We Need To Be The Change We Are Looking For

So it is 2022. Four weekends into it, in fact.  And all I can say for the new year thus far is that any improvement over 2021 is going to take some time. 

As I write this, one major legislative piece of the Biden Administration's agenda, a combination of bills designed to protect and expand voting rights, has just gone down to defeat, while another, the Build Back Better human infrastructure bill, totters on the brink of defeat.  Both of these setbacks are almost entirely because of the intransigence of 4% of the Democratic Senate caucus.  Predictably, this is feeding the Dems-in-disarray meme that passes for mainstream media insight into progressive politics.  

Lost in the process, unfortunately, is the fact that congressional Democrats have shown remarkable unity in supporting a wide range of proposals that, in the not-too-distant past, would have been considered wildly out of the mainstream.  No longer.  But, as I just mentioned, two out of 50 Senate Democrats systemically refuse to get the message.  At times, they appear to be working overtime in order to do so.  Are they being bribed?  Blackmailed?  Does it even matter any more?  This much is clear:  Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are working overtime for something other than the public interest.

And, as a consequence of all of the above, the media chorus predicting a red tide in this year's midterm elections is growing louder and more confident that the tide will not be modest in nature, and may sink progressive politics in the U.S. for decades to come.  And that assumes that it won't also sink the prospect of future free elections and, perhaps, the Constitution itself.

My concerns about the latter prospect, for reasons I'll shortly discuss, are far greater than the are for the former.  Whatever happens this coming November, it will not change the fact that progressives are a growing cohort among Americans, and that the policies they favor, as shown by poll after poll after poll, are popular across the country.  As it stands right now, however, most if not all of those policies are no closer to reality than they were at this time a year ago.

Why?

This much seems clear to me:  over the past four decades, as coverage of national and even local politics has become characterized by profit-driven mergers that reduce the number of outlets, enslave those that survive to the need for compounding profits, and achieve that goal by a who's-up-who's-down focus rather than pursuit of the truth, the inevitable result has been a political dialogue that focuses on personalities rather than, to borrow a phrase from ABC News, issues and answers.  Thanks to Rupert Murdoch, and those who have paid him the complement of imitation, all journalism is tabloid journalism.  

As a consequence, the focus of political journalism, like its cousins in sports and entertainment, is almost exclusively on personalities.  And that focus has the twin benefit for conservatives of simultaneously obscuring the unpopularity of their positions on issues, while driving the level of discussion down to the lowest-common-denominator level of understanding.  Put another way, it reduces much of the discussion to the level of rumor, or, at least, slanders that can not be either clearly or easily disproven.  At that point, all that is needed to win is the ability to throw muck on the wall of public opinion, and hope that enough of it sticks long enough that it can't be completely scraped off.

Unfortunately, and unfairly, this is the fate that seems to have embraced Joe Biden, a man once described by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina as being as good a man as can be found in politics.  Well, that was then, and now is a very different story.  Whether the subject is mental competency, respect for women, or even a willingness to compromise, Biden has been so badly slandered by Republicans and their media allies that he is in the unhappy position of being more unpopular than the policies he has been advocating.  And, speaking of Graham and his latter-day fealty to Donald Trump, this does not even touch the inanity that Biden was not fairly elected to the presidency.  

Moreover, in the run-up to the midterms, it allows the Republicans, whose 2020 political platform went no further than pledging complete and blind loyalty to Trump, to take the position that they will attempt to regain control of Congress with no policy or programmatic agenda whatsoever.  Don't take my word for it; take the word of Mitch McCONnell, who said so publicly in so many words without apology.  The reason for this brazenness seems pretty obvious:  why deal with what is complicated when you have a talent for going right for your opponent's gut?

Especially when you don't have to do the dirty work yourself, because you have millions of anonymous foot soldiers all across the nation more than ready, eager, and willing to do it for you, either by way of the Internet or by way of hand-to-hand combat.  January 6 of last year can no longer be considered an outlier in American behavior, but rather a template that shows how overthrowing constitutional government can be done:  stage a mix of protests and violence, make the mix look ambiguous enough on video that you can more easily lie about it, and then argue that everything was the other side's fault and no one should believe their lying eyes.  Violence, for the right, is the new normal, and what has essentially been a cold civil war for decades is rapidly turning into a hot one.

And I can tell you, from twelve regrettable years of personal experience, that fundamentalist Christianity, which puts a premium on faith over reason, has played a central and indispensable role in making all of this happen.  If you've read enough of my posts, you may be rolling your eyes, because I talk about this so much.  Frankly, I could talk about it on a weekly basis (which I have not done), and still not talk about it too much.  This goes well beyond the scope of my personal experience, the details of which I'm saving for my memoirs, if I ever retire and write them.  Consider, for example, the case of the Ohio pastor who bragged about hunting people, and may very well have done just that; he has been charged with shooting an individual to death.

