CRISIS OF FAITH

For as long as I can remember I've loved politics.

When I was in the first grade, my best friend and I would spend recess having "summits" on the playground. We bickered over who got to be Reagan and who had to be Gorbachev and eventually agreed to flip for it, freeing up considerably more time to hash out reductions in strategic nuclear weapons.

In October of 1984 my dad took me to the old Chicago Stadium, since demolished, to see a Ronald Reagan campaign rally shortly before the November election. It was, to a six year old, just about the coolest thing I could imagine. Reagan made his entrance atop a wailing fire truck, a fact that was sufficient to persuade me that being president was a goddamn cool job.

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In 1988 we waited outside in subzero weather for five hours to shake hands with George H. W. Bush.

By middle school and junior high I had the Senate and most of the relevant people in the House committed to memory; I can still tell you who was in the Senate in the late 80s and early 90s with useless accuracy. I watched the news for fun, mostly CNN despite its raging Liberal Bias. Whatever was happening in Congress or in the elections, I would tell anyone who would listen about it in great detail.

Finally I got to college where I could major in political science and spend every day talking about politics in great detail with like-minded people. It turned out that the other students didn't seem to care quite as much, or often at all, but at least the professors and grad students were usually willing to shoot the shit. That helped. But by the late 90s, something had started to change.
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The strategy of the Republican Party after the "revolution" of 1994 became to disassemble or otherwise ruin the government when in power and to be mindlessly obstructionist when in the minority. Oddly enough, government became less interesting when it wasn't doing anything. Or, after 2000, when everything it did was driven by ideology rather than reality.
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Still, I loved politics. I started this blog mostly to talk about it, although never focusing on it exclusively. I used to write up quite a bit of armchair analysis of the elections; in particular there is a lot of election content in 2004, 2006, and 2008. It tapered off in the next two elections and now here we are halfway through 2014 and I haven't given the midterm elections a moment's thought.

I spent a good deal of time thinking about this while on vacation and it became apparent that, if I'm being honest, my name is Ed and I don't think I care about politics anymore.

The GOP has become a cargo cult of extremists, the white Christian American version of the Taliban. The Democrats, when in power, offer some improvements around the margins but on economic and defense issues essentially tow the same one-party line with a softer message. And more importantly, 90% of the time, nothing is happening. Elections have become bizarre spectacles that cost billions and take place in the intellectual sewer. And ultimately the GOP ends up doing better than it deserves because millions of people like you and I – people who occasionally read stuff and have better things to do than take a debate between Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid seriously – just give up. The GOP base, however, never gives up.

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Yes, I'm being somewhat lazy and taking the easy way out. It's facile to say "These people are all the same, who cares who wins" because of course we know that there are instances in which it will matter. It is on some level important; I still vote and I still teach it well (teaching political science, unless you're a hack, involves very little of the day-to-day of politics). It just isn't interesting anymore. And I don't feel bad about that, because the process has changed more than I have. As the old school Republicans say, I didn't walk away from the Party; it walked away from me. Look at the ways in which doing business in the House and Senate have changed, or how the Supreme Court has changed, or how the media coverage of all things political has changed, and I feel justified in saying, yeah, this is stupid.

Maybe it will come back to me at some point. Maybe it won't. Maybe this was the plan all along, to make the political process so unbearably awful and uninteresting that people would stop paying attention to it altogether and the moneyed class could get away with literally anything. If that was the plan, then I feel the same way I feel when I realize an advertising jingle is stuck in my head: I'm mostly annoyed that such a cheap trick worked on me.

37 thoughts on “CRISIS OF FAITH”

  • Burnout is perhaps inevitable for anyone who isn't actively in the profession of politics itself–working campaigns, covering them for a news service, etc. But regardless of that possibility, what's more likely is that part that you said.

    I finally got around to reading Thomas Frank's THE WRECKING CREW (I suspect you've committed much of it to memory), and if he's right, and he almost assuredly is, then yeah, that's exactly been the plan for a long time: to make government so ineffective, so retrograde, so impenetrable, so awful that nobody who isn't receiving scads and scads of money to destroy it will be able to stay in it, or even to pay attention to it.

    When the fundamentalist reactionaries are in power, they can destroy and tear down and eliminate far, far beyond the ability of the progressives to repair or build up in the time in which they are in power. So it's just gotten worse, and worse, and worse, until the system of governance is simply too crippled to do anything, much less do it effectively.

    The early years of the 21st century have undone all that was accomplished in the entirety of the 20th. A few things linger–Social Security will hang on, so will Medicare, because the people who vote the reactionaries into office like them–but wages will continue their slide in losing ground to inflation, workplaces will become toxic, the infrastructure will crumble as more of it is ignored and outsourced to charlatans, and basically we'll become the post-Soviet Eastern Europe with abundant foodstuffs.

