The Shame of a Generation

Trump! Trump! Trump! – 24/7 – the ever quickening descent spiral of American politics. It is simply wrong to think, despite the political establishment’s insistence, this Yeatsian decline with the worst filled with passionate intensity, began with the President’s election. Most accurately, the election represents the complete failure of established American politics. At one time or another, the entire political establishment, Democratic and Republican, opposed Trump’s election. Their current infatuation with ridding the system of Trump will do nothing to fix our underlying political maladies. If American politics is to be revitalized, we must honestly acknowledge the failures that brought us here, most essentially, the abject failures of the American political class.

Somewhat arbitrarily but nonetheless quite usefully, the start of the decline of American politics can be placed to 1973 with the first oil-price spike. It was an existential shock for our then and very much still oil dependent economy. It is an event forever stuck in my mind. For the first time in my life, daily existence changed and changed abruptly, including hour long lines and fights at gas stations, economic dislocation, and inflation, all accompanied by befuddled political leadership. Oil was important.

In hindsight, it was the beginning of a great change across both the American and global economies. It was the end of the great post-World War II economy marketed as the American Dream. All figures for the economic decline of American working people – wage stagnation, obscene concentration of wealth, and ever increasing debt across all sectors of the economy – start here.

At the same time, television, then still a relatively new technology, established complete supremacy across the American political, cultural and economic landscapes. Today, it is difficult to understand what a unhealthy and destructive force television has been for the American political system. First and foremost, it secured a malignant presidential dominance over the American system. A dominance for which the system wasn’t designed. Television truncated political dialogue, while the means and methods of marketing, advertising, and entertainment defiled and devastated established democratic processes and infrastructure. Acting, always an entertaining subordinate aspect of civic space, completely usurped political subsistence.

With presidential and television preeminence, three corporate broadcast networks, run by people who all read the New York Times and Washington Post, became self-anointed gatekeepers to acceptable politics. In the early 1980s, Pat Caddell, one of the first Americans to understand the growing dysfunction of our politics, publicly challenged one of the media’s new praetorian guards asking simply, “Who elected you?”

In 1992, as Communications Director for then former and now current California Governor Jerry Brown’s presidential run, I worked with Caddell in an attempt to get an increasingly alienated and politically disenfranchised American people to understand what was going wrong and offer a vehicle to begin fixing it.

Our campaign sought to go around the newly erected technological barriers to democratic rule. We extensively used what at that point was the new media environment of cable-television, shunning the three networks and their offers of 10 second sound bites and five minute interviews. Instead, we focused on cable and talk-radio shows that offered 30 minutes or an hour. By the end of the ’92 campaign, cable-television had come of age as a new political medium, forcing even the three broadcast networks to give candidates half-hour or an hour.

25 years later, who would have unfortunately guessed, Donald Trump becoming the first cable-television president? It’s fashionable in certain circles to blame Trump’s win on the Ruskis or the internet or the intelligence of Trump supporters, but don’t ignore the obvious. From the day he announced until the election, Trump was a constant fixture on cable. His life-long honed talents as an obnoxious blowhard, half-funny reality TV star brought viewers, bringing money to the network’s corporate parents and votes to Trump. A year later, the incessant ubiquitous Trump cable show continues relentlessly.

While cable was Trump’s main medium, in the memory challenged United States, it is just important to recall the political dynamics of 1992, understanding their roots reached back 20 years to 1973. They were the exact same dynamics that festered for another 25 years and gave us Donald Trump. A very good Los Angeles Times’ article from December 1991 succinctly summed it up,

“Brown, like a lot of people, believes that the nation’s political process, and the style of government created in its wake, have become irrelevant. It’s all flags and fetuses and not much else. He blames the bucks, arguing the agenda is narrowly drawn to protect the interests of those who finance campaigns. There’s room for debate about money’s culpability, but not about the fundamental notion that American politics no longer matter much. You know it, I know it, Brown knows it. In the last presidential election, almost half the nation didn’t bother to vote.”

“The insiders dismiss this attitude as apathy, but it’s more like anger, and it runs broad and deep. And the first politician who can connect with this black hole of enlightened disinterest will go a long way.”

Sound familiar? This dysfunction, corruption, anger, and their causes would be both dismissed and arrogantly stoked for another 25 years by the political class, allowing Donald Trump to connect with them and be the first, though he wasn’t a politician and it helped him immensely, to take it all the way.

Most amusing, if you have the stomach, and even more telling of our political decline are the Clintons, who entered the national stage in 1992 and with the help of Ross Perot, fortuitously succeeding in their boundless empty ambitions. They then failed in every way to solve or even mitigate our rotting political dynamics, and still remained at the “top” to lose to Trump in 2016.

