America The Atomized

If you follow the health care debate and watch the sausage-making machine called the United States Senate, you would despair about whether our political system can actually cope with any dire domestic policy issue,let alone reform anything. The reactions of right and left have gotten beyond hysterical suggesting we are in for long times of political conflict as nothing seems to move. Our system is intended to be reactionary and the U.S. Senate was created to slow political action and temper the public's mood. The Guardian recently wrote that this may all be well and good but the system has stalled out. Thomas Friedman says that we can only produce sub-optimal solutions anymore from our political system.

This all worries me since the public trust in all our institutions is falling to the level we saw in the late 1960s without the violence. It's probably the unconscious reason that the right has consciously adopted as their "heroes" such old left mainstays as Saul Alinsky as the model for organization. If you think about it, the private sector is all but discredited for its failure to create jobs over the past eight years, the banks by their incredible indulgence and giving themselves bonuses that are several times the production of the American GDP last quarter, and the political parties--first the Republicans by their colossal failure over eight years and the Democrats for their fratricidal antics of late. Only the military retains some trust among the public and it is getting hollowed out by over-extension. There are no recognized Ameican moral leaders. the fact that Barack Obama has to go back and quote Reinhold Neibhur testifies to the paucity of real public philosophers in American life.

While conservatives continue to play the victim while having built up an arsenal of think tanks and media outlets, it is sobering to realize that evangelical movement with its separate ayatollahs boasts over 6500 radio stations and mega-churches that are now complete with shopping centers. A whole generation of Americans now have grown up in fundamentalist schools and churches and are removed from any of the diversity of normal American life. The re-segregation of America started innocently enough with the development of the suburbs and such quaint innovations like Levittown but has expanded into cultural-religious enclaves that have formed the backbone of the modern Republican Party. The splits between urban and suburban continue to grow and the rural pastoral ideal is now used to identity the "real Americans" in the words of Sarah Palin.

With this deepening gulf between Americans, it is now hard to see a consensus build around the common good or the idea of general welfare. The key demographic for Republicans now are seniors, people 60 or over, who tend to vote heavily in mid-term elections. From my conversations with so-called economic Republicans there are as hysterical as social conservatives during this uncertain period. A former banker wants to liquidate his bank shares because he is convinced the capital gains tax is going to go to 40% and he will not answer the census because he is convinced Barack Obama will know how much he is worth and confiscate it. Others have fed into the Rupert Murdoch-Glenn Beck Gold Fever and will not even keep significant funds in banks. They maintain that a Weimar Republic period of hyperinflation is upon us. Their own views do ot differ by much from tea-baggers. But it is a type of "I got Mine, You get yours" mentality. Even though most I have talked to have Medicare, Social Security and the benefits of pension plans, they are against further government social programs to assist those hurting during this time. Usually a sober group during normal times, these people share the same beliefs as birthers and the view that Barack Obama is really a Muslim. There is no split between them and the religious right in terms of a critique of modern America except they don't use religious language.

This hysteria has generated a type of reality-free politics that simply can not be reasoned with. Even more worrisome to me is that this sector of the Republican Party had always supported innovation and scientific change but now are routine global climate deniers and also have turned against many of their past beliefs that America must continue to invest in research and development. These people are part of the national malaise, a phrase President Carter popularized but never said. This is not the bouyant optimism of Ronald Reagan who proclaimed," The Best years of America are before us." It is a hyper-pessimism that is not even congruent with normal conservative sentiments.

The euphoria on the Left expressed right after Barack Obama's victory has dissipated and turned rancid. The bitterness that dominated the Left in the late 1970s and early 1980s has returned because they oppose the escalation in the war in Afghanistan, a position held by Obama during the campaign, and they are bitterly disappointed by the failure of the Democrats to pass a health care reform that would have a strong public option or, in their view, be a single-payer system, which never was in the cards. They have soured on President Obama because they feel he is too much a tool of Wall Street and big corporate interests. The tone and quality of such internet sites as Daily Kos and HuffingtonPost has turned dramatically in the last month to a bitter litany of disappointment with President Obama. There is no sense of realism in their arguments and Arianna Huffington herself, once a darling of the Right, now has become resident scold of the Left. Even one of my favorites The Young Turks has taken a gloomy and almost pedantic turn of late.

We have been here in history. It is the disillusion of intellectual elites with democracy itself that generates the rise of worse political solutions. If there is no trust in the political and judicial institutions of a country, there is a tendency to search out "radical" solutions, which will inevitably provoke conflict and societal collapse. We have remarkably escaped any economic violence that we saw at the turn of the 20th century when big financial interests physically battled workers and there was the phenomenon of American anarchists. The desparate plight of millions of Americans really raises the question why this isn't so now. And let's hope it stays that way.

Meanwhile, our system keeps creaking along. Significant financial reforms have passed the House and will be debated in the Senate early next year. The much-criticized TARP plan has actually been a success. And the health care bill looks like it will be passed. Imperfect, of course, but changes in the way medical insurance companies operate are very significant and meaningful. And, given the lag time of any initiative, what makes anyone think the stimulus would be the magic bullet that produces millions of jobs overnight?

America is moving between two economies--the process is gut-wrenching for millions and the cause of deep anxiety for both the right and the left. If we make the transition, we all will be in a better place. But the question remains is America now so atomized, so polarized that it can not manage to make that transition?