Paranoia, the default option in interesting times

That until there are no longer/ First class and second class citizens of any nation/ Until the color of a man's skin/Is of no more significance than the color of his eyes/ Me say war. "War/No More Trouble" - Bob Marley

(Bob Marley's lyrics are the "red lines" of left wing populism)

A little light reading to start off with (be prepared to discuss)

So, this is what everyday chaos is like -- a situation that is not predictable in the short run, even less in the middle run. It is therefore a situation in which the economic, political, and cultural fluctuations are large and rapid. And that is frightening for most people. Immanuel Wallerstein

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years. Dan Peck - The Atlantic

Wired: What happens if we don’t get the growth everyone expects? Peter Thiel: If it doesn’t happen, people will go bankrupt in retirement. There are systemic consequences, too. If we don’t have enough growth, we will see a powerful shift away from capitalism. There are good things and bad things about capitalism, but inequality becomes completely intolerable to society when everything’s static. Wired

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.(...) They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.  New York Times

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Below the surface of the seas of finance, the shadowy movements of many enormous predators are dimly perceived... swimmers cry out and are dragged under: who will be next?   What can be done?

The thread that links all the texts above is that we live in a period of crumbling certainties and a growing gap in America between immensely wealthy elites, a struggling middle class that is rapidly being proletarized, and a ballooning, lumpenproletariat-underclass. And history teaches us that persistent, intractable, inequality brings conflict.

Peter Thiel's insight in the Wired interview quoted above is worth underlining, "inequality becomes completely intolerable to society when everything's static."

Americans only tolerate temporary inequality, never permanent inequality.

If Americans can see the clear possibility of their own situation getting better they are not so likely to begrudge the good fortune of others, if not, they might begrudge... big time.

Thiel's viewpoint is quintessentially American, because endless growth, an ever larger pie to share, is the keystone of America's social pact.

However, Theil can only see the American pie growing through some sort of miraculous technological breakthrough: outer space or nanotechnology.

Ah, the future!

Didn't Stanley Kubrick think that by 2001 we would be vacationing in space stations instead of watching the Twin Towers fall in ashes and in flames?

This crisis, if it is structural and not temporary, is of an unimaginable peril to America' future. Economic growth, expansion, personal freedom and the fulfillment of dreams are the glue that holds America together.

White, Black, Asian and Hispanic, Christian and Jew: have we been assembled from the four corners of the earth only to shop together? And if the shelves are empty? And if the shelves are full, but our pockets are empty?

Today, suddenly, many Americans are discovering,for the first time since the legendary 1930s, that capitalism is no longer the large friendly animal that they had always had thought it to be. Here we are in a situation where fraudulent financial products pimped by frivolous criminals have destroyed the future of millions of our not "too big to fail" citizens, who must "save" the malefactors with their tax money and then watch as their education, pensions, medical care and other "entitlements" are shredded in the interest of financial "responsibility".

To explain it simply the American economic system is admittedly very brutal, but traditionally it has usually been so flexible, grown so fast and the chance of both physical and social mobility so real, that most Americans blame themselves when things don't turn out well for them; they direct their frustration inward instead of blaming the system itself. Much of America's culture of violence can be explained by this need to offload anger from the self.

Seen this way, there is a positive side to the flakey-fascist Tea Party movement.  The white middle class, lower and middle-middle class, people who were the heart of the system, its "salt of the earth", now realize that they have been screwed and they are looking for the culprits. Instead of shooting up their workplace and then committing suicide, they are holding meetings, organizing study groups and blaming Wall Street and Washington for their pain. I find some of this truly positive.

Once people start questioning their reality as earnestly as many of the Teabaggers appear to be doing, it quickly becomes habit forming. You can never know where it will finally lead them, how they may finally evolve. Now that Obama appears to have neutered the left, rebellion is apparently up to the wingnuts, but the important thing is to rebel.

This rebellion, as wacky as it seems, appears to be producing results, it is putting the wind up the right people. Here, for example is neocon Michael Gerson writing in The Washington Post 

Opponents are not just wrong; they are secretive, ruthless and demonic. They want to overturn the Constitution, establish a police state, cede American sovereignty to a new world order, fight wars for the sake of Israel, carve out a nation of Aztlan in the American Southwest. The argument of "us against them" is a temptation across the ideological spectrum. But it is intensified by Gnostic insights that pit the children of light against the children of darkness.(...) The "revolution" we are seeing is a metaphor. This is not 1776, in which the avenues of representation were blocked by a distant power. Those who take the revolutionary metaphor too literally are not engaged in politics, they are engaged in sedition.

