Latimer on Law & Politics

Turn Out The Lights, The Party's Over

                            Turn Out The Lights, The Party's Over

                 -Or The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire                

 

                          Turning and turning in the widening gyre
                          The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
                          Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
                          Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
                          The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
                          The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
                          The best lack all conviction, while the worst
                          Are full of passionate intensity.
                          Surely some revelation is at hand;
                          Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
                          The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
                          When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
                          Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
                          A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
                          A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
                          Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
                          Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
                          The darkness drops again; but now I know
                          That twenty centuries of stony sleep
                          Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
                          And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
                          Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

                      -Wm. Butler Yeats. "The Second Coming" (1920)

 

"Treating this as a mere law enforcement matter places our country at great risks because that is not how radical Islamic extremists look at this.  They know we are at war.  To win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern." -Sarah Palin, Keynote Address to Nat'l. Tea Party Convention, 2/6/10.

 

             The problem today, during the Great Recession brought on by the catastrophic crash of the economy in 2008, unlike during the Great Depression after the crash of 1929, is exacerbated by the GOP's  involvement with fervent cultural extremists on the religious right, based on a faux populism that focuses on so called "values" issues, school prayer, creationism, abortion, gay rights, sex education, et cetera.  That is the core principle on which the GOP's "Southern Strategy" is based, conceived during the Nixon administration, perfected by Ronald Reagan and then put into overdrive by the Bush administration that took office with GOP majorities in both houses of Congress.

          Basically, the Southern Strategy was conceived as a cynical political agenda to focus on divisive social issues that could be exploited by skilled right wing demagogues, like Reagan, to manipulate a congeries of single-issue voters all across the American Bible Belt into voting Republican by pandering to their biases and prejudices and, of course, fearmongering combined with a heavy dollop of anti-intellectualism.   

          Such playing on our fears is just a cynical GOP tactic, designed for political gain rather than any real concern for national security.  That fact has been irrefutably documented by the recent  RNC strategic fundraising   memo, in power point format,  that one Republican operative inadvertently left behind in a hotel  room and was then published on politico.com.   That memo, under the caption "Strategy for Motivating Donors,"  has two main headings. 

            Under the heading "Visceral Giving,"  i.e. the "values" voters in the Bible Belt and Tea Party types, the first listing is "fear."  Also, quite candidly, and embarrasingly so, it lists "reactionary" -cup of tea, anyone?  It also lists creating an environment of negativism toward the Obama administration.  Here, it doesn't actually come out and say "racism," but when you put negativity against America's first minority president into context with "fear" and "reactionary," you really don't have to spell it out, do you. 

             So, for all you "values" oriented GOP voters out there, you must by now realize that the Grand Old Party itself is in the pocket of the corporate elite and they've been playing you for fools all along.  And if you continue to vote Republican, as with the election of Scott Brown this past month, you'll only be proving them right -again.

           Under the heading "Calculated Giving," i.e. the corporate elite and the rentier class that lives off inherited wealth, are factors such as "ego driven" and "wall of fame" -like Bush's "Pioneers."  Then, of course, it lists  the major reason for corporate giving, "access."  But don't just take my word for all this, check it out yourself.

http://www.politico.com/static/PPM136_100303_rnc_finance_leadership.html

This memo is so damning of the GOP, clearly betraying its agenda of cynical, unpatriotic fear mongering and pandering that has been SOP for Republican politicking since Reagan's election in 1979, that current GOP officeholders, like Orrin Hatch, are now scurrying around trying to distance themselves from it.

            The talking points about fear and loathing, to be directed at the "visceral" donor, were  most recently illustrated by Sarah Palin's derisive reference, while delivering the keynote address to the Tea Party National Convention, to President Obama as a "law professor standing at the lectern."  That was clearly a classic example of right wing, know-nothing demagoguery designed to manipulate  the "masses of the plain people," to borrow Mencken's term, by distracting them from the real,  serious issues that severely impact their own economic self interest. 

            Here, Palin, in keeping with the RNC fundraising memo, sought to turn her audience against Obama because he is a member of an intellectual "elite," thus creating a false class distinction intended to distract them from the real class distinction that exists in America,  between them and the financial elite.  It is that class, the moneyed class, that  caused the economic and political mess we are caught up in today and the class whose interests GOP economic policies are, always, primarily designed to serve, as with tax cutting and deregulation.

          A  principal architect of the Southern Strategy was Kevin Phillips, who had been a Nixon administration political analyst, and set out the parameters for the GOP's pseudo populism in his 1969 book  The Emerging Republican Majority.   Phillips, however, unlike today's GOP leadership, is an honest conservative who realizes the need for pragmatism over ideology.  

         Phillips now  recognizes the political Frankenstein monster he helped create in the GOP's divisive Southern Strategy, and  has written several recent books exposing the utter folly of today's extreme ideological, reactionary Republicanism that combines the  dishonest cynicism of corporate "free market" capitalism with the simplistic idiocy of religious fundamentalism.  It is a combination of the very worst of both worlds, business and religion.

