Tuesday, October 25, 2011

RESCUED THEN BUT NOT NOW?

In need, this republic has always found or generated truly outstanding leaders. Whether that has been owed to the inner genius of a democratic people or to providence, or to just what, one can speculate.

There was first of all that extraordinary collection of individually flawed but collectively wise thinkers and doers who led us to independence and managed to establish this nation despite all our differences. Recognizing how to consolidate and when to compromise, they bequeathed us a model of citizenship and a requirement that power be answerable, the right standards for a mass society that would result from the industrial revolution and the technological exploision.

George Washington was a figure of such recognized integrity and dignity that he was twice elected without opposition to our top office when lasting arrangements had to be put into place. While the Jeffersonian tea-partiers called him a tyrant, he gave us a firm and flexible central government and demonstrated that our institutions would function well if run intelligently and with humility.

Andrew Jackson took on the dislocations caused by rich business interests with a dose of populism while countering the fractiousness of a nation of sovereign states by leaving no doubt that there would be hangings and military action in response to attempts at nullification or secession. The frontiersmen who followed him had in them the toxic individualism that still afflicts us, but in those days it was offset by the now-depleted belief in equality that is one of our healthiest legacies.

The breaking up of the country into two competing camps with incompatible worldviews brought forward Abraham Lincoln with his determination to reunify it and his instinct for the reconciliation of estranged neighbors. Paired with him in odd synergy was Pennsylvania's radical Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who went farther than anyone then or later in enshrining in law the same rights and opportunities for all citizens, regardless of race or social standing. These two, working sometimes with and sometimes against one another, made modern America possible.

Social evils perpetrated by corporations protected by campaign contributions and outright bribes led to the emergence of a vigorous progressivism in the early twentieth century. Wisconsin's "Fighting Bob" La Follette, a governor and senator of rare effectiveness, and William Jennings Bryan, who merged the Populist party into the Democrats and spoke for a victimized and neglected rural America, boxed an essentially conservative and big-business-worshiping President Theodore Roosevelt into pushing reforms.

With too many abuses and insufficient regulation, Laissez-Faire America collapsed into a Depression that finally made possible some fundamental changes in policies and attitudes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wealthy squire and advocate for everyday people, evoked a degree of confidence that averted our slide into ill-considered social adventures while experimenting with forms of relief and public enterprise. He reduced these efforts during his second term, believing that they had succeeded, a mistake that brought back the Depression amidst skepticism that it could be ended. But his exceptionally knowledgeable and able leadership carried us to victory in a world war, and his plans for a postwar alliance of many nations that could adapt to conditions and head off further wars set us on a course that we have halfway maintained and halfway forsaken.

With World War II impending, the country was sharply divided between isolationists and internationalists, the latter headed by the president and eager to buttress our allies against Germany and Japan by means short of war lest their collapse leave us more exposed. Almost miraculously, the Republican party, largely a bastion of isolationist sentiment, nominated for president in 1940 the dark horse Wendell Willkie, a fervent internationalist and an outspoken liberal. Magnetic and persuasively sincere, Willkie wrought greater unification of opinion to ready the country to defend itself. His subsequent tour of nations on behalf of FDR and his visionary book One World contributed importantly to public appreciation of the equal worth of people everywhere and to acceptance of what a viable postwar order must entail.

Dwight David Eisenhower, hugely popular as a general, steered the Republican party away from the temptation to repeal the New Deal, using his authoritative and fatherly persona to displace that aim with sensibly centrist attitudes and moderate, flexible policies. Thus a showdown was postponed, buying the country time in which to see what approach would work best, demonstrating how it could profit from a high tax rate on the rich and the refusal to precipitate an arms race or engage in elective wars. While those lessons were not learned, they can still be looked to if we one day decide to have a rational opposition.

Steeped in postwar cynicism and corrupt arrangements, we were awakened to the prevalence and the political influence of organized crime and to the rapacity of the pharmaceutical industry by the labors of Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator with an instinct for publicizing rottenness and an implacable refusal to be bought off or scared off or shunted off.