In the last 25 years, a cavalcade of low characters across American politics led the way for our current president, but none more so than Mr. and Mrs. Bill. You could write a book, a fairly nauseating one, about the great Democratic heroes culpability in leading the Democratic party’s capitulation to the economic policies of Ronald Reagan and facilitating the complete economic dominance of Wall Street, the mega-banks, and mega-corporations. Even more debased, Mr. Bill was the only president who for two full terms blatantly lied to the American public claiming Saddam Hussein possessed WMD’s. The weapons Saddam always rightfully claimed he destroyed six months before Mr. Bill even took office. That didn’t stop the “Big Dog” from wickedly trying to turn Congressional and public attention from his penis predicament by bombing Baghdad two days before his impeachment.

For an even greater depraved context to this nihilistic abomination, remember Mr. Bill and his generation’s great outrage about Vietnam. He and many others dodged the draft by safely ensconcing in our prestigious citadels of higher education. A generation learned an early and bad lesson they then endlessly repeated – flouting the rules for personal benefit paid handsomely. The Clintons well represented a generation who avoided war when their lives were at risk, but for the last 25 years led a bloody destructive conflagration across the Middle East for one thing – oil.

These issues all directly created the environment for the election of Donald Trump, but let’s return briefly to the tawdry and hilarious impeachment, still highly relevant in the midst of the latest of their generation’s periodic bourgeois cultural purges. For political entertainment value, there’s nothing better than a good purge. I’m all for stomping out sexual harassment. Without reservation, I support my sisters, they have always been some of my favorite people, but at some point, if we’re to get anywhere, the next generations will need to widen the debate about the established structure of political economic power and its non-discriminatory gender, color, educational, and age abuse.

But for now, more amusingly, remember the Big Dog caught with his pants down in the Oval Office with an intern and the vast army of liberal Democratic apologists, particularly his wife, and her spinning of “vast right-wing conspiracies.” Former Cabinet member Kathlen Sebelious recently stated, Hillary “went after the women who came forward and accused him.”

“How, oh how could Mrs. Bill lose? Oh why, oh why could Trump be elected?” has been the ceaseless whine of the past year. “Can’t they see he’s such a pig?” Indeed.

In 1998, the eminent thinker and author William Greider wrote an astute piece about Mr. Bill and his Johnson caught in a political wringer. Greider presciently concluded, “I think it would be good for the country if he(Clinton) decides to go away.” Good advise then, even better now, and necessarily we must include Mrs. Bill and the whole worthless lot they’ve helped to power across the country – talk about your necessary purges!

In the previous decade prior to writing that piece, Greider wrote three of the great American political economy books of the late 20th century; the first “Secrets of the Temple” deals with the politics of money; the second, “Who Will Tell the People” concerns the growing dysfunction and corruption of American politics”; and the last, “One World Ready or Not” the corporate globalization process and its impact on the American economy. The problems and issues these books extensively and excellently laid out were never challenged, on the contrary, they were gluttonously indulged by a bipartisan American political class, once again, leading to the election of Donald Trump.

Returning to 1973, the year of the oil spike, it was also the year of Mr. Nixon and the disclosure of the uncontrolled and depraved power developing inside DC since the end of World War II – the unchecked and unbalanced power of massive corporate interests, unending wars, and the city’s increasingly duplicitous character. For the crimes of many, the political class looked to scapegoat a few.

In December 1973, writing for the Washington Post, Greider, in a prescient and still horribly relevant article entitled “The Impeachment of Politics Past,” concerning the exposed rotten underbelly of the DC power structure, stated,

“They know―the politicians―that the Nixon offenses which have so shocked the public’s sense of constitutional government are not not exactly unfamiliar to this town…the excesses of this particular President―the arrogant use of governmental power, the political spying, the cozy special-interest dealings―are not new sins.”

“To draw a line around those offenses and declare that they are forbidden, Congress must tactically acknowledge that electronic spying, excessive presidential secrecy and power, abuses of special-interest dealing―that all these are maladies of this era, not just of this President.”

If this wasn’t done Greider warned, “Just as the Nixon White House looks back on the unpunished excesses of recent history to justify its own abuses, future Presidents would be able to look upon Watergate as their license, not their proscription.”

Mistah Nixon was run out of town and little was done. We are now left in the same predicament, though exponentially graver. It is time to face the discomforting reality that the growing failure of politics over the decades has dealt the next generations a tough, but not unwinnable hand. They have little to learn from the politics of the past four decades. In reforming and revitalizing American politics one place they can start is where the generation preceding them consistently refused to go, with our still oil dependent economy, the weight of which grows ever heavier in blood, debt, and environmental destruction.

They will need to figure out how to evolve democratic self-government for the 21st century so it is part of a solution to demilitarizing and de-oiling a planet with 7.6 billion people. They need to be older than the perpetual juvenilia of the Clinton/Trump generation and reach back to our foolishly discarded democratic traditions, revitalizing them for a new era.

Vires acquirit eundo.