is very different. While during the Cold War republican amateurs could campaign by red-baiting liberals (see Richard Nixon) and tarnishing genuine reform efforts with the stain of communism, at least there really was an outside force that could occupy professional servants of organized money, often drawing them into public service instead if busting unions. With the end of the Cold War, these hyper-patriots had less opportunity to screw with other countries. It is no surprise that many former anti-communist zealots have found their way into right-wing think tanks and continued their crusades on American liberals.

While Schlesinger advocated a robust non-communist left at home and abroad to blunt communist appeals within wailer intellectual circles and the labor movement, an intellectual on the other side warned how freedom in the liberal sense could undermine American institutions directly. James Burnham started his career as a Trotskyist and morphed into an anti-communist conservative of the very right-wing variety. Though outside Schlesinger's Vital Center coalition in both guises, Burnham's ideas have resonated down to contemporary politics a half-century after he wrote them. Liberalism in Suicide of the West is described by Burnham in theoretical terms akin to the Marxist literature in which real world events are less important than how theory dictates those events should play out. Liberals in Burnham's view are incapable of learning from mistakes and guilty of other transgressions against good governance, but not evil or mentally defective in the way right-wingers caricature Democrats today.

One of Burnham's most important observations about freedom in liberal America is its dependence on all political actors playing by the same rules. When a non-liberal faction refused, believers in traditional American liberties such as freedom of speech and association had no real recourse. Liberals either upheld their standards and stood by helpless while totalitarians took over by lying and cheating, or compromise the very ideals liberals most cherish. "Liberalism granted a free hand to its assassins" as Burnham wrote, comparing politics to a football game where one side played by the rules and the other simply wanted to disrupt the game (obviously these were the communist provocateurs). Many years later Thomas Frank expounded on the idea of free market-obsessed theoretical republicans gouging and kicking their way through middle-class America and the institutions built up over decades of compromise between business and the people. But Burnham could have found a parallel in Nazi agitation against the Weimar Republic. Monsters like Joseph Goebbels did not sit by and allow his enemies the freedom to think for themselves but perhaps that was too easy and did not indict communists.

Twelve years after the most deadly attack on American soil and five years after the great economic collapse our country needs a Vital Center more than ever. Whether we will actually get one is still up in the air.

Never Again

I get angrier every year on this day. I am never exactly sure why, it could be the recognition of everything that came after the disaster, it could be the zeitgeist of pseudo-patriotism, or perhaps the outpouring of saccharine sentimentality from people. The anniversary has morphed into nostalgia, WTMJ just asked viewers "What's your most vivid memory of 9/11?" Facebook is inundated with recollections of where the writer was that day. Every news channel plays up the memory, ahistorically, as though context is meaningless. That context was that the United States at the time was being run by the most corrupt, incompetent, venal, bunch of gangsters in our history. The American experience of 9/11/01 should include a commitment to never, ever, again let the fabric of our nation be so torn apart.

Of course, it is impolite to remind people of this. As though living through the corruption, war crimes, and devastation once was enough. Americans need to remember though, just how close we came to dictatorship and collectively vow not to let it happen again. A giant hole seems to have built up around 9/11 to the point that right-wing commentators sometimes try to get away with asserting that "no terrorist attacks occurred on US soil during the Bush administration." The entire business: the wars, the torture, the rendering, the privatization of government operations, the debt, the deficit, the tax cuts, the corporate colonization of Iraq and its oil, the witch hunts of dissent, the color-coded terror alerts, the no-bid contracts, and the marketization of fear were just what the Nineteenth Century Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich called "politics by other means." The total war on liberalism taken to its highest form by the most vile foes of democracy and good government this country has ever seen.

Right-wing sociopaths in this country have long memories for the slightest errors committed by Democratic administrations, but reminders of real crimes by right-wing heroes are met with either unbelievable screeching or refusal to even admit they happened. If somehow the admission by a bush official that "you don't roll out new products in August" (in reference to the buildup for war in Iraq and the beat down of anyone expressing doubts) ever got as much repetition as the throwaway line by Rahm Emmanuel that you never let a good crisis go to waste, America might find the resolve to resist making aggressive war on other countries "just because."

So much for that Constitution worship

ThinkProgress today reports that a small, republican-dominated county in Northern California voted to secede from the state and form a new, fifty-first state. Proving yet again that conservatives are nothing but whiny little babies with absolutely no concern or respect for anything.

"We want our way." Emphasis on the period, there is no 'and' there is no 'but' it is not even an 'or else'. From now on, "Jefferson" should be the only response to any, any conservative or republican screed about the constitution they claim to revere. That is the name these children want to give to their new state, as in "Davis". You know, president of the rebel confederacy. Seceding from the Union outright in Barack Obama's America has become a nonstarter, a pipedream held now only by the most deluded of conservative babies. But, aha! Seceding from blue states! That's the ticket.

