Restoring the Status Quo Will Not Cut It.
I have read many commentators expressing mystification about President Biden's stubborn unpopularity. They list his legislative accomplishments, which frankly do border on the miraculous: the "bipartisan" infrastructure bill, the remarkable and transformative Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act, and a couple of other achievements give him one of the most successful and impactful first terms of any President since FDR. At least on paper, the economy roars ahead, creating jobs by the millions. Inflation declines, interest rates may soon as well. We have largely put Covid behind us. He revived NATO and led Europe in standing against Russian aggression in Ukraine.... By all normal measures, Biden should enjoy stratospheric polling and coast to re-election.
But not only does he not have a lead in polling, but his presumptive opponent -- the twice-impeached, four times indicted on over 90 charges, disgraced, incompetent, disingenuous, breathtakingly corrupt, aging, and arguably mentally ill predecessor, by any measure the worst President in history, who actively and intentionally undermined the Constitution and attempted to reverse a 180-year tradition of peaceful transfer of power, against whom like 70 courts ruled on this, and who provoked a violent and deadly riot against the Capitol, and one of the most unpopular figures in American politics, who has lately spouted obviously fascist tropes like calling his opponents "vermin" and whining about immigrants "polluting our blood" -- remains not just competitive but often ahead.
What the hell?
I understand the sober, circumspect observers who reassure us that polling this far out has no point and usually gets it wrong. They mention how Obama and others languished far behind (but not this far behind...) a year out, and came back to win reelection. They remind us that voters have not yet started paying attention. They blame the media's inexplicable harshness towards Biden. And so on. All of which would make more sense if we had some confidence that we live in normal times.
What if we have left normal behind us? What if we do not live in the same era or world as we did even a few years ago... and I fear that Biden does not get it. He seems to still want to function according to norms, procedures, standards, and practices that may have held for generations, or even centuries... but no longer work.
Look, he can spout about how government still functions, and that we can even accomplish things in an arguably bipartisan manner. But I wonder if policy and legislation have ever mattered less. Arguing facts and statistics doesn't work when people feel nervous and riven with anxiety, sensing a world in uncontrolled tailspin. The standard economic metrics may not relate to real people anymore. Maybe they show us the security of the top 1% or even 20%, while not really reflecting the lived experience of most Americans.
Just as no level of prosperity can outweigh a diagnosis of cancer or heart disease, if we sense the bottom dropping out of civilization itself, extra cash in one's paycheck doesn't matter that much. Do people sense the center not only not holding but starting to give way beneath them? Have our systems and institutions become irrelevant and ineffective, if not actually harmful? Do we feel this fundamental malaise and sense of impending doom, or at least chaos? I feel like we're on the Titanic and Biden brags about improving room service.
When people start asking "What's normal done for us lately?" it does not help to brand oneself as the re-establisher of normal. Maybe people feel that the old normal has gone and will not come back, and they peer ahead with trepidation because a new normal has not yet established itself. They wonder what it will look like when it does, and who will decide about that, and how much turbulence they will have to endure before that happens? And the fact that they can't put their finger on or articulate any of this only makes it scarier.
Every night on MSNBC the hosts and experts revel in Trump's legal woes. Experts predict his likely conviction and the triumph of the American Criminal Justice System. Of course, I hope Trump ends up in a Federal prison. But having seen our legal system at work up close, it looks like a matter of deals and games played among rich and connected people. I know that it exists in part to humiliate the poor and powerless. Why should I want to see it triumph? We know it has never really worked for minorities at all, and insiders readily manipulate it in their own interest.
Other systems teeter on the edges of legitimacy as well. Our economic order actively sinks into a kind of techno-feudalism as a handful of overlords like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Google, Apple, and other multi-billion-dollar corporations and individuals increasingly manage the world economy for their own benefit. Musk alone has $215b, which means he could give every human on earth a billion dollars and still have well over $200 billion to squeeze by on. Capitalism steadily reveals its original purpose as a system that kills the earth while obscenely enriching a very few. They respond by idiotically pouring billions into ventures to the Moon and even Mars.
We see the world of business infected by frankly evil forces epitomized by the murderous Sackler family which received no significant consequences or punishment at all for intentionally driving millions of people to addiction and death! Or the fossil fuel companies which knowingly and constantly continue to destroy the very ability of the planet to sustain life, and spread lies about it. Again, with no penalty.
Our political system seems in freefall as well, as we have had to endure the repeated election of Presidents who do not win the most votes, a Congress stifled in manifold ways by its own rules, a Supreme Court which has lost legitimacy due to obviously partisan decisions, not to mention overt corruption. We see an aggressive rise in voter suppression laws, with many states, hamstrung by gerrymandering, come ruled by a cynical and entrenched minority. Our 18th century Constitution and medieval legal system simply does not have the structure or flexibility to deal with this level and scale of sabotage, duplicity, and manipulation.
We lose 35,000 people to gun violence every year, and the government cannot enact even the most tepid and sensible regulations to curtail it.
Mass and social media have become cesspools of lies, hysteria, partisan spinning, pornography, mindless entertainment, and despair. And we're careening into a world enmeshed in AI with no plan and no guardrails.