For the moment there are many, very worrying racist and anti-immigrant overtones to much of what the Tea Party folk are saying, but the US Constitution is a holy document for Teabaggers and no matter how much you bend it out of shape, the Constitution is not Mein Kampf.

If the economy stays stagnant long enough, I predict that it may soon become evident why so many of the parents and grandparents of today's Teabaggers worshiped Franklin Delano Roosevelt and have great grandparents that turned out in their thousands to raptly listen to the speeches of William Jennings Bryan. They have been sold a bill of goods, buyer's remorse may be setting in.

It appears that many of these people are doing the first serious political thinking in their entire lives... let them ferment a bit more.

The Teabaggers aren't really "revolutionary", the idea of a stagnant America, with a permanent underclass is "counterrevolutionary". Everybody should rebel against that.

Stagnation and a permanent underclass directly attack the whole idea of the United States itself... because if the USA is really exceptional in any way, it is that it is an idea before it is anything else and without that idea of growth and possibility of change, of social mobility, the whole thing is in danger of coming apart at the seams.

There are people who compare the fall of Lehman brothers with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Maybe we should be so lucky.

The problem for the United States is that, contrary to the Russians, without their revolution, without their "dream", much of America's national identity simply disappears.

When the USSR went down, the Russians abruptly stopped being soviets and went back to being simply Russians. In fact they had never stopped. Theirs is a culture that goes back centuries before Lenin was even a gleam in his father's eye. A national identity that strong needs no "exceptionalism" to exist, it simply is, was and, presumably, always will be.

There is no "Russian Dream" as there is no "Chinese Dream"... They are just the Russians and the Chinese and as far as they are concerned others are simply defined as "not Russian" or "not Chinese".

Frankly speaking, such knee jerk, ethnic, "us and them", nationalism is offensive to most thinking Americans, because outside of America's "ideals", exactly who is "us" and who is "them"?

Except for Native-Americans all of the rest of "us" are descended from some sort of grab bag of "thems".

What is there outside of this ongoing revolution, exactly, that is going to ever make "E pluribus unum"? Without some idea of limitless horizons of "possibility and transformation": growing prosperity, social mobility etc, what is to keep America from flying apart like some Bosnia Herzegovina on steroids?

In the end the Teabagger's anti-tax, anti-government movement is not going anywhere. The real story is how the government, the state, which belongs to all its citizens, can be regenerated and regain its power over multinational corporate and special interests.

Every problem we are facing, from Wall Street to the climate is calling out for more regulation, more control and more taxes; this at a moment when both left and right are in agreement that the political system is paralyzed and and the people who run it are corrupt. As professor Wallerstein would say: this is a recipe for chaos. This is a time when paranoia is the default option. The Teabaggers are at least lucid to the point of being paranoiac. DS

Populism: riding the Scotch-Irish tiger

Below is an example of good populism

And...

This is an example of bad populism

David Seaton's News Links

The Tea Party Convention is over and any amateur anthropologist who treasures our folkways, folklore and the cultural artifacts known as "Americana" will have found much to enjoy.

So much has changed in America over the centuries since it was first colonized by settlers from the British Isles that in many ways the country is hardly recognizable from what it was in say, the early 19th century. But the Scotch-Irish, who with the Native-Americans and the African-Americans are one of America's founding tribes and who make up the cultural backbone, the soul, if you will, of the Tea Party movement are still perfectly recognizable.

Their ancestors came to colonial America from the anus mundi of an orangeman's Ulster, hungry for land and hungry for work and they had to fight the Indians for the land and compete with the slave labor of the African-Americans for wages. These struggles did nothing to soothe their irritable natures, sweeten the sourness of their Calvinism or give them a sunny view of life or a charitable view of those of their brethren of duskier complexion. In short this is a breed or a caste that treasures its resentment and nurtures the adrenaline of its explosions of violence as a miser would old coins, knowing where each one came from and what it cost. The often poetic self pity of country-western lyrics, set to the warrior dissonances of Celtic music give a bay window into the bitterness and disappointment of a race of hard fighting, hard working, losers.

They also make up the backbone of America's military caste and any military prestige that such a hedonistic country as United States has is probably due to disciplining and directing the pent up rage of the Scotch-Irish.

The Scotch-Irish  also provide a ready made cultural context for any more recent arrival that has less hereditary claim on such thin-lipped acrimony. That might explain where somebody with a name like "Tancredo" gets off spouting nativist crap like he was a "McTancredo".

