Which Part of the 1930s Did You Not Get? Americans Finally Learn To
Cooperate On A National Suicide Project
Published on
Wednesday, November 23, 2016
by
Common Dreams
Which Part of the 1930s Did You Not Get? Americans Finally Learn To
Cooperate On A National Suicide Project
What you assist... you will become
by
David Michael Green
President Barack Obama meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval
Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (Photo:
AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Americans have, in recent years, managed to secure for themselves a false
and therefore undeserved reputation as a people so politically polarized
that we cant agree on even the simplest things anymore. That seems to me a
bit unfair.
True, red-staters are puzzled by the concerns of those in blue states, and
sometimes you can hear them mutter: Yall say gun homicide, teen
pregnancy, infant mortality and morbid obesity as if those were bad
things!
While those in the blue states have yet to appreciate the culinary joys of a
deep-fried Snickers bar and a Coke for breakfast, or the many laudatory
human virtues invoked by the flying of the Confederate flag.
So, yeah, we have our problems. But its wrong to suggest that we cant
ever collaborate. As a matter of fact, right now we are witnessing enormous
cooperation across the political spectrum in the great national project of
destroying the republic. And, thanks to such widespread support, I can
report that its going quite swimmingly indeed! I think the events of
November 8th leave little doubt about that...
In that spirit, I thought it might be useful at this juncture to catalog
some of the major contributors to this great national unraveling. There are
in fact so many that the list is quite endless. Some of them are tangential
and/or inadvertentlike, say, globalization or technological developmentand
so probably should not be included herein. Othersfor instance, Donald
Trumps own campaign for the presidencyare too obvious to merit a mention.
That leaves a handful of players, however, who deserve full recognition for
their important contributions to the present catastrophe.
High on this list one would obviously find the grandees of the Grand Old
Republican Party. To be honest, though, I almost hesitate to include them,
because their role has been so obvious. Nowadays, they dont really even
quite bother to pretend anymore that theyre serving some sort of national
interest. Its like the old bit about prison lifers who have told the same
jokes so many times that they just refer to them by number, then all bust up
in laughter. Its just that its so not funny. This is the root-menace to
any post-Neanderthal America one might envision, and we should never forget
just how we got to this ugly place now called home.
Nor should we ever forget the road not taken. The basic storyline is a
simple one. Beginning in the 1950s, following the massive mutual sacrifices
required to get through the Depression and the War, certain segments of
American society began demanding a little more mutuality when it came to the
benefits of that society as well. First African Americans, then women,
Native Americans and Latinos, and most recently LGBT folk, have successively
risen up to demand respect, dignity, equality of legal standing and
political power, and a fair share of American prosperity.
Lets be honest. Never were more reasonable demands made upon a society,
and the movements presented politicians with a simple choice to make: Which
side of history do you want to be on, the right one or the wrong one? Do
you want to be the guy who opposed independence in 1776, the Constitution in
1787, ending slavery in the 1850s, and fighting fascism in the 1930s? Or do
you want to be the guy we revere in the history books were doing the right
thing at the right time, often at substantial personal cost?
Its a very rare thing for me to write a single sentence that includes both
the words politician and courageous between the dots, and theres a damn
good reason for that. But lets give credit where its due. When the chips
were down, many Democratsand certainly their leader, Lyndon Johnsontook
serious political risks in order to get on the right side of history, and
courageously advocated on behalf of out-groups who had little other voice
within the system. Notwithstanding the incredible sacrifices made by
millions on the street in order to realize civil rights goals, we should
never forget how different America would look today had somebody else been
in the White House in the 1960s, and had both political parties opted to
stand by silently and watch these movements be crushed by indifference and
backlash.
Nor should we forget the Newtonian complement to the political courage,
sheer decency, and moral vision of Johnson and the Democrats. While they
were doing the hard work for all the right reasons, over on the other side
of the aisle we saw an equal and opposite reaction from the Republican
Party, which continues down to this day. Their decision was to oppose legal
equality, moral dignity and societal inclusion every step of the way,
following a blueprint in which they literally labeled the approach as their
massive resistance strategy.
"I am literally hard put to imagine many greater acts of sheer cynicism and
repugnant human behavior than the Republican Partys track record over the
last 60 years."
Readers should pardon my naïveté, but I am literally hard put to imagine
many greater acts of sheer cynicism and repugnant human behavior than the
Republican Partys track record over the last 60 years. This is especially
true because I doubt seriously that elites within the party are themselves
essentially all that racist, sexist and homophobic at their core. My guess
is that a lot of them are actually pretty agnostic to these questions, and
indifferent to the answers. But what they know is that these are powerful
emotions that can be politically weaponized, and that is exactly what they
did for the last half-century, using the denial of the civil rights of one
group to appeal to the insecurities of another, so that they could meanwhile
pick the pockets of all of the above, which was their only real goal.
Seriously, are there lower forms of life than people who would do this?
Yeah, but now youre pretty much talking about slave-traders,
sex-traffickers, or war criminals.
