Or Well

Pennsylvania voters, God love ‘em, have just elected (by a sizable margin) a Republican governor and (in a squeaker) a Republican senator who share, among other loony opinions, the belief that taxes are evil and should not be imposed under any circumstances. Seems like folks in the Keystone State were sick an’ tired of them damn tax-and-spend liberals in Warshington and Harrisburg with their bailouts, stimyoolous plans, and what-not draggin’ our country and our economy down.

Never mind that without the bailouts of the automobile, banking, and lending industries, millions of jobs (not only in those industries but in all sectors affected by them) would have been lost. Never mind that without the stimulus, we’d be in a full-blown depression comparable to the Great one. Never mind that the deficit under Obama is actually lower than it was after eight years of Bushonomics.

Never mind any of that. The citizens hath spoken, and their word is law.

Now, from an environmental perspective, the most depressing part of this whole business is the governor-elect’s vow to resist imposing a severance tax on the gas companies that have descended on my state like a swarm of locusts. Every other state in the union that allows deep-well drilling (the “fracking” process you’ve heard me talk about before) makes the drillers pay such a tax, which the states use to support various programs including, most importantly, environmental clean-up from the drilling. Pennsylvania’s State House, controlled by Democrats, passed a severance tax last year, but its State Senate, controlled by Republicans, can’t seem to move this legislation out of committee. With the new governor at the helm, all hope for a severance tax is lost: even if, by some miracle, the Senate could be convinced to pass this legislation, the governor would surely veto it.

Those opposed to the severance tax say it will scare away the gas companies. If this were true, I’d say that's the best reason of all that we should impose a severance tax. But it’s not true: the gas companies will come wherever the gas is, and the gas is in Pennsylvania. They’ll pay the tax if that’s what it takes to mine our state’s natural resources, just as they pay it in every other gas-rich state across the land.

As you know, I'd prefer a permanent moratorium on gas drilling. That would be the ideal. But in the absence of that unlikely outcome, a severance tax is a minimal palliative against the environmental devastation drilling causes, as well as a minimal mechanism to level the playing field for alternative energy development. It’s a recognition that when drillers drill on public lands--as they’ve already begun to do in Pennsylvania’s state forests--they owe the people who own the lands, namely the citizens of the state of Pennsylvania, something in return. It’s a tax, sure, but it’s a tax that returns money to the citizens, not one that takes money away from them.

But in the Orwellian logic of our newly anointed governor and senator, any tax is a bad tax. The only exception they’ll make, the only tax they’re all too willing to impose, is the exorbitant tax on the health, the environment, and the communities of the very people who put them in office.

Well, Well, Well....

And here's a shock: it now appears that Halliburton, the company that brought us the Iraq War as well as the gutting of environmental regulations to promote the Marcellus Shale feeding frenzy, knew weeks beforehand that the cement mixture it planned to use to seal the bottom of the Deepwater Horizon well was unstable. Halliburton has steadfastly denied that it did anything wrong or that it had any prior knowledge of faulty methods or materials.

Halliburton lied.

And when Halliburton lied, 11 human workers--and countless non-human workers--died.

If the Iraq War is any indication, Halliburton's punishment for its criminal malfeasance and suppression of the truth will be . . . well, nothing.

When you go to the polls tomorrow, all fed up with the damn Democrats and itching to make a change, to get the country back on track, to axe Obamacare, to do away with the new regulations on Wall Street, to lock in tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent of Americans, or whatever the hell else you plan to vote for, remember this: a vote for the Republicans is a vote for Halliburton, a vote for everything Halliburton stands for: rampant corporate greed and disregard for human (and non-human) life. It's not about limiting government, cutting taxes, restoring individual liberties, or any of that tea-party crap; it's about limiting government, cutting taxes, and restoring individual liberties for the people and corporations who are ruining this country and this world.

But hey, if you can live with that, vote for Halliburton. Maybe they'll be so thankful they'll clean up their act.

Realism and Romance; Or, Politics and Principles

Back in college, I remember hanging out one night shooting the breeze with my hallmates. This was early freshman year, when I didn't know people that well. I remember one guy stopped me in mid-sentence, fixed me in the eye, and said, "You know, you're a romantic." I can't remember what precisely I'd been talking about that elicited his remark; probably I was saying something about how I had faith in the essential goodness of humanity or rightness of the universe. But whatever it was, I remember being taken aback; it seemed to me he'd said the word "romantic" as if it were some sort of crippling inadequacy. I never got to like the guy; in fact, I took out my anger by turning him into the lamest, most pathetic character in the comic book I drew for those on the hall who became my friends. I turned him into a lazy dreamer, a romantic. Take that!

