Letters To America - The Divided Nation

"And so, it begins" ~ Kosh Naranek

Dear America,

Can you explain to me what the fuck "conservative" actually means these days? Because it seems that these days, anything someone on the right does is "conservative" and therefore good while anything anyone on the left does is "liberal" and therefore bad. The actual principles I always thought of as "conservative", things like small government, states rights, transparency and accountability in government, responsible taxation; barely anyone still on the right is actually espousing those values. Under Bush, who is apparently a "conservative", you have the biggest, most secretive and corrupt government in recent history, taxation so irresponsible that your great-grandchildren are going to be paying down the debt and he thinks so much of states rights that he went straight to the SCOTUS to steal the election and keeps trying to enact an ammendment banning same-sex marriage instead of letting the states sort it out on their own. Meanwhile, Clinton, who actually did abide by those principles to an extent is held to be a man of the far-left. I just don't get it.

Watching Mrs. Alito's wholly-manufactured waterworks during her hubbies rubber-stamping, I am however reminded that the right has learnt the lessons of media manipulation far better than the left. While Scalito was answering some fairly normal questions, his wife bursts into tears, allowing Republicans and their media noise-machine to rant about "vicious Democrats". I smell set-up here but the accusations did allow a friend of mine (someone I like and respect even while his political opinions are rapidly shifting to the right of Attila the Hun) to rant about how liberals and the left have long since given up any pretense to civil discourse (this coming from the party of Ann Coulter, Dick "fuck you" Cheney, Jack Abrahamoff, the Dan Rather witchunt and the Swift Boat Smear) and he's not alone in thinking that. This kind of mindset, a way of looking at the world where black is white, the media is liberal and asking fairly normal questions is "vicious interrogation" if a Republican says so is alarmingly common. So, I'm forced back to my original opinion: It's not about policies or principles anymore, it's about tribalism, an "us vs them" mentality. The right consider themselves to be at war with us, with liberalism and, like any war, any tactics are excusable. It's acceptable to lie, cheat, take bribes, manipulate the media, steal elections, anything at all so long as it's the right doing it. Bush's real mistake is that he doesn't come right out and say "yes, I stole the election. I had to protect us from terrorism" because seemingly the entire Republican party would give him a free pass these days.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that America was dead, in principle if not yet in fact and one of those reading suggested (quite reasonably) that the McCarthy era was worse. He pointed out that McCarthy essentially controlled the entire political apparatus and it took a full-blown expose of how illegal his actions were to stop him. I respect the readers opinion but I also have to respectfully disagree. With McCarthy, there was a political will to stop him, there was a media which were actually interested in looking for the truth, there was a public vaguely interested in whether their politicians were crooks. Today, there are none of those things. Today, you have all three branches of government controlled by the extreme-right fringe and, thanks to the efforts of Diebold, that's not likely to change anytime soon. You have a media dominated by extreme right pundits (anyone about to say anything about Michael Moore can kindly go and boil their head), a media so browbeaten by the accusations of "liberal bias" that they now have a distinctly conservative bias (of course, the cries of "liberal bias" have to be kept up to prevent the media resetting to anything like a neutral position). If Watergate happened today, the only result would be the arrest of a few people for leaking information. Far from impeached, Bush would be applauded for going outside the law so long as he claimed it was to keep the country safe. As for the electorate, it seems that the majority of the electorate either just doesn't care or is so throughly brainwashed that they will laud anything anyone on the right does, regardless of right or wrong, legal or illegal or even whether it works. Are there those who don't fit that? Yes, of course but if they exist in any great numbers and given the nakedly incompetant, corrupt and criminal actions of the administration, where are the protests? Where are the riots, the acts of civil disobediance? Where are the cries of "have you no decency?"?

No, this is worse than McCarthy. McCarthy wasn't having hundreds or thousands of people locked up on no charge (McCarthy always charged them, even if that charge was bullshit). There were checks on McCarthy's power, even if those checks weren't used for a long time. I didn't live through the McCarthy era. I'm about twenty years removed from that. I am however, a lover of history, of political intrigue and of mysteries (I am seriously considering having "Collector Of Mysteries" added to my business card) so I think I can draw a comparison and this is far worse than McCarthyism, it's worse than Watergate. With McCarthyism, there were checks of Smokin' Joe's power even if they weren't used. Bush has spent the last five years systematically removing any check on his power. From stuffing the courts with his far-right appointees (many of whom really do deserve the title "activist judge") to setting up "Free Speech Zones" to writing a section into the new Patriot Act making it legal to arrest those protesting his power (Washington Post) to the attempt to remove the filibuster, Bush (or, more likely, his handlers) has deliberatly dismantled every check on his power. An imperial presidency is what he's after and he's damn near achieved it. Power without limit, for ever and ever, amen.

