Whenever I find myself holding hands with political Pollyannas, and someone foolishly yells “Red Rover Red Rover, send Chris Hedges right over,” I cringe, close my eyes, and wait for the impact of the Tasmanian Devil himself. Seriously, this guy’s columns should come with a warning label: “Not to be read by anyone displaying signs of clinical depression or prone to suicidal ideation.”
Case in point: His latest weekly Monday column at Truthout.org is titled “The Election March of the Trolls,” a why-bother-to-vote preview of the upcoming 2012 national election. It begins thusly:
We have begun the election march of the trolls. They have crawled out of the sewers of public relations firms, polling organizations, the commercial media, the two corporate political parties and elected office to fill the airwaves with inanities and absurdities until the final inanity—the 2012 presidential election. Journalists, whose role has been reduced to purveyors of court gossip, whether on Fox or MSNBC, descend in swarms to report pseudo-events such as the Ames straw poll, where it costs $30 to cast a ballot. And then, almost immediately, they blithely inform us that the Iowa poll is meaningless now that Rick Perry has entered the race. The liberal trolls, as they do in every election cycle, are beating their little chests about the perfidiousness of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. It is a gesture performed not to effect change but to burnish their credentials as moralists. They know, as do we, that they will trot obediently into the voting booth in 2012 to do as they are told. And everywhere the pulse of the nation is being assiduously monitored through polls and focus groups, not because our opinions matter, but because our troll candidates understand that by parroting back to us our own viewpoints they can continue to spend their days lapping up corporate money with other trolls in the two houses of Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and television studios where they chat with troll celebrity journalists.
IOW, the fix is in. While a Democrat in the White House might mean a few more crumbs for the peasants to scrap over, decades of determined, well funded corporatist infiltration of the American government has succeeded in turning what was once a viable representative democracy into an oligarchic, plutocratic “payground.” Recall Benjamin Franklin‘s answer to a woman waiting outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall where the Constitutional Convention was finalized:
“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic, if you can keep it,” Franklin replied.
As conditional clauses go, that’s a pretty big IF. To Hedges and others, history has answered Franklin’s formulation in the negative. At the other end of the progressive spectrum, we are told by the likes of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and leading progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann that “Despair is not an option.” To which a cynic might reply “No, it’s a freakin reality.”
Hartmann encourages Dems to adopt the same strategy that the Teabaggers used to gain control of the GOP’s nomination process: take over the political levers of the party at the level of precinct captains, a low budget investment of energy that determines who actually gets on the ticket, thus minimizing the influence of Big Money. Bottom line for Hartmann is that the next president will likely nominate one or two Supreme Court Justices during his or her first term. Justices Kennedy and Scalia are both 75, Breyer is 73, and Ginsburg, who bears the additional burden of having undergone surgeries for both colon and pancreatic cancer, is the oldest at 78. (It should be noted that there is no upper or lower constitutional age limits for SC justices, meaning there’s nothing to stop a future Rethug dominated government from nominating, say, Trig Palin. )
Hartmann argues that a Republican president could cement an already reactionary court for decades to come, and that Democratic nominated justices could at least turn the court back to a more moderate direction. But that argument is considerably weakened by current political realities. With 33 senate seats up for grabs in 2012, the Rethugs need only win a net 4 to give them control of the Senate and effective veto power over any Obama nominees (assuming he wins his own election, which at this stage is looking ever less likely; see below). Not only do they have the numbers on their side– 10 seats in play versus 23 for the Dems (which includes the two independent seats occupied by Bernie Sanders and Traitor Joe Lieberman), they can look forward to unlimited amounts of corporate cash from plutoctrats like the Koch Brothers, the Walton family, the Mellon-Scaife contingent, et al, thanks to the Supremes’ ruling in Citizens United.
In addition, the traditional bi-partisan comity that once prevailed over the nomination and vetting process has been relegated to a quaint artifact from the past, replaced with the militant just say no to everything Obama attitude that the Teabaggers have brought to the table. Add President Obama‘s unblemished track record of pre-emptive capitulation on anything the Rethugs object to and Hartmann’s argument begins to look a lot less convincing.
Hedges believes that our current two party political system is a duopoly, controlled by the powers that be through an unrelenting campaign of fear directed at both ends of the political spectrum, modified as needed to fit the particular psyches of individuals who identify with either of the two wings of what others have termed the Republicrat Party.
“For those, usually liberals, still rooted in a reality-based world, one that believes in evolutionary science, the corporate trolls offer a more refined, fear-based message of impending doom: If you abandon the Democrats we will be governed by Bible-thumping idiots who will make us chant the Pledge of Allegiance in mass rallies and teach the account of Genesis as historical and biological fact in our nation’s schools.”
[…]
“The trolls dominate or have neutralized every major institution in the country on behalf of their corporate paymasters. The press, education, Wall Street, labor and our political parties are managed by trolls or have been destroyed by them. Sometimes these trolls speak like liberals. Sometimes they speak like conservatives. Sometimes they are secular. Sometimes they are Christians. But the language they use is a cover for the relentless march toward a totalitarian capitalism and a kingdom where the trolls, if not the rest of us, live happily ever after. Rick Perry and John Boehner overtly make war on Social Security. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi say they would like to save Social Security but are sadly powerless before the decisions of a congressional super committee they helped form. The result, of course, is the same. We get to choose the rhetoric and manner in which we are deceived and disempowered. Nothing more.”
