At the end of the American Empire, we decided to fiddle while Rome burned; go out with a bang not a whimper. No quiet, decent, honorable exit for us, no. We got good and drunk and forced the bouncer to throw us out on our asses. Will the dollar remain the world reserve currency for even another year? Will Congress ever really function without extremist threats, brutal calls for casting aside our fellow citizens, and wrestling in the mud? I once thought that pure, cold-blooded racism would undermine President Obama's presidency, but now I think it is something else.
Pure, cold-blooded stupidity.
There you have it. I've said it. I'm sorry if you think it elitist, but it's true. We died of a form of rabid stupidity that grew out of a political discourse that was meant to fool the working class white male into thinking he'd be better off supporting the wealthy than affiliating himself with a rainbow of people who ruffled his sensibilities and offended his sense of God and Country. If they weren't freaking out about blacks and gays they were feeling inferior to Ivy Leaguers. And so the ideators on the Right made up ridiculous but powerful labels like "tax and spend liberal" at just a time when their hero, Ronald Reagan, was taxing and spending at a rate vastly in excess of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. (Reagan cut taxes once and raised them many times, yet he increased spending so much that despite the tax increases he increased the debt four times more than did Carter -- and he did it in two terms. Carter meanwhile alienated progressives by refusing social spending demanded by his base because he was so fiscally tight. But who cares about the truth?)
They paraded out their Stern Parent frame to rile the sensibilities of people who were both righteous enough to resent freeloaders and naive enough to believe that the recipients of social services (who were largely the elderly and the sick and children) were indeed freeloaders. I would find it personally easier to find 535 freeloading legislators than 535 retired elderly who don't deserve their social security checks.
Don't get me wrong. The Left takes some blame here. Not only did the Left fail to see the successful framing game working against them, but they got caught up in their own form of labeling -- political correctness -- and then followed this by cutting off serious disagreement amongst themselves. Leftist errors are personified by NPR's tossing Juan Williams to the wolves and handing him over to Fox News who could play the "fair and balanced" game with their very own black, immigrant liberal on the payroll.
Soon there were just two little red books: the Republican Party Song book and the Democratic Party Song book. No discourse allowed within, no discourse possible across the aisle.
But then it blew up. A third red book came along: the Tea Party Screed. And now guys like Rove see that they are the Dr. Frankenstein and they have created a monster that cannot be contained no matter how firmly they tell the likes of Palin, Bachmann, and Ryan to get back in their tea crates. The Tea Party -- like the Minutemen on the border with Mexico -- started out as healthy protest movement but quickly attracted the very ugly and the very manipulative. The guy who started the Minuteman confessed recently that the violent members who joined were far worse than the immigrants crossing the border he used to fear. Now the many senior Tea Partiers have to face up to the fact that their mob violence has left their own just rewards -- social security and medicare in their old age -- wrecked. They were just played for stooges. The real payola is in the hands of the mega-wealthy and it is moving out of US dollars as we speak.
Fiddle and dance, it's over.
