My own story is in process. Next steps.

My own story is in process.
I have quite personal concerns in writing this. I was born smack in the middle of the last century, and by the time I started to pay attention to politics, it seemed for a while that, with all the strife, the world was going in the right liberally direction; more understanding, more freedom. What kind of progressive doesn’t have faith in Progress?

But good models have been hard to come by. I read about the Social Democrats of Germany, millions of members, and how they were tamed by imperial militarism and swept away by the Nazis. I read how some old-time commies, incredibly brave, resourceful and self-sacrificing in the face of corporate thugs and czarist torturers, turned into murdering lickspittles of Stalinism. From afar I saw how the failed dictatorships in Russia, Iran and a dozen other places gave way to merely shabbier despotisms.

I wasn’t prepared for decades of Reagan backlash, the renewal of the religious wars at home and abroad, and the persistence of carefully nurtured hatreds. A friend remarked once that New York City is very cool, all the different kinds of people riding peacefully on subway. I didn't feel even slightly reassured. We've been reminded too forcefully in Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Russia, Africa, Iraq and Los Angeles that decades of apparent neighborliness don't erase cherished enmities; that perfectly normal folks go about their daily routines, and would snatch a machete in a heartbeat if the local Osama called. The day after 9/11 a colleague remarked of Iran and Pakistan, We should kill 'm all. 200 million people, I said. Kill 'm all, she said. She had experienced exactly one day of TV terrorism. I meet many perfectly nice people --nicer, in fact, than I-- who think they’re helping the world by promoting, paying and arming the most vicious killers on the planet.

It bothers me that my neighbors and I have such different understandings of the world we share. I want to know why. Really, I’d like everyone else to see the world exactly as I do; short of that, I suppose I can learn to see it the way they do. Maybe together we can reach an even better understanding.

Second, I need a Story, too. I need an understanding that will help me figure out what to do next, and how to love the world as it tries to squash me. I can’t quite fit into the stories I’ve heard, so I'll have to cobble one together for myself.


Next steps.
At some point I may post my name. It seems the responsible thing to do. But I’m new to this medium and I want to gauge how it’s working. I also don’t want to risk messing up my fragile personal and professional life unless I have to; the ideas I write about seem quite bland and apple pie to me, but possibly they’ll provoke offense even beyond the people I am happy to offend. I notice some of the other web publications I admire are likewise anonymous, so that’s how I will remain for now.

As you will see right off, these essays are not nearly complete. As soon as I win the lottery, I’ll have time to write about how we develop stories to define ourselves and our groups, manage uncertainty, choose sides, set boundaries, allocate responsibility and blame. I’d like to explore common political stories like the ones we tell about government and individual freedom. Most of all, I’d like to rework my ideas to include readers’ insights. Not soon, though, you may be relieved to read . . . .


Update 09. I update this introduction soon after the 08 election. Like many others, I was pleased with the outcome. Staggering under the cost of the economic and foreign policy catastrophes, voters finally pink-slipped the Halliburton gang. (Bad as it is, as yet we’ve seen only the tip of the iceberg --literally-- of the world wide environmental disaster). Dire circumstances compel us once again to see democratic government as our support rather than our enemy. Some good folks have taken government posts, which will help even if the new president turns out to be as conservative as he promised during the campaign. I like that the new crowd continue to keep health care on the agenda, and so forthrightly connect it to the health of our economy as a whole. After so many squandered lives and opportunities, we’ve got a chance now to start repairing some of the devastation of nearly 30 years of Reaganism. Despite all our problems, I see many people ready to work harder than ever to rebuild our communities.

Just as important as the new leadership, more of us may be ready to think about new ways of doing business. The failures of unregulated markets and the imperial presidency have the rightist ideologues sputtering indignantly, scrambling to regroup, frantically digging up the old slogans to see which will stick. Younger voters especially, heirs of earlier democratic movements, and emerging from the meanness of the Reagan backlash, may be less haunted by traditional racism and sexism than people my age. More of us will come to realize what our grandparents knew: choosing gangsters as leaders does not protect us.

Still yet, we know this is at best a beginning. The magnitude of the crisis (by which I mean the latest sudden drop in incomes, employment and household assets, as opposed to the steady, murderous pace of capitalism when it’s happy, keeping billions of us on the edge of beggary, sickness and death) demands bold action but leaves the new regime little room to maneuver. We see plenty of the same old faces back in power, running the same old institutions. The Democrats’ electoral majority is nothing like a policy consensus, and includes a lot of folks who would like nothing better than a return to the status quo before the bubbles burst, as if we could have one without the other. Not to mention the one half of voters who judged Democrats to be scarier than climate change, the recession, and Mideast wars. I live in Tennessee, where the corporation Christians won more votes in ‘08 than four years before.