As mentioned, there was always a specific target audience for this cynical
manipulation. Call it Cracker Nation if you like, though in some ways thats
a bit unfair. In truth, these (white, straight) Men Who Used To Be Kings
have suffered some genuine setbacks over the decades. If theyre lucky,
their standard of living has merely stagnated since 1980. If theyre less
lucky, the good job they once held now resides somewhere in Mexico, or more
likelysince even Mexican labor is now too expensivein Vietnam or Malaysia.
They have every right in the world to be angry at the hand theyve been
dealt, and I dont for a minute begrudge them those sentiments.
Where we depart from one another is in the domain of analysis and action.
People should feel free to be as politically ignorant (which is almost
always a polite way of saying lazy) as they want on their own nickel. But
if youre getting it dramatically wrong, and if youre willfully doing so at
the expense of other people, your laziness has now become a criminal act.
This is where Crackers have earned their reputation for idiocy and
brutality. Get up off of the sofa and spend ten percent of the time now
devoted to following the NFL or stock-car races, and any fool can figure out
that the real reason hes getting poor is because the One Percent is getting
richer, not because some immigrant from Guatemala stole his bedpan cleaning
job. But if youre just lazy and angry, and you like being lazy and angry,
then youre going to play a big role in putting Donald Trump in the White
House. And just think about how much their lives will improve once Herr
Fury has succeeded in deporting 10 or 12 million illegal immigrants. All
those Trump supporters will then have the privilege of paying more for their
meals when they dine out, paying more to get their lawn mowed, paying more
for the care of their parents at nursing homes, paying more to get their
pickup truck washed, and so on. Its tempting to say Congratulations,
Tools!, but in fact they will be happy campers. Its not really about
standard of living for these folk. Its about social status. What Trump
gives them is the satisfaction of seeing some brown persons ass get kicked,
and reminding them that there are folks lower on the totem pole than they
are. And, at the end of the day, thats what they really want.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are least as much to blame for the catastrophe of
Trump as are Republicans, starting with Hillary Clinton herself. In
reality, Clinton was so morally compromised a candidate, and so lacking any
serious rationale for her candidacy other than her own self-aggrandizement
(as leaked documents revealed, even the campaign couldnt figure out what
their appeal was supposed to be), that the only serious asset she brought to
the campaign was having Trump as her opponent. I mean that quite seriously.
Had the Republicans nominated anyone without the astonishing baggage that
Trump carried, its hard to imagine that Clinton would have ever had even a
remote chance to win. In the end, even going up against a gigantic
voter-insult machine wasnt enough, and that tells you something right
there. If youre so morally freighted a candidate that you cant even beat
the guy with sixteen built-in self-destruct buttons (including being an
admitted sexual predator) who is tweeting out messages that chew through
alienated groups as fast as his thumbs will allow, you must be one hell of
an abysmal candidate. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce to you Hillary
Rodham Clinton!
It is true, that the Clintons have been subjected to the boundless
dishonesty and destructive appetites of a genuine vast right-wing
conspiracy. However, for every false scandal imputed to Bill and Hillary,
theres a real one thats equally bad. Theyre just sleazy at the core, and
theyre breathtakingly self-interested. Theyre disgustingly entitled and
dishonest, and Hillary the nominee came by her record-setting low
favorability ratings more or less, er, honestly. Of course she was lying
when she concocted a reason for not releasing transcripts from her bazillion
dollar Wall Street speeches, and of course it came out when they were leaked
that she was saying something entirely different to the Lloyd Blankfeins of
this world that she was saying to the rest of us. Moreover, she admitted
right in the middle of one of those speeches that she had one face for
insiders, and one face for the rest of us. Quick, which audience do you
think got to hear from the real Hillary, Big Money or Stupid Voters?
Clinton also lost a lot of progressive supporters by voting for George W.
Bushs Iraq war resolution, as well she should have. In fact, she should
count yourself lucky that shes not sitting in some civil or criminal court,
or both, to answer for that crime. The lie that shes offered in the form
of some jive apology only compounds the sin of the original lie. Iraq,
which had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, was no threat to America in
2003, and in fact wasnt even making threatening noises in our direction.
Weapons inspectors were on the ground, finding nothing, and begging for a
few more weeks to finish their job. Moreover, plenty of countries in the
world had weapons of mass destruction at that time, and nobody talked about
launching an invasion against China or Russia or even North Korea. And yet
Clinton, who never even bothered to read the intelligence dossier presented
to Congress, voted for the war resolution. Why? Everybody knows the answer
to that. She desperately wanted to be president and fearedperhaps
especially as a female candidatethat a no vote would make her look weak on
national security. So, now, somewhere between 100,000 and one million
Iraqis, Americans and others are dead, all lives sacrificed on the altar of
the personal careers of American politicians like Bush, Kerry and Clinton.
Again, please forgive my naïveté, but I just dont know how somebody like
that sleeps at night. To be honest, it seems to me that only a full-blown
sociopath could live with themselves, having traded so much human misery for
their own pathetic career ambitions.
