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As America Declines, Don't Expect Anyone To Talk About It

Is our political system too far gone to even discuss the predicaments of the volatile dollar, run-amok debt and Middle East disasters? Rarely in U.S. history has a president, especially a two-term president, been so unpopular at a time when the Congress, captured in the midterm elections by the opposition, is held in no greater regard. In such a case, the norm is for the two to fight, with one side gaining the edge. But that has not been true of George W. Bush and the Democratic Congress elected by running against him in 2006. The two sides have gone after each other in a fashion, but more often they have simply talked past each other to their separate party constituencies, repeating familiar commitments to keep the true believers on each side somewhat more contented than the unimpressed independents -- those who bulk so large in the 60 to 70 percent of voters convinced that the country is on the wrong track.Most office holders on both sides seem to rest easier if everyone stays away from uncomfortable themes, even ones in the headlines, like costly U.S. overreach in the Middle East; the reckless expansion of private debt,

as well as the federal budget deficit variety; the new economic (and political) dominance of the financial sector; and the mounting probability that the nation will have to choose between desirable energy supplies and global warming measures.

After all, what you can sidestep today might go away tomorrow. True, the public is not impressed -- "no guts" and "living in a dream world" are frequently heard descriptions of politicians. However, most big party contributors tend to donate based on established relationships and sympathies or on nonideological desire for access, not on philosophical engagement. No parallel to the simultaneous public distaste for a president and his opposition Congress comes to mind, but then modern polling goes back only to the 1930s. Let me stipulate: despite the obvious salience of predicaments like oil, climate, the volatile dollar, run-amok debt and credit, the housing bubble, and imperial over-involvement in the Middle East, I would be the last to say that any more than 5 to 10 percent of the electorate would favor a 2008 debate over American decline. Average voters do not. In these matters, history does not merely urge caution; it demands skepticism -- and about both public attention and likely governmental achievement.

It is necessary to consider two other symptoms of weak, even failed U.S. politics: the entrenchment in Washington of a staggering array of interest groups, which has engendered a soulless political dynamic of perpetually raising and dispersing campaign funds; and the further, bipartisan trend toward what can only be called a politics of inheritance and dynasty. Money politics and entrenched interests -

The English-speaking peoples, when filling in new lands, had a certain naviete about the power of entrenched interests and how these could be subdued by locating a political capital in a remote federal preserve far from the existing centers of (corrupting) urbanity and wealth. The capitals were thus located in backwaters at a time when geography trumped media (Washington, D.C., Ottawa, and Canberra); but today, those names have become shorthand in their respective electorates for (1) metropolitan areas with strikingly high (and recession-resistant) per capita incomes; and (2) hothouses of seething interest-group concentration where elected representatives, shedding whatever grassroots fealty they may once have possessed, often train to retire after ten or twelve years to triple or even quintuple their salaries by becoming lobbyists. As an aspiring theorist four decades ago, I developed a belief that the realignments seen in U.S. presidential politics every generation or so had an (idealized) cleaning-up component. The victors, with a mandate of sorts from an annoyed electorate rearranged in new party coalitions, came to the capital city and purged it of the used-up elites of the crowd that had just been voted out.

Some of that occurred after Thomas Jefferson's election in 1800, Andrew Jackson's in 1828, Abraham Lincoln's in 1860, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's in 1932. At any rate, it didn't happen after the 1968 election, although Republicans held the White House for twenty of the next twenty-four years. And it certainly hasn't happened since. Congress and the White House have been in the hands of different parties two-thirds of the time since 1968, so the United States has progressed to a new kind of interest-group influence: the simultaneous entrenchment in Washington of the used-up, don't-want-to-go-back-to-Peoria elites of both major parties. This electoral duopoly is in turn protected by various state and federal election and campaign-finance laws that make it hard for new parties to take hold or flourish.

It's not that there aren't differences between the parties; it's just that they are limited differences and ones often reflecting cultural polarization. In the early 1980s, an American sociologist by the name of Mancur Olson published a book called The Rise and Decline of Nations. Its thesis was that decline comes because after many years of success, a nation's political and economic arteries get so clogged with special-interest groups that its life-giving circulation of ideas

and elites is impaired. Countries that are beaten in wars and occupied receive a new lease on life because their old interest-group structures get uprooted. He dwelled on Britain, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, none successfully invaded or occupied over the last few centuries, as examples of impaired political and economic circulation. Olson misjudged the links between inflation and political failure, but his interest-group focus may have a partial utility in explaining political and governmental entrenchment and decline. If one goes back and looks at the capital cities of the four previous leading world economic powers, in later eras attempts were made to divide, abandon, or relocate them. Capitals in both Rome and Spain were relocated -- in the fifth century A.D. the Roman capital moved to Ravenna, and Spain's for a while moved from Madrid to Valladolid. Concern about elites that were calcified and verging on permanence worried people then, too.