And no one needs to rely on me for an assessment of how evangelicals have degraded American politics.  If you have not already done so, do yourself a favor and listen to the words of Frank Schaeffer, the son of one of the 20th century's leading evangelical philosophers, who grew out of the cramped world view of the faith as I did, but who can give you an insider's perspective on its perniciousness.

A perniciousness, I would add, that is fueled by its contribution to the vaccine denialism that has thwarted the best effort of Biden's Administration to bring the COVID-19 pandemic to an end, or at least do something like bring it under control.  I never thought I would live to see a day where a deadly virus is effectively displaying a partisan bias, but there can be no doubt that the pandemic is infecting more people and claiming more lives in red states than blue ones.  Why?  Again, drawing from my own experience, evangelical beliefs are a factor here.  Death can look like a very attractive alternative when life on Earth feels miserable and Heaven feels guaranteed.  Never mind the prospect of spreading a deadly disease by refusing to take any precautions against it.  That would require a vision of God's work that reaches beyond one person or family's circumstances.  You would be surprised how rare that can be in evangelical circles.

And so Republicans do nothing to encourage their followers among the faithful to take precautions.  Why, that would make them look oh-so-secular, like those science-loving liberals evangelicals love to castigate.  Better to bet on the prospect that there will be enough surviving voters in November to make up for the losses among their ranks to the virus.  If Democrats are sufficiently discouraged in advance, especially by media coverage that downplays Democratic accomplishments, it's a bet that might very well pay off; Democratic turnout in midterm years, except when Republicans are in power, tends to fall off relative to its Republican counterpart.

To sum up, a combination of profit-driven corporate media, suicidal evangelicals and other Trump cultists, and Republican politicians who quietly allow these forces to enable their re-election and hold onto the only thing they stand for--power.  All at the expense of America, the Constitution, and the values that the nation and its government were created to uphold and advance.

What, if anything, can and should be done?

For starters, the rest of us, from Biden on down to bloggers (me included) need to do what we can to factually change the narrative.  Talk, for example, about how Biden, with the thinnest possible support in Congress, passed two landmark bills in his first year in office:  one to stem and reverse the tide of the pandemic, the other to begin rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure with a focus on attacking climate change, promoting clean energy, and increase public access to broadband.  And it's not like the economy hasn't noticed all of this.  Even an uber-capitalist like Michael Bloomberg has taken notice and called public attention to what Biden has done.  You recall the GOP-promoted narrative that Biden was going to destroy Christmas?  Didn't happen.

And the Republican critique of Biden's handling of the pandemic?  That's meant to deflect attention from their own spread of misinformation about COVID-19 and how to fight it.  And gas prices?  Well, Biden's powers over gas prices is, to put it mildly, limited at best.  Gas prices are the consequence of forces not merely outside of our control, but outside of our borders.  That reality is what led in the first place to the search for alternative sources of energy.  It's not like gas prices under Trump were any picnic.  The GOP and their allies hope you don't remember that.

The gas price attack, of course, is part of the larger critique about inflation in the past twelve months.  This is less about a legitimate concern on conservatives' part about average households, and more about finding a proxy by which to attack their real concern:  an increase in public spending that might remind those households that government isn't always the problem.  Yes, public spending has increased, as it always does in a crisis.  But allowing conservatives to lay the inflation blame at the feet of that spending would be yet another instance of conservatives obscuring the details for self-serving goals.

In our current crisis, inflation is almost entirely fueled by a series of pandemic related symptoms:  supply-chain problems caused in part by just-in-time inventory methods, a refusal of workers (particularly in service industries) to return to substandard working conditions, a goods-versus-services imbalance attributable to homebound families increasing their Internet shopping, and, most perniciously of all, corporations trying to recoup their 2020 losses at a faster rate than consumers can afford.  Margaret Thatcher famously said that socialism's weakness was running out of other people's money.  As it turns out, capitalism in the 21st century suffers from the same weakness.  This is why Wall Street should be a bit leery of bragging about its elastic power to raise prices.

Admittedly, it's a phenomenon that doesn't lend itself to a bumper-sticker sized solution.  But, despite that fact, Republicans are trying to make inflation the campaign hobby-horse that they can ride back to the seat of power.  There's just one problem.  What would they do about inflation?

