ONE NATION UNDER THE HAMMER

Our society rewards dividers and self-seekers and so encompasses its own disintegration.

It renders people unfree and poor in the name of freedom and creation of wealth. Some desire anarcho-fascism and many more submit to it because of a failure to spot connections.

Citizens don't vote. They insist that all politicians are scum, which is not true and which allows those who are to get away with it while undercutting the ones who want to mend things and who cannot do so without popular backing.

The deadline has passed for candidates to register for the New Hampshire primary. It is now improbable that there will be a Democratic challenger to President Obama. I was convinced that there would have to be one because the need for one is so blatantly obvious and because we have, or so I thought, several million potential national leaders of nerve and energy and imagination.

But no. Nobody says "Follow me." We are awash in learned helplessness. The right-wingers have taught us servility, as they meant to.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, Ralph Nader, and others have planned, perhaps still plan, to introduce into six different presidential primaries six candidates, each concentrating on a distinct speciality, so as to make Mr. Obama compete with them and compel him to shift leftward or be embarrassed by a protest vote. While I understand the strategy, I see no felicity in backing six people who don't want to be nominated rather than one who does.

Whoever succeeds in the general election, the economy will most likely fall through all the way. The Republicans will continue to promote civil war and will demand or precipitate greater violence against protesters. They will ramp up their efforts to turn great sub-populations of us into second-class citizens and to render us passive and afraid while our prospects dwindle. Their mentality is such that they cannot feel secure unless making others insecure, strong unless making others weak, or prosperous unless making others into beggars.

There remains an outside chance, nothing more, that a persuasive third-party candidate will embrace the agenda of Occupy Wall Street. It would be cute if it were to be a Wall Street billionaire who could self-fund and follow Ross Perot's populist example. There is no shortage of ambitious billionaires out there today, and the polls say we're ready for a third option.

Such a candidate could stress necessity rather than liberal idealism, proposing to do only what must be done to save the country. Any businessperson should be able to recognize that unless Main Street capitalism displaces Wall Street feudalism there cannot be a functional economy; the people must have money to spend, and it must come from redistribution of our overwhelmingly concentrated national wealth. The wars and their devastating costs, human and financial, must be ended. Global warming must be taken seriously and addressed. Our government must be able to plan for the more remote future rather than being distracted constantly by crises of the moment and petty scandals hyped by partisans and a visionless press. An independent candidate could say all of that and be credible with most Americans.

It will be objected that such a candidate would only split the moderate and progressive voters with Mr. Obama and so assure the election of the Republican. But the candidate could offer the president a deal on these terms: "One week prior to the election, whichever of the two of us is running behind the other will withdraw from the race and campaign for the other." The president would concur because he would assume that he would be the one who was ahead.

No, none of that is at all apt to happen. We are barreling toward an abyss. Perhaps out of that will come a revolt that can issue in a government of, by, and for the people, instead of one of the lobbyists, by the politicians, and for the corporations and the mega-rich. Or perhaps our time is just up and it will be countries we have looked down on like Egypt and Tunisia and Libya and Syria who will do what we say we believe in doing but don't do.