Parties and factions can also run out of creativity. British party politics was chaotic in the decades between the two world wars, which limited innovation and complicated any prospect of renewal. There is little more to be said for U.S. party politics in the early 2000s. The Republicans were discredited by eight years of failure in war, diplomacy, and fiscal honesty, and the Democrats won no laurel wreaths for effective opposition. Institutionally, the 180-year-old Democratic Party and the 150-year-old Republican Party have, over the last 40 years, uprooted themselves from what were their constituencies and allegiances as late as the 1960s. Gone on the Democratic side is the southern and western geography of opposition to northeastern financial elites under the aegis of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. Instead, there is a new Democratic politics of new national elites -- financial, high-tech, and communications.

The Republicans, in turn, have lost many of their old, post-Civil War northern and western constituencies and biases, turning to the South and the interior West and a combination of old-line northern business elites and the Sun Belt power structure so ascendant in the late twentieth century. For both parties, the bottom line is usually the same: the bottom line. Fund-raising. Money. Comparative rootlessness makes it easy.

By Kevin Phillips

Fictions and truths

Posted by: talkville on Apr 8, 2008 1:24 AM

Yet again, in a strange post-modern way, we find ourselves "in the best of times and the worst of times": our Two Cities, that one up there in the corporate and financial worlds where bonuses rise to ethers and life is sweet and ever so, well... downright Delicious! and then This One, where most of us are living, well -- not so much. Via fictions like those Charles Dickens conceived and published we wind ourselves towards truths such as Mr Phillips points to in this piece. And it is very much true that what is most required is that skepticism and that caution noted; these are not days of impulse. Not only our political but also our economic, social and cultural systems (which are processes, really) are under attack, and I think it's a very well thought out, constructed, deliberate and single-minded attack by a particular historical contingent that cannot be described other than by the term Radical and is most definitely of the Right side of the political spectrum. They range from authoritarians to outright fascist opinions and beliefs; they believe in 'top-down' rule and they believe in force and in un-questioned power.

They are religious and they are secular; they use religion and they use science. They rose gently during the 80's and more and more vehemently to our own present times and we are only beginning to see the effects and experience the apparatus that has been (and is being) built to maintain it. Ours is indeed a Tale of Two Cities (Them and Us) and is definitely a time for each citizen to take stock. One aspect that seems singularly weak these days in thinking (and acting) our way through this assault on our Constitutional framework being stretched beyond breaking points is a concept that has been mentioned by those such as Istvan Meszaros and others: Self-Critique. I

t goes hand in hand with the caution and skepticism mentioned by Mr Phillips. It is always much easier to look Outwards and analyze, study, act upon and mobilize against or for the multitude of factors that are raining down upon us from every quarter. Less easy to take some time and look Inward. Is my thinking and activity helping or hurting efforts to bring each of us closer to justice, to equity, to dignity? For the short-run? For the long-term? For me? For my family? For my society and my culture? For my species? Skepticism, caution, critique - inward and towards the outside; but we must face those 'uncomfortable themes and issues" Mr Phillips spoke of -- honestly, with integrity, and in the interests of This City, ours.

From the individual all the way to the species and the environment in which we thrive (or don't). And towards all those facts AND values which point toward justice, peaceful coexistence, dignity, equity, justice; towards and not away from truth. "The Best of times and the Worst of times" (a value question involving reason, science and ethics and not least what is called "The Will") brings always a window and an opportunity for great things, great advances, better conditions; or it can bring almost (but not quite) un-thinkable and un-mitigated and un-speakable disasters. Our political, social, cultural and economic processes accomodate both possibilities. "We the People" and NOT "We the Volk" -- the edges are always thin, dangerously thin! Each of us has skeptical, cautionary but very worthwhile work to do. I think it can be done in this City and on this planet. A better world is possible.

HOW HOT?

Posted by: skizum on Apr 8, 2008 5:17 AM

It's true that a solid core of political players have been recycled since the mid 60's and we have not paid much attention to it. In part, because the country had gone through a cleansing process which yielded strides in civil rights, extricating ourselves form a war of choice, womenâ€™s rights, environmental regulation and to a lesser extent, gay and lesbian rights. The peace and progressive movements had worked hard to overcome extreme repression and abusive dominance. Understandably, people were tired after these epic struggles to produce tangible "˜victories". Under increasingly less perceived repressive stress, compared to the mid 60's, the following generations until now have continued to carry the slowing momentum forward. Simultaneously, our consumer society continuously provides an ever-increasing amount of distractions for us to independently purchase identity and acquire individualistic psychological security. We have become the "me" society where most of us fail to act with compassion towards one another.

The focus of our individual search for and realization of, identity has been turned outward to become increasingly influenced by the externally manipulated and idealized imagery of material success. The myriad of competing external influences has led us to become significantly distracted, segregated, complacent and fearful of facing the realities of our own human behavior. I believe it's time for us to start to courageously face the realities of the human condition; to take an honest look inward and understand what drives us humans to create the world as it is. Perhaps by doing so, we might learn to better recognize the roots of why we are fundamentally motivated to act, and to what degree we are willing to act in order to get what we want or stay off that which we do not want.