    And we'll let it happen. Because that's what we do.

    It's not just politics that has changed. We have. And not for the better.

    So, yeah, I get it. If this is a prelude to your retirement, I can understand. I won't support such a decision, because I am selfish and I like my sanity and coming here keeps that fragile vessel unshattered. But I can't argue with your dispirited exhaustion, not when I feel it so acutely myself.

  • "The GOP base, however, never gives up."

    This is sufficient for me to stay involved. Granted, I have no illusions that we can do better than right-of-center friends-of-bankers like Obama and Hillary, but man, consider the alternative — President Rand f'ing Paul.

    I do take pleasure in blogs like this one, Tbogg, Roy Edroso, and others who pretty much see what a shit show American politics has become. As a former student of Richard Rorty's this makes me, at best, an Ironist, at worst, a misanthropic fuck.

    So be it. I'm getting older, but I still give a damn. If I get to see Republicans on an almost daily basis shit their Pampers, well, I can still afford to throw a hundred bucks at the Dem candidates that I like.

  • Sounds to me like a great time to get back to those dadaist humor snippets you used to cultivate. I know whole countries back in what used to be the Eastern Bloc where grim humor became the national coping mechanism to the horrors of history and politics. What's naked Bay Buchanan up to these days? Last time I checked, she used to ride a unicycle on stage or something. Lemme hear more of that.

    Or, you could focus on the positive, and start looking at other aspects of the shit show you chose to study for a living. (No offense, but learning that you got into this out of passion cracks me up not a little, even as it rattles my cynical sensibilities. We Olde Worlders have a hard time getting that–last time government was interesting was 1789.) For instance, you can focus on hilarious–the leptosomatic establishment trying, and comically failing, to keep a foaming mad dog on a leash, the teabaggers. Or, more seriously, the medium term future of a party where the beast is out of the cage and won't go back in, and the sources of political finances have diversified enough that the beast thinks it don't need Republican daddy to feed it no more.

  • I have no great love for the Democrats but I see them as the last bulwark keeping the extremist cargo-cult's hands off the levers of power.

    There's one party that wants to do away with the minimum wage, privatize Social Security, do away with the EPA, attack voting rights, plus kneecap Medicare – and it ain't the Democrats.

    I'll take the guys I sometimes disagree with over the ones that want to slit my throat and render the fat from my corpse to grease the bearings of their pickup trucks.

  • c u n d gulag says:

    Yeah, I feel the same way as Ed, and the rest of you.
    But still, I fight on. I'll be doing GOTV again this year – thought probably from home.

    But the problem if we give up, is that the truly rich and their ignorant lackey's and rubes will win.

    They're already winning, but like Major Kong says, I don't want them to "slit my throat and render the fat from my corpse to grease the bearings of their pickup trucks."

    With the amount of fat I have – and it's not all in my head – I'd be looked upon, as "The Mother Load!"

  • Thanks for the honesty. I was never the politigeek that you were, but I went out and canvased for John Anderson a few years before I was old enough to vote. And to this day, my career as a cultural anthropologist remains diverted into the effort to make US policy discourse less stupid and enervating. Yes, you are right, electoral politics has been slouching toward the threadbare theater democracy that most of the world has always had to put up with. And since it is usually easier to prevent constructive action than enable it, and because there is no status quo industry in this society that has scruples about using every resource to prevent to prevent any and all dangerous changes (that is, that stuff that used to be called progress or innovation or even maintenance), and because one, well-funded Party has no real hope of democratic legitimacy — well, as the wag said – "if voting changed anything – they'd have outlawed it by now."

    On the other hand, there is still political discourse in this country – though maybe not on television or among the punditry. And it is being fought over (though again, not on TV). People are not ignorant about what is wrong with politics (i.e. money), though they don't know what to do about it. The status quo is untenable (see climate change, fossil fuel depletion, decline of Empire, infrastructure, etc.), which means electoral politics and possibly democracy get sidelined when we are actually forced to deal with reality, and gosh won't that be interesting – in the Chinese curse kind of way. Who knows, we might even take government back from the grifters.

    So, though it's momentarily hard to move on when your favorite show jumps the shark or gets cancelled, there are still plenty of other sources of entertainment and engagement.

  • Studs Terkel said years ago that the first tool of dictatorship was to make people feel disengaged. (I don't remember the word he used, but he was brilliant and the sentence zinged, coming from him.)