Barack Obama also has fingerprints all over these election results, even
though most Democratic voters will never figure that out, and he is
therefore likely to go on down the years being a heroic icon to these
people, just like Bill Clinton has been for over a decade now.
(Regrettably, liberals can be virtually as dogmatic and irrational as
conservatives on these questions, and Clinton is Exhibit A. No oneReagan
and Bush Jr. includeddid more harm to the American middle class and to the
Democratic Party than did Clinton, for which they love him to this day.) In
any case, Obama set this election result up, just as skillfully as the
Weimar Republic set up the Nazis coming to power through the ballot box in
1933. In my lifetime, I doubt there has been an occupant of the Oval Office
with more pure intellectual firepower than Barack Obama. But I also doubt
whether there has been one with anything remotely close to Obamas total
lack of understanding of the presidency itself, even at the end of two terms
holding that office.
Dont believe me? Take a quick pop quiz, and youll see what I mean. Ill
name a president, and all you have to do is shoot back two or three big
ideas or projects that president went to the mat to fight hard for, and with
which that president is indelibly associated. Okay? So, if I said FDR,
youd say saving the country from the Great Depression, fighting a global
struggle against fascism, and building Americas social safety net. If I
say Ronald Reagan, you say cutting taxes and fighting the Soviet Union. If
I say Lyndon Johnson, youd say civil rights and expanding the countrys
social safety net. If I say George W. Bush, you say cutting taxes,
fighting terrorism, going to war against Iraq. See how this works? You may
not necessarily agree with all of these policiesI certainly dontbut, all
of these were highly successful presidents on their own terms. In other
words, they got what they wanted, and they got it because they articulated
so clearly what it was they wanted, why it was (supposedly) urgent, and they
did so over and over and over again, incessantly, marshaling a full national
campaign in order build massive pressure for achieving their goal. Fair
enough?
Now try it with Obama. Go ahead, Ill wait. No, really, give it a shot.
Drawing a blank? Yeah, me too. Maybe you could say Obamacare!, but
remember that while that was happening he more or less never once
articulated a vision for what he had in mind. All we knew was that he
wanted to do something with healthcare. And he sure as hell never sold it
to the American public before, during and after its absurdly protracted and
tumultuous legislative process. But what else is there? Gun control? Yeah,
for about five minutes. Civil rights? Thats a laugh. Jobs? Im not sure
Ive ever heard him speak the word.
Stop and think for a moment about what were saying here. This is the
Seinfeld presidency. Its a presidency about nothing. Thats not to say
that Obama didnt do a few good things, especially using his executive
powers, but by January 21 next year those will all be wiped out anyhow.
More importantly, even on issues where he has something of an admirable
track record, like climate change, he did absolutely nothingnothing!to
move public opinion and build a solid national ethos and a public
willingness to fight for something important.
The American presidency, as compared to other chief executives in other
democracies, is actually a relatively weak institution. What makes it
strong, and what successful presidents understand makes it strong, is
effective use of the bully pulpit. You have to lead. You have to persuade.
You have to be proud to have the enemies you do, and you have to punish them
publicly for their intransigence, their obvious self-interested motivations,
and their hostility to the public interest. You have to show some courage.
You have to be thematic. You have to demonstrate that you really, really
care about something, and explain to the public why they should really,
really care about it too. This is not a job for the aloof. Cerebral
golfing philosopher kings need not apply. They may get the office, but
theyll never get success.
Obama never understood the slightest bit of this, and his presidency has
been a woeful failure relative to the challenges of our times, in huge part
because of his lack of insight. And the cherry on top of that cakemake no
mistake about itis Donald Trump. When Obama came to office in 2009, people
were being crushed economically. Responding to their plight, no matter what
obstacles got in his way, should have been his first, second and third
priorities for his first two years in office. He should have presented a
clear and comprehensive solution to the crisis in peoples lives and pitched
it relentlessly. We should have gotten sick of constantly seeing him
fighting so hard for us. He should have never skipped a waking hour in
pointing out the (true) fact that his opponents to national recovery in the
Republican Party were putting personal politics above the survival of the
American people in a midst of a crisis. They shouldve been made to pay
dearly for their cynical intransigence.
"People want action and leadership from their president, they want passion
and a narrative, and they want the issues that affect their lives to be
addressed. If you dont give it to them, they will look further and further
afield until they find it."
But he did none of these things, instead bringing to Washington an
astonishing combination of arrogance and historical naïveté. Of the latter,
I was struck right from the beginning by the degree to which Obama and I
seem to have lived different realities for the past thirty years. Looking
back, I saw little but a wake of sheer institutional destruction to the
fabric of American democracy in the years of Reagan, Gingrich and Rove.