The Scotch-Irish have been used as the right wing's rottweiler ever since Nixon weaned them from the bosom of FDR and transformed the party of Lincoln into the party of "state's rights" and discovered that the horror of even a nickel of their tax money being spent on black people was greater than their desire for health or an education for their own children. AIPAC even convinced these natural haters of all that is scholarly or cosmopolitan that their starring role in the Apocalypse depended on the existence of the state of Israel. Obviously an African-American, with a middle name like "Hussein" in the White House is a rank provocation to the racist traditions and phobias of this tribe, but that Obama may be turning out to be completely ineffectual is like pointing a cap pistol into a mafia soldato's face and crying, "bang you're dead".

With the bailout of Wall Street something snapped. The right has feasted on their resentment for years... The waiter has just arrived with the check.

Suddenly corporate America's rottweiler's has a strange glint in its eye and is emitting a low, throaty, growl.   The conservative movement has been cultivating the resentment of this tribe for many years, but now with their homes and retirement in jeopardy  they appear to be turning on bankers and Wall Street.

The rottweiler is off his chain.

If corporate power thinks they can ride to safety on the back of the Scotch-Irish they may find themselves on the back of a tiger... These spawn of Oliver Cromwell are what is left of the America of Andrew Jackson and along with the Pashtun of Afghanistan, a badder-assed tribe than America's Scotch-Irish would be hard to find... You'd have to go back to Ulster to even get close.

The people like Rupert Murdoch and Sarah Palin who are pimping the hurt and resentment of this tribe are taking their lives in their hands. If you don't believe me, whip out your Ouija board and channel Timmy McVeigh. It is nowhere written in heaven that this tribe is wedded eternally to shareholder capitalism. Leave the teabag in the hot water a bit longer and the descendants of Jackson, Bryant and Huey Long could give you quite a surprise.

What can progressives do with this, besides fueling more of its rage with their ridicule and condescension?

It is important to take Tom Tancredo's nauseating speech and, like a neurosurgeon winkling out a brain tumor without trashing the piano lessons, find what emotional levers there are in this speech that could be put to better use.

For example, if the Teabaggers want "Judeo-Christianity" give it to them till they choke on it. I would take the bible and apply it to them like a red hot iron.

Here, for example are some choice bits  from the book of Deuteronomy - 14 -22:

Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates: At his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it: lest he cry against thee unto the LORD, and it be sin unto thee.(...)Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of the fatherless; nor take a widow's raiment to pledge: But thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee thence: therefore I command thee to do this thing.  When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands. When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.  When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt: therefore I command thee to do this thing. - Quoted by Socialist Spanish president, José Luis Rodriquez Zapatero, at the recent Washington "National Prayer Breakfast".

If they are so serious in all their Bible thumping and pumping, that business about "Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates", more or less ties it up on hassling immigrants doesn't it?

You betcha.

And how about the Beatitudes: they like Jesus? Hit them with Luke 6:20-26: 

And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets. But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.

That "woe unto you that are rich" is not exactly Gordon Gecko, is it?

These texts, and others like them from the world's great religions, are the earliest expressions of the universal human hatred of oppression and thirst for social justice. As such they help give shape and a common, deeply rooted, electrifying language to express a growing consciousness that things are not as they should be.

They are also a barrier against the taking out of frustrations on those  that are even more vulnerable and weaker than we are, which is as workmanlike description of fascism as I can think of.

Trying to make the Teabaggers square their program with the Holy Bible might short circuit the whole business.

All of this is about building consciousness and directing it into positive and effective channels. That is the political task facing progressives today. I am not totally pessimistic that this is impossible. As I keep repeating: the natives are restless.

In short there must be a progressive "tea party" movement... come to think of it, the civil rights struggle and the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations were progressive "tea parties".

I think consciousness is growing exponentially these days. When people got so starry eyed about Barack Obama they were expecting him to be the solution to any number of specific problems. His supporters had correctly identified the problems, although by now it seems that they erred as to the solution.

To save the situation we must look to the impulse that caused people to support Barack Obama in the first place rather than looking to Obama himself. That impulse is what must be cultivated. To Obama goes the credit for discovering how deep, how resonant and how strong the chords he was playing on are.

Now that it is getting increasingly obvious that Obama "can't" or "wont" play the instrument he discovered, progressives themselves should again proclaim: "Yes we can!" and organize accordingly. DS

The "conversation" about race begins

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American," former president, Jimmy Carter told NBC in an interview. Washington Post

When Bertold Brecht got cynical or angry at Communist regimes, he told them that, if the people were rebelling against their wisdom, they should "change the people." Perhaps that's what Obama needs to do -- change the people, his people. Or maybe, in time, the people will change themselves. Immanuel Wallerstein

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Color in the United States is just a "warning signal" that history has walked into the room. But even history doesn't explain it all. Our history of slavery is pretty horrible, but slavery was horrible in Cuba and Brazil too. However, Cubans and Brazilians are much more relaxed about color. Americans, though, are not really relaxed about much of anything.