    It was so long ago, I remember wondering how one could be dumb enough to give up, seeing how obvious the endpoint of doing so would be.

    I've since found out. The corruption grinds you down. All the dressing-up-in-ideals-to-commit-hackery. After a while life seems too short and you start spending more time enjoying your garden and filling hummingbird feeders.

    And then the hackery really mushrooms and you give up even more.

    I know where it ends, but I have no idea how to end it.

  • A little while ago, maybe around the middle of Obama's first term, I started putting it this way, that the Republicans are diabolical sociopaths, but that the Democrats are powerless to stop them. It's funny that your youthful love of politics sounds so much like comic book geekdom, because DC now is an awful lot like a Metropolis with all Lex Luthors and no Supermans.

    Well, not "funny ha-ha." With apologies to Phil Hartman, it's more "funny boo-hoo-that-sucks."

  • In a number of different places I've seen interesting comparisons between the US and the Soviet Union, focusing not on their differences but their similarities. I think you may have hit upon one. There is a theory that the omnipresent politicization of Soviet society was intended not to make everyone politically aware, but to accomplish just the opposite — to make everyone so sick of politics that they ignored it, letting the political class do pretty much whatever it wanted to without much interference. I wonder if the plutocrats (let's call them their true name) in alliance with their allies/minions/paid servants in the American political class have, perhaps inadvertently, hit upon the same strategy — make the "people" sick of politics, and they'll just give up.

    The strategy seemed to be working until Chernobyl. At least that's Gorbachev's position — an external event occurred that revealed the utter inability of the political class (including, he admitted, him) to deal with actual reality. So what's our Chernobyl?

  • Scott – what's our Chernobyl?

    We already know: Hanford

    In May 2007, state and federal officials began closed-door negotiations about the possibility of extending legal cleanup deadlines for waste vitrification in exchange for shifting the focus of the cleanup to urgent priorities, such as groundwater remediation. Those talks stalled in October. In early 2008, a $600 million cut to the Hanford cleanup budget was proposed. Washington state officials expressed concern about the budget cuts, as well as missed deadlines and recent safety lapses at the site, and threatened to file a lawsuit alleging that the Department of Energy is in violation of environmental laws.[69] They appeared to step back from that threat in April after another meeting of federal and state officials resulted in progress toward a tentative agreement…

    There's yer utter inability of the political class to deal with actual reality right there, yessiree bob.

  • No where is this inability to create real policy more obvious then in NY and WA, where Democrats have technical control but allow Republicans to gain the majority in the state senates. These states are doing jack shit policy wise as a result. The only thing that gets me through is the development and energy of third parties in these states. The WFP is getting some shit done in NYC, and here in my locale the Socialist Alternative party, while only having one council members/9 in Seattle, successfully pushed and inacted their signature campaign issue, raising the minimum wage to $15. Now they are running another candidate for state house, Jess Spear. Maybe they can break the lethargic state government.

  • I date the rot to 1980 and the Reagan/Thatcher alliance. Up until then I believe that the memory of Fascism's social effects was too recent for there to have been a wholesale swing to the nasty Right.

    From 1980 onwards the nasty Right appear to have decided that it was OK to continue with the New Fascism, Fascism meaning the unholy alliance of Government with corporations against the interests of the citizenry.

    That is what you have in America now and that is what America is busy exporting to its "friends" around the world.

    Carefully hiding this agenda has been what you describe, Ed – the awfulness and tedium of politics so mediocre that the citizenry turn off, tune out and drop out.

    Politics is theatre, and the theatre is so poor that you wouldn't pay to take a seat in the house. The players are so inept, ill-willed, charmless and ignorant that one turns away in embarrassment.

    The fact that a political Party could even contemplate offering up GWB, the gauche and moronic smirking chimp idiot-child youngest son of a political dynasty, as a Presidential candidate did something to me. I said to myself, "can it really get this bad?" Can their contempt for citizens be this great?

    So, having seen the quality of the players in this season's rendition of the Great Song Cycle that is politics, we leave the theatre and don't feel like returning.

    And that is exactly what the players want. An audience probably embarrasses even them.

  • Quixote said: "I know where it ends, but I have no idea how to end it."

    Well, what traditionally happens is either internal revolution when people finally get pushed too far, or external "regime change" when other countries decide it's time for an intervention or a looting. The latter we can't do much about, but the former usually gets started with a seed crystal person or group, and a government miscalculation. The gun fellators keep trying, in their own 'special' way, to trigger that miscalculation, but so far no dice. What they miss is that the government miscalculation often involves government murder of unarmed groups of citizens, not the murder of armed and murderous citizens by government forces (aka 'anti-terrorist police action'). Even then, it often doesn't seem to work unless and until the conditions are right (see Square, Tienanmin).
    In the meantime, while I see where Ed's coming from, I'm going to keep doing what little I can to fight against that fascist tsunami. It may be useless, but you never know when the tide will crest and start to recede.

