Interesting thoughts, Urban. And they would give me great comfort, except for one pesky detail: we are now in completely UNCHARTED territory. If you can find precedence for the world’s only superpower (bristling with 300 million people) falling in a slow-motion collapse over a period of months, I’d be glad to see it 😉 My concern is that if our economic foundation collapses, it may be naive to expect that our political foundation can and will remain untouched. And so history may no longer serve as a reliable guide for what we are about to encounter.
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Your point is well taken. Democracy was never invented. It exists (and always has) as a means to address the inequities inherent in capitalism. So your concern that the economy underpins politics has a point.
However, I don’t buy that this is totally uncharted. We have had relatively cataclysmic economic events throughout our history. The fed was wished into being by banks wanting to decrease the frequency of those events. The current failures are all in the banking department. They will result in mass layoffs and that really matters.
However, we still have a highly diversified economy with lots of developed resources and industry. Even if our debt and economic issues were denominated in foreign currency, that would keep us from going the direction of Argentina’s last major fuckup (which was distinct from their history with exogenous political influence).
You need a true collapse to get there. We don’t have that going on right now.
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Also, no one on this board believes (or should believe) that the president has the power to *steer* us anywhere. Only the invisible hands behind a president have that power. The question is: who are the hands that pull Obama’s strings, and what is their agenda? Make no mistake: any first term senator who can raise $800 million while millions of Americans lose their homes and struggle to put food on the table, garner the immediate and unwavering support of the media and defeat the 20-year old Clinton Machine has VERY powerful hands that are moving his.
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No, I think you see too much agency there. Obama draws together a large coalition of disaffected republicans and independents in addition to democrats. Many people, rich and poor, have given money to him. Again you are looking at broad effective demand for the supply of change he offers and ascribing this demand to Dr. Evil. He just barely won against Clinton. He was behind in the polls several weeks ago. He seemed like a long shot a year ago. Last night I saw houses in my neighborhood with Shepard Fairey’s Obama posters on them. It looks more like Mexico in the 70’s with this weird Messianic adoration. AND NONE OF THIS SEEMS FAKE OR INORGANIC OR THE AGENDA OF EVIL MEN; PEOPLE ARE JUST PISSED. Thats what happens.
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And distressingly, I think we’ve already seen the lengths to which our Congress will go to in order to protect out freedoms: both parties blithely looked away as Bush pushed through the Patriot Act; they have repeatedly agreed to extensions of the Act; they have continued to fund a criminal war; and impeachment has been taken “off the table” for the only U.S. president in U.S. history who can be classified as a war criminal
So much for checks and balances.
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While I don’t like the PA, it mostly just brings us in line with international security standards. Some parts will go away and some parts will get stronger.
Also, impeachment is not an effective strategic goal.
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The danger I see here is that people who have spent the past 232 years living — on an uninterrupted basis — in a democracy tend to take for granted what people living in Germany, Russia, Peru, Argentina and Iran do NOT. Democracy is not a given; it is a privilege that must be closely and meticulously guarded. Moving through our lives and making decisions about those who will lead us based on (a) the belief that the unique system we have always had will continue to exist without the need to defend it and (b) events in the past will always serve as a guide for the future, could be our fatal undoing.
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I do agree that being observant and vigilant is important. But our system is not unique and history is a good starting point for analysis. Democracy is pretty durable except when people vote against it (eg: Germany).
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I’m sure you’ve heard of Nassim Taleeb’s book. I worry that this could be a Black Swan moment. Much as the world was not expecting and could not have *foreseen* a global systemic collapse until it happened, we in the U.S. do not expect our democracy to ever be taken away from us and will doubtless be dumbfounded when it happens.
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I don’t agree it could be taken from us.
I only agree that we are potentially dumb enough to give it away.
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And at the rate events are unfolding, and given the opacity of Obama’s resume and agenda and Biden’s exceptionally creepy remarks, I have a nagging suspicion that we are going to be dumbfounded.
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The general assertion here that we are just victims here is not one that has validity. No one may enter the house of strong man without his permission and so no one may take away our power just by force. We may be dumb enough to be conned out of political power and in that sense you have a point.
