a clash of civilizations

I mentioned in yesterday's post that the World Series this year, pitting the Texas Rangers against the San Francisco Giants, is a nifty little metaphor for the cultural divide in the USA. To call the polarization between red and blue America a clash of civilizations, after Huffington's right-wing theory of the motive force driving contemporary geo-politics, is maybe a little extreme, but it doesn't feel that way to me living in this country at this time. Granted much of my thought process was filtered through dense clouds of pot smoke this past weekend, but when we made the passage from LA County to Kern County on Friday night, it seemed to me like we were traveling into another world.

...Bill Clinton recently told a group of Democratic fundraisers that, among his generation, those who think the 60s were a good time in America tend to be Democrats, and those who think the opposite tend to be Republicans. That seems about right even if it's oversimplified. The former are concentrated in the densely populated cities of the coasts and parts of the Midwest, the latter are everywhere else. This has been discussed to death at this point from every conceivable angle, and I can't add any additional insight. But I would like to clarify something for myself. No one to my knowledge has yet provided a satisfactory answer to the question of why poor and middle class rural and suburban whites consistently vote against their economic interests. This seems to me to be the key to so many other issues. In fact, you can broaden the issues and ask why so many people in America vote against their interests? The quick answer to the question is that they see their interests differently than I see their interests, so the question itself is based on assumptions that aren't accepted by all. But what if we grant a little latitude and pose the question as why do so many people vote against their economic interests? Why, for example, do they vote for candidates who are beholden to laws and corporations that will inevitably crush any and all possibility for upward mobility in the future? Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas? comes close to a satisfactory answer, but it's written more as a memoir and journalistic expose than a rigorous theory. I like my explanations to be sustained and tight, while Frank's book is loose and somewhat amorphous. The best I can do at this point is to list a number of factors that together have some bearing on the outcome in question...One factor is religion, Christianity in particular. The fascinating thing here is that, while there have always been conservative strains and sects within American Christianity, there were also progressive strains in previous periods of crisis in the United States, such as the Civil War, the Great Depression, Viet Nam... But you don't hear much about liberal Christianity these days. I know it still exists, but the loudest and most well organized bible thumpers are conservative fundamentalists and evangelicals, so that Christianity has become a deeply conservative force in the nation's politics, at least among whites. Since Nixon's Southern Strategy of the late 60s, the Republican party has been able to paint the opposition as a party of godless secularists who are coming to burn your bibles and teach your kids how to be gay.

...The second factor is the superior and sustained organizing efforts on the American right. Sydney Blumenthal has written a great book about this called The Rise of the Counter-Establishment. The theory in its bare essentials goes something like this: The New Deal created a consolidated liberal consensus after World War II. Eisenhower was actually more liberal in many ways than either Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. But at the same time, a counter-establishment began organizing at the grass roots level. This counter-establishment was in the political wilderness for 25 years or so, but during that time various segments sharpened their organizing skills, learned how to manipulate the media and the terms of political discourse, and developed all kinds of think tanks and message factories, like National Review, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and today Fox News. All the while, the progressive wing of the American party slept, and you really see the results of it now. Republicans are so vastly superior in getting their message out by comparison with Democrats, so much so that the Democratic party has pretty much adopted all the Republican assumptions and simply put a slightly more human face on things. I have largely tuned out politics for reasons I've described before, but I am quite amazed at how astoundingly bad and clumsy the Obama administration has been at shaping the overall level of political discourse. During the health care debate in particular, I found myself asking how the Administration could not have been more prepared for the onslaught from the right. Did they not learn anything from Monica Lewinsky? Do they not understand the nature of their opposition? Much was made during the election about the Obama campaign's deft use of new social networking technologies for the purpose of mobilizing voters. But where is the carryover? At a certain point the bullshit hope and change emails I get everyday from David Plouffe (which at this point I delete without reading) have to translate into something more forceful , something that takes on the right wing talking points and demolishes them for the drivel they are. you can't be conciliatory and compromising with an opponent that views you as a mortal enemy. But I can't completely blame the Administration because the right has had a 45-year head start in terms of organizing and manipulation of the media.

...The third factor is really two factors that intersect with one another: the decline of the labor movement and the backlash against civil rights gains. American unions began their precipitous decline in the mid 60s, at exactly the time when the civil rights movement was winning its big victories, so that working class whites felt little solidarity with working class minorities. There was no mechanism through which they could be brought together to fight for common goals, or whatever mechanism existed was weak and not very well organized. We would be living in a very different world now if the labor movement and the civil rights movement had become more coordinated and intertwined. Minorities and working class whites would be much better off today. But instead of the counter-factual scenario, what actually happened is that as the world economy went into the shitter in the 70s, there was little working class resistance to the assault on unions or to the impetus towards privatization. Likewise, there has been fairly weak resistance to the right's efforts to roll back civil rights gains. The superior organizing on the right is important to point out here as well. It's like a perfect storm for the emergence of conservative hegemony, one in which employers use race to divide workers, white workers gravitate towards their whiteness and their religion, and the seeds of Reaganism are planted in fertile soil.







The fourth and final factor I can think of, which is really an amalgam of the other four, is the weakness and incoherence of the Democratic party. I know this has been said a million times before, but there's really not much difference between the two parties when you cut through all the ideological bluster. The notion of government as the enemy is an article of faith on both sides of the aisle. Privatization good, government bad. Social spending bad, free market capitalism good. These are taken as points of departure in mainstream politics today, not as points of debate. And on the rare occasions when the assumptions are taken as points of debate, the right wing noise machine, almost 50 years in the making, is there to steer the conversation with little countervailing resistance...






It's remarkable how little things have changed since the last ten years, except that things have just gotten steadily worse. The stagnation may be unprecedented in American history given the number of catastrophes we've been through since Bush took office. The Reagan Revolution is still alive and kicking, and it continues to be propped up in part by the people it has hurt the most. It's depressing. There's a lot of anger out there. I see everyday instances of frustration and rage that feel different than anything I can remember feeling before. It's sad to think that rage and stagnation will likely be the defining concepts of our times. When I look back on this period 10, 20, 30 years from now, I think I'll remember it as the angry era. And I'm not immune to it, of course. What troubles me most is that I don't perceive any path out of the current impasse. Maybe that's why there's so much anger. I know a path will develop, but who knows whether it'll be of the democratic or authoritarian variety?