Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Hail Mary pass incomplete

 When Joe Biden took office, his administration knew that they had a limited window in which to make noticeable improvements in the economy. People fail miserably at voting with their wallets, but they vote from them all the time.

Simultaneously, the Biden administration had to lay down social progress that would reassure the progressives who had grudgingly thrown in with them. Everyone wants a magic bullet election, regardless of how history shows that we never ever get them and never will. Government doesn't work that way, especially in a ponderous global superpower. Make up your mind: do you want to be the exceptional behemoth that steers the entire rest of the world with your economic and military might, or do you want to have a government that operates with absolute transparency and almost telepathic indulgence of your most recent hot take?

Foreign relations have always depended on public agreements and secret treaties. The general public has never known a fraction of the details of interactions with other nations. As technology evolved, the extent of the gap between public and insider knowledge has increased. You can't run a real grownup country without a bunch of things that happen out of the spotlight.

The opposition filled the news with as much distraction as they could. The media helped them immensely by taking that bait.  The senate majority failed because of Manchin and Sinema. When the House of Representatives went under Republican control in 2022, it was all over. We could pretend that it wasn't, and set our sights on 2024, but the odds of success had crashed. Ideological voters dashed away, while consumerist voters fell for the raft of lies floated by the presidential challenger and lovingly illuminated by the corporate media and the relentless right wing disinformation machine. The Biden administration was democracy's hail Mary pass, and it dropped to the field without anyone near it.

The 45th occupant of the Oval Office had packed the courts with the judges he was assigned by oligarchy's intellectual machine. He's too stupid and short-sighted to care about anything other than his own immediate pleasure. But that doesn't matter when his backers assure him that an appointment will work out in his favor. Naked corruption goes unpunished when the institutions assigned to control such behavior are already corrupted. Clarence Thomas doesn't care about the country, "his people," or anything more than his own access to luxuries. He made it, and frames his story as the American Dream written in bold Black. Y'all go out and cut your own deals to get ahead. That's how this country works. You figure out how to monetize your most prominent characteristics. Why do you think so many Black entertainers signed on for the Inaugural festivities? Money's money and a gig is a gig. They got theirs. Y'all figure out how to get yours, and ignore the losers dying all around you.

The unhappy consumers low in the food chain who make up the solid core of Republican support would have benefitted greatly from the Biden administration's policies to grow the economy "from the bottom up and the middle out," but they've been so conditioned to hate the government in general and the Democrats in particular that they will very seldom cross that line. I know a tiny few who appear to have done so, but they're unlikely to do it again soon, because it didn't work this time. They were betrayed and abandoned by the non-voters. We may not get another chance anyway. Between the damage that the oligarchy has already done, and the structural reinforcements they will build without opposition over the coming years, they may manage to make elections into the kind of meaningless shows that they are in Russia and Hungary, and other nations collapsing into right wing fantasylands.

It's tempting to check out, to disconnect completely from politics. That temptation is what got us where we are. In defense of that apathy, we could say that not much seemed to change from one party's control to the other, because both factions seemed to believe in principle in the vague generalities of the American ideal. Even the Republicans could be convinced to support some environmental protections and diversity initiatives. The environment was a slightly easier sell, because diverse people are so weird and disturbing, but we made progress all the same, until the backlash of 2016 blew it all up.

The "left" frames everything as a cooperative endeavor. The right frames everything as a war. The "left" tries to promote kindness and tolerance. The right stokes anger and promotes aggressive confrontation. There are exceptions in that Black protesters might lose their tempers after yet another deadly police encounter, and gosh that's just unforgivable, those uppity n****rs! But in general the leaders of what are referred to as leftist groups in this country try to conduct themselves as they wish that we all would. They keep advocating for ridiculously expensive things like an actual system of universal health care that would threaten the ability of anyone to amass multibillion-dollar fortunes at the expense of sick people, and environmental regulations that will assure that the children coming into the world now won't die miserably on a smog-choked, stinking rock swirling forlornly around its sun.

We might yet manage to veer toward that left exit and get on the road to the pretty planet where people realize that they're going to have to get along. We're going to need a lot more people to wake up and start leaning that way. You don't have to blossom into a full-blown commie liberal. Just vote against the anger and destruction a few times and see how it goes when you give it more than an 18-month chance.

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