Obama, instead, just seemed to perceive some very nice men, having good
patriotic intentions, with whom he just happened to have a few minor policy
differences. He never understood his adversaries in the slightest, but boy
did they understand him. And then the bizarre arrogance thing kicked in,
because he also seemed to believe that he was the Kid Jesus figure who could
come to Washington and finally bring the (equally guilty, equally
intransigent) warring parties together over his holy body, and heal all the
wounds of the American Republic. No doubt Valerie Jarrett told him he could
do it (which pretty much seems to have been the totality of her job in the
White House) and so, hey, it must be true! In fact, no president has ever
been more completely rolled by the opposition than Barack Obama, ultimately
culminating in having his Supreme Court nomination shoved back in his face
while he haplessly sat on the sidelines whimpering (again) for an entire
year, knobby tire tread marks all over his body.
I mention all this in part because of the anger I feel towards this buffoon
who wasted eight years of opportunity, and who crushed the hopes of tens of
millions who believed in him. But mostly because this wholesale meltdown
calling itself the 44th presidency had so much to do with allowing a
civilizational catastrophe like Donald Trump to waltz into the White House.
People want action and leadership from their president, they want passion
and a narrative, and they want the issues that affect their lives to be
addressed. If you dont give it to them, they will look further and further
afield until they find it. Im not sure theres a more succinct way to
explain Election 2016 than these last two sentences. So, thanks Barack, and
thanks especially for the smug reminder that the sun will come up again
tomorrow, even as you welcome into the White House the very man who did more
than anyone in the entire world to delegitimize your presidency through
disgusting racist innuendo. Really, is there anything anyone can say to or
about Obama that might make him even slightly fighting mad? Evidently not.
So here we are, quite likely at the edge of some sort of apocalypse. And,
no, I dont use the term lightly. Scholars of the American presidency are
sometimes loath to look for explanations of behavior and outcomes in
personality traits, but the more I observe, the more I believe these factors
are just about everything. In particular, so many people who seek this
office are really seeking badly needed attention and validation which
presumably eluded them in their childhood years. I couldnt imagine trying
to understand, for example, the George W. Bush presidency without
understanding the sheer neediness of a guy whos family (correctly) told him
all throughout his life that he was a no-good piece of crap. And look at
how the whole world had to pay with incalculable amounts of blood and
treasure to satiate the needs of that one boy-man whose parents dropped the
ball sixty years ago.
"I genuinely believe that the American republic as a system of government,
built on a fabric of certain political norms and social trust, is deeply
imperiled for the first time in my lifetime."
Thats why, just to begin with, Trump scares me as much as he does. As
astrophysicists will tell you, any human being theoretically more needy than
Donald Trump would, according to the laws of physics, have to implode into a
black hole singularity, sucking some large chunk of the universe in with it
from the sheer gravitational strength of its neediness. If you could stuff
Silvio Berlusconis incessant compulsion to seek attention and control into
Vladimir Putins power matrix in Russian government, youd be getting pretty
close to where Trump will go if he can. It is not hyperbolic, for example,
to imagine the First Amendment and the entire American tradition of free
speech and a free press hanging in the balance. As we speak, Donald Trump
is now attacking the cast of Saturday Night Live and the musical Hamilton
for daring to speak to him. Imagine the pressure real media organizations
are going to come under, especially if they start reporting the rampant
corruption that will ooze out of every pore of this administration, and
especially if some national security emergency is used for cover in order
to attack them as insufficiently patriotic when troops are in the field. We
could go on and on here, but you get the idea. I genuinely believe that the
American republic as a system of government, built on a fabric of certain
political norms and social trust, is deeply imperiled for the first time in
my lifetime. And even if that is not the case, the destruction of the last
half-centurys hard-fought gains in equality at home seems highly likely,
and the potential for international wreckageperhaps based on some perceived
slight by some foreign leader toward El Jefeis almost limitless.
And, there will be almost no opposition. This will be far worse than even
the Bush years during the run-up to war. Trump, this joke being played upon
us by a sadistic cosmos, will have control of every branch of government,
and already he has called a meeting to lean hard on the press for lying
about him, when in fact their greed produced almost wall-to-wall coverage of
him throughout the campaign and was hardly surpassed as a factor in helping
him get elected. Remember how quickly they folded when Bush/Cheney/Rove hit
town, and how the liberal New York Times even abetted the administration
in selling its dirty little war? The sheer potential darkness of this
moment cannot be overstated.
In this context, nothing is more disheartening than the insane discussion by
Democratic Party elites of finding issues on which they can cooperate with
the new Trump administration. Even if this wasnt a complete fools errand,
in which these punks will be used and discarded like so much spent toilet
paper, the idea of cooperating with these people on anything is noxious
beyond belief. This administration has delegitimized itself by the very
campaign that it ran. It is corrupt, it is dishonest, it is racist, is
sexist, it is predatory, and it is antithetical to core American values. If
the Democratic Party had the slightest shred of integrity left to it, it
would spend the next four years relentlessly probing and publicly assaulting
this administration on all these fronts, never once tainting itself with any
association of any sort.
Heck, maybe Satan himself has a redeeming quality or twothe stylish swish
of his tail, or the warmth of his breath on a cold winter night. I dont
know.
But I do know that if you cooperate with him, you legitimize him, you assist
him, and you abet him.
Andultimatelyyou are him.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
License
David Michael Green
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra
University in New York.