But the fact is, he was right. I am a romantic. Always have been. If, that is, one defines the word "romantic" the way it was defined by the nineteenth-century Romantic movement in the arts: as the tendency toward the ideal, the deeper truth, the imaginative, the possible, over against the tendency toward the literal, the everyday, the rational, the "realistic." Hawthorne, for example, called his works "romances," not novels: to him, novels were about consensus reality, and as such were limited by what actually was, whereas romances were about the transcendent, the mystical, the might be, and thus were free to shape themselves according to the limitless range of human creativity. As Robert F. Kennedy put it, "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why. . . . I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” The former folks are realists. Kennedy was a romantic.

I wish we had more romantics, and fewer realists, in politics today. Lots of people saw Obama as a romantic, and voted for him as a result; turns out he's just another realist, and not even a very effective one at that. The Democrats, as I've pointed out in several earlier posts, are all a bunch of failed realists; you might even say they're failed because they're realists, because they can't imagine what it would be like to imagine. They're game-players, bureaucrats, horse-traders; there's not an ounce of romanticism in the lot of them. If there were, we'd have universal health care. We'd be out of Iraq and on our way out of Afghanistan. We'd have climate legislation. We'd have a government worthy of our respect, and a future worth dreaming about.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was another great romantic. The philosophy he more or less founded, Transcendentalism, was an idealist one--meaning, in the narrow sense, that it hearkened back to the Platonic philosophy of ideal forms, or in the broader sense, that it was founded on a faith in the power of ideas, or ideals. In his essay "Man the Reformer," from 1841, Emerson wrote: "The believer not only beholds his heaven to be possible, but already to begin to exist,--not by the men or materials the statesman uses, but by men transfigured and raised above themselves by the power of principles. To principles something else is possible that transcends all the power of expedients." Emerson was notably skittish about involvement in politics; he frequently sounds elitist, out of touch, or frankly aloof when he discusses his reluctance to mingle with the madding mob. But he did speak out against Indian Removal and African slavery, two of the greatest sins of his day. He did rally his fellows to live their lives according to what might be, what should be, not merely what was. He did, in the best romantic fashion, imagine his heaven into existence--here, now--without waiting to see if he had enough votes to override a filibuster or enough pork to toss to the Blue Dogs.

We could use some of his romanticism today.

The Dems, Part Deux

A good friend sent me a link to a recent segment from The Daily Show that she thought segued nicely with my op-ed on the Democrats. Indeed, the segment essentially mirrors my argument: that for the past year the Democrats, rather than acting like a party swept into office by an immense popular mandate for reform, have been cowering like a bunch of marginalized, impotent pantywaists. So where’s my cut of the scriptwriting money?

This same friend, though--and she's not alone--has also challenged my analysis of the Democrats’ woes, suggesting that my indictment is too extreme, too sweeping. Is it, these friends have asked, the Democratic Party as a whole that has failed to live up to its promises, or is it certain rancorous elements within the Party—Joe Lieberman and the so-called “Blue Dogs” most prominently—who have derailed what the Party leadership might otherwise have sought to achieve?

Now, I’d be the first to agree that my analysis was anything but nuanced. I’ve never considered the op-ed form (or the blog form, for that matter) a place for hedging and niceties. But above and beyond the expectations of the form, I believe there is considerable value in radical analyses (in the root sense of “radical,” which means, in fact, “root”): analyses grounded not in the often distracting complexities and elaborations of the quotidian world but in first principles, in the solid substratum of what the writer takes to be the truth. The Democrats’ failure, I believe, is at root a failure of such principles, a concession to Beltway business-as-usual. And if so, then applying a Beltway analysis to this failure will not get us very far in breaking the paralyzing stalemate in which the Party currently finds itself.

Let’s consider, in this light, the Party’s treatment of the rogue Lieberman. A perfectly simple solution to his antics has presented itself all along, and if the Party leadership had the slightest notion of core principles it would have put this solution immediately into effect: call the silly monkey’s bluff. Let him caucus with the Republicans, participate in their filibusters, obstruct the reformist agenda the electorate who put his party in power charged that party to carry out. Let him hoist himself on his own petard. And then let him explain to the people why he was the one who took it upon himself to hijack their demands and their dreams. He wouldn’t have dared.

The Blue Dogs are a similar story. It serves their purposes very well, of course, to represent themselves as the true core of the Democratic Party, the “moderate” core, the “centrist” core, even the conservative core. But begging their pardon, that’s a bunch of bull. The Democratic Party’s core is no more conservative than the Republican Party’s core is liberal—the only difference is that the Republican Party recognizes this, and pursues an extreme right-wing agenda with scant regard for the naysayers among its ranks. The Republicans give those folks a place at the table, I suppose. But they don’t let them carve up the pie and shove it down everyone else’s face.

Without principles, without convictions, without courage, without vision, without conscience, no political party can hope to achieve anything of value or import. There has always been a deep well of populist, collectivist, socialist radicalism in this country, and when it gathers itself and comes to a full awareness of its power, it rocks the world: in the New Deal, in the Civil Rights and antiwar era, in the environmentalist movement, in the birth of labor unionism, in the kind of social collectivism toward which the ideal of universal health care points. In the past century, the Democrats have proved best able to tap this radicalism, to recognize it, energize it, call its core principles to light and fruition. That the very party that should be embracing, defending, and advocating such principles is now in full flight from them exposes the hollow charade the Democratic Party has become.

