Regular readers of this blog know that I generally avoid
partisan politics in the essays posted here. There are several reasons for that
unpopular habit, but the most important of them is that we don’t actually have
partisan politics in today’s America, except in a purely nominal sense. It’s
true that politicians by and large group themselves into one of two parties,
which make a great show of their rivalry on a narrow range of issues. Get past
the handful of culture-war hot buttons that give them their favorite
opportunities for grandstanding, though, and you’ll find an ironclad consensus,
especially on those issues that have the most to say about the future of the
United States and the world.
It’s popular on the disaffected fringes of both parties to
insist that the consensus in question comes solely from the other side;
dissident Democrats claim that Democratic politicians have basically adopted
the GOP platform, while disgruntled Republicans claim that their politicians
have capitulated to the Democratic agenda. Neither of these claims, as it
happens, are true. Back when the two parties still stood for something, for
example, Democrats in Congress could be counted on to back organized labor and
family farmers against their corporate adversaries and to fight attempts on the
part of bankers to get back into the speculation business, while their opposite
numbers in the GOP were ferocious in their opposition to military adventurism
overseas and government expansion at home.
Nowadays? The Democrats long ago threw their former core
constituencies under the bus and ditched the Depression-era legislation that
stopped kleptocratic bankers from running the economy into the ground, while
the Republicans decided that they’d never met a foreign entanglement or a
government handout they didn’t like—unless, of course, the latter benefited the
poor. An ever more intrusive and
metastatic bureaucratic state funneling trillions to corrupt corporate interests,
an economic policy made up primarily of dishonest statistics and money-printing
operations, and a monomaniacally interventionist foreign policy: that’s the
bipartisan political consensus in Washington DC these days, and it’s a
consensus that not all that long ago would have been rejected with volcanic
fury by both parties if anyone had been so foolish as to suggest it.
The gap between the current Washington consensus and the
former ideals of the nation’s political parties, not to mention the wishes of
the people on whose sovereign will the whole system is supposed to depend, has
attracted an increasing amount of attention in recent years. That’s driven
quite a bit of debate, and no shortage of fingerpointing, about the origins and
purposes of the policies that are welded into place in US politics these days.
On the left, the most popular candidates just now for the position of
villainous influence behind it all mostly come from the banking industry; on
the right, the field is somewhat more diverse; and there’s no shortage of
options from further afield.
Though I know it won’t satisfy those with a taste for
conspiracy theory, I’d like to suggest a simpler explanation. The political
consensus in Washington DC these days can best be characterized as an
increasingly frantic attempt, using increasingly risky means, to maintain
business as usual for the political class at a time when “business as usual” in
any sense of that phrase is long past its pull date. This, in turn, is largely
the product of the increasingly bleak corner into which past policies have
backed this country, but it’s also in part the result of a massively important
but mostly unrecognized turn of events: by and large, neither the contemporary
US political class nor anyone else with a significant presence in American
public life seems to be able to imagine a future that differs in any meaningful
way from what we’ve got right now.
I’d like to take a moment here to look at that last point
from a different angle, with the assistance of that tawdry quadrennial
three-ring circus now under way, which will sooner or later select the next
inmate for the White House. For anyone who enjoys the spectacle of florid
political dysfunction, the 2016 presidential race promises to be the last word
in target-rich environments. The Republican party in particular has flung
itself with creditable enthusiasm into the task of taking my circus metaphor as
literally as possible—what, after all, does the GOP resemble just at the
moment, if not one of those little cars that roll out under the big top and
fling open the doors, so that one clown after another can come tumbling out
into the limelight?
They’ve already graced the electoral big top with a
first-rate collection of clowns, too. There’s Donald Trump, whose campaign is
shaping up to be the loudest invocation of pure uninhibited fΓΌhrerprinzip since,
oh, 1933 or so; there’s Scott Walker, whose attitudes toward working Americans
suggest that he’d be quite happy to sign legislation legalizing slavery if his
rich friends asked him for it; there’s—well, here again, “target-rich
environment” is the phrase that comes forcefully to mind. The only people who
have to be sweating just now, other than ordinary Americans trying to imagine
any of the current round of GOP candidates as the titular leader of their
country, are gag writers for satiric periodicals such as The Onion, who have to go
to work each day and face the brutally unforgiving task of coming up with
something more absurd than the press releases and public statements of the
candidates in question.
Still, I’m going to leave those tempting possibilities alone
for the moment, and focus on a much more dreary figure, since she and her
campaign offer a useful glimpse at the yawning void beneath what’s left of the American
political system. Yes, that would be Hillary Clinton, the officially anointed
frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. It’s pretty much a foregone
conclusion that she’ll lose this campaign the way she lost the 2008 race, and
for the same reason: neither she nor her handlers seem to have noticed that
she’s got to offer the American people some reason to want to vote for her.