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Which Part of the 1930s Did You Not Get? Americans Finally Learn To
Cooperate On A National Suicide Project
Published on
Wednesday, November 23, 2016
by
Common Dreams
Which Part of the 1930s Did You Not Get? Americans Finally Learn To
Cooperate On A National Suicide Project
What you assist... you will become
by
David Michael Green
50 Comments
President Barack Obama meets with President-elect Donald Trump in
the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016.
(Photo: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Americans have, in recent years, managed to secure for themselves a
false and therefore undeserved reputation as a people so politically
polarized that we cant agree on even the simplest things anymore. That
seems to me a bit unfair.
True, red-staters are puzzled by the concerns of those in blue
states, and sometimes you can hear them mutter: Yall say gun homicide,
teen pregnancy, infant mortality and morbid obesity as if those were
bad things!
While those in the blue states have yet to appreciate the culinary
joys of a deep-fried Snickers bar and a Coke for breakfast, or the many
laudatory human virtues invoked by the flying of the Confederate flag.
So, yeah, we have our problems. But its wrong to suggest that we
cant ever collaborate. As a matter of fact, right now we are witnessing
enormous cooperation across the political spectrum in the great national
project of destroying the republic. And, thanks to such widespread support,
I can report that its going quite swimmingly indeed! I think the events of
November 8th leave little doubt about that...
In that spirit, I thought it might be useful at this juncture to catalog
some of the major contributors to this great national unraveling. There are
in fact so many that the list is quite endless. Some of them are tangential
and/or inadvertentlike, say, globalization or technological developmentand
so probably should not be included herein. Othersfor instance, Donald
Trumps own campaign for the presidencyare too obvious to merit a mention.
That leaves a handful of players, however, who deserve full recognition for
their important contributions to the present catastrophe.
High on this list one would obviously find the grandees of the Grand Old
Republican Party. To be honest, though, I almost hesitate to include them,
because their role has been so obvious. Nowadays, they dont really even
quite bother to pretend anymore that theyre serving some sort of national
interest. Its like the old bit about prison lifers who have told the same
jokes so many times that they just refer to them by number, then all bust up
in laughter. Its just that its so not funny. This is the root-menace to
any post-Neanderthal America one might envision, and we should never forget
just how we got to this ugly place now called home.
Nor should we ever forget the road not taken. The basic storyline is a
simple one. Beginning in the 1950s, following the massive mutual sacrifices
required to get through the Depression and the War, certain segments of
American society began demanding a little more mutuality when it came to the
benefits of that society as well. First African Americans, then women,
Native Americans and Latinos, and most recently LGBT folk, have successively
risen up to demand respect, dignity, equality of legal standing and
political power, and a fair share of American prosperity.
Lets be honest. Never were more reasonable demands made upon a society, and
the movements presented politicians with a simple choice to make: Which side
of history do you want to be on, the right one or the wrong one? Do you want
to be the guy who opposed independence in 1776, the Constitution in 1787,
ending slavery in the 1850s, and fighting fascism in the 1930s? Or do you
want to be the guy we revere in the history books were doing the right thing
at the right time, often at substantial personal cost?
Its a very rare thing for me to write a single sentence that includes both
the words politician and courageous between the dots, and theres a damn
good reason for that. But lets give credit where its due. When the chips
were down, many Democratsand certainly their leader, Lyndon Johnsontook
serious political risks in order to get on the right side of history, and
courageously advocated on behalf of out-groups who had little other voice
within the system. Notwithstanding the incredible sacrifices made by
millions on the street in order to realize civil rights goals, we should
never forget how different America would look today had somebody else been
in the White House in the 1960s, and had both political parties opted to
stand by silently and watch these movements be crushed by indifference and
backlash.
Nor should we forget the Newtonian complement to the political courage,
sheer decency, and moral vision of Johnson and the Democrats. While they
were doing the hard work for all the right reasons, over on the other side
of the aisle we saw an equal and opposite reaction from the Republican
Party, which continues down to this day. Their decision was to oppose legal
equality, moral dignity and societal inclusion every step of the way,
following a blueprint in which they literally labeled the approach as their
massive resistance strategy.
"I am literally hard put to imagine many greater acts of sheer cynicism and
repugnant human behavior than the Republican Partys track record over the
last 60 years."
Readers should pardon my naïveté, but I am literally hard put to imagine
many greater acts of sheer cynicism and repugnant human behavior than the
Republican Partys track record over the last 60 years. This is especially
true because I doubt seriously that elites within the party are themselves
essentially all that racist, sexist and homophobic at their core. My guess
is that a lot of them are actually pretty agnostic to these questions, and
indifferent to the answers. But what they know is that these are powerful
emotions that can be politically weaponized, and that is exactly what they
did for the last half-century, using the denial of the civil rights of one
group to appeal to the insecurities of another, so that they could meanwhile
pick the pockets of all of the above, which was their only real goal.
Seriously, are there lower forms of life than people who would do this?
Yeah, but now youre pretty much talking about slave-traders,
sex-traffickers, or war criminals.