Rather than wasting time and energy on traditional two-party Republicrat kabuki exercises, Hedges recommends the kind of direct actions that brought progressives and unions to power during the worst corporate excesses of the prior Gilded Age. Yes, you might be arrested and maybe have your head cracked opened by the 21st century version of the Pinkerton goon squad. And given the expanded powers of the 21 st century US Surveillance State instituted by the Bush Administration and expanded under the Obama Administration (not even W had the guts to publicly order a hit on an American citizen without due process), you could easily find your social security number in any number of cross-linked databases that could spell personal and professional ruin. But that’s the price of freedom in today’s America, which could learn some things from the current spate of public uprisings in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring.
Hedges continues:
“The trolls have gamed the system. There is no economic, political or environmental reform, from campaign finance to environmental controls, that can be implemented to impede the march of the corporate state. The rot and corruption at the top levels of our financial and political systems, coupled with the increasing deprivation felt by tens of millions of Americans, are volatile tinder for revolt. And the trolls are prepared for this too. They have put in place draconian state controls, including widespread internal surveillance, to silence our anemic left. They know how to direct the rage of the right wing toward the last pockets of the cultural, social and political establishment that cling to traditional liberal values, as well as toward the most vulnerable among us including Muslims, undocumented workers and homosexuals. They will make sure we consume ourselves.”
While the average hard working American might not appreciate the finer nuances of Hedges’ argument, they do know that something is rotten in Denmark the US. According to a Gallup Poll released today, the percentage of Americans who had a positive or somewhat positive view of the US government has gone from a peak of 29% during the first years of the Obama Administration to only 17% today. Those with a negative view of government peaked at 60% during the last year of the Bush Administration, fell to 54% during the first two years of the Obama Administration, but now stands at 63%– 3 points higher than the worst level of the Bush years.
Obama can talk the talk, but he has largely failed to walk the walk. Picking up the baton from the Bushies, he continued the Wall Street bailout while paying little more than lip service to Main Street. He lent trillions of dollars at virtually no interest to the former while naively trusting that such unprecedented largess would magically trickle down to the latter in the form of small business loans and relief for homeowners, many of whom were steered into sub prime loans by those self-same Wall Street Bankstas who engineered the real estate bubble to begin with.
Hedges again:
“… the most radical and retrograde forces within the body politic have seized control. These forces demand that we serve the dictates of the marketplace. They are destroying all legal impediments to corporate exploitation and profit, as well as dismantling the regulatory agencies that once protected the citizen. They defend torture, offshore penal colonies, black sites and kidnapping (they call it “extraordinary rendition”) of state enemies. They protect and abet financial fraud. They wage pre-emptive war. They refuse to restore habeas corpus. Without warrants, they monitor, eavesdrop on and wiretap tens of millions of citizens. They order the assassination of U.S. citizens. They deny due process. They give corporations the status of persons. They ignore the suffering of the unemployed and the poor, slashing basic social service programs while doling out hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds to corporations. On these key issues, the only ones that really matter, there is no disagreement among trolls from either the self-identified left or the self-identified right. All their public disputes in the election cycle are a carnival act.”
AKA: Kabuki theater. At least the Soviets, when trying to put a positive spin on their failed economic policies, could and did stage Potemkin Village sideshows designed to foster the illusion of a prosperous commonwealth. Given the nature of our independent, corporatist media, the Obama Administration has no such luxury. The best he can do is try to prove a negative: Absent the Administration’s compromised stimulus program, things would have been a whole lot worse. That might prove persuasive to a colloquium of academics, but will hardly fly with the average American voter, who, after all is said and done, vote their wallets.
As the LA Times reported August 9:
After holding steady at about 60% for most of the year — and spiking to 70% in May when U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden — the chances that Obama would be reelected next year have plunged this month just like the Dow Jones industrial average.
After Monday’s sharp selloff, political futures trading on the site pegged Obama’s odds at 50.7%. And despite Tuesday’s market turnaround, Obama’s odds in early trading on Intrade had dropped to 50%.
In the interests of demonstrating their commitment to green technologies like recycling, the Obama campaign team might consider employing any unused 2008 campaign bumper stickers like “Change We Can Believe In” and “You Are The Change You Seek” with scribbled addendums like “Eventually” or “Maybe” or more honestly, “Just Kidding.”
The only potentially good election news for the Dems is that the Rethugs will overplay their hand, an example of which was provided by Teabagger darling Rep. Eric Cantor’s demand today that emergency disaster relief for victims of natural catastrophes like Hurricane Irene wait until matching cuts can be agreed to elsewhere in the budget.
As has been said many times before, hope is not a strategy. But given their recent record of leaving the political battle field with their tail between their legs, hoping that the Rethugs self-destruct may be the Dems’ only viable election strategy.
