Lament After Lament

I say this with no pride but the United States is done, finished, kaput. It is broken. We have nothing to do but watch its inexorable decline. Watching may not be appropriate, for its demise will not be pretty; it may even be dangerous. A country that is highly armed, romanticizes war(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnCAjAVsM_E), is in steep economic decline, has both an obsession with its own exceptionality and a political system that no longer functions, is ripe for demagogues and tyrants to move in.

Nothing can stop this decline. There is no savior. (Obama’s election healed a national wound and that was a significant gift to the Republic. After that? Yes we can, but only if everyone wants too.) Some time ago—who knows exactly when?—politicians learned that while you speak to the people, you listen to the money. Some time ago—who knows exactly when?—the dumbing down of the citizenry went too far. Some time ago—who knows exactly when?—the role of government stopped being about serving its citizens and became about serving those who run its machinery and grease its wheels. Some time ago the press stopped trying to be a courageous and honest voice, and surrendered. Some time ago conversation and compromise packed up and went home, leaving theatre and spectacle and sound bites to claim center stage. Some time ago the Supreme Court wasn’t politicized, the ads weren’t written by pit bulls and civility had a seat at the table. Some time ago—who knows exactly when?—the United States could still turn things around.

Despite all of this, I have no deeper hope than being proven entirely wrong.

And here’s an equally cheery lament from Christopher Hedges author of Death of the Liberal Class:

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

The liberal class, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible, functioned traditionally as a safety valve. During the Great Depression, with the collapse of capitalism, it made possible the New Deal. During the turmoil of the 1960s, it provided legitimate channels within the system to express the discontent of African-Americans and the anti-war movement. But the liberal class, in our age of neo-feudalism, is now powerless. It offers nothing but empty rhetoric. It refuses to concede that power has been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens by corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty are irrelevant. It does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent underclass. And the disparity between the rhetoric of liberal values and the rapacious system of inverted totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes liberal elites, including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of public ridicule. The liberal class, whether in universities, the press or the Democratic Party, insists on clinging to its privileges and comforts even if this forces it to serve as an apologist for the expanding cruelty and exploitation carried out by the corporate state.

Populations will endure repression from tyrants as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are swiftly and brutally discarded. Tocqueville observed that the French, on the eve of their revolution, hated the aristocrats about to lose their power far more than they had ever hated them before. The increased hatred directed at the aristocratic class occurred because as the aristocracy lost real power there was no decline in their fortunes. As long as the liberal class had even limited influence, whether through the press or the legislative process, liberals were tolerated and even respected. But once the liberal class lost all influence it became a class of parasites. The liberal class, like the déclassé French aristocracy, has no real function within the power elite. And the rising right-wing populists, correctly, ask why liberals should be tolerated when their rhetoric bears no relation to reality and their presence has no influence on power.

The death of the liberal class, however, is catastrophic for our democracy. It means there is no longer any check to a corporate apparatus designed to further enrich the power elite. It means we cannot halt the plundering of the nation by Wall Street speculators and corporations. An ineffectual liberal class, in short, means there is no hope, however remote, of a correction or a reversal through the political system and electoral politics. The liberals’ disintegration ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression in a rejection of traditional liberal institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. The very forces that co-opted the liberal class and are responsible for the impoverishment of the state will, ironically, reap benefits from the collapse. These corporate manipulators are busy channeling rage away from the corporate and military forces hollowing out the nation from the inside and are turning that anger toward the weak remnants of liberalism. It does not help our cause that liberals indeed turned their backs on the working and middle class.

To read the rest of it: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/P100/