Nothing.  Nothing, that is, but continue talking about it.  They don't have a plan for dealing with it.  They only have plans for exploiting it.  And that's something that can be reduced to bumper stickers, sound bites, blog posts, social media posts, and everything else we can do to point out, once again that Republicans don't care about anything except power.

So, step one:  speak out more.  This is especially important for the President.  By definition, he's the leader of this parade.  And yet, for a very long time, he hasn't been acting like it.  Even his supporters have taken notice of this, and spoken up about it.  That probably goes a long way toward explaining his marathon press conference this past week.  And, while it was good to see him going to the public and making his case, Biden being Biden, it was rhetorically a mixed bag. Not only did he suggest that a small "incursion" by Russia might somehow be acceptable, but he stated that he had no reason to think that Republicans wouldn't negotiate in good faith with him for the sake of the nation. No reason?  Here's one gargantuan one:  he was Barack Obama's Vice President for eight years, and had a bird's-eye view of how badly Obama was treated by many of the same Republicans that are now pushing him around.

Biden, as even Graham was once forced to admit, is a good man. Overall, he's probably done the best that anyone could have done with the biggest mess any President has ever inherited, and limited congressional leverage for dealing with it.  But, as those of us who have observed him for a long time know, his mouth can make him his own worst enemy.  Still, he has the proverbial bully pulpit, and he should speak out, regularly and forcefully.

But the rest of us need to do everything we can to help him.

We can no longer take it for granted that we are the world's leading democracy.  We can, in fact, no longer take it for granted that we are even a democracy.  And, as a nation, regardless of what side of the partisan divide we fall on, we are deeply depressed and fearful for the future.  Not without reason, either.  After all, the Trump syndicate is still out there, waiting for an opportunity to regain power, provided it can remain one step ahead of the law, and continue to intimidate the Republicans whose support it needs to do so.

We may yet get some help even from the media.  There are some signs that even corporate media is beginning to understand that bothsiderism isn't up to the task of taking on the existential crisis we're facing.  You can see some examples here, here, and here.  Perhaps this is the best example:  the suggestion that the press can be a partisan for democracy.  This seems entirely appropriate; after all, the press is essentially empowered by the First Amendment to do exactly that.

But it's still on our shoulders.  Yours, mine, and everyone's.  What are the next steps?

We're in uncharted territory, so making a definitive outline is not really possible at this point,  The outline may have to evolve over time.  But mainly, we have to start by refusing to play by GOP rules.  We have to stop reacting, and start pushing back.  That doesn't mean resorting to violence.  But it does mean asserting ourselves without being afraid of the type of responses we attract.  Let them worry about our responses for a change.

And, speaking of media, one place where we can all start is Fox News.  As any sane person knows, Fox is not really a "news" network; it's infotainment for true believers on the far right.  So why is the fee for Fox bundled into the basic price charged for cable, as is the case with other news networks.  This effectively amounts to liberals and progressives being charged a "Fox tax" for a network they would never watch.  Perhaps we should all petition our cable companies to have this tax revoked.  I sure don't want to help subsidize the cost of Rupert Murdoch's broadcast bilge.

We can not only stand up to the cable companies, but to the yahoos they showcase.  When they try to make fun of Biden with that "Let's Go Brandon" nonsense, let's face it and laugh it off.  Even Biden has learned how to do that.  So effectively, in fact, that the unforgivably racist Trump stooge Stephen Miller complained about it. 

We can and must openly mock the hypocrisy on the right, which manifests itself in so many ways.  Take immigration.  It's offensive and anti-freedom to try locking down the country for COVID, but not for immigrants, who are often refugees from countries being destroyed by climate change.  Ironic, since COVID and climate change are both the products of multinational corporations that have done so much to tear the planet apart while destroying the blue-collar American economy that Trump voters mourn.  Prioritizing profits while being beyond the reach of any one country, they are the culprits behind the abuse of science, who try to reap its benefits without respecting the subsequent social, physical, economic, and moral cost.

And, at the same time, we must be hard on ourselves, and on the politicians who claim our support.  We need those politicians to take and fight for tough stands on fundamental issues, like human rights.  We need to push back on Biden's withdrawal from negotiations to compensate the victims of Trump's inhumane immigration policies.  We need to stop acting afraid of core values.  That's how you address the question "What do Democrats stand for?"

We may not yet have the media our our side.  But we have ourselves.  We need to hang onto that like our democracy, and even our lives, depend on it.  In the short run, it may be what we need to do to keep the Democrats in change.  The party is far from perfect.  But the days of sitting elections out and waiting for it to get better are over.  We don't have the luxury of that kind of time.

We'd better start acting like it.  To paraphrase Obama, we need to be the change we are looking for.