Should the Democrats ever come into full self-possession and self-consciousness, should they ever recover the root principles on which they rely, they might yet be what they should be. Failing that, they will remain what they are: a rudderless motley of hacks and masochists, a disgrace to the very legacy they should claim as their own.

I Want to Par-TAY

After reading my op-ed, a few people have asked me why, if I'm so thoroughly disgusted with the Democratic Party, I end the piece by predicting or hoping for some new party to emerge. Maybe, these friends have suggested, it's futile to look to political parties at all to heal our society's ills.

Part of me is very responsive to this argument: the part of me that agrees with Thoreau, Gandhi, and King that civil disobedience, protest, and other forms of direct citizen action are the best (or only) way for citizens in a stiflingly complex sociopolitical system to "break through" and effect real change. Such an argument, taken to its logical conclusion, would dispense with political parties (or government itself) entirely: for what possible use could it be to align oneself with a preconstituted party (or even one of one's own devising) if the point is to liberate oneself from the very structures that exclude, or at least distance, citizens from direct participation in the political process?

So in that respect, I sort of wish I'd ended not with a plea for a new party, but with a plea for a new social consciousness, conscience, and conviction among ordinary citizens. That might have made the article stronger.

But at the same time, there's a large part of me--call it Socialist if you want, or if you must--that believes in the fundamental power of social collectives to multiply the clout, and soften the selfishness, of individuals. Political parties, of course, aren't the only such collectives; the organized, grassroots movements of Gandhi, King, and others are too, and may be even more powerful examples of the form. And yet I continue to find the promise of political affiliation, if not its practice, appealing; I continue to find myself believing that there must be a place, however small, for politically constituted collectives to guide and shape the political process.

Maybe this makes me wishy-washy, an independent not worth his name. Maybe it shows I'm still very much a child of my parents' New Deal legacy; maybe it says I've been drinking our political system's Kool Aid so long I can't imagine a true alternative to the junk it's been selling me. I'm not sure. I'd like to hear what others have to say about this, though. Maybe, together, we can figure out a way to party without parties.

In Case You Missed It....

In case you missed it, here's an op-ed of mine that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The piece with which my article was paired--about the Republican Party's habit of turning a blind eye to its own racism--is worth a look too.


There's been a lot of hand-wringing--as well as mud-slinging--following the election of the first Republican senator from Massachusetts in nearly 40 years and the Democrats' consequent loss of the supermajority they briefly enjoyed in the Senate. But personally, I'm not surprised by the Democrats' meteoric fall from grace. And maybe, instead of wringing our hands, we the people should be wringing their necks.

I'm an independent, but like many progressives I voted for the Democrats--including Barack Obama--in the 2008 election because I hoped they'd keep their promises concerning the issues that matter to me most: global warming, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the policies of torture and detention pursued by the previous administration, the lack of universal health care, the profligacy and criminality of the financial industry, the corruption of Washington politics, the devastating effects of the recession. But with a year in office, most of it spent with their vaunted supermajority in place, what have they done?

They've derailed international climate-change negotiations by failing to get climate legislation off the ground. They've escalated one war and extended the other. They've kept in place effectively the same wartime policies of their predecessors. They've watered down the health care bill to the point of meaninglessness and still failed to see it through. They've made feeble stabs at corralling the most egregious sins of Wall Street (CEO perks, credit card rate hikes) while utterly failing to address the system's fundamental inequities. They've done nothing about the lobbyists who swarm around them--indeed, it's their incestuous dependence on those money-peddlers that has squelched the other reform legislation I hoped to see. In order to achieve all of this nothing, they've thrown around so much cash (but none of it to you and me) you'd think they were on a year-long holiday shopping spree. And still the economy is reeling.

One might expect such monumental failures to produce not excuses and accusations but soul-searching. If, that is, the Democratic Party still had a soul left to search.

The Massachusetts election, in short, has only driven home what was already painfully evident from the past year: The Democrats are a failed party in every conceivable way. They no longer stand for anything coherent or meaningful, they no longer feel any responsibility to the people they serve, and they are no longer capable of achieving anything of consequence no matter how many votes or offices they hold. A party so ideologically, morally and politically bankrupt has no business existing.

In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama asserted that "it's time the American people get a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength." I couldn't agree more. But I no longer believe the Democratic Party has a part to play in creating such a government.

Historically, political parties arise to meet a great but unfulfilled need: The Democrats emerged in the 18th century as the "party of the common man," the Republicans in the 19th to oppose the extension of slavery. I don't know what new party will rise from the ruins of the Democrats. All I know is it can't rise too soon.