ARE THE WHEELS COMING OFF - OF EVERYTHING?
War in Israel. War in Ukraine. The federal government shutting down in 35 days. These are uncertain times.
What makes these times far worse than other times of crisis is that the American people - and thus the American government - are unprepared to recognize this crisis exists and deal with it at a moral, political and emotional level.
Crazy rhetoric pours from Republican members of Congress as they daily demonstrate they no longer are a party of government; they are a cultural movement of resistance to progress and modernism as they advance the interests of those they impoverished with their anti-government politics over the past 50 years, convincing the people they screwed that the screwers are their deliverers while they consciously ally with political leaders overseas dedicated to the destruction of the world created by the country in whose government they claim to serve.
There has never been such disjunction between the seriousness of the problems this nation faces at home and abroad and the irresponsibility of one of its two political parties.
Today, the United States confronts more serious threats to its security than it has since at least the Cold War, and perhaps as far back as the years leading up to the Second World War. The United States has not had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia since the Korean War. No one alive now can remember a time when an adversary had as much economic, scientific, technological, and military power as China does today, a situation that has not existed since the United States fought Nazi Germany.
Events this past week in Israel, and the possibilities that emanate from them - increased involvement in the Middle East by China, which credibly seeks to become an alternative power to the United States in that region, and the increased possibility of an outbreak of war in Asia should China decide that the United States is sufficiently distracted internationally and divided internally to give them the opportunity they have long sought to finally deal with Taiwan.
It’s not hard to feel as if we are looking at a train rushing out of control toward a bridge that’s been blown up.
It is not hard to look at things and conclude that the wheels are coming off, that we are living at the end of an Age, and that the forces of destruction have acquired new momentum and strength.
Quite frankly, any study of the past 30 years reveals that the United States, the guarantor of the liberal order, wasted the opportunity that was presented by the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. A better and more just world was there for the having, if only we were moral enough to push for it. Russia did not have to end up ground under the heel of a third-rate Stalin.
We had the power 30 years ago to make the Israelis see reason and accept the fact that they could not simply take Judea because of an alleged 2,000 year old “debt.” In the aftermath of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, we could have given support to his supporters, and applied enough pressure to both parties - Israeli and Palestinian - to accept and move forward on the basis of the Oslo Accords. We didn’t have to face the events that exploded a week ago.
As my ex-wife used to point out, “If wishes were horses, we’d all be riding.”
Our complacency was burst on 9/11, and our response over the past 22 years achieved the opposite of what was expected. The Middle East is nearly broken in smithereens by our ignorance and stupidity in the aftermath of getting our bell rung. The United States is weaker than it was because our moral authority can be reasonably questioned.
At home, when liberal democracy won the fight in 2008, the victor unfortunately failed to understand the first rule of community organizing: that the REAL fight happens AFTER the election is won. The opponents of Democracy came back in 2010 and in the past 13 years have been able to regain the power they lost and consolidate it. As a result, we now face an election in a year that could lead to the final extinction of the democractic experiment that was run for the past 235 years.
Our potential trouble at home is only equaled by the potential trouble internationally, which is only equaled by our inability to resolve the current domestic political crisis that prevents us dealing with both threats. Does the system have the ability to stand the daily stress and last another year until it can be resolved?
The order we have known domestically and internationally is in the process of collapsing into chaos.
Robert Kagan, a political scientist I have disagreed with more than I have agreed, wrote, “order is a garden to be tended, but the jungle is the norm.”
The argument is made by most progressives that the forces of order are on the right side of history, a history that bends toward justice; that the drift toward disorder defies that and thus is bound in the end for defeat, o long as we do our part in pushing things in their proper direction, staying informed and active in order to give a little push here, a little pull there, that the train can be slowed and stopped before it reaches the blown-out bridge.
But looking around, there is a lot of darkness in all directions.
Russia, China, and Iran are not an “axis” of anything, and are most definitely not devoted to something as intellectually vacuous as “evil.” They do have national interests that lead them to push against the rules-based world system created out of the Second World War that reached its logical position of encompassing power 30 years ago with the collapse of the Great Adversary, the Soviet Union that had the strength to pose a credible threat to that order. That collapse created a power vacuum, and as is well-known, nature and politics abhor a vacuum.
Our mistake was to believe there was an “end to history” and that we were living it; that there was nothing more needed doing other than to enjoy the fruits of victory. Two entire generations have come of age in a world in which there was no Credible Adversary, which allowed us to indulge ourselves in all the political pettiness that has brought us to the situation that exists now in Washington. Another “empire” is falling as the Soviet Union fell, this one being the political institution that was the Republican Party.
The growth of the jungle - internationally and domestically - has created insecurity, and in fear of it, people in more countries that Russia, China, and Iran are increasingly turning toward the authoritarian alternative.
Poland is ruled by the kind of theocratic-authoritarian government that ruled there before 1939 - and was unable to deal with the beasts of that jungle when they burst out of their cages. Hungary has reverted to its pre-1939 illiberalism. The descendants of Mussolini’s fascists are in power in Italy and came to that position through popular support. In the recent state elections in Germany, the neo-Nazi “Alternativ fur Deutschland” received more votes than the mainstream Socialist Party that forms the national government of Germany. In France, the inheritors of pre-war French Fascism are the credible alternative to the current governing party. In the United States, a theocratic-authoritarian “fascist-curious” movement has a 50-50 chance of taking power in a year.
