Letters: Questioning our Political Future

This week Steven Hahn and Howard Johnson share their introductory letters…
Dear Fellow Citizen,
In November of 1976 I cast my first vote in a presidential election for Jimmy Carter. From this vantage point I don’t recall any particular elation about the act or the choices. Gerald Ford was a clown obviously, according to Saturday Night Live, who had literally stumbled into the Republican nomination. Carter was the peanut farmer with the southern accent who had virtually no political history, which was fine with me. I came from a working class Catholic household with a mother who venerated JFK, so we were naturally Democrats. Party of the working man, FDR New Deal, racial justice — all that stuff.
In subsequent years I railed against Reagan, bashed Bush I, made allowances for Clinton, and finally found myself truly outraged by the dimmest bulb of an already undistinguished political clan. Bush II had me flummoxed; had it really come to this, could literally anyone be elected president? In retrospect, it’s easy to identify his terms as the beginning of the end of the two-party state. The real power had always been behind the scenes [e.g. Clinton abdicating financial oversight of the banking system to the Rubin/Summers/Goldman/Citibank cabal] but the neo-con takeover of the Bush administration was calculated, total, and public. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, et al. set about to destroy the Middle East with malice aforethought and little Georgie was just the patsy they’d been waiting most of a lifetime for. I remained in a perpetual state of disgust. Their crimes continue to play out in the failed states that remain in their wake.
After eight years of that, America breathed a sigh of relief. There was a financial crisis, sure, but the feel-good politics of the half-African upstart warmed American hearts. Hope and change; who could argue with that, and everyone admitted that he gave a great speech. Besides, the guy had a mandate and would shortly be cleaning house. Wait a second…what’s this? Rubin, Geithner, Summers — the Clinton Citigroup/Goldman cabal all over again. Weren’t these the guys that nearly destroyed the banking system and now we’re relying on them again? And what?…they’re recommending bailouts for their buddies as a necessary public sacrifice to save us all from certain doom? Sounds kind of self-serving, doesn’t it? Later of course we discover that all of Obama’s economic advisors are chosen from a list provided by Michael Froman of Citibank who just wants to help, of course. Am I surprised that not a single figure of significant responsibility in marketing fraudulent real estate loans is ever charged with a crime? Disappointed yes, but not surprised.
Obama continued to prove himself to be the ultimate empty suit with his subsequent capitulations to the insurance industry in his disastrous health care legislation that began to fail almost as soon as it started. Affordable care? Not while the insurance companies are running things. What else? Continued Bush’s wars and started a few new ones [Libya, anyone?], expanded the Patriot Act in collaboration with the deep state, allowed the illegal immigration debacle to fester by ignoring existing law — the list goes on. I can’t think of a single boat he rocked over the course of eight years. Go along, get along, blame the obstructionist Republicans, and then impose a lot of executive orders that would be immediately overturned by the next administration. Wow, that’s leadership. His final, and perhaps most craven capitulation, was to the race hustlers of Black Lives Matter. Half-black man is obviously in a difficult position, got to acknowledge history, of course, but when the voice of reason was required, Obama was AWOL. Race relations have been disastrous ever since, and the loci of conflict — Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis — have had significantly elevated murder rates ever since. Blacks killing other Blacks; thanks Obama.
I voted for him. I had high hopes for change. He might have made a difference, but ultimately he was owned by the same powers that Bush was. And like Bush, he was responsible for destroying what remained of the Democrat party, which in his tenure devolved to nothing more than squabbling factions of identitarians protecting their turf. Though I count Obama as the most disappointing president of my lifetime, I credit him for bringing me to my present political understanding which is that the solutions to our current malaise cannot come from politics or politicians. By that I mean our ostensible “leaders” no longer have any followers. They presume to guide matters, but the public is no longer buying it. Mitch McConnell? Nancy Pelosi? Chuck Schumer? Paul Ryan? What are they leading? Our present two-party system is a fraud — there is only one party, the party of Soros, the Kochs, the Council on Foreign Relations, Bill Gates, the Project for a New American Century, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, Sheldon Adelson, AIPAC, every central bank, Jeff Bezos, the corporate media, think tanks [academia’s pathetic lust for influence], and ultimately, the impersonal power of global wealth that recognizes no national boundaries or sympathies. These are the powers currently arrayed against Trump who, inconsistent and chaotic as he is, represents the inchoate yearnings of millions of Americans who are tired of being yanked around by the global elites. Trump is post-political; he speaks directly to his supporters who are indifferent to his breaches of “presidential” protocol. They recognize the unrelenting corporate media war against him for what it is: the desperate campaign of entrenched power to eliminate an existential threat. Those of us disgusted by the present system might wish for a better protagonist in the battle, but Trump is what we have.
Let the disruption proceed.
Yours,
Steve
I am a Democrat.
There is an old saying that goes like this, if you’re not a Democrat when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not a Republican when you’re old, you have no brain. There is some truth in this statement and we hope that we’re governed by both heart and head. But I feel that the foundation of this old saying has been violated by the current Republican Party, a violation that can be traced to problems of ideology.
I’ve written before that a problem with both parties is a lack of ideology. Ideology can be a problem when people follow ideas in spite of contrary evidence that strains common sense. This is the place where ideology gets a bad name. But someone without ideology is like a boat without a rudder, aimless and blown about by every wind. The later is a problem with the Democratic Party. When I was little my dad said he voted for Democrats. He elaborated; Republicans are for rich guys and Democrats are for the little guy and I’m a little guy, so I vote Democratic. That was a clear ideology, traceable to FDR and the depression era. Since (Bill) Clinton’s Third Way Democrats adopted a lite version of Reagan’s Neoliberalism, that old FDR ideology has been downplayed and has left Democrats without a clear ideology.
When I see the Republican Party, I see extremism. Why? Well, I don’t believe their ideology, I think it’s past its expiration data. If you look at Trump’s campaign rhetoric, it doesn’t sound conservative; it’s all culture wars, nothing traditional. And many traditional conservatives seem to have been replaced by someone trying to drown government in a bathtub or arguing that tax cuts are going to bring tons of middle class jobs. Common sense tells me that Republicans are mostly empty rhetoric. The world is changing rapidly and it is important to conserve what is most valuable in our culture, but Republicans seems to be stuck in 1950s movement conservatism and Nixon’s southern strategy.
The bottom line. The future has multiple possibilities and we, together as a culture, are the stewards of those possible futures. Politics is about painting a picture of only two possibilities, one good and one bad. We have to strive to be good stewards that aren’t drawn into false binaries. Currently, I find the Democrats to lack the ideology to have a true vision of the future, but I think they’re being much better stewards of our future, our children’s futures and our children’s children’s future; and that is really important to me right now.
I am a Democrat.
Howard
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