Fear and Loathing in America

SEARCHING

When did it start…this disturbing division in America which we feel and read and talk about?

Because to blame it on the real estate developer and TV reality show host who became President is taking a very easy way out. Everybody loves a scapegoat. And this one is perfect: with the ego and self-involvement, the mean mouth, the easy way with a lie and an excuse, magnifying every little event so that it is “historic” if it makes him look good and the worst of all events if it doesn’t.

He’s just designed and trained to take advantage of what America has become…someone able to make it obvious and rub our noses in it. He’s actually doing us a favor if we have the courage to see what this division is really about. It started a long, long time before he was even a glint in someone’s eye.

Maybe with the Founding Father’s: Small businessmen, commercial traders, farmers, cotton-growers, slave holders and slave traders with a few brilliant legal and scholarly minds among them, who wrote us an extraordinary Constitution which promised the people of this fledgling country an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with an added sprinkle of “being created equal” and “justice for all” and “freedom of opportunity”.

There had never been such a document, so explicit in its desire to develop something important. Living in barely twenty percent of what would become a continent-sized country with more than 330 million people, could they have genuinely believed that such promises were nothing more than expedient, very attractive lies to bring together 13 colonies with very different aspirations?

Whatever the answer to that question, those promises have driven our idea of America for more than 300 years and pollinated our growth, power and influence…so that the entire 20th Century became America’s century.

Indivisible with justice and liberty for all. The World’s peoples wanted to come here for that promise and they did.

Have we outlived the promise? Was it true once but not now?

Or maybe this intense division we are experiencing now is the result of the dissolution of the political parties which became the basis for the electoral system of a democratic republic. The names changed over the years but we came through the 19th and 20th centuries with the Democratic and Republican parties intact and essentially in control. They were the basis for our local and national politics…clearly identified, involved with running the government, solving local and regional problems, providing jobs as well as well as keeping things in order.

Today the Democratic Party of FDR and LBJ is long gone. The New Deal, the Great Society did what they could for more than half a century. That Democratic Party – recognizing the ultimate power of good government involvement, gave working people job and built a middle class — an extraordinary economic development in World History. It made the best use of capitalism for the greatest number of people. It gave the Democratic Party its identity.

And then when it wore out, when money alone couldn’t provide the answers, came Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party serving the population that Republicans strove to serve; those who believed in limited government, reduced taxes, the individual’s role in society without government involvement. It talked about a ‘safety net’ for the very people who had gained strength during the Democratic years. Corporations and those in the upper income grow gained as economic inequality grew exponentially.

The brief revival of Democrats under Bill Clinton did not last as Clinton “triangulated” what Republicans had been doing with a realistic approach to money and those who had it. Whatever identity remained before Clinton was gone after his eight years in office.

Mistakes abroad and economic fears at home had swept through the GOP in a rising tide of conservative populism…making it difficult to know what ‘conservative ‘ actually meant. The concept of small government, balanced budgets and the libertarian idea of leaving people alone was suddenly gone replaced by economic nationalism, anti-immigration policies and the attempt to enshrine evangelical morality into political law.

As the political parties became more and more similar, the true power underneath government policies became money – money in amounts never before seen in this nation’s history. And as more and more money fell into the hands of fewer people and larger and larger corporations, it was possible to simply buy policies by electing people who would’ sell’ their vote to you for money to keep them in office.

And maybe there is where this division had its roots: when running for public office became a career and not simply a public service. Nowhere in our research have we found evidence that the Founding Fathers ever believed that such an idea would take hold. They began this nation with a President who really didn’t want to serve and had to be convinced that his service was honorable and not a substitution of one “King” for another.

While political power and its uses did occur to them and they took steps to address those possibilities, the idea of ‘term limits’ didn’t seem to occur to them. And so it is that out national government has only one place where term limits exist and it is in the Executive branch but not in the Legislative or Judicial branches.

If being a Congressperson is the way you earn a living, then you will do what every ‘ordinary’ job-holder does…work hard to keep that job…no matter what.

And what that leads to is the stunning announcement made by Kentucky Senator and eventual Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said before newly elected President Barack Obama took office: that it would be the singular job of the Republicans to never let him enact a single law or policy during his Presidency effectively limiting him even before his Inauguration.

And so it was that much of what Obama did he did without Congressional support and by Executive Order…those that can easily be overthrown in Court or by subsequent administrations.

FINDING

And so the whole of idea of bipartisan government has seemingly disappeared. The concept that men and women on both sides of the aisle can find ways of compromising to see decent legislation passed seems impossible now.

Now we face two sides: those with great wealth fearing that a system of progressive elites will take some of that back in an effort to lessen the staggering economic inequality which puts so much power in the hands of so few.

And on the other side those with not very much who fear that immigrants, people of color and progressive elites will take what they have leaving them with a poor present and no future.

And there is that word ‘fear’: that the political system as we see now it is failing and that American power and influence is failing as well.

And that fear has revealed behavior which open wounds that have never been healed:
the Long Island Real Estate Board being investigated when it was found that an overwhelming number of its members are steering African-American home buyers into black areas only – 62 realtors refused to show up at a hearing about the matter;

And a major national bank has been denying loans to those who were “too black”…caught on hidden tape recorders making that statement.

And the incidents of random antisemitism seemingly everywhere around the country.

Old wounds torn open reminding us that just because we make steps forward doesn’t mean that our past is past.

We are heading towards a Presidential election where the ferocity of desire to win will stun us; will threaten to rip the nation in two because we will hear – that a second term for this President will mean the end of democracy as we know it and – that people who want change are traitors and un-American.

But remember this…while any President is important, the power, influence and longevity of the job is vastly overstated…vastly. Bill Clinton worked for eight years with Robert Rubin to turn staggering Reagan-Bush deficits into surpluses. They did. But those surpluses were gone in barely One MONTH after George W. Bush was elected.

Barack Obama worked for eight years to bring some effort to regulate corporate power in many critical areas of this country – anti-pollution climate control among them. The current administration has wiped out ALL of what Obama had accomplished…is less than three years.

DOING

We cannot undo the work of the Founding Fathers…it has sustained us for 300 years whether they meant well or were simply arranging a business plan to bring together 13 separate little entities into one so that money could be made. It is now immaterial.

We cannot bring back the power of political parties because we live in a time when but for labels, political parties mean little unless and until minds bring them back in ways that matter. Not likely.

But we can finally destroy the idea that holding political office for life as a career no longer exists by forcing the institution of term limits on the Legislative and Judicial branches of government. No more lifetime jobs. No more needing vast amounts of money to buy an office or to sell a vote. This will not be easy but a national will must be developed or what failure we see now will only be the genuine beginning of a very real end. Take out the need, take out the money and power it buys.

The present occupant of the White House has got the PR smarts to know his audience and the ability to reach them. He uses the media who hate him every day as no one else ever has. No matter the World’s opinion, he received 65 million votes. He will face a compromise Democratic candidate – with all that implies about voters going to the polls to vote. His feeling that a one-term President is a failure will drive him as nothing else can…because that kind of failure is psychologically “impossible” for him.

There can be no compromise in an election…there is a winner and a loser.

Perhaps somewhere in the process we will find ‘indivisible’ again. We have a 300 year history of it despite the problems within. It is difficult to think that ‘vicious’ and ‘ferocious’ or any outside influences will finally undo it.