John F. Kennedy showed that the presence of a crisis is not necessary for our government to upgrade its ways and re-address how things are, invoking an ideal of excellence and peopling this work with business and academic eminences of realism and brilliance. A crisis did, however, soon arrive, with pressure for civil rights coming to a head amidst organized resistance. The advent of Lyndon Johnson enabled the Congress and the country to take the necessary steps to implement the equality we were long pledged to and also to begin a campaign against entrenched poverty that lifted a million Americans into the middle class, serving as the basis for the prosperity we enjoyed till recently. (Johnson's legacy was greatly impacted by the divisive and futile Vietnam war, which allowed right-wingers to often employ cultural "wedge" issues to win by turning Americans against one another, a condition that has endured to this hour and that may be the main factor in our present woes. )

Today our economy has come apart and we are in a new Depression (For what in the name of Denial is a "Great Recession"?), resulting from Congress's systematic imposition of an astonishingly unequal allocation of wealth, and from unjust "free trade" agreements, and from the turning over of regulatory functions to representatives of the industries regulated. The executive branch is paralyzed and the opposition is blindly refusing us the chief means of reversing this situation, which is large-scale income redistribution. Continuation of the existing trends promises a level of devastation likely to exceed that of the 1930s Depression and to sink the rest of the world along with us.

It seems that nothing can be done to halt this terrible denouement, although common sense is enough to tell us what we should be doing. Such leadership as exists is issuing not from our elected representatives but from the spontaneous mass movement Occupy Wall Street. There is probably a severe limit to what it can accomplish in the absence of another, complementary form of popular initiative.

When we have been saved so many times from so much, is it possible that no one with the instincts of a leader will offer us the democratic means of remedying our situation, one as ominous and as reparable as any of them? That question comprises the background from which I look for a presidential candidate who can rally us to do what we must to secure our future: another Washington or Jackson or Lincoln or La Follette or FDR or Willkie or Eisenhower or Kefauver or Johnson.

Well, maybe our luck has finally run out. Maybe we have outlived our capacity for tapping into something beyond self-deception and small-mindedness. Maybe we are due to suffer hideously and all of humankind with us because we have not appreciated what we should be and what options are always ours.

Nothing says that that can't be so. And the time is short for a new leadership to declare itself, if it is to come for the 2012 elections, after which will probably be too late.

Looking about us, one could despair. Looking back, one sees a heritage of great leadership and great hazards overcome. Looking ahead, one sees a question mark.

So we go on waiting and watching and wondering. And if you pray, praying for your country would be a good idea.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

A SORRY LOT

At one time there were self-styled "ten percenters" among the black population. They believed that 90% of their kind were inferior human material but that they themselves were the exceptions. He won't admit to it, but one of these vainglorious souls is currently the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.

Tea partiers whose obsessive hatred of the president is partly grounded in racism are embracing Herman Cain. While that may appear incongruous, doing it likely makes them feel better about themselves and affords them protective coloration. And they aren't giving up anything by it. He is as contemptuous of blacks as they are and is equally bigoted across the board, refusing to consider naming a Muslim to his cabinet and telling those who are protesting the absence of jobs to quit bitching and go find work.

You have to wonder where Cain has been, whether he follows the news. He didn't know what a neoconservative was although that tribe got us into two wars recently. He comes up with gimmicks and stunts and jokes and is otherwise shallow and prone to winging it and to the offhand denial of facts when confronted with them.

I told you months ago that Sarah Palin would not run. I told you more recently that "a Marginal Melvin" like Rick Perry, who wants people to give up Social Security and Medicare in exhange for nothing, would not be the GOP nominee. I tell you now that Cain will suffer embarrassments and a fall from which he will not rise. The enthusiasm for him won't endure. Blackness and ignorance are a combination he can't surmount.

As for Mitt Romney, his best trait may be the plasticity and hypocrisy that make it hard to guess what he would actually do if elected, especially if he saw that he would be a one-termer regardless of what stance he took.

As the obvious compromise choice in a very flawed field, the smooth and plausible Romney should have been able to close the deal long since. Instead, we find Bachmann, then Perry, then Christie, and now Cain popping up as preferred alternatives to him. He is being denounced as unconservative by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. And the anti-Mormon fanatics are after him openly now. In his swim to the fair shore he is dragging heavy anchors.

Newly in third place is Gingrich, who looks like no bargain and sets no souls afire. He told his inner circle months ago that the summer was for hanging on and the fall for breaking through. If Cain and Romney go down and additional entries don't take place, there will be no one other than Gingrich left who is conceivably electable. My suspicion is that most of the party faithful would rather settle for him than for Romney, if only because Newt is more viscerally and angrily conservative. What he says alternates between sensible (good for courting the general public) and embittered and unreasonable (good for courting the base).

On the other side of the fence, Occupy Wall Street is telling us what a Democratic candidate ought to be proposing answers to. Among other predictions, I have said that there will be such a candidate. I continue to think so, though the hour grows late and the money factor may be
daunting to those who consider a run.

Scientist Harry Braun, who once ran against John McCain for Congress, is in the race as a progressive Dem and is pushing a hydrogen economy and a Constitutional convention. You can see him on YouTube if interested. His Constitutional convention idea is terrible, as right-wingers would spend limitless amounts to get control of it and would put through pet abominations like a flat tax, a balanced budget requirement, and voting restrictions. Changes should be made by means of specific amendments that can lose if they must without pulling down the house that our fathers built.