Are wants driven by a deeper set of needs? Are these needs universal to us all anyway? Is it possible that we all can get what we need and want without relying purely on material consumption? In any case, the world will continue to get hotter in many ways, the question is how badly will we get burned before we stop reaching towards the fire? Learning hot is the basis of our ability to exercise good risk taking judgment. Experiencing the consequences of various degrees of "hot" develops our first ideas about security. In order to increase the chances of improving our world, we need to develop the motivational will to unite and act; I hope this is not forced upon us by survival. There are many things we can all do to initiate this process, the first thing is to come clean and face our own worlds as they truly are. We need to learn to communicate with the objective of understanding someone else's perspective.

This might give us some practice "letting go" of some deeply entrenched beliefs thus allowing ourselves the freedom to open our own perspectives to mutual benefit. This would require that we also learn to stop lying to manipulate situations or avoid confrontations. It's time to build our own ideal societies at home, work, in the neighborhood and anywhere else we interact with each other; spending more time face to face with each other laying out our deepest issues of desire in straight-forward honest terms. Practicing sharing these types of experiences is a viable path to creating a more perfect union. Start at home and create an environment where good practices can be experimented with, learned and shared --try actually living your ideals. Right now many of us are caught up in the game of wearing noble words like suits that conceal our sweat stained preconceived desires. We are isolated from each other by ideas; let's unite around ideas that have a commonly shared truth for us all.

The end is near, and we all know it

Posted by: Farasien on Apr 8, 2008 5:40 AM

We, the lemmings of the former USA have a pervading sense that something has happened, something world-changing, and know its eventual outcome. If you look around at things at this moment in history, you can see that people know something big has happened, even if they don't really have the definitions for it. Its obvious in our pervading nhilistic policies and rampant all-out race to the bottom on virtually every front. To me it seems that people don't, deep down, believe that the world is going to get better. In fact, most seem to be betting that it won't. Instead, or so it seems over the last decade or so, most are trying to party themselves to death, hoping that the coming disasters will somehow pass them over, or if not, that they'll have so much of a hangover from the binge that they won't notice the pain of them. Its most obvious in the USA at the moment.

People know the moral bankruptcy of the Oil War, know the ultra-rich (both the corporations AND the political elite) have sold us all down the river and are busy fighting over who gets the largest payout for the last remnants of the soul of the nation... But who cares! Whenever the corruption starts getting too obvious to hide, do people take to the streets? No. Do people demand a real change and back it with the threat of force? No. Do the lackwits in the media even bother to point it out? NO! What do we do, then? We turn on the Game and crack a beer. We delve a little deeper into American Idol. We go shopping at the mall. We immerse ourselves into the unending soap operas that pervade what we pathetically have come to call 'popular culture' and tune out.

There is no single generation to blame for this- young and old, black and white, men and women all are doing the same thing, and with the same end result. Oh, there's a war going on? Two? Another on the way? Like, wow. The economy is about to collapse? Really? You don't say... Hey, did you hear who got kicked off on Idol last night? Who won the final four? Didja hear what Hillary or Obama or McCain said the other day? Hey, guess who just announced they're pregnant in Hollywood! Vomit. People are going to continue doing this until they are literally starving in the streets. Our appointed leaders have learned the lessons of statecraft from Cesar all too well. Give them blood and circuses until they die of it and you can do anything, LITERALLY anything, you want. The whores in DC have rigged the system such that almost nothing short of riots and almost full anarchy will disinfect them from the halls of power. We deserve the coming hellstorm. We have the nation we really do want. God damn us all.

1973 Posted by: kungfoofighterx on Apr 8, 2008 7:02 AM

This country has been in an economic decline at the level of the individual since 1973. That is last year things went well for the average citizen in an adjusted earnings sense (if money can actually measure wellness even though it is highly correlated). People talk about the decline of the USA. Lots of people have been talking about the decline in a great many things from morals to car sales. It is everywhere. People talk about it. People talk about it a lot. It has been talked about since I was a child and I can remember watching talking heads on the black and white TV go about the decline. Unfortunately, it is hard for those affected by the decline do anything about it. Votes don't mater in a national two party system while power is consolidate at the federal level. The party gets to pick who runs.

Now the media gets to pick whatever candidates they want to show you. That's a real blow to national democracy. The vast majority of people vote within the two parties. The two parties are very similar on almost every topic. There is no lack of creativity. Unfortunately lately that creativity has been used to sucker and swindle money. Too many of our representatives have gone to jail because they applied their creativity towards selfish ends. My real question. Are the citizens the ones who are in decline? And not along the wow the past was so much better thing. I mean a functional decline from the mind to the belly.

http://alternet.org/story/81652/

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