This diary is an attempted articulation of some thoughts that have been on my mind in some form or other for a couple of years now, and began to be solidified in the context that I refer to them here during the heat of the election cycle. Today I am more full of questions than answers, and am thoughtful of the necessity of failure to achieve success. It strikes me that there has been a fundamental shift in American politics at the level of each citizen. This is partly due to demographics, as Teixiera and Judis have done such an excellent job of outlining, but it is also a change in each one of us, a change that Barack Obama spoke of today as "the new era of responsibility." I felt Kos did an excellent job of summarizing the attitude that now dominates our political discourse in his post on patriotism today.
Our version of patriotism is a celebration of what makes our nation great. It's the diversity, our people, our communities. Rather than confrontational, it's communitarian.
The celebration of community is precisely what has been missing from our politics for the last 30-40 years, for the most part since the Nixon Administration. The great achievement of the Democratic Party in general and Barack Obama in particular has been to reverse the inward looking mindset of the Reagan era and usher in a sense of hope, that we don’t need to simply look out for our own interests, we must defend the well being of our neighbors. President Obama (god I love the sound of that) reminded us of this today when he spoke of "a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves." For a long time now, since the end of the Great Society Americans have expected nothing more of their neighbors than to stay out of their affairs, and nothing more from their government than a tax cut. Obama speaks this language of responsibility better than anyone, but Barack Obama did not emerge on the scene to show America the light, the stage had to be set for his emergence as the bearer of this message.
The politics of the 80s dismantled legal protections for minorities of the Warren Court, it raged war on Roe v. Wade, it sliced away progressive taxation, and killed affirmative action. By the early 1990s it would kill Clinton’s universal health care plan and dismantle Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Then came the election about nothing. At first Reagan and his Republican cohorts had performed a miracle, creating a politics of inwardness. As much as it seems like an oxymoron, it was a movement to remove individuals from political participation, from collective responsibility. No longer would individuals need to feel drawn to help those in need, if you were poor it was your problem, "personal responsibility" was the battle cry. This succeeded so well that by 1996 our elections became about nothing leading to abysmally low turnout. The 2000 election rolled around and the nothingness of our political discourse became so strong as to blur the contrast between two radically different candidates.
But out of the ashes of 9/11 somehow arose a new spirit of commitment to others, a spirit that would create a tidal wave for Democrats in the 2006 midterms, and eventually carry Barack Obama to his victory this year. Michael Tomasky outlined that spirit of commitment and its relationship to Democratic ideals in early 2006 in the American Prospect. I feel no need to chronicle the abysmal failures of the Bush Administration here, we all know very well all the things that went wrong during the last 8 years. It feels wonderful to feel that spirit sweeping through our public consciousness, but did it come about solely as a result of the failures of the Bush Administration (particularly hurricane Katrina)? Absent the Bush Presidency, could we have found ourselves in this place at this time, or would the reckless libertinism of the 1980s continue to prevail in our political consciousness? It was not the war that brought us here (but it helped), it was the combined effect of the Bush Administration’s non-response to Hurricane Katrina combined with the collapse of the economy. I found myself depressed during the week following the Republican convention, when with no message, and a full-fledged assault upon community organizers, the Republicans got a big bounce that briefly brought John McCain ahead of Barack Obama in some polls, and tied pretty universally. A large swath of the American public briefly bought in to the nonsense message of the RNC, most coherently articulated by Mitt Romney’s absurd claim that " We need change all right — change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington." It was when the shit hit the fan with the economy that Obama surged ahead and didn’t look back.
Much like the rise of the New Deal in the 1932 election, it took a crisis that touches all to alter the public consciousness in a profound way. Franklin Roosevelt was able to usher in an era of responsibility not unlike the one Obama spoke of today, and that consciousness would last up through the late 1960s fuelling the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Great Society, as well as providing for the intellectual beginnings of the Feminist Movement, the Environmental Movement, and the Gay Rights Movement. All three have represented counter-cultural elements of American society from 1980 until 2008. The New Deal probably could not have occurred without the phenomenal failure of the Hoover Administration, trapped so much by its own consciousness that it could not respond to the crisis, much like the Bush Administration whose "personal responsibility" paradigm would not allow them to respond to Hurricane Katrina or to defend a safety net that could protect people from such a collapse (or god forbid re-regulate to prevent the crisis at all). There is a sense in which both Administrations deserve pity, because they could not conceive of the world in the ways that were necessary. But they both played a crucial role in drastically changing the public’s view of its political state.
Can it ever then be said that unbelievable harm can be justified in the name of a new beginning, a revolution in public political thinking? We probably did need Hoover to get the New Deal, though we may have gotten FDR anyway, just as we probably did need Bush to get the "new era of responsibility" that Obama spoke of today, though we may have gotten Obama anyway. To what extent is the short-term desolation that these Administrations left behind them justifiable on the grounds of the long term recovery? I do not wish to imagine a world without Social Security. Obviously we don’t yet know whether Obama will be able to push his agenda through such that one day our grandchildren will say the same thing about universal health care, but if we are indeed witnessing the first breaths of such a moment in history can Bush be said to have been worth it all? Can we sacrifice real people to the alter of history in this way? Our work to build this momentum into a long-standing progressive movement is just beginning, and we need to continue the work to ensure that this is in fact the beginning of something great. And let’s refuse to ever forget how awful the Bush Administration was, for it provides an important lesson to future generations about how dangerous it can be to forsake our commitments to one another.