In a way, Clinton is the most honest of the current crop of
presidential candidates, though this is less a matter of personal integrity
than of sheer inattention. I frankly doubt that the other candidates have a
single noble motive for seeking office among them, but they have at least
realized that they have to go through the motions of having convictions and
pursuing policies they think are right. Clinton and her advisers apparently
didn’t get that memo, and as a result, she’s not even going through the
motions. Her campaign basically consists of posing for the cameras, dodging
substantive questions, uttering an assortment of vague sound bites to encourage
the rich friends who are backing her, and making plans for her inauguration, as
though there wasn’t an election to get through first.
Still, there’s more going on here than the sheer
incompetence of a campaign that hasn’t yet noticed that a sense of entitlement
isn’t a qualification for office. The deeper issue that will doom the Clinton
candidacy can be phrased as a simple question: does anyone actually believe for
a moment that electing Hillary Clinton president will change anything that
matters?
Those other candidates who are getting less tepid responses
from the voters than Clinton are doing so precisely because a significant
number of voters think that electing one of them will actually change
something. The voters in question are wrong, of course. Barack Obama is the
wave of the future here as elsewhere; after his monumentally cynical 2008
campaign, which swept him into office on a torrent of vacuous sound bites about
hope and change, he proceeded to carry out exactly the same domestic and
foreign policies we’d have gotten had George W. Bush served two more terms.
Equally, whoever wins the 2016 election will keep those same policies in place,
because those are the policies that have the unanimous support of the political
class; it’s just that everybody but Clinton will do their level best to pretend
that they’re going to do something else, as Obama did, until the day after the
election.
Those policies will be kept in place, in turn, because any
other choice would risk pulling the plug on a failing system. I’m not at all
sure how many people outside the US have any idea just how frail and brittle
the world’s so-called sole hyperpower is just at this moment. To borrow a point
made trenchantly some years back by my fellow blogger Dmitry Orlov, the US
resembles nothing so much as the Soviet Union in the years just before the
Berlin Wall came down: a grandiose international presence, backed by a baroque
military arsenal and an increasingly shrill triumphalist ideology, perched
uneasily atop a hollow shell of a society that has long since tipped over the
brink into economic and cultural freefall.
Neither Hillary Clinton nor any of the other candidates in
the running for the 2016 election will change anything that matters, in turn,
because any change that isn’t strictly cosmetic risks bringing the entire
tumbledown, jerry-rigged structure of American political and economic power
crashing down around everyone’s ears. That’s why, to switch examples, Barack
Obama a few days ago brought out with maximum fanfare a new energy policy that
consists of doing pretty much what his administration has been doing for the
last six years already, as though doing what you’ve always done and expecting a
different result wasn’t a good functional definition of insanity. Any other
approach to energy and climate change, or any of a hundred other issues, risks
triggering a crisis that the United States can’t survive in its current
form—and the fact that such a crisis is going to happen sooner or later anyway
just adds spice to the bubbling pot.
The one thing that can reliably bring a nation through a
time of troubles of the sort we’re facing is a vision of a different future,
one that appeals to enough people to inspire them to unite their energies with
those of the nation’s official leadership, and put up with the difficulties of
the transition. That’s what got the United States through its three previous
existential crises: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Great
Depression. In each case, when an insupportable status quo finally shattered,
enough of the nation united around a charismatic leader, and a vision of a
future that was different from the present, to pull some semblance of a
national community through the chaos.
We don’t have such a vision in American politics now. To an
astonishing degree, in fact, American culture has lost the ability to imagine
any future that isn’t simply an endless rehash of the present—other, that is,
than the perennially popular fantasy of apocalyptic annihilation, with or
without the salvation of a privileged minority via Rapture, Singularity, or
what have you. That’s a remarkable change for a society that not so long ago
was brimming with visionary tomorrows that differed radically from the existing
order of things. It’s especially remarkable in that the leftward end of the
American political spectrum, the end that’s nominally tasked with the job of
coming up with new visions, has spent the last forty years at the forefront of
the flight from alternative futures.
I’m thinking here, as one example out of many, of an event I
attended a while back, put together by one of the longtime names of the
American left, and featuring an all-star cast of equally big names in what
passes for environmentalism and political radicalism these days. With very few
exceptions, every one of the speakers put their time on the podium into vivid
descriptions of the villainy of the designated villains and all the villainous
things they were going to do unless they were stopped. It was pretty grueling;
at the end of the first full day, going up the stairs to the street level, I
watched as a woman turned to a friend and said, “Well, that just about makes me
want to go out and throw myself off a bridge”—and neither the friend nor anybody
else argued.