The state of Jefferson, as TP writes: "if Siskiyou [county] formed its own state, those 45,000 people would receive exactly the same amount of representation in the Senate as the nearly 850 times as many people who live in the rest of California." And the littlest state would have one representative in the House that would be ten times as powerful as a congress member from normal areas. This is just as obvious a power grab by rural old white conservatives as the numerous attempts on high to give the GOP continuing relevance in an America that is utterly sick of them. From Gerrymandering to voter ID to dividing California's electoral votes, if you can't win fairly-just cheat.

TP concludes with a passage from the constitution that will test whether there is any strength left our union to oppose blatant authoritarian drives for power. Article 4, Section 3 of the second most sacred document to these children after the Bible very clearly states that this action is unconstitutional.

Will the powers that be roll over to satisfy a tiny population of whiners in Northern California or Northern Colorado? And in doing so effectively transform the United States into an authoritarian dictatorship? Prior to the 21st Century I don't think anyone could have imagined how easily laws are trampled, progress thwarted, and privilege reinforced in America circa 2013. Power will do what power wants now and the rest of us are just spectators.

Intentional Community Thought Exercise II

One plan for building a cooperative neighborhood would be a roughly square block larger than average with private houses around the perimeter and a commons in the center. If the member residents can agree to make their yards as small as possible, thereby reserving more space for the commons, considerable gains can be realized. A park for the children, bigger and better than any individual backyard can be. Communal garden space, even greenhouses or space for some livestock would be possible. Residents could share the cost of a pool or public clubhouse nicer than any individual household could afford. Childcare, a communal kitchen and dining area could save a lot of money for members not having to procure those services from outside, for-profit firms. Workshops, wind or solar energy production and distribution, compost, bio-gas digesters, there are a lot of possibilities. Ironically, once upon a time working together was a no brainer. Affluence drove us apart after the Second World War; polarization and inequality could bring us back together.

I readily admit that many communities still possess public spaces: libraries, parks, town squares, and so on. The Progressive movement, such as it is and that outside of the supposedly neo-libertarian far left, should absolutely work to defend these institutions. Schools as well, education is the absolute core of the public sphere in America and undermining it for purposes of privatization has to be the biggest coup by the fascist idiocracy and their authoritarian masters. At this point is there any way back for parents who want their children to actually be educated? The [every] child left behind act has set us back so far that generations of Americans will probably be crippled intellectually. Recently this picture has been making the rounds:


Some measure of public attitudes can be gauged by how often something like this lands in your news feed or inbox. The problems with public education in this country are legion. To take just a few: each school district is decentralized and atomized, making it easy prey to ALEC and their evil demands; as we saw from [E]CLB when authoritarian republicans sneak into office at the top they can wreak havoc on even somewhat successful school districts; and the steady demonization of teachers (especially their unions) have led to parents internalizing the propaganda and allying with the privatizers.

Then there are the often long-forgotten Progressive victories. It is all too appropriate on Labor Day to share this one:



Hooray for ingratitude:



This is the crux of why I am giving up on any hope of large-scale organizing for the betterment of all. When "we" win, the idiocracy benefits, when "they" win only the elite win at our expense. Call it the free rider problem on a national scale and spilling out from the shop floor into the political and social spheres. Maybe I am vindictive and bitter, maybe I have a low opinion of most of humanity and very little expectation of change but I see no evidence that the divisions in our society can ever be healed. Those gaping divisions between members of the idiocracy and normal people who are influenced by them prevent any kind of solidarity in the non-elite. In short, I give up.

"But wait," you might be thinking, "are you saying that you want insulated, suburban cubical mice to start milking their own cows?" In a nutshell, yes, but only the people that can realize why it is important that we become more self-sufficient and mutually supporting. There have to be some Americans out there who reject the meaning of life as buying stuff we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like.

Intentional Community Thought Exercise

It is now five years since the great crash of "the housing bubble" i.e. an enormous con job perpetrated by every level of the financial and real estate scam machine and its willing agents. Five years after revealing themselves to be spectacular failures, the giant wall street banks are still in charge with more power than ever. There is negligible evidence or prospect of ever bringing them to heel, or even punish a single banker that bundled and sold America's future for bonus glory. It is also increasingly evident that the political system controlling regulatory agencies that might curb future abuses has been bought by the predatory class. If regular Americans have any chance of protecting themselves, they (we) will have to do it on their own.

The American population has been split outside the ruling class into an authoritarian idiocracy and a bewildered, atomized mass. The former is, well, hopeless. The latter is by and large resistant to organizing due to residual traditions about individuality, distrust of authority, aversion to compulsion or coercion, and private property. This residue of course goes out the window concerning employment, which is coercive and compulsory by definition. The first and last traditions come from the Horatio Alger mythology perpetuated by the extremely rare success stories and the simple aspect of human nature encapsulated by "mine." Trust issues abound in America as con artists, hucksters, speculators, and other assorted specialists in separating the people from their money have flourished here since the foundation of the republic.