  • I'm in a college town (SUNY Oswego) and most of the college students who I talk to want an end to the criminalization of marijuana and LESS welfare for the moochers. Yes, they're libertarians. Except for the Greeks, they are all young republiturds as near as I can tell.

    One young fella I play trivia with said something about Obama in mid 2012 that was completely untrue. I told him so and he said, "That's what my dad told me.". I told him that his father was wrong and explained why. He then said, "So, who do YOU think I should vote for?". I told him that what I thought meant fuck all in HIS decision making process. I told him to do some reading from neutral reporters (a difficult assignment) and make up his OWN mind.

  • "I'm going to keep doing what little I can to fight against that fascist tsunami."

    One word needs to be changed.

    "I'm going to keep doing what little I can to fight against that fascist SHITnami."

  • Anonymouse says:

    @democommie; I work with adults, in the 40s – 50s age ranges, who use the same excuse when called on their blatant lies, "So-and-so told me". I have also asked, "But what do YOU think?" and they have absolutely no idea. They just parrot the right-wing talking points.

  • Every time I read a news story about another state legitimizing marriages/families like mine, my enthusiasm for politics is renewed. It's like someone clapping for Tinkerbell. In my lifetime, being gay in the USA has gone from a felony to a mental illness to a regionally unpopular quasi-ethnic identity. I can refer to my husband as my husband without being particularly concerned about who might hear. If I dropped dead tomorrow, my former employer – the Federal Government – would treat him as my survivor.

    It's not everything, but it's something. We're still passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Greedheads, but we're still moving.

  • Mike Furlan says:

    From Wikipedia:

    "The reasons for the Weimar Republic's collapse are the subject of continuing debate. It may have been doomed from the beginning since even moderates disliked it and extremists on both the left and right loathed it."

    Not quite there yet. But a possible lesson from history, is that things could get worse. If our current system falls apart, the right wing sociopaths will probably thrive in the chaos.

  • Ed, as you are no doubt more aware than I am, negative campaigning works in that it suppresses voter turnout, which is always better for the GOP. I sometimes feel like that's largely the point of right wing media: turn off reasonable people and hype up the greedheads and racists. Throw in a hapless Dem party which abandoned their traditional base at least twenty years years ago, and this is what we get.

    On the upside, the US Senate race in MS is INSANE. You might wanna check it out.

  • Gerald McGrew says:

    Here's the thing though….demographic trends suggest that there's a chance the pendulum will start to swing the other way.

    Today's GOP base is overwhelmingly old and white. IOW, the baby-boomers. They watch Fox News, vote Republican (even when they pretend to be pissed at "establishment Republicans"), and vote conservative on ballot initiatives.

    But as they are dying off, the population behind them is decidedly non-white and comparatively liberal, especially on social issues. Plus, as we've seen, the GOP is content with letting things decay and public confidence erode; they're actively dismantling things and going after non-white, non-penis-having people. Play this out a few more cycles…their base declines, the Democratic base increases, and they GOP continues to piss off more and more people, thereby incentivizing them to actually vote.

    Best case scenario, the DNC takes back the House before the next census, undoes all the absurd gerrymandering from 2010, and actually starts to implement a progressive agenda (e.g., some of the things E. Warren and S. Brown have been proposing).

    The downside is that I think before things go that direction, the libertarian/tea-party agenda is going to have to be implemented to some degree, so people can actually see what these selfish, racist, misogynist, assholes plan to do. Then perhaps enough people will start paying attention enough to….you know….VOTE.

  • Sometime in the 1970s the GOP decided that they loved the country but hated its people.

    They discovered that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson types were handy. It worked beautifully and their campaigns took on the awful look of so called pro-life rallies. We're paying a terrible price for letting them get away with it. By doing so, the party has become a cult.

    Perhaps the idea from that disgusting shithead Robert A. Heinlein, applies: There's always something to vote against. Sad to say this is about the best we can do today.

  • I've had any number of epiphanies of how bad things are and, yet, I'm as interested as ever. The general corruption of the mainstream media has made the process more interesting, because that corruption spawned so many alternatives to the wax works and House GOP fellators at the Washington Post and elsewhere.