McCarthyism was also different in one regard: McCarthy was a man of principles and, whether I think his principles were completely insane or not, he stuck to them. That's why he went after the Hollywood players who had very little actual power. Bush and co have no such principles. They recognise that actors have virutally no actual power so beyond making sure that everyone knows "Hollyweird" is a hotbed of liberals (and therefore, immoral and evil), haven't bothered going after them. Who needs to have flashy show trials when you can just create an atmosphere where no-one takes the opponant seriously anyway? They're liberals, they were never going to give Bush a chance anyway so why listen when they say bad things about him? And there, Bush's handlers prove both that they're smarter than McCarthy and that they have less principles.

Watergate was different. During Watergate, you had an interested electorate not so easily distracted by questions of patriotism and not so terrified by the threat of terrorism (a threat the Bush administration has ruthlessly exploited, witness the ridiculous naming of a security act [the USA PATRIOT Act] so that it's opponants could be accused of lacking patriotism). You had a political climate not so used to teh politics of smear and abuse and not so accustomed to corruption. During Watergate, you didn't have roughly a quarter to a third of the country who had embraced fundementalist Christianity as another would embrace the cults of David Koresh or Jim Jones and were willing to read any criticism of a fundementalist Christian as an attack of Christianity itself (NOTE: This is not meant to imply all fundementalists engage in cult-like behaviour, nor that all fundementalists are far-right fanatics. However, I've met scores of fundementalists and only three were what I would call decent people). Nixon claimed that anything he did was legal because it was the president doing it and the courts corrected him. Today, it seems that the courts will affirm Bush is right when he says the same thing.

So, I think your situation now is worse. You have a supine electorate, a throughly cowed news media, checks and balances that no longer exist, a judiciary in bed with the very powers they're supposed to be controlling and a chief executive totally beholden to mega-corporations and religious fanatics who views himself as somewhere between Henry Ford and the Messiah. Perhaps, if this was the Christianity I grew up with, a religion that preached faith, love and charity even if their deity seemed to be a psycho, it wouldn't be a problem. If Bush had fallen in with the faction of fundementalism which actually seems to be based on the fundementals of the faith, it wouldn't be a problem. But he didn't. He fell in with the faction of fundementalism (almost the entirety of fundementalism these days) which grew out of and exists in symbiosis with, extreme-right politics and that's not a faith of peace, love and charity. It's a faith of an eye for an eye and rage that the world is no longer as you would like it to be and revenge fantasy (the emphasis on hell). It's a faith not of charity but of "people choose to be poor", it's a faith not of humility before one's supreme being but of lording it over others because we're saved and they're not (oh, they'll deny that but then, they would). There are a few decent people I know who are fundementalists, I don't doubt that there's a few more I don't know but experiance leads me to believe that they are the exception, not the rule. This is not their fundementalism, this is the fundementalism of Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps, this is the fundementalism of supply-side economics (aka: voodoo economics, aka: trickle-down economics) and the imposition of values on the surrounding world. This is the fundementalism where Bibles cost whatever the market will bear. Sometimes, it's also the fundementalism of racism but that's rarer today. You still have a race problem America but it's not as pronounced as it once was. Then again, I still hear people coming out with lines like "I could never be anti-semitic, that would be totally against scripture". Maybe it's my ingrained cynicism but anyone who's primary reason to not be racist is because their holy book says so worries me, there's always the chance that they might reconsider.

But by and large, racism is not teh problem, tribalism is. The noise generated over the last twenty years or so has been very effective at dividing you into two tribes. Through public bombasts like Rush "behold, my inability to sustain a relationship" Limbaugh (no disrespect to those who have divorced but a man with three divorces and a prescription drug problem should not be lecturing me on "traditional" values), myths like the Latte Libel (the myth that liberals are all city folk who drive Volvos, drink Lattes and read the New York Times) and some fairly unsubtle bits of playing to rural resentment of city-dwellers (such as Bush, teh Conneticut Cowboy), the right has largely succeeded in creating a new kind of tribalism. A tribalism of city vs. country, intellectuals vs... who? Anti-intellectuals, I guess. It's neatly divided teh nation into the down-home, good ole boys who vote Republican and can mend an engine and plow a field and have good, honest callouses on their hands versus the snotty, effete liberals in the city who think they know what's good for everyone and would ban the Bible and invite the terrahists in.

