"Will The Future Ever Arrive?"

Will the future ever arrive?...Should we continue to look upwards?  Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished?  The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threaten on all sides by the dark forces that surround it; nevertheless, no more in danger than the star in the jaws of the clouds.                                                                                                                                                                --Victor Hugo

I have been a--well, call it what you will, but I have been a "progressive," a "liberal," a "reformer," and yes, a Democrat, and in some ways even a socialist, for as long as I've been actively interested in politics, which is to say since the 1968 presidential election.  I turned 64 this past Tuesday, at a time in our history when we as a people, and as individuals, face multiple challenges.  Individually, each of these challenges are powerful enough to serve as the definition of an entire era.  Collectively, they may be powerful enough to rip the fabric of this country to pieces, and turn what we have called the United States of America into just another historic relic, another failed attempt at a just and prosperous society no more meaningful or influential than any failed society that preceded it.

In no particular order:

Our streets are filled with the anguished voices of people whose civil rights have been withheld for centuries;

Our economy is in the worst condition it has been in since the Great Depression;

Our health is menaced by a pandemic whose boundaries, as of this point, are beyond our ken, with no long-term solution in sight;

And our planet itself is threatened by the poisons we have produced in our desire to consume without consequences.

Any of these disasters, and certainly all of them taken together, are overwhelming enough to give rise across the political spectrum for demands to take political action.  Unsurprisingly, especially in an age when the power to reach the rest of the world is literally in everyone's hands, those demands are not in short supply.  Nor should they be, however inarticulate some of them may be.

What result?  Stalemate.

We have two political parties.  One of them conducts political discussion and action like a graduate seminar, for which the point is to endlessly research, opine, and discuss what might be the intellectually perfect solution to all human problems, without ever expending much practical effort, and sacrifice, to find out if any of the discussions have produced ideas that work.  The other one conducts political discussion and action like a crime syndicate, for which the only point is the maintenance of its own prefered position in the scheme of things, a state of affairs it always describes as the only possible state.  And any debate about that state of affairs is effectively thwarted by the fact that, in true crime-syndicate fashion, it has effectively bought out every branch of government at every level.

And horrible as all of this is, it would be less horrible were it not for the one segment of our society that is affected by, yet not really at home with, either of our two woefully deficient parties.

Poor white men.  Men who long for a world in which they can feel prosperous and powerful simply by way of the fact that they are white men.  Men who, having been born into a constitutional structure that renounces aristocracy, yearn to be part of an aristocracy, yearn to feel powerful simply by dint of identity, and feel that, if government is to have any value at all, it is to make them feel that way, whether as well-paid factory workers, or well-heeled plantation owners.  Nothing matters for these men except the raw feeling of "being on top."

Once upon a time, they were New Deal Democrats, in an age when the Democratic Party was content to make merely token efforts to empower women and people of color.  When the politics of the New Deal morphed into those of the Great Society, they began the long transition into being Reagan Democrats, hoping to find shelter in a party that promised, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, to protect them against "the other"  And, when they finally figured out that their new "home" had no real room for anyone except the folks that already owned it, they threw out the owners and became Trump Republicans, men so filled with rage from their self-deceptions that, like their new leader, they could think of doing nothing but tearing the house down, if only to ensure that "the other" could never feel comfortable in it.

Will the future ever arrive?

The past can serve as a guide to the future.  In some ways, that's the most fundamental truth contained in conservative politics.  What does America's past tell us about ourselves, that might be useful in working our way through the crises of our current moment.

We have always been a society hungry for reform.  We have also always been a society hungry for the power that can be wielded and maintained through the ownership of property.  We have often been resorted to violence in cases where that ownership was either threatened or thwarted.  And we have ultimately been a society which has needed the so-called "heavy hand" of government to both restore order and to implement changes needed to ensure either the protection or expansion of the social, economic, and political power that comes with the ability to hold and acquire property interests.

Don't believe me?  Take a look here.

I'm not writing this to give you a cherry, chipper, we've-been-through-this-before lecture.  I have no wish to belittle the magnitude of our present crises, individually and in combination.  I do it to remind all of us, perhaps even myself, that their are two essential ingredients to overcome any crisis or series of them.

Not giving up.  And voting.

Not giving up can be hard.  Voting shouldn't be hard, save for the fact that the aforementioned crime syndicate is making is so.  But both of these things have never been more essential than they are now.

And, in any event, the two of them in combination are the only possible way to ensure that the future will arrive.