As mentioned, there was always a specific target audience for this cynical
manipulation. Call it Cracker Nation if you like, though in some ways thats
a bit unfair. In truth, these (white, straight) Men Who Used To Be Kings
have suffered some genuine setbacks over the decades. If theyre lucky,
their standard of living has merely stagnated since 1980. If theyre less
lucky, the good job they once held now resides somewhere in Mexico, or more
likelysince even Mexican labor is now too expensivein Vietnam or Malaysia.
They have every right in the world to be angry at the hand theyve been
dealt, and I dont for a minute begrudge them those sentiments.
Where we depart from one another is in the domain of analysis and action.
People should feel free to be as politically ignorant (which is almost
always a polite way of saying lazy) as they want on their own nickel. But if
youre getting it dramatically wrong, and if youre willfully doing so at
the expense of other people, your laziness has now become a criminal act.
This is where Crackers have earned their reputation for idiocy and
brutality. Get up off of the sofa and spend ten percent of the time now
devoted to following the NFL or stock-car races, and any fool can figure out
that the real reason hes getting poor is because the One Percent is getting
richer, not because some immigrant from Guatemala stole his bedpan cleaning
job. But if youre just lazy and angry, and you like being lazy and angry,
then youre going to play a big role in putting Donald Trump in the White
House. And just think about how much their lives will improve once Herr Fury
has succeeded in deporting 10 or 12 million illegal immigrants. All those
Trump supporters will then have the privilege of paying more for their meals
when they dine out, paying more to get their lawn mowed, paying more for the
care of their parents at nursing homes, paying more to get their pickup
truck washed, and so on. Its tempting to say Congratulations, Tools!, but
in fact they will be happy campers. Its not really about standard of living
for these folk. Its about social status. What Trump gives them is the
satisfaction of seeing some brown persons ass get kicked, and reminding
them that there are folks lower on the totem pole than they are. And, at the
end of the day, thats what they really want.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are least as much to blame for the catastrophe of
Trump as are Republicans, starting with Hillary Clinton herself. In reality,
Clinton was so morally compromised a candidate, and so lacking any serious
rationale for her candidacy other than her own self-aggrandizement (as
leaked documents revealed, even the campaign couldnt figure out what their
appeal was supposed to be), that the only serious asset she brought to the
campaign was having Trump as her opponent. I mean that quite seriously. Had
the Republicans nominated anyone without the astonishing baggage that Trump
carried, its hard to imagine that Clinton would have ever had even a remote
chance to win. In the end, even going up against a gigantic voter-insult
machine wasnt enough, and that tells you something right there. If youre
so morally freighted a candidate that you cant even beat the guy with
sixteen built-in self-destruct buttons (including being an admitted sexual
predator) who is tweeting out messages that chew through alienated groups as
fast as his thumbs will allow, you must be one hell of an abysmal candidate.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce to you Hillary Rodham Clinton!
It is true, that the Clintons have been subjected to the boundless
dishonesty and destructive appetites of a genuine vast right-wing
conspiracy. However, for every false scandal imputed to Bill and Hillary,
theres a real one thats equally bad. Theyre just sleazy at the core, and
theyre breathtakingly self-interested. Theyre disgustingly entitled and
dishonest, and Hillary the nominee came by her record-setting low
favorability ratings more or less, er, honestly. Of course she was lying
when she concocted a reason for not releasing transcripts from her bazillion
dollar Wall Street speeches, and of course it came out when they were leaked
that she was saying something entirely different to the Lloyd Blankfeins of
this world that she was saying to the rest of us. Moreover, she admitted
right in the middle of one of those speeches that she had one face for
insiders, and one face for the rest of us. Quick, which audience do you
think got to hear from the real Hillary, Big Money or Stupid Voters?
Clinton also lost a lot of progressive supporters by voting for George W.
Bushs Iraq war resolution, as well she should have. In fact, she should
count yourself lucky that shes not sitting in some civil or criminal court,
or both, to answer for that crime. The lie that shes offered in the form of
some jive apology only compounds the sin of the original lie. Iraq, which
had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, was no threat to America in 2003,
and in fact wasnt even making threatening noises in our direction. Weapons
inspectors were on the ground, finding nothing, and begging for a few more
weeks to finish their job. Moreover, plenty of countries in the world had
weapons of mass destruction at that time, and nobody talked about launching
an invasion against China or Russia or even North Korea. And yet Clinton,
who never even bothered to read the intelligence dossier presented to
Congress, voted for the war resolution. Why? Everybody knows the answer to
that. She desperately wanted to be president and fearedperhaps especially
as a female candidatethat a no vote would make her look weak on national
security. So, now, somewhere between 100,000 and one million Iraqis,
Americans and others are dead, all lives sacrificed on the altar of the
personal careers of American politicians like Bush, Kerry and Clinton.
Again, please forgive my naïveté, but I just dont know how somebody like
that sleeps at night. To be honest, it seems to me that only a full-blown
sociopath could live with themselves, having traded so much human misery for
their own pathetic career ambitions.
