June 17, 2021
Issue #79
By Marc Cooper
America is back! America is back! How many times have we heard that over the last few months, especially in the last week in the run-up to the Geneva Summit?
I can’t really blame Biden for spreading this slogan. It should surprise nobody that an American President serves as an American Booster.
That’s part of his job. That’s no excuse, however, for the rest of us to continue believing this hooey.
And not at this crucial, dangerous moment in our history where maximum clarity is in order.
America is not back, whatever being back would even mean.
America is no longer the “best, last hope” as a democratic beacon in the world (to the degree we ever were).
How about some simple, obvious and not all together encouraging truths about who we are today?
When clumps of angry men surround state legislatures carrying AR-15’s and wearing armor because they don’t want to wear masks in a deadly pandemic, how do you think the rest of world sees us?
In the poorest parts of the world, where vaccination rates hover at 2% or less, how do we look when we sit on our fat bums and whine that we don’t want any of those vaccines unless they come with a lottery ticket, free beer or –where I live-- a free joint?
America is now a politically unstable nation whose form of governance is in question, whose economy is wildly unequal, and whose population seems to be living through some sort of mass narcolepsy while simultaneously prepping for civil war.
The democratic and civil institutions that have bound the country together have been severely damaged and continue to erode. Half the country hates the other half, with increasing intensity. The Republican side of that equation is now embarked, in the light of day, on a nakedly authoritarian project that endangers democracy itself and aims toward permanent minority rule.
A clearly criminal and mad grifter who ran the country for four years, continues to hold 40% of America in a hypnotic thrall as he desperately seeks to return to power while spreading a Hitlerian-scale Big Lie.
Many of these same folks have immersed themselves in the perverse, twisted world of Qanon, thereby blocking out any rational thoughts that might penetrate their skulls. The media arm of this half of America blares out non-stop messages of resentment, incitement and bald-faced subversive propaganda with impunity. The latest iteration, spun out by the pudgy preppie Tucker Carlson, posits that the January 6 assault on the US Capitol was planned and carried out by the FBI.
As our institutions of governance wobble and erode, our economy becomes more unequal by the minute. In less than two weeks, on June 30, some 8 million Americans will be subject to losing their homes as mortgage support programs expire.
An even greater number of renters will also face eviction. The American Dream has been replaced by the nightmare of wages below $15 an hour in much of the country and housing and rental prices up somewhere in the stratosphere.
It’s hard to be the light of the world when it requires a family of four to have have 5 jobs to pay for housing and school.
Meanwhile, just as the New York Times publishes a crushing investigation of the Dickensian nature of the Amazon workplace, purposely designed to be so, its owner – the richest man in the world-- is preparing to ride one of his rocket ships into space, selling a companion seat for the 11 minute ride to another rich turd for $28 million.
We’re flying off into space but… we are back!
And as we try, as we struggle, to move forward it looks like at best we are going to advance an inch at a time and that seems way too slow a pace if we want to head off a political collapse and increased economic and social injustice.
Indeed, the media totally overhyped the Biden-Putin summit this week and showed their disappointment when Joe didn’t just kick Vlad in the nuts onstage. Fortunately, Joe Biden understands international relations better than Kaitlan Collins and he took his low-profile, low expectation approach to Geneva because he knows Russia is hardly our biggest problem today.
No question by the way that the Russians did screw with our last two elections and more likely than not are behind the recent ransomware attacks on our infrastructure (putting aside the pro-Russian apologias suddenly coming forward from once incisive American writers Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi).
But the Russians pose no serious threat to the U.S. (unless that is, the U.S. takes it upon itself to be the cops of the world).
In case you didn’t notice, the biting anti-U.S. rhetoric that Putin employed this last week was nothing more and nothing less that current Republican Party talking points. The Republicans are not Russian dupes.
It’s simply the Republican threats to our democracy are much more credible and immediate than anything coming from Moscow and it’s no sweat for Vlad to follow McCarthy and McConnell’s lead. If we want to protect global democracy as Biden says (but clearly does not mean as the Saudis can testify) he better start right here in the United States right now.
As a younger man, I have witnessed the rise of an explicitly fascist movement… in this case, Chile. I saw first hand how not only conservative parties, but also long-standing centrist and reformist parties, like the Christian Democrats, can swing toward authoritarianism when the pressure is on.
I don’t know what you are seeing, but I am seeing a deliberate, step-by-step strategy being implemented by the Republican Party to assume complete minority rule by 2024 with the first big step being the takeover of the House in 2022 (which would probably lead to impeachment of Biden). In 2024, there will be a half dozen or more Republican-led swing states that will be in place to legally nullify the popular vote and send their own GOP puppets to the electoral college.
Yes, there has been some –I believe temporary— movement this week on the The For The People Act as Pope Manchin has revealed his, um, demands to alter the bill in a way he could support it.
I doubt the bi-partisan support he seeks for this will materialize. And even if it does, even if it passes, the bill will do nothing to stop the latest Republican gambit that is no voter suppression, but rather allowing Republican-led state legislatures to ignore the popular vote and name their own electors. My guess is that we should believe the Republicans. They are not engaged in a “slow motion coup.”
They are not playing a game. They are dead serious. They are embarked on a methodical, steady and transparent march to assume control of all three branches of government by 2024 and in a manner that will permanently marginalize the Democrats. Nothing slow motion about it.