            Another astute contemporary observer, Thomas Frank, has written two books that describe how the Southern Strategy has played out in the heartland and in Washington.  One of them, What's The Matter With Kansas, provides an overview of how the GOP's unholy alliance between Mammon and Jesus has played out in the microcosm of Kansas state and local politics. 

            Frank's other recent book, The Wrecking Crew, provides an incisive analysis of how the right wing has been so successful in polluting national politics with corporate money through the manipulations of K-Street lobbyists. They are exemplified by the convicted felon Jack Abramoff, who came up through the reactionary conservative student organizations that formed during the 1960s -all the little soulless Wall Street wannabes who didn't care that their young cohorts were being sent off to die in Viet Nam as long as they had their own deferments.  Richard Cheney is a classic example of the type.  Abramoff, by the way, is quoted by Frank as expressing the same cynical contempt for the GOP rank and file as demonstrated by the inadvertently leaked  GNP fundraising memo.

            Kevin Phillips puts these same events in a broader historical context. In his most recent book, American Theology, published in 2005 before the crash but while the handwriting was on the wall, Phillips outlines three factors present in today's American society which, historically, have led to the decline of nations after attaining global predominance.  Those factors are the political entrenchment of a single energy technology, the financialization of the economy, and the ascendance of religious fundamentalism giving rise to a pervasive sense of national exceptionalism.

            Phillips is a historian and political analyst who predicts the gradual decline of American ascendancy in international affairs, using the historical examples of Holland in the 18th century, giving way to England in the 19th century, giving way to America in the 20th century, all due to a combination of those same three factors.  Phillips' prediction is backed by solid historical research as well as cogent analysis of how the Dutch and British empires both came to fall after about 150 years as world hegemons as the result of the same combination of entrenched energy policy, financialized economy and religious fundamentalism as has taken hold of America today.  So, folks, like the song says -turn out the lights . . . .

           It is really the last factor, however, the religious fundamentalism combined with a nationalistic exceptionalism as manipulated by today's  GOP demagoguery, that makes the decline inevitable, because energy policy and financial control could be adjusted to prevent the decline, but only if we as a people had the political will to do so.   As Shelley wrote in Prometheus Unbound about the British ruling class at the height of its imperial power in 1820:

            Hypocrisy and custom make their minds.

            The fanes of many a worship, now outworn,

            They dare not devise good for man's estate,

            And yet they know not that they do not dare.

It is just such "hypocrisy and custom" which informs the ideological agenda of today's GOP, that dares not devise good for the general welfare of all Americans and yet doesn't even realize how that is so, trusting instead to purportedly "free" market forces to do so, despite all evidence both historic and current which tells us that is a simple-minded myth wrapped in fantasy.  That's not just ideology, it is idiocy.

       In 1904, not quite a century after Shelley penned Prometheus Unbound, the handwriting was on the wall for Britain's inevitable fall due to the financialization of its economy, as clearly recognized by Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain who warned:

Banking is not the creator of our wealth but the creation of it; . . . and if the industrial energy and development . . . in this country were to be hindered or relaxed, then finance and all that finance means, will follow trade to countries which are more successful than ourselves.

That warning fell on deaf ears, of course, due to the pervading sense of exceptionalism among the British ruling class, for whom neither history nor logic had any significance, and within another decade the once mighty British Empire began its precipitous decline, giving way to the then potent industrial energy and creativity of the United States.  

         The same message about the proper role of finance is being made today by economists like Joseph Stiglitz, and only an ideologically blinded fool cannot, or will not see the same thing happening in 21^st Century America as happened in early 20^th Century Britain. Today's GOP agenda is based on a rigid, ideological commitment to "free market" capitalism that allows finance and insurance to dominate the economy while petroleum and fossil fuels remain solidly entrenched politically, thanks largely to the GOP's ability to manipulate Bible Belt voters by pandering to them on things like abortion and school prayer.

          Thus you may recall Cheney's "Energy Policy Task Force" comprised solely of fossil fuel industry executives that convened in the White House in early 2001, followed by the Bush administration's trillion dollar oil war in Iraq while pressing concerns to develop new, renewable energy technologies were ignored. That same mindset, combined with financialization of the economy and the emergence of the religious right, are exactly what caused both Holland and England to fail after attaining global dominance for  150 years or so.

        So, today, in the early years of the 21st Century, we are witnessing history repeat itself, as China is emerging as a major economic force on the world stage and the likely successor to America's predominant position.  While America's right wing ideological extremism has been increasing and hardening due to GOP politics and demagoguery, facilitated by corporate control of the media, China's former ideological rigidity has softened as it has embraced the socially beneficial elements of a market economy for manufactures and exports along with socialization of essential industries and services.

