By Madeleine KandoI am ill-equipped to write about politics. All I have in my arsenal is an instinct for the ‘right’ thing. But even that is failing me as I am struggling to make sense of the events of the past year: the economic crisis, the ruins left behind by the Bush administration, the unemployment rate.. above all this nation’s resistance to health care reform.
I don’t think that even the most knowledgeable academician could explain to me what is going on in America today. How did we get to a place where it is tacitly accepted that the poor have to bail out the super rich, or the whole country might sink into a depression (as we are told).
One source I found to cope with my confusion is in a book by Thomas Frank: ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas’. Frank tries to make sense of the transformation of his home state of Kansas, which has turned from a populist left-wing state to a state controlled by conservative, pro-business, right-wing evangelical Christians.
He asks the sensible question: how so many people can vote against their own economic interests? His explanation rings true in my opinion. Conservative politicians have managed to deny the ‘economic’ basis for the difference in social classes. They have replaced it with a ‘cultural’ basis. They have branded left-wing liberals as those latte drinking vegetarians who don’t like guns. It is clever. By removing the ‘economic factor’ as a source of discontent conservative leaders find no opposition to their free-market, laissez-faire, lower taxes for the rich policies. By keeping people angry about cultural issues such as family values, intelligent design or abortion and gay rights, they are masking their true motivation: keeping the system friendly to unregulated, run-away capitalism.
This might explain why so many poor people are against health care reform. Health care reform equals government intervention. It infringes on a person’s privacy and right to self-determination (the right to not get affordable health care when they are sick?)
But this phenomenon of polluting true politics with ‘cultural’ issues is also a disease of the liberal left. Rather than pushing for more equality and economic security they concentrate instead on gay rights, pro-choice and anti-school prayer. As important as those issues might be, I consider them far less important than the fact that 14% of families in america suffer from food insecurity. That on any given night there are a million homeless people on the streets.
How did we come to accept the inevitability of so much inequality? The liberals have long ago stopped talking to the ‘working class’ and in a sense they have what is coming to them: an opposition that is much better at manipulating politics.
Sometimes it seems that the word 'liberal' is becoming a dirty word and that its true meaning is becoming so tarnished that before long there may only be different shades of conservatism. We have a Democratically dominated House and Senate and a Democratic Presidency, and yet the government is unable to pass a health care bill, which is clearly the wish of a majority of Americans. leave comment here
6 comments:
amen
A very eloquent and troubling statement. Troubling because so true. I have made the very same points in several posts, for example in " Are Identity Politics and Culture Wars Necessary?" (October 20), in "Useful Idiots?" (On the absence of class consciousness in America)(September 1), and in "Why are Democrats richer than Republicans?" (March 12).
Let me just add the following:
Some of the paralysis in American politics (E.g on Health Care, or the chronic California budget crisis) has to do with some built-in systemic flaws, such as asinine super-majority rules that require 60 Senate votes and two-third majorities in many state houses (E.g. California) to pass legislation. In fact, the very power of the Senate - an undemocratic Upper House - is an anachronism.
The two senators who represent Wyoming's half million people (including Dick Cheney) have the same power as the two who represent California's 38 million. By cleverly exploiting this antiquated system, the Republican plutocracy is able to maintain the status quo in American politics.
However, I hope, and I believe, that this country will return to the rich progressive tradition which is an equally important part of its heritage: Time and again in American history, the good finally triumphed over error.
I believe that it was Winston Churchill who said, lovingly, that “Americans always end up doing the right thing - after having tried every other possible solution.”
During the Civil War, half a million Americans died to abolish slavery. FDR’s New Deal during the 1930s represented a great progressive surge for the people. The Unions, Hollywood, the folk music, all of American culture was massively liberal. During World War Two, another half a million Americans died to rid the world of fascism. During the sixties, the people spontaneously rose to end a misguided war and to advance civil rights. Most recently, Americans elected the first African-American head of state of any Western country. I believe that America will do the right thing again in the future, as it has done in the past, even if it first tries every wrong alternative.
Brilliant!!
Becky Foreman
St. Paul, MN
When you talk about "the Left," it's important to distinguish between the citizens on the Left from the politicians on the Left.
I agree the politicians on both sides of the aisle are corrupted by big monied interests, via pressures from lobbies and campaign donations. But I think what Madeleine perceives the Left-leaning citizens are doing, and not doing, is not reality. It's an image projected by the commercial, mainstream media (MSM), which is comprised of managed, for-profit corporations with major investments in the defense industry, Big Oil & Coal, etc., and possessing very rich, powerful lobbies in Washington. Journalists are micro-managed by supervisors, and ultimately what gets printed and what gets deleted is decided at the top.
The effect of this commercial control of our media is often underestimated, as it is in Madeleine's piece, because we like to think we are a "free" nation. But MSM is not free at all. And, as our founding fathers warned, a democracy cannot function without a free press.
Whether we get our news by radio, newspaper, TV or all three, we don't notice what is missing until we begin to hear about independent web sites. We may hear about them by word of mouth or through progressive journals like "The Nation." Then we begin to see MSM, as well as the Left, through a different lens.
For example, estimates of numbers of anti-war protesters during the Bush years were either severely under-reported by MSM, or they weren't reported on at all. MSM wants Republicans to stay in office because the CEOs want to continue to pay as little tax as possible. So MSM lobbies heavily for Republican candidates. Go to www.fair.org (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and you can see statistically valid analyses of MSM. They'll invite 2 conservatives for every 1 liberal on their talk shows, for example. These studies have been going on for years, and I've been watching this problem closely. My opinion is based on facts from FAIR and other independent, non-commercial media watchdog groups.
MSM wants the public to believe that the Left is simply reacting in a narrow and knee-jerk fashion to the silly challenges by the Right. They want to project the image of the progressive Left as "elitist," and out of touch with the working masses so they can continue to exploit the working masses by keeping their own taxes extremely low.
And by the way, no one I know self-identifies as "Liberal" anymore. It's a label that has gotten so kicked around by the Right that it's been dropped and replaced with "Progressive." Concerned about poverty in America? There are now more than 600,000 members of the "Aggressive Progressives" -- a new netroots branch of the Democratic Party, that tries to elect candidates who will tackle this ever-growing problem in our nation.
Madeleine's piece doesn't mention the important force of the new netroots on the Left, without which Obama could not have been elected. I can only assume she's not participating in netroots, and gets her news instead via MSM, or else she would have a less narrow view of what the Left has really been up to.
And let me add that, sadly, NPR is no longer very different from commercially controlled stations because they now get most of their funding from the likes of Archer Daniels Midland (huge defense company) and WalMart. They say they're supported by "listeners just like you" because a portion of their funding comes from individual donations, but that slice of the pie has been narrowing every year. Progressive bloggers are so dismayed with the commercial control of NPR that it is a frequent issue in the blogosphere. One piece that came out last year was entitled "The Militarization of NPR." Has anyone noticed how the air time devoted to war coverage has increased enormously in the last few years?
Food Insecurity?? You've go to be kidding! Have you seen how fat those people are on welfare?
Franks's hypothesis on cultural politics has been disproved with Republican wins in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts which were fought on the basis of economics and the incompetence of Obama and the Democrat party.
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