Our health care system costs an unconscionable amount of money, excludes many people, and has lost the trust of a large segment of the population. I don't agree with them, but I totally understand why some don't trust vaccines. Big business designed the whole system for their own enrichment; they have lied to us repeatedly and compulsively in the past.
And the world order we all got used to no longer functions. Who predicted a land war in Europe due to Russian aggression? And we find ourselves completely unable to do anything about the mass murder of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza.
Our immigration system remains inadequate. Republicans demagoguing it refuse to work on any improvements. It has become a lightning rod for racist paranoia. It results from failed policies, and the climate crisis, in Central and South America. We ignore the suffering and courage of millions of ordinary people.
To sum up, our society languishes in crisis largely because of the rampant exploitation by the wealthy elite, and everyone else seeks to follow their example. They control all social and cultural institutions for their own profit, even the ones most of us could until recently trust and respect. In Greed We Trust would serve as a more accurate national motto than the sanctimonious and hypocritical one we display now.
Which reveals a crisis of character in Americans as trust and civility break down and we have trouble even communicating with each other.
Religious institutions, intended to cultivate spiritual values like compassion, humility, forgiveness, non-violence, generosity, and acceptance, do not. Christian churches should encourage personal transformation and social justice. But now, on the one hand, the Evangelical movement has completely discredited itself with its infatuation with easily the least Christlike human ever to hold the Presidency, the old-line churches sink into ineffective irrelevance, and the rise of people claiming no religion (the "nones") portends a nation with no spiritual guidance at all beyond the craving of individual egos.
And churning under everything portends the most consequential earthquake of all: the deepening and spreading climate catastrophe, brought on all of us by centuries of waste, growth, extraction, destruction, and profit. We see exponential increases in wildfires, floods, and extinctions, with stronger hurricanes, longer and more severe droughts, hotter and more unpredictable weather, and a steady rise in species extinction, sea levels, habitat loss, and the number of climate-related diseases and refugees. In 2023 we shattered all records for atmospheric heat, by far. Governments respond with big meetings and brave statements and goals... that they largely do not enact. We have moved past the tipping point where we can prevent it; now we scramble just to limit the damage.
Meanwhile, right-wing think tanks openly and enthusiastically gush about different kinds of minority rule or even autocracy that need to be invoked to impose their will on everything. They dream of "Red Caesar" and martial law. Large portions of Congress advocate for Trump's election lies and other preposterous and paranoid propositions, a level of blatant disloyalty to democracy not seen in our country since the 1860's. Twenty-five percent of Americans profess a willingness to accept political violence if it achieves their goals. Having gone full nihilistic fascist theocracy, we have no reason to hope the Republicans can offer anything but brutal, repressive tyranny.
In the face of this blizzard of toxic political, moral, economic, cultural, and ecological sludge, Biden's boasting about the "bipartisan" Infrastructure Bill seems somewhat... inadequate, even quaint.
If Biden goes into the 2024 election campaign as the great restorer and maintainer of the status quo, he will only win because people hate Trump more than they fear the future. The "America Is Already Great!" argument didn't work for Hillary Clinton; why should it help Biden? People know things do not look great right now, and they don't know what to do about that. If left with the choice between propping up a rotting and ineffective faux-democracy and burning it all down in an orgy of autocratic retribution, I fear disaster.
And I find it hard for Democrats to claim to present a viable alternative, when they have morphed into the party of the wealthy, educated, connected elite. Embracing Wall Street and Neoliberalism under Clinton, Democrats have helped to oversee the slide into inequality and polarization. They have largely abandoned and therefore lost the working class and frankly seem far more concerned with pushing advances in social equity... we need this too, but it shouldn't happen at the expense of economic justice for all. The fact that most American families do not have $400 in the bank for an emergency says it all.
And when the Democrats do come into power, they manage to squander it by adhering to archaic and obsolete, arbitrary rules, rules they could change had they the will. Instead they still pretend we live in 1999 (or even 1789).
Even our version of democracy has lost a lot of its legitimacy with many people. For if this system brought us to this place of anxiety, confusion, division, and grief then maybe, some people may reason, we should try something else now. Indeed, can Biden claim the role of protecting "democracy," when the system he wants to sustain shows only a casual relationship to actual democracy?
We need a credible third option. Or, we need the Democrats to realize the depth of the crisis, and present a plan to repair and renew America. What if they remade themselves into the party of responsible, forward-looking, major, fundamental change? What if they talked about wealth redistribution more directly, even proposed a Guaranteed Basic Income? What if they started advocating for actual democracy, and developed a battery of Constitutional Amendments, and other measures that indicated a truly transformational vision for the 21st century? What if they said, "We get that things do not work for people and that the country approaches freefall; here's how to fix it"?
If 1789 gave us Constitution 1.0, and after the Civil War we developed the 2.0 version. Clearly we need 3.0 now. That should include an array of political, economic, media, tech, and judicial changes that would make the economy more equitable and opportunity-driven, and government more representative, responsive, accountable, nimble, and open.
We cannot sustain our current situation. Something has to give. We can either collapse into violent minority rule, or present and fight for a vision for renewal. We can try to impose the terror of white supremacy. Or we can offer the hope of liberty and justice for all, the multi-cultural, multi-racial, communitarian democracy that stands as America's highest goal, and always has.
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