          Thus, while America is still bogged down in overseas resource wars to steal foreign oil and secure pipeline routes, along with an increasingly financialized economic base, China is stepping out ahead of us in developing clean energy industries as well as manufacturing in general. While our national enslavement to "free market" ideology has increased exponentially over the past 30 years, China's enslavement to strict socialist ideology has been softening. 

           China's  easing up on ideological rigidity allows for a pragmatic flexibility to emerge where  the government is able "devise good" for both its citizens and  mankind generally, as with the development of alternative energy technologies.  It is just that kind of flexibility in China, combined with the ideological rigidity imposed by a series of post-Reagan GOP governments in America, holding the White House for 20 out of 28 years before the crash in 2008, that is allowing China to ascend as we decline further into both economic and political dysfunction.

           As Phillips thoroughly documents, Holland with its entrenchment of wind power combined with financialization gave way to England when it's coal-based industries emerged.   England, in turn, with the entrenchment of the coal industry, combined with excess financialization as lamented by Colonial Secretary Chamberlain, gave way to the U.S. as our petroleum based industries emerged in the early 20th Century. 

          The pattern is clear, and it is clearly applicable to America today as we come to realize that the heyday of cheap oil is long gone, and we will need to engage in more trillion dollar  resource wars as in Iraq, under ever more imaginative pretexts, in the vain attempt to sustain our oil centered industries. And the longer the GOP maintains a stranglehold on national politics, either as a majority in power or the obstructive party of "no," the more likely it is that the present Great Recession will turn into another Great Depression, accelerating our present decline into second-tier national status.

             Recently, a Texas start-up alternative energy company funded with stimulus money, Green, Inc., came under fire from Democrat Charles Schumer because they seek to partner with a Chinese firm that manufactures wind turbines.  Schumer complained correctly that stimulus money is supposed to create jobs here in America, but the real problem is that there are no companies in America capable of producing wind turbines in the quantity, with the quality and at the cost required by Green. 

          As supporters of the Green project have pointed out, China will be purchasing many standard parts manufactured by G.E. and other U.S. firms, thus sustaining some manufacturing jobs here in America, but the cutting edge technology is today dominated by the Chinese and other nations, while fossil fuels are politically entrenched here, and that is a factor that will drive the ascendancy of China as we decline over the next few decades.

           Such  inability of American industry to keep pace with the Chinese and others in the emerging renewable energy technologies that will inevitably be  the new paradigm for the 21st Century, just as coal eclipsed wind in the 19th Century and oil eclipsed coal in the 20th, is in large measure due to the Bush administration's laissez faire failure to do anything to encourage renewable  energy technology during its eight year tenure of misfeasance in the White House, combined with six years of GOP congressional dominance. 

            That failure of the Bush administration and it's GOP congressional majority to do anything to develop renewable energy is plainly the ideological consequence of the example set by  Ronald Reagan who, upon taking office, made a well publicized point of removing the solar panels Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House.  Carter, during the market manipulated oil shortage of the mid 1970's, had declared the need to develop alternate energy technologies, in order to reduce our dependence on Middle-Eastern oil, the "moral equivalent of war." 

           What Carter was talking about was not a shooting war, but a national commitment to developing technologies that would obviate future shooting wars in order to meet our petroleum based energy needs. Carter's GOP successors, of course, always prefer shooting wars to advance American business interests, sending middle class and working class young men off to die in wars of corporate opportunity as in Iraq.  Shooting wars, on any pretext, are essential to the GOP's continuing demagogic success, using fear as acknowledged in the leaked RNC memo, to motivate the "visceral," reactionary voters who make up its populist base in the Bible Belt. 

           Looking at the American political landscape today, one is reminded of Yeats' verse in The Second Coming, lamenting that the "centre cannot hold."  Yeats wrote about early 20th Century England, as that nation was sliding into its long decline, that "the best lack all conviction" and "the worst are full of passionate intensity." 

           The essence of the problem today is that centrist pragmatism, as Obama is attempting to establish, is being thwarted by the GOP's agenda of right wing obstructionism in the interest of corporate welfare, but enabled by the religious right's "values" agenda to the extent that many moderates, to the left or right of the center, are being driven out of politics.  The GOP has long made it clear that moderates are not welcome under their circus tent, and now Democrats like Bayh are just throwing in the towel in disgust.  It's a case of the corporatist GOP's politics of "no," being enabled by the Bible Belt GOP's know nothing politics.

          Thus, at the start of the 21^st Century, instead of meeting the clear need to foster renewable  energy technology here in the U.S., through grants, tax incentives and the like, the two Big Oil cowboys Bush and Cheney squandered a trillion borrowed dollars in Iraq, seeking long term oil leases for Exxon Mobil that never materialized.  Much of that trillion dollars, by the way, was borrowed from China as a major player in purchasing U. S. Treasury bills. Which leads us right back to the financialization of the American economy in a vicious cycle that the Democrats have been unable to break, while the GOP has neither the understanding nor the will to do so.