Our culture is Calvinist: brittle and inflexible even in its hedonism, where, with predestination, the devil literally takes the hindmost.

Although in many parts of Europe, for example, losing, being maudit, is considered romantic, the worst put down in American English is to call someone a "loser".

Therefore, Americans are obsessed with "winning" and "losing".

This makes American racial tension different... I think America's racism has something to do with America's puritanical streak, with its hatred of vulnerability and the vulnerable slaves were "losers" par excellence.

The vulnerability of the "other", whomever that other might be is the origin of the sickest of fantasies.

This role has been passed onto the slave's descendants.

Probably the most valuable service that slaves provided even, or especially, for those who didn't own them was there being someone even the most miserable white person could feel superior to, and God knows that America is full of desperately miserable white people. Not all of them are poor, not by long shot.

For losing and feeling miserable in America is not just economic, a study of marketing messages will give you an idea of the infinite ways that an American can be a "loser".

The entire American consumer economy, which is 70% of the total, is based on making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid, inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain of rejection and failure.

Those whites who fear they might be "losers" themselves, and if we look at the economic and psychological facts of life that might include most American whites, desperately need someone to look down upon as insurance against being losers and of course, since time immemorial African-Americans, even the lightest skinned among them, have served that purpose. Their status as loser was even pleasing to the abolitionists that wanted to "uplift" them.

For literally hundreds of years, besides this role as the loser, no other role beyond entertaining or lifting heavy loads was permitted them.

In 1952 an African-American author, Ralph Ellison published a ground breaking novel, “The Invisible Man”, whose title many critics feel defined the experience of people of African descent in America: that of being invisible and voiceless. In the years that followed, the people of color in the United States raised their voices and became visible, to the great and continuing discomfort of many whites. The white people of the US south who once voted solidly Democratic have punished that party’s leadership of the civil rights movement by voting solidly Republican ever since… the key to the victories of Nixon, Reagan and Bush. The “Conservative Revolution”, that only favors the rich, is based on the resentment of poor whites.

I wrote this a while back:

Making equal citizens of the descendants of slavery: descendants of both master and slave, was the inescapable duty, dharma, of American progressives. This situation made and still makes a mockery of the Declaration of Independence, which was written by a slaveholder and seconded by slaveholders... This injustice could not be allowed to stand

Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the closest thing to a man of the left that has ever sat in the White House, knew that this was his duty and although a southerner carried out that duty unflinchingly.

Master politician that he was, I'm sure he knew what was to follow: Nixon's "Southern Strategy", that opened the door to Reagan, Bush-I and Bush-II, a movement that strove mightily to undo all that Johnson tried to achieve with his "Great Society"... and largely succeeded in destroying it and gave a political base to all those whose philosophy has deprived generations of Americans of decent public health care and decent public schools.

With Barack Obama this resentment is coming to head.

Up till now, American "identity" politics was always played with surrogates: WASP men wearing masks.

Thus Bill Clinton was "America's first black president". The whatever WASP whose turn it was to woo Latinos, would eat tacos and say "juntos podemos" with an atrocious accent etc, etc. Candidates would attempt to show that they were "sensitive" to the feminist agenda and so on. Absolutely de rigueur for all white, male and protestant presidentiables was a photo at Yad Vashem sporting a yomulka. This all came with the turf like kissing babies. It was all a game.

The problems start when the Democrats decided to use "originals" instead of the traditional, "ballo in maschera". The whole charade begins to fall apart without the WASP surrogates.

All of this resntful white anger has been directed heretofore against surrogates: the Jimmy Carters, the Ted Kennedys, the Walter Mondales, the Dukakises, the Gores and the Kerrys; and all the racism was disguised in euphemisms like "state's rights" or "liberal" or "elitist" or "un-American".

Now for the first time the American white ultra-right have got the chance to actually organize and march against a real black man who incarnates all the euphemisms, instead of a surrogate.

Even a "JFK meets Sydney Poitier" figure like president Barack Obama, or especially like Obama, is an unbearable provocation -- a lifetime membership card in the "loser" club -- for millions of American white people.

The real problem in America is not racism in itself, the problem is a society or a culture that divides human beings into "winners" and "losers" and punishes the losers so mercilessly. These unfortunates simply cannot survive psychologically without their "whipping boy". DS