The Israeli government wasn’t the only party that didn’t see the events of last Saturday coming. The world - and each of us - is still reeling in the shock of that. The perpetrators didn’t expect to have the success they did; they didn’t think the Israeli government could be so blinded by the extremists in it who thought they had finally achieved the power to obtain their goal and turn the country into a theocratic-fascist state.
No one knows exactly what the coming Israeli action will be, or what will result from that action, whatever it is. But all indications appear to be that they are choosing to act as we did in 2001; if they do, then the likelihood is things are going to get worse in ways we cannot now know.
That’s on top of a war against a fascist aggressor in Europe, one that at first appeared to wake up the democracies to the threat. But those recent elections in Europe have their governments again getting potentially “squishy” on their continued support of Ukraine. Our support cannot be guaranteed since the majority party in the House of Representatives cannot get itself organized and threatens to produce a Speaker who is a pro-Russian representative of MAGA and will not allow a bill to provide continued support for Ukraine to come to a vote in the House if he is put in place by the collection of unserious flakes calling themselves “conservatives” whose actions prevent the Republican Party acting as a governing party.
The United States, the guarantor of the liberal world order, is literally paralyzed with no resolution in sight other than the results of an election a year away.
The world might literally fall apart in those twelve months.
As an historian, I have been looking this week for other crisis points in our history that can be seen as similar to this, and I cannot find one. There has never been a time before when the general public was so splintered; we are under siege from self-indulgence spreading from a hundred million social media feeds that mostly spread lies, conspiracy theories and general ignorance; the vast “anger-tainment” industry that is Conservative Media Inc. has merged with an individual-based “Trump industrial/media complex” whose practitioners are proud to be considered as toxic and rancid as the man they give their allegiance to.
A significant number of the American public has lost the ability to distinguish reality from delusion, to tell the difference between truth and lies. After 40 years of public miseducation, even more Americans are wholly ignorant of American history and the ideas and ideals of the country than was the case when H.L. Mencken could accurately say that “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Americans have almost traditionally been misinformed throughout our history, but never before at this level, with a firehose gushing dogma, ignorance and propaganda.
At the same time, the American political system has become staggeringly and shockingly deeply corrupted. This weekend - in the face of what is likely coming in the Middle East - the United States does not have a functional government and there is no discernible path to changing that fact that has a realistic chance of adoption. The only thing that can be forecast is that next week will be worse.
There has never been a time before when the United States was this bitterly internally divided politically, when we faced such major external threats simultaneously.
I’m not trying to go all doom and gloom here, but a review of the the facts does paint a portrait of Doom that is pretty damned Gloomy.
The jungle is growing back. And we naive civilized folks, who couldn’t start a fire without matches, let alone feed or defend ourselves in such a place, are the ones who have to find a way to avoid this looming disaster.
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I Liked this, Tom, but I hate it. You've encapsulated how a treasured democracy is perilously close to turning into a fascist state. That there seems to be no way to penetrate the anti-truth bubble of the MAGAts is depressing. Many of them are educated people. What value do they see in losing our freedom? What will they gain? I used to be so proud of the gains we made from the '60s to the '80s, and then began the road to where we are now, with the liberals blissfully unaware of or unable to confront the steady and continuing onslaught by the far right. The only hope I see for the Untied [not a typo] States is to get out the blue vote in overwhelming and incontrovertible numbers and stop the Repugnants from taking over. There are many people and organizations working to do that. We must support them.
And we must stay informed by reading Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Hubbell, Jay Kuo, Joyce Vance, Dan Rather and many others. We must subscribe to "Chop Wood, Carry Water" and follow the valuable suggestions of Jessica Craven to let our legislators know our views.
It is alarming that so many around the world choose peonage over liberty. No one wants to grow up any more and carry out duty, responsibility, honor and integrity. Let the loudest mouths with the smallest brains and the biggest platoon of door-to-door enforcers lead us into the abyss where we'll clamor over one another trying to escape. Can hardly wait for the enforced feudalism. The rosy view is that mankind did survive the Dark Ages, the Civil, World, and Cold Wars, and think we can again if we put our collective shoulders to the wheel and push this mutha out of the muck we're mired in. Save elections first by signing up to work on them and by voting. Recruit and promote sane candidates, all of whom seem to be Blue, by phone banking and canvassing and contributing a few bucks. And be sure to blame the money lenders created by Citizens Unchained and demand they be driven out of the temple of democracy.
Once Dems have a majority in the House, Senate, and White House make elections taxpayer funded with each candidate getting the same amount of funding and only six months to campaign because it will expose the best managers of time and money and keep the Mercers, Kochs, Thiels, etc. from doing the recruiting and financing. Evidence of dark money kills a candidacy. Demand other reforms, including eliminating the Electoral College, a relic of our agrarian past. And on and on.
I'm four-score and likely won't see any of this happen, but when I was young I never expected to see happen the many things I have. I'm clinging to hope. But only by a four-pound test line.