Barack Obama also has fingerprints all over these election results, even
though most Democratic voters will never figure that out, and he is
therefore likely to go on down the years being a heroic icon to these
people, just like Bill Clinton has been for over a decade now. (Regrettably,
liberals can be virtually as dogmatic and irrational as conservatives on
these questions, and Clinton is Exhibit A. No oneReagan and Bush Jr.
includeddid more harm to the American middle class and to the Democratic
Party than did Clinton, for which they love him to this day.) In any case,
Obama set this election result up, just as skillfully as the Weimar Republic
set up the Nazis coming to power through the ballot box in 1933. In my
lifetime, I doubt there has been an occupant of the Oval Office with more
pure intellectual firepower than Barack Obama. But I also doubt whether
there has been one with anything remotely close to Obamas total lack of
understanding of the presidency itself, even at the end of two terms holding
that office.
Dont believe me? Take a quick pop quiz, and youll see what I mean. Ill
name a president, and all you have to do is shoot back two or three big
ideas or projects that president went to the mat to fight hard for, and with
which that president is indelibly associated. Okay? So, if I said FDR, youd
say saving the country from the Great Depression, fighting a global struggle
against fascism, and building Americas social safety net. If I say Ronald
Reagan, you say cutting taxes and fighting the Soviet Union. If I say Lyndon
Johnson, youd say civil rights and expanding the countrys social safety
net. If I say George W. Bush, you say cutting taxes, fighting terrorism,
going to war against Iraq. See how this works? You may not necessarily agree
with all of these policiesI certainly dontbut, all of these were highly
successful presidents on their own terms. In other words, they got what they
wanted, and they got it because they articulated so clearly what it was they
wanted, why it was (supposedly) urgent, and they did so over and over and
over again, incessantly, marshaling a full national campaign in order build
massive pressure for achieving their goal. Fair enough?
Now try it with Obama. Go ahead, Ill wait. No, really, give it a shot.
Drawing a blank? Yeah, me too. Maybe you could say Obamacare!, but
remember that while that was happening he more or less never once
articulated a vision for what he had in mind. All we knew was that he wanted
to do something with healthcare. And he sure as hell never sold it to the
American public before, during and after its absurdly protracted and
tumultuous legislative process. But what else is there? Gun control? Yeah,
for about five minutes. Civil rights? Thats a laugh. Jobs? Im not sure
Ive ever heard him speak the word.
Stop and think for a moment about what were saying here. This is the
Seinfeld presidency. Its a presidency about nothing. Thats not to say that
Obama didnt do a few good things, especially using his executive powers,
but by January 21 next year those will all be wiped out anyhow. More
importantly, even on issues where he has something of an admirable track
record, like climate change, he did absolutely nothingnothing!to move
public opinion and build a solid national ethos and a public willingness to
fight for something important.
The American presidency, as compared to other chief executives in other
democracies, is actually a relatively weak institution. What makes it
strong, and what successful presidents understand makes it strong, is
effective use of the bully pulpit. You have to lead. You have to persuade.
You have to be proud to have the enemies you do, and you have to punish them
publicly for their intransigence, their obvious self-interested motivations,
and their hostility to the public interest. You have to show some courage.
You have to be thematic. You have to demonstrate that you really, really
care about something, and explain to the public why they should really,
really care about it too. This is not a job for the aloof. Cerebral golfing
philosopher kings need not apply. They may get the office, but theyll never
get success.
Obama never understood the slightest bit of this, and his presidency has
been a woeful failure relative to the challenges of our times, in huge part
because of his lack of insight. And the cherry on top of that cakemake no
mistake about itis Donald Trump. When Obama came to office in 2009, people
were being crushed economically. Responding to their plight, no matter what
obstacles got in his way, should have been his first, second and third
priorities for his first two years in office. He should have presented a
clear and comprehensive solution to the crisis in peoples lives and pitched
it relentlessly. We should have gotten sick of constantly seeing him
fighting so hard for us. He should have never skipped a waking hour in
pointing out the (true) fact that his opponents to national recovery in the
Republican Party were putting personal politics above the survival of the
American people in a midst of a crisis. They shouldve been made to pay
dearly for their cynical intransigence.
"People want action and leadership from their president, they want passion
and a narrative, and they want the issues that affect their lives to be
addressed. If you dont give it to them, they will look further and further
afield until they find it."
But he did none of these things, instead bringing to Washington an
astonishing combination of arrogance and historical naïveté. Of the latter,
I was struck right from the beginning by the degree to which Obama and I
seem to have lived different realities for the past thirty years. Looking
back, I saw little but a wake of sheer institutional destruction to the
fabric of American democracy in the years of Reagan, Gingrich and Rove.