Perhaps what is needed is a new organizational model on a smaller scale than factory-wide trade unions or D.C.-based outfits like Greenpeace or the ACLU. Small, cooperative units about a large suburban block in size that could make use of the new normal to prosper. Not hippie communes, or evangelical communities centered around a church but a group of regular Americans sharing for mutual benefit. Small sacrifices of convenience for great gains in efficiency and cost control. But the central idea is trust and accountability, the final form is less important. Being able to see and communicate with democratically designated authorities directly and having a voice in what they do. The kind of democracy that is almost impossible on a national scale anymore.

There are already intentional communities like this all over America, Google it and take a look. What I have in mind is to take advantage of their models and incorporate existing realities. Child care and education is expensive, durable goods such as stoves or furnaces are also; sharing the things that regular people can do themselves will make life less expensive for all members. Then we have already-existing institutions like credit unions, time banks, community gardens, and so on that can thrive even in deep-red sections of the idiocracy. It is so much more efficient to borrow a book from the library, why not a lawn-mower? Time is so important, and in such short supply that people are willing to buy bad food at bad prices from restaurants rather than spend the time to cook good meals. Our jobs increasingly suck all quality time from our lives, forcing us to spend falling real wages on expensive daycare for our children just to name one more example.

Good jobs that pay are increasingly scarce, if we think in terms of [blaaaahhh] markets the supply of labor is too large. How many people do you know who spend their days "pounding the pavement" for jobs that most are just never going to find anymore? Most of the effort expended in chasing employment is just waste, the game of musical chairs has finally closed out a lot of us. There is so much more we could do instead that would actually be a productive use of time but does not produce an income. Why do people play the lottery or otherwise desire to be rich in many cases? So they don't have to work and can concentrate on what they like to do. The nature of our "go-go-go" economy makes doing something you enjoy, say teaching or restoring cars just as an example, far less enjoyable if you are doing it in the employ of someone else.

We can work together in one way or another, or we can take our chances of starvation separately. The idiocracy has made its choice, they will ritually sacrifice each other to the false god "market" as long as there is one dollar among them. We do not have to follow.

A fault line of callousness

The discussion of poverty in America has always centered around the question of deserving vs. undeserving poor. Some of the first acts of Congress dealt with providing pensions for the widows and orphans of Revolutionary War veterans. But up until the Great Depression the Federal Government largely left "poor relief" to localities and private charitable organizations. The experience of government remedies for poverty in England was fairly negative, poor laws sometimes drained the revenue of a parish to the point of bankruptcy. Then there were workhouses in the old country that basically put many paupers in prison. Besides, this was a land of opportunity so much of public opinion held that if you were able-bodied and still poor it was your own fault.

Deserving poor included widows and orphans of war veterans, but also people rendered unable to work due to illness or disability. However, to get any kind of relief the deserving people had damn well better show gratitude and humility. The undeserving... well at best they are on their own. And once race is entered into the equation the long knives really come out. America's original sin of slavery has had long-lasting consequences of callousness and irrationality that will provide fertile ground for academic study until hell freezes over.

When the stock market crashed in 1929 and local relief was quickly overwhelmed by the resulting carnage of economic dislocation, certain influential people realized that the government would have to do something. So FDR's New Deal created a number of agencies to provide relief and try to counteract the deserving vs. undeserving dichotomy by helping all of the downtrodden regardless of situation. Somehow, finally, the public came to understand that not all poverty was the result of laziness... for a time. Not that a certain segment of the population ever truly stopped hating the poor, but they were marginalized. Again, for a time.

Recessions came and went, Keynesianism did it's best to stabilize the economy but as the gospels say "the poor shall always be with you." Slowly, the war on poverty declared by LBJ in the 1960s mutated into a war on the poor because the white middle class could not let go of the undeserving frame. Then along came Ronald Reagan and tall tales about "welfare queens" driving Cadillacs with welfare money and "big bucks" eating T-Bone steaks on the public dole became conventional wisdom instead of bitter whispers. It just did not matter that the stories Reagan told were manufactured, the seed of propaganda always plays to the prejudices of the people.

Anecdotes and exaggerated rumors replaced statistical analysis and untainted Christian charity in the direction of anger and callousness. Where I live, you will no doubt run into someone who will tell the fantastic tales of abuse by unscrupulous and undeserving poor people. Always there are bad people out there perfectly able to work but taking advantage of the system and breeding like rabbits, according to the now loudly voiced opinions. The great recession and subsequent depression Americans are still living through bears more than superficial resemblance to the Great Depression, but there has been no upwelling of caring and sympathy for our neighbors. The list is just too long to recount but social media makes the attitudes of popular opinion plain and in text format. I wanted to share one such crowd-sourced exposition I recently witnessed, just for the heck of it.