Max Planck famously suggested that new ideas triumph not by persuading everyone of their superiority, but because devotees of the old ideas eventually lose power or die out (Gratzer 304). But there’s no sign that our authoritarians are anything but hale and hearty and ready for new adventures. We’ve seen before how lightly reality weighs on true believers; the would-be Rambos, for instance, who clamored to invade Iraq as a way to “get over” the U.S. loss in Viet Nam. And that was in more prosperous times than these. When we look back to the economic troubles of the 1920s and ‘30s, here they engendered powerful grassroots movements and a lasting liberal coalition; in Germany they begat Hitler. Just tune in to the talk shows and rightist blogs. In addition to their usual racist and sexist rants --politely termed “cultural” conflict-- they’ve trotted their core agenda more nakedly than I’ve ever heard before: saving billionaires from taxes, unions, environmental regulation, and thrifty consumers. They try to depict the new administration as tools of the corporate looters, while demanding policies that attack workers, consumers, and the government programs to help them. Halliburton himself, dethroned but not defunct, makes the round of infotainments, determined that the U.S. shall not take one step back from the oil wars.

If the current economic morass displaces many millions from homes and jobs, if the billionaires lose too many privileges, if the new administration stumbles (as it will), we know already who is poised to deal the bullet behind the ear, or (more likely) the death of a thousand cuts. We fought our neighbors when we were rich, biting and gouging each other for crumbs from Halliburton’s table; now that the pickings are so much slimmer, how can we learn to stick together?

In any case, a democracy cannot afford to shut out half the population. Nixon tried to, Rove tried to, but their goals are different from ours. Fletcher and Gapasin (52) note that the lack of common ideas in unions means widespread passivity by the rank and file, and control by a small group at the top. We could say the same for our country as a whole.

When we look for historical comparisons, we see that much of the New Deal of the 1930s was a top-down technocracy of do-gooder WASPs making vast decisions for the rest of us-- thank goodness for the rank and file union members who fought for a much more ambitious agenda. Where I live, the Tennessee Valley Authority was a good example of the good work of the New Deal, and of its gradual corruption. The TVA brought electric power and other economic projects to this region of the upper South, and a model of relatively progressive labor relations. It’s one of the few large government corporations to survive and prosper. There was never a strong system of democratic accountability, however, and the next generation of technocrats ended up burning many billions of taxpayer dollars doing the dirty R&D work for the nation’s nuclear powermongers.

Likewise, in the coming years a charismatic and lucky new president with the right package of patronage could renew the fortunes of the Democratic Party without ever strengthening democracy itself. He might win limited reforms without challenging authoritarian ideas, leaving them to fester and infect a new generation. He could even start big new programs without winning broad buy-in, and thereby pave the way for another Reaganist revival.

Early as it is, the Obama crew may be approaching a crossroads. I think they believed they could help many people and revive the corps at the same time. The genii of high finance tell us that the economy can’t get better until they do. They ought to know, right?

As I write, that rationale and hope seems ever shakier and more unlikely. I like the president’s efforts to reach out to a broad range of people, and I hope that doesn't turn out to be simply conceding high ground to rightist leaders. Rahm Emmanuel is correct: Rush Limbaugh does not represent tens of millions of white people. As a one-time stockbroker himself, Emmanuel should know with equal confidence that the billionaires do not represent our best hopes for a healthy economy. They have declared a capital strike, yanking resources out of our economy as fast as they can separate the gold from the arsenic, doing to the U.S. what they’ve done over and over to Asia and Latin America. The established economic decision makers and processes have been poison for the U.S. and the world; restoring their power can only hurt the rest of us. What’s the priority: propping up Wall Street or making sure there’s safe, productive work for everyone? Policy makers say it's the same thing, in the face of recent devastating evidence to the contrary. However, that’s not Obama’s choice to make, it’s ours. When push comes to shove, we need to be clear among ourselves what we want.

And as I look to the future, if through hard-fought battles we can restore some of the security, cooperation and freedom Halliburton stole from us, I don’t want to see the next wave of corporate pirates and their groveling servants in the universities, media, and churches telling us once again how inefficient, old-fashioned, and disobedient democracy is, as they have done after every tiny advance or desperate repair job in the past. We need to know what is causing all this death and destruction. We need to know it well enough to be determined not to let it happen again and again. All of us.

So we have no reason to rest easy about the narrow political breathing space won in 2008. It will be nice if Obama dials down the wars a bit, and the tax breaks for billionaires. It would be swell if he actually tried to pry loose the corporations from their stranglehold on Congress and the courts, though at this point we have no reason to think he could do so, or cares to. It would be totally unrealistic to imagine we will see any lasting structural change for the better unless many millions of people organize for it, democratically. The president knows that and has said so himself.

That’s why I take this change of regime to be an opening that we have to widen and push through together. Many of us reckon the hardest work has yet to be done.