Obama, instead, just seemed to perceive some very nice men, having good
patriotic intentions, with whom he just happened to have a few minor policy
differences. He never understood his adversaries in the slightest, but boy
did they understand him. And then the bizarre arrogance thing kicked in,
because he also seemed to believe that he was the Kid Jesus figure who could
come to Washington and finally bring the (equally guilty, equally
intransigent) warring parties together over his holy body, and heal all the
wounds of the American Republic. No doubt Valerie Jarrett told him he could
do it (which pretty much seems to have been the totality of her job in the
White House) and so, hey, it must be true! In fact, no president has ever
been more completely rolled by the opposition than Barack Obama, ultimately
culminating in having his Supreme Court nomination shoved back in his face
while he haplessly sat on the sidelines whimpering (again) for an entire
year, knobby tire tread marks all over his body.
I mention all this in part because of the anger I feel towards this buffoon
who wasted eight years of opportunity, and who crushed the hopes of tens of
millions who believed in him. But mostly because this wholesale meltdown
calling itself the 44th presidency had so much to do with allowing a
civilizational catastrophe like Donald Trump to waltz into the White House.
People want action and leadership from their president, they want passion
and a narrative, and they want the issues that affect their lives to be
addressed. If you dont give it to them, they will look further and further
afield until they find it. Im not sure theres a more succinct way to
explain Election 2016 than these last two sentences. So, thanks Barack, and
thanks especially for the smug reminder that the sun will come up again
tomorrow, even as you welcome into the White House the very man who did more
than anyone in the entire world to delegitimize your presidency through
disgusting racist innuendo. Really, is there anything anyone can say to or
about Obama that might make him even slightly fighting mad? Evidently not.
So here we are, quite likely at the edge of some sort of apocalypse. And,
no, I dont use the term lightly. Scholars of the American presidency are
sometimes loath to look for explanations of behavior and outcomes in
personality traits, but the more I observe, the more I believe these factors
are just about everything. In particular, so many people who seek this
office are really seeking badly needed attention and validation which
presumably eluded them in their childhood years. I couldnt imagine trying
to understand, for example, the George W. Bush presidency without
understanding the sheer neediness of a guy whos family (correctly) told him
all throughout his life that he was a no-good piece of crap. And look at how
the whole world had to pay with incalculable amounts of blood and treasure
to satiate the needs of that one boy-man whose parents dropped the ball
sixty years ago.
"I genuinely believe that the American republic as a system of government,
built on a fabric of certain political norms and social trust, is deeply
imperiled for the first time in my lifetime."
Thats why, just to begin with, Trump scares me as much as he does. As
astrophysicists will tell you, any human being theoretically more needy than
Donald Trump would, according to the laws of physics, have to implode into a
black hole singularity, sucking some large chunk of the universe in with it
from the sheer gravitational strength of its neediness. If you could stuff
Silvio Berlusconis incessant compulsion to seek attention and control into
Vladimir Putins power matrix in Russian government, youd be getting pretty
close to where Trump will go if he can. It is not hyperbolic, for example,
to imagine the First Amendment and the entire American tradition of free
speech and a free press hanging in the balance. As we speak, Donald Trump is
now attacking the cast of Saturday Night Live and the musical Hamilton for
daring to speak to him. Imagine the pressure real media organizations are
going to come under, especially if they start reporting the rampant
corruption that will ooze out of every pore of this administration, and
especially if some national security emergency is used for cover in order
to attack them as insufficiently patriotic when troops are in the field. We
could go on and on here, but you get the idea. I genuinely believe that the
American republic as a system of government, built on a fabric of certain
political norms and social trust, is deeply imperiled for the first time in
my lifetime. And even if that is not the case, the destruction of the last
half-centurys hard-fought gains in equality at home seems highly likely,
and the potential for international wreckageperhaps based on some perceived
slight by some foreign leader toward El Jefeis almost limitless.
And, there will be almost no opposition. This will be far worse than even
the Bush years during the run-up to war. Trump, this joke being played upon
us by a sadistic cosmos, will have control of every branch of government,
and already he has called a meeting to lean hard on the press for lying
about him, when in fact their greed produced almost wall-to-wall coverage of
him throughout the campaign and was hardly surpassed as a factor in helping
him get elected. Remember how quickly they folded when Bush/Cheney/Rove hit
town, and how the liberal New York Times even abetted the administration
in selling its dirty little war? The sheer potential darkness of this moment
cannot be overstated.
In this context, nothing is more disheartening than the insane discussion by
Democratic Party elites of finding issues on which they can cooperate with
the new Trump administration. Even if this wasnt a complete fools errand,
in which these punks will be used and discarded like so much spent toilet
paper, the idea of cooperating with these people on anything is noxious
beyond belief. This administration has delegitimized itself by the very
campaign that it ran. It is corrupt, it is dishonest, it is racist, is
sexist, it is predatory, and it is antithetical to core American values. If
the Democratic Party had the slightest shred of integrity left to it, it
would spend the next four years relentlessly probing and publicly assaulting
this administration on all these fronts, never once tainting itself with any
association of any sort.
Heck, maybe Satan himself has a redeeming quality or twothe stylish swish
of his tail, or the warmth of his breath on a cold winter night. I dont
know.
But I do know that if you cooperate with him, you legitimize him, you assist
him, and you abet him.
Andultimatelyyou are him.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
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David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra
University in New York.