Mike: so i switched jobs, have a lapse in insurance, and wanted to get badger care, TEMPORARILY, for my kids. initially I was told that any child could be covered, regardless of income. now i'm being told that I make too much money. so the programs that I pay taxes for cannot help me temporarily?! how come there are no programs for people who play by the rules? theres a loophole for the crackhead that has seven kids and I can't get help? FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!! [comments follow]

 You actually expected anything different....I thought you were American. Welcome to the country....lol

I agree, its a jacked system!!! 

 

Randy Luetticke Obama

16 hours ago via mobile · Like

Sara: Did you not see my post a couple days ago about having dual citizenship? This government is backwards! Trust me... I work with the exact population you describe and know all the loopholes! Its disgusting!

16 hours ago via mobile · Like

Randy Luetticke Hi my name is Obama I'm going to ruin your country. I'm going to keep the war going to massacre children in other country's and joke about it, I'm gonna take your tax money and spend it however I see fit. Even if its giving just a little to warfare for phones and other non productive things or just going on vacation. I'm going to make this a police state by monitoring you through your computers and drones. Don't u feel special? I'm going to cater to Muslims cause duh I'm one of them.....
How long is this shit going to last.

16 hours ago via mobile · Like · 1

Noble Craver II Yup, sounds about right, the planet will boil over if everyone has access to air conditioning, automobiles, and big houses, lol!!

15 hours ago via mobile · Like · 1

Randy Luetticke I think sometimes the guy does things just to see what else he can pull.

15 hours ago via mobile · Like

Noble Craver II He hasn't pulled the rug out from under the American people, he has burned it!!!

Noble Craver II Yet we stand around and let our feet get burned!

15 hours ago via mobile · Like

Neil: I'm pretty sure the old employer has to offer Cobra.

14 hours ago via mobile · Like · 1

Neil: It's not anything new. This happened to us long before Obama was president.

14 hours ago via mobile · Like · 1

John OMalley Yep and Obamacare will make it worse

12 hours ago via mobile · Like

John OMalley They want to mandate wearing a microchip, so the NSA can spy on us even more so than they already are. The NSA is the biggest joke since the war on drugs. I'll explain the war on drugs, basically we spend billions of dollars a year for the same drugs we can prescribed and now you're starting to go after their own by making prescription drugs illegal unless your prescriped it then it doesn't matter who you get it from as long as your name is on the lable,

12 hours ago via mobile · Like

Matthew Mattyg Gutoski hard working people always get fucked, elections will not change that....only revolution

11 hours ago · Like · 1

Mark Rakow talk to, dare i say the word, our so called governor ??? 

 So right from the beginning the "deserving vs. undeserving" meme is present and is never challenged. What amazes me is how quickly frustration with our shredded safety net boils over onto the president but not onto the immediately responsible state government until much later. I know some of these people so the regression to conspiracy theories is not surprising, but the attention to conspiracy in lieu of Occam's Razor or even the mention of insurance companies is a revealing glimpse into how people think. Granted, American society is incredibly complex and unbiased information about how the system works is often hard to come by, but does it necessarily follow that the real world should automatically be discarded in favor of wild speculation?

Divide and conquer.

Information-Action Ratio

Every now and then you come across a passage in a book that just begs to be quoted verbatim. I just found one such passage that "sank my battleship" as it were. From Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to death, pp. 67-8.

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use. A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about. The telegraph may have made the country into "one neighborhood," but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.

Since we live today in just such a neighborhood (now sometimes called a "global village"), you may get a sense of what is meant by context-free information by asking yourself the following question: How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the "information-action ratio." 

In other words, everything I write about, so much of what we all busy ourselves arguing over... does not matter one wit. Postman continues to argue that the irrelevance of information makes us impotent, the possibility of effective action to address problems is in practical terms... nil. Given this practical reality I suppose my job as blogger needs a reassessment; history and national issues are important... somehow,  but I and others interested in these things need to construct a new defense of why and how what has happened before or what happens in Washington D.C. matters. This is certainly not impossible, Seventy years ago Reinhold Niebuhr built from scratch a defense of democracy that went beyond the theoretical or abstract and corrected for just this kind of deficiency. New Left intellectuals and activists tried to redress the balance of the information-action ratio by promoting "participatory democracy" and since then those of us interested in justice have attempted to increase the potency of citizens and make information relevant again. It is a hard road, just look how easily so many 'wingers have been sucked into a completely imaginary world where information is not simply irrelevant but useless. However the right clings to its fantasy tenaciously and if we are not careful the Daily Me can become just as dangerous to the left.