America’s System Failure: Only a Wave of Democratic Participation Can Save This Country

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



The Nation / By Christopher Hayes

America’s System Failure: Only a Wave of Democratic Participation Can Save This Country
As welcome as it was, the removal of George W. Bush was not enough to cure what ails us. It goes to the root of our political system.

February 3, 2010 |


There is a widespread consensus that the decade we've just brought to a close was singularly disastrous for the country: the list of scandals, crises and crimes is so long that events that in another context would stand out as genuine lowlights -- Enron and Arthur Andersen's collapse, the 2003 Northeast blackout, the unsolved(!) anthrax attacks -- are mere afterthoughts. We still don't have a definitive name for this era, though Paul Krugman's 2003 book The Great Unraveling captures well the sense of slow, inexorable dissolution; and the final crisis of the era, what we call the Great Recession, similarly expresses the sense that even our disasters aren't quite epic enough to be cataclysmic. But as a character in Tracy Letts's 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, August: Osage County, says, "Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm." American progressives were the first to identify that something was deeply wrong with the direction the country was heading in and the first to provide a working hypothesis for the cause: George W. Bush. During the initial wave of antiwar mobilization, in 2002, much of the ire focused on Bush himself. But as the decade stretched on, the causal account of the country's problems grew outward in concentric circles: from Bush to his administration (most significantly, Cheney) to the Republican Party to -- finally (and not inaccurately) -- the entire project of conservative governance.

As much of the country came to share some version of this view (tenuously, but share it they did), the result was a series of Democratic electoral sweeps and a generation of Americans, the Millennials, with more liberal views than any of their elder cohorts. But it always seemed possible that the sheer reactionary insanity of the Bush administration would have a conservatizing effect on the American polity. Because things had gone so wrong, it was a more than natural reaction to long for the good old days; the Clinton years, characterized by deregulation and bubbles, seemed tantalizingly placid and prosperous in retrospect. The atavistic imperialism of the Bush administration had a way of making the pre-Bush foreign policy of soft imperialism and subtle bullying look positively saintly.

Toward the end of the decade, as the establishment definitively rebuked Bush and sought to distance itself from his failures, the big-tent center-left coalition took on an influential constituency -- the Colin Powells and Warren Buffetts -- who didn't want reform so much as they wanted restoration. This was reflected in a strange internal tension in the Obama campaign rhetoric that simultaneously promised both: change you can believe in and, as Obama said at a March 2008 appearance in Pennsylvania, a foreign policy that is "actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father." .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/rights/145521/america%E2%80%99s_system_failure%3A_only_a_wave_of_democratic_participation_can_save_this_country

[old mark]

1. Absolutely correct. Democrats must realise how important it is for the US

that the right wing/fundamentalist/racist party-the GOP-be rendered harmless. They have brought every one of us close to destruction by economic collapse, and obviously would resume the same path if and when they returned to power.

We all have valid complaints about individual Democrats, but we must get together to defeat the GOP. They are the enemies of our country even if we don't realise that.

rec

mark

[Tippy]

2. K&R...marmar, thanks for posting this.....

[Moostache]

3. K&R --- should be REQUIRED reading!

Chris Hayes is a fantastic writer and a voice for Progressive thinking at a time when it is dearly needed.

Thank you Chris for using your gift to give clear voice to the issues that many of care about so deeply; as well as an outlet to the frustration we all feel. The only nit I would pick with Chris is the end of his fantastic piece....standing by and watching the field turn hard and barren is actually not the worst outcome as sad as that would be...the worst outcome would be ceding the field to the right and watching them salt the earth and pour quicklime into any portions that would ever provide for the common good in the future...

Our fight is not for today, it is not for ourselves and that makes it a tough sell. We fight for the maintenance of a system, a government and a nation we will never know...to borrow from the words of the founders : "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

We are not engaged with a rational enemy who can be shown the folly of their ways and brought to reform or even to compromise. Their view is such that "victory" no matter how fleeting or nebulously defined is the end in and of itself, not a means to a greater good. We must view the struggle as the tale of the ant and the grasshopper; and we must reach people on that very real, yet very difficult plane of understanding - that our actions today may not have immediate repercussions, but there are greater causes to fight for than just our own creature comforts and temporal satisfactions. The genius of the Constitution was not just in its giving power to the people; it was in the men that realized, even then, that power has corrosive qualities and the antidote is the shared destiny of all, not the simple prosperity of one or a few. They did not write of "the defense", they wrote of the COMMON defense. They did not write on the projection of power (to enrich corporations and provide them with resources and markets to exploit) outside the borders, they wrote of insuring domestic tranquility. And finally, they did not write on the securing of liberty for only ourselves or our families, but rather the importance of securing these blessing for all posterity, for those whom we will never meet and never know, for the nation and not only the individual or the family.

It may sound trite, but it is always darkest before the dawn and I hold out hope that the rest of our countrymen will rally to restore the republic before it can be extinguished.

[Demeter]

4. Sorry, It's MUCH Too Late for This

That window disappeared in Reagan's second term.

Now, the only thing that will save democracy will be the blood of patriots shed on native soil, eliminating the economic elite and their panderers. And even so, the religious whackos will try to queer the revolution. They may have to be eliminated, as well.

[teknomanzer]

5. Armed revolutions are a risky prospect...

as history shows. The fact that a stable and reasonably democratic government was founded here is a notable exeption, but the increased reliance on military power is slowing choking that to death. The Poeple need to take hold of the democratic institutions before it is too late.

[Doctor_J]

6. Afraid you're right

This latest news about white collar terrorists taking over the water should be the last straw for even the most optimistic. I personally don't think it would take full-scale revolt, just a shifting of the paradigm - some consequences rendered for the daily sedition on the airwaves. But however it unfolds, my advice is to be ready when the time comes, we will need all hands on deck.