Contrary to popular belief, this is not a new phonomenon, it's remarkably easy to start a class war when you can convince one class that they're being oppressed. When I was a kid, they used to tell me that America was a classless society. Like hell are you. You're more riven by teh class divide than England is, it's just that the definitions are a little different. In England, class was about ancestry mostly. In the US, it's about where you live and who you vote for but it's still about class and class is ultimately about tribalism. In England, the class system finally collapsed as a result of Thatcherism (one of the few things Thatcher can be thanked for) but for you America, teh class system kept going and teh New Right played into that ("New Right" = neo-cons, the "fellow travellers" of Gingrich and those who followed him). They studied history and noticed how easily the working class resentment of those in the classes above could be turned into blaming them for everything held to be wrong with the universe. So Gingrich, Bush and their accomplices affected a down-home populism, affecting a working-class rural accent, carpetbagging to rural areas like Texas is often assumed to be, feeding into that resentment with things like the Latte Libel, playing off it by claiming fundementalist religion and anti-intellectualism (which were then mostly rural things), by playing up their supposedly humble beginings. Forget for a second that the man most rewarded for this populaism (Bush) is the silver-spoon son of a career civil servant and politician who's never held a manual job in his life. Forget that teh man most demonised by this movement (Clinton) actually did come from humble, rural origins. Details like that are beside the point to the man in Dogfart, Texas. Convince a little man that he's serving some great purpose and he'll do anything for you. Convince him he's helping to throw off the hated oppressors and he'll vote for you, torture your enemies for you and he'll do it with a smile. Convince him that he's part of a crusade to throw Washington insiders, pointy-headed experts and godless liberals out of government and he'll vote for you and he won't look too closely at what you actually do once they're gone. These aren't new tricks. Machiavelli laid out some of them in The Prince, Hitler used some of them on the German people and told them as much. Lenin, Stalin, the power-hungry have often used similar tactics and any serious student of politics or history soon learns to recognise them but then, any serious student of history or politics is an expert or at one of those hotbeds of liberal treason, a college and therefore, not to be trusted. Clever little system isn't it? Totally self-preserving.

America, schizophrenia is not healthy. Dividing your society into two groups and then seeing how vitriolic the differences will become (and teh right have been far more willing to go down that road, no matter how much self-hypnosis their apologists are willing to engage in) is going to explode, sooner or later. Perhaps it'll come to a new civil war. That's possible but unlikely. Oh, I think the divide has got easily nasty enough for that. I think it'd actually be fairly easy to convince the same stupids (no, conservatives are not necessarily stupid but stupid people do tend to be conservative) who proclaimed theat Roy Moore was being persecuted for his faith to take up arms against the traitorous liberals in their midst but I doubt that will happen. Mostly, there's no need for another civil war. The liberals have no power, the laws and courts are being systematically turned against them and the electorate can be distracted. The traditional bread and circuses, a carefully orchestrated scandal or two that seems to have an effect but just removes a couple of fall guys (the mob had a similar way of occasionally sacrificing someone to the feds), maybe disappear a few of the more public protesters and the problem goes away, everything back to normal. Intimidation, distraction, division, sacrifice a few pawns. Hardly groundbreaking tactics but tried and effective ones.

Have you ever read Orwell, America? George Orwell has been quoted so often these days that quoting him tends to get denounced as standard leftie paranoia (ah, tribalism again, I do love synchronicity) but in many ways, 1984 remains the standard guide to this administration. Spying on one's own citizens, the corporate friendly corruption of the Party, all that's apropos but the bit I was really thinking of right now was the section about teh Party's need for perpetual war, how all the Party really desired of the people was a primative patriotism which could be appealed to when they were needed to work longer hours or accept shorter rations. And then, I turn on my PC and find that Bush has told voters to punish any Democrat whose comments on the Iraq War gives "comfort to our adversaries" (Associated Press), perhaps by pointing out that the bloody war is unwinnable, and I think that Orwell was a prophet and anyone who seriously thinks the similarity to the defintion of treason ("giving aid and comfort to the enemy") was accidental needs to take off the dittohead coloured glasses. Bush may be stuck on The Very Hungry Caterpiller but it seems Rove has read his Orwell.

"So this is how liberty dies - with thunderous applause" ~ Senator Padme Amidala