Let’s take a closer look, though, at the strategy behind the
event. Was there, at this event, any real discussion of how to stop the
villains in question, other than a rehash of proposals that have failed over
and over again for the last four decades? Not that I heard. Did anyone offer
some prospect other than maintaining the status quo endlessly against the
attempts of the designated villains to make things worse? Not only was there
nothing of the kind, I heard backchannel from more than one participant that
the organizer had a long history of discouraging anybody at his events from
offering the least shred of that sort of hope.
Dismal as it was, the event was worth attending, as it
conducted an exact if unintentional autopsy of the corpse of the American left,
and made the cause of death almost impossible to ignore. At the dawn of the
Reagan era, to be specific, most of the movements in this country that used to
push for specific goals on the leftward end of things stopped doing so, and
redefined themselves in wholly reactive and negative terms: instead of trying
to enact their own policies, they refocused entirely on trying to stop the
enactment of opposing policies by the other side. By and large, they’re still
at it, even though the results have amounted to four decades of nearly unbroken
failure, and the few successes—such as the legalization of same-sex
marriage—were won by pressure groups unconnected to, and usually unsupported by, the professional activists of
the official left.
There are at least two reasons why a strategy of pure
reaction, without any coherent attempt to advance an agenda of its own or even
a clear idea of what that agenda might be, has been a fruitful source of
humiliation and defeat for the American left. The first is that this approach
violates one of the most basic rules of strategy: you win when you seize the
initiative and force the other side to respond to your actions, and you lose by
passively responding to whatever the other side comes up with. In any contest,
without exception, if you surrender the initiative and let the other side set
the terms of the conflict, you’re begging to be beaten, and will normally get
your wish in short order.
That in itself is bad enough. A movement that defines itself
in purely negative terms, though, and attempts solely to prevent someone else’s
agenda from being enacted rather than pursuing a concrete agenda of its own,
suffers from another massive problem: the best such a movement can hope for is
a continuation of the status quo, because the only choice it offers is the one
between business as usual and something worse. That’s fine if most people are
satisfied with the way things are, and are willing to fling themselves into the
struggle for the sake of a set of political, economic, and social arrangements
that they consider worth fighting for.
I’m not sure why so many people on the leftward end of
American politics haven’t noticed that this is not the case today. One
hypothesis that comes to mind is that by and large, the leftward end of the
American political landscape is dominated by middle class and upper middle
class white people from the comparatively prosperous coastal states. Many of
them belong to the upper 20% by income of the American population, and the rest
aren’t far below that threshold. The grand bargain of the Reagan years, by
which the middle classes bought a guarantee of their wealth and privilege by
letting their former allies in the working classes get thrown under the bus,
has profited them hugely, and holding onto what they gained by that maneuver
doubtless ranks high on their unstated list of motives—much higher, certainly,
than pushing for a different future that might put their privileges in
jeopardy.
The other major power bloc that supports the American left
these days offers an interesting lesson in the power of positive goals. That
bloc is made up of certain relatively disadvantaged ethnic groups, above all
the African-American community. The Democratic party has been able to hold the
loyalty of most African-Americans through decades of equivocation, meaningless
gestures, and outright betrayal, precisely because it can offer them a specific
vision of a better future: that is, a future in which Americans of African
ancestry get treated just like white folk. No doubt it’ll sink in one of these
days that the Democratic party has zero interest in actually seeing that future
arrive—if that happened, after all, it would lose one of the most reliable of
its captive constituencies—but until that day arrives, the loyalty of the
African-American community to a party that offers them precious little but
promises is a testimony to the power of a positive vision for the future.
That’s something that the Democratic party doesn’t seem to
be able to offer anyone else in America, though. Even on paper, what have the
last half dozen or so Democratic candidates for president offered? Setting
aside crassly manipulative sound bites of the “hope and change” variety, it’s
all been attempts to keep things going the way they’ve been going, bracketed
with lurid threats about the GOP’s evil plans to make things so much worse.
That’s why, for example, the Democratic party has been eager to leap on climate
change as a campaign issue, even though their performance in office on that
issue is indistinguishable from that of the Republicans they claim to oppose:
it’s easy to frame climate change as a conflict between keeping things the way
they are and making them much worse, and that’s basically the only tune the
American left knows how to play these days.
The difficulty, of course, is that after forty years of
repeated and humiliating failure, the Democrats and the other leftward
movements in American political life are caught in a brutal vise of their own
making. On the one hand, very few people actually believe any more that the
left is capable of preventing things from getting worse. There’s good reason
for that lack of faith, since a great many things have been getting steadily
worse for the majority of Americans since the 1970s, and the assorted
technological trinkets and distractions that have become available since then
don’t do much to make up for the absence of stable jobs with decent wages,
functioning infrastructure, affordable health care, and all the other amenities
that have gone gurgling down the nation’s drain since then.