    Years ago, I interned for a housing advocacy organization. I discovered that they basically cooked their evaluation data. Some time later, I saw the Ralph Nader people destroy a former Naderite who had become a congressman. Years later, I saw them attack the personal integrity of a colleague's husband. Over time, I learned that many supposedly worthy organizations have isolated themselves from their supposed grassroots and that some of them mostly exist to keep out of touch people in nice offices on K Street. And many smart people fail to notice the obvious–that Michael Kinsley is an authority appeasing dick (it's taken 20 years, but now they know). On the Right, the well-financed world of wingnut welfare means that hasbeens like Laura Ingraham always have work.

    But part of what makes it all interesting is seeing what happens when Karl Rove finally overreaches, when people who should know better finally treat Kinsley as an out of touch dick.

    If you know history, you know that FDR didn't reach far enough and didn't do enough for the Jews. JFK needed to dragged kicking and screaming toward civil rights and began slightly to the right of Richard Nixon. Politics has never been pretty and a true believer will always get their heart broken. I remember rolling my eyes at the people who were enthusiastic for McGovern, Carter (inept pols), John Anderson (nothing to offer, no power base), Nader (I've already explained that one) and Kucinich (another Nader only worse–I watched him start out as a race-baiting councilman and screw-up as mayor). Thankfully, my PhD is in a field that's never broken my heart, although it's filled with jerks, too.

  • Middle Seaman says:

    True, it's a one party system with exceptions such as Warren, Sanders and a few others. The left died an easy death abandoning blue collars and spending time on foreign policy, drones, NSA and climate change.

    Instead of giving up I donate money to organizations such HRC, SPLC, food banks, ACLU, etc.

  • I don't really agree. Not because you're wrong about how bad things are not. Not because you're wrong about how things have changed. It's just that things were every bit as bad (and usually worse) in the old days. There's all kinds of bullshit that used to happen all the time in the old days that doesn't fly anymore, sure we have all kinds of new bullshit but we've left some vile vile shit behind us over the decades and improved in so many ways.

  • Early-ish in my career, I got an offer to work in the non-profit world and thought I'd give it a try. What I didn't know was the vast majority (48 out of 50 employees) came from an evangelical church. I'd been there about a month when Clinton took office, and these "godly" Christian folks completely lost their mind. Among other things, their church school played against other private schools in the area, and they used to come in to work gloating about how the school would have an assembly before the soccer games and instruct their children to "take out" 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton on the soccer field. They said despicable things about Hillary Clinton, and I don't need to go into details about what they had to say about Bill Clinton. It was like the work version of the documentary Jesus Camp. THAT'S what opened my eyes as to how utterly batshit that segment of the population was, and I got out of there as soon as I could. 18 years later, I was at a professional conference attended by a number of folks "in the field", including a webmaster from that company who spoke at lunch about how awful her company was and how miserable coming to work was now that the country had overwhelmingly elected a black man for the white house. Nothing had changed with that group; they were still as crazy as when I left.

  • Gerald McGrew Says: IOW, the baby-boomers. They watch Fox News, vote Republican

    Is that a fact? I'm not sure you can even see any Baby Boomers through that broad brush you're using.

  • anotherbozo says:

    Thanks to Guerre for reminding me about the Working Families Party in NYC. I've voted with them in the last few elections (they endorse the Democratic candidates is most cases) but haven't investigated further. Maybe they have meetings, organize stuff.

    I've come to political awareness late in life. This may be like taking an interest in baseball in the bottom of the ninth, fifth game of the World Series. The plutocrats may have already clinched it. Fortunately I've come to enjoy ritual lately and will vote against them to the end, symbolically if for no other reason.

    But cheer up, the FCC is about to vote on "net neutrality," no? Maybe this blog will take 1/2 hour to come through the Tubes, testing my patience. And even this forum, this group of the relatively knowledgeable and sane, will dwindle and die. Have a nice day!

  • "Maybe this was the plan all along, to make the political process so unbearably awful and uninteresting that people would stop paying attention to it altogether and the moneyed class could get away with literally anything." The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has an explicit theory of how this dynamic works (and asserts that it is a common one). Author is at the Hoover Institute so there's that, but I am curious how this is thought of in polisci circles.

  • I hate myself for doing this, especially since there are so many good comments here, but I can't help it. AIEEEEEEEE! You do not "tow" a line! You tow a boat, you tow a trailer, you tow a car, but you toe a line. I've read that the phrase comes from Prussian military training, where new recruits were told to all stand with their toes touching a line so that they formed a straight line. I've generally believed it came from nineteenth century boxing, where two boxers started out by each putting the ball of their foot (their toes) on a line drawn on the ground or on the deck of a ship. Then they took turns punching each other. The first one to take his foot off the line lost. Anyway, never, never, never write "tow the line."

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