Can it happen here? You bet it can.
The only issue we should be concerned about at this moment is defense of democratic institutions. And as a corollary to that, a fight against economic inequality because that is the greatest accelerant of political instability. Period. Full Stop.
Frankly, I think the Democrats have already blown their first opportunity to properly confront this crisis. All of this was certainly predictable if not before the election, then certainly after the January 6 Trumplican assault on the Capitol.
IMHO, the Dems should have come out swinging and not have engaged in all –to the moment mostly useless-- bi-partisan patty cake with seditious Republicans. The administration should have made it clear from Day One there would be no recognition, let alone talks or negotiations, with any and all Republicans who refused to vote to certify the election. And if one thinks that such an ultimatum coming in Biden’s first week would have been precipitous, ok, then that’s a position that still could have been adopted after the Republican Quislings refused to authorize a January 6 commission.
Those moments have passed and here we are at the beginning of the summer living through the following contradiction: This week the administration finally recognized the domestic threat of right-wing subversion (led by Republicans) and yet the administration and other Democrats continue to exude cheer over possible (minimal) bipartisanship with same.
So, which is it, Joe? Are the Republicans our friend and negotiating partners, or are they the vanguard of an authoritarian push, because to hear you, they are both.
Better said, it’s hard to convince the public that they should mobilize against a subversive Republican Party while you keep bestowing them tremendous political legitimacy.
I am not giving up hope in the Democrats, mostly because I never invested more than maybe 20% of my Hope portfolio in them.
So, I don’t have much to lose in that sense, as the Democrats are behaving more or less as I expected (a lot better than I imagined during Biden’s first 100 days and a whole lot worse since then).
The only real hope we have must be invested in ourselves.
And I will admit, reluctantly, that’s where my faith is failing. This is no time for Americans to be outsourcing their political sovereignty to a bunch of feckless pols on both sides (some worse than others). It will end badly if they do. Yet, it seems the nation is sleepwalking into inevitable dictatorial rule (I sure hope my perceptions are wrong!).
But as George Packer argues in his latest book, Americans failed the test of “self-democracy” as evidenced during the pandemic – that term defined as our collective capacity to take care of ourselves. Yet, our collective behavior during the pandemic has been among the most reprehensible in the world. It absolutely appalled me.
A massive failure to show minimal social solidarity and concern for others. What are we to make of the fact, for example, that at this late date in the pandemic with 2/3 or more of American adults vaccinated, the plague threatens to survive and even intensify in the fall because the most backward region in the U.S., the Deep South, flounders at half the national vax rate? And, of yeah, unvaccinated Republicans are twice the percentage of others).
I’ve no words left to characterize these folks who are selfish enough, dumb enough, or, charitably, ignorant enough to put the rest of the country and their own children at risk instead of taking 2 minutes out of their important lives to get a shot and get this over with. This is the last, best hope of the world?
Heightening the challenge before us, the Great American Dysfunction, I am sorry to say is not strictly American. The way out of this crisis is much more complicated than getting Trump off the political stage or winning this or that vote. As the American media is allergic to covering international news (except for Royal babies) and most of the American people could not find Canada on a map, most are unaware that this crisis of authoritarianism is not a strictly domestic issue but is rather a global trend.
Writing in the New York Times, Tom Edsall recently highlighted the work of Stanford sociologists Michelle Jackson and David Grusky, who identify what they call “the ubiquity of loss,” a “late industrial experience, in short, increasingly one of omnipresent loss and decline.” They further define this sentiment of gloom:
"[This can be] experienced by children as a dramatic decline in their chances of achieving a standard of living as high as that of their parents. It is experienced by men as a decline in the gender pay gap, occupational segregation, and other types of loss relative to women. It is experienced by manufacturing workers as a sharp loss in the number of high-paying union jobs. It is experienced by “rust belt” families as a loss of employment and earnings to China and other countries."
As Edsall writes: the politics of loss have, in turn, empowered the populist right by encouraging the view “that disadvantaged groups have unfairly benefited from legal protections, egalitarian social movements and government and charitable assistance. These initiatives, far from facilitating fair and open competition, are instead seen as overshooting the mark and providing unfair advantage,” ushering in “a new era of high grievance, high conflict, and high ideology.” In other words, everybody finding a way to feel they are the victims of everybody else.
And even more precisely, these are the devastating and alienating effects of late stage capitalism as the major stress factors for the global population become the one-two punch of globalization and technology.
It’s not just us, folks. It’s also the UK, Germany and France (where neo fascist Le Pen has a shot in the next presidential elections).
Name almost any developed country in the world and inside it you will find a vibrant, growing and restless movement of the authoritarian populist Right. What to do here? You tell me. At a minimum it would be a step forward to find what we have in common so we can grow our numbers instead of continuing to divide among ourselves. Here’s a two sentence teaser that I will take up in the coming weeks. How much further along would we be if we had spent the past year talking about Wealth Supremacy instead of White Supremacy? No doubt that the latter is a very dark stain and flaw in our past that casts a shadow into the present. But the former is the universal primary challenge we face today going forward. +
You might have noticed I have been on break for two weeks. I did some analysis and thinking about the newsletter as web readership all around is way down when it comes to politics. Same thing for cable and network TV news.
Too many Americans are too apathetic and too many just want all the political noise to go away. I would like that too but it's not gonna happen on its own.
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