Otherwise, Braun has more brains than braun. Elderly and scholarly-looking, he gets no recognition. Though articulate and impassioned, he lacks the implicit forcefulness and the air of invincible confidence that a viable outsider candidate must have.

One barn-burner of a speech can do the trick, I believe, provided the right kind of personality delivers it. For that, one goes on waiting in the hope that this year what can be also must be.

Friday, October 7, 2011

THE ARMY OF OCCUPATION

Suddenly, unlooked for, there is the leaderless mass movement called Occupy Wall Street, with its encampments, its street theater, its "Occupied Wall Street Journal", its humor in the face of outrage, its offshoots in various places.

It is represented as made up of young people and neo-hippies but is in truth diverse; there are many in it who are "square" and long unemployed or newly broke, who otherwise might be relatively conservative. There are traditional liberals in it and socialists and right-wing libertarians and even some tea partiers, as well as grannies and businessmen and others.

Right now, they are what is happening in this country, as everyone else seems frozen in fear and bile.

The news media, that fervent guardian of the status quo, at first ignored or downplayed what some are calling the American Spring (after the Prague and Arab "springs"). But the movement is too big, too colorful, too assertive, too prone to growing and morphing, for them to continue that.

Those who love privilege and hate equality are complaining as though aggrieved that the Occupiers have no manifesto and no list of unconditional demands. Anything specific that they published would of course become a target as well as weakening their unity. Their genius is in their maintaining the diffuseness of their overlapping objectives.

Yet what they basically stand for is evident to anyone who will pay attention: accountability of economic power to the government, accountability of the government to the people (and not to economic power), and accountaility of the people to our now-compromised ideals: equality, personal freedom, and human rights. These and not the tea party Tories are our real patriots.

The massive anti-war and civil rights movements of the tumultuous 'sixties eventually succeeded in shutting down the Vietnam war and racial segregation. They were a hard sell to most Americans because they seemed to embody socialism, drugs, revolution, scruffiness, free love, and distaste for the work ethic. Occupy Wall Street is quite different, as it represents "the 99%" of us who have gotten hurt by this economy, by the criminals of finance who created it, and by the implicitly bought politicians who are protecting accumulated wealth and not us.

Politicians have sized up this new force differently. That some profess to be more-or-less favorable to it hints at their fear of its potential.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg, hitherto supposedly a good guy, is surly toward it and says it will cost jobs. (What will cost jobs, Mr. Mayor?) And Herman Cain (who also says that blacks are brainwashed, that he would not consider putting a Muslim in his cabinet, and that it's your own damn fault if you're unemployed) alleges that it is unAmerican, a term better applied to himself. Mitt Romney says it is scary class warfare.

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, spins it as a justified anti-Obama display (though in truth it seems indifferent to the president, probably regarding him as irrelevant). Rick Santorum sees it as righteous in demanding that crimes be punished but is against government "intrusiveness" to set the economy right. Another GOP aspirant, Buddy Roemer, endorses it outright, saying that Main Street stands for jobs and Wall Street for greed.

The sincerity of the movement's political admirers will be established by whether they are now ready to tax the rich. I don't see many takers.

Mr. Obama is calling for that, but he waited to do so till he had lost the clout to make it happen. Though he says what most people believe according to polls, his popularity keeps declining; he is probably seen as maneuvering for political advantage rather than as sincerely a populist. He is out of options, while the economy remains stalled or in decline.

Tea party types are calling the movement anti-capitalist. But I would bet that most of its members would welcome the return of a taxed and regulated and competing capitalism, as feudalism isn't working out so well. Capitalism is possible only where large groups of people are not kept artificially in poverty by bigotry and economic royalism.

Soon it will be too cold for camping out in parks and public squares. What will Occupy Wall Street do then? Getting behind a Democratic nomination fight could be an option. The candidate would have to be as free from the rigid going assumptions as the movement is yet fairly believable as a possible president -- unconventional but not marginal.

In the previous Great Depression there was no leveraging of events by mass movements. Struck down by conditions, Americans looked to the New Deal for hope. This time it will be the people who will directly drive events and cause the government to do right. Continuing public vigilance will be the necessity and is the essence of democracy.

For the longer term there will have to be larger innovations. Climate change, peak oil, peak coal, and other grave problems may be upon us. Even apart from that, there will never again be jobs enough; but there will always be more than enough work that will have to be done.

Under a far-sighted and responsive president, our options should be laid out for us and discussed democratically in every community throughout this land.

The time is coming to occupy the White House!