July 22, 2007
A Midsummer Complaint
By Harry T. Cook

I do not like what is happening to my country. I do not think its future will belong to ordinary Americans (like me), much less to its minorities and its disadvantaged.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan almost 27 years ago, except for the conflicted Clinton years, the United States has been shifting ever rightward in its politics and public policy

 · toward the privatization-for-profit of functions that properly belong in the sphere of the public interest,

 · toward a greater divide between those with a super abundance of resources and those with fewer and fewer,

 · toward a class separation between those who can afford health care coverage and those who can’t,

 · toward a pseudo-Darwinian social arrangement that rewards the already economically fit at the expense of the might-be-fit to guarantee a splendid survival of the former.

This is not how America was supposed to turn out. Our founding parents envisioned a commonwealth of citizens operating under equal protection of the law (though not at first for African- and Native-Americans).

Abraham Lincoln envisioned a government of, by and for the people. Theodore Roosevelt was able to see that the upper classes from which he came were not merely fortunate but sometimes “malefactors of great wealth,” and then went on to do something about it. His cousin several times removed, Franklin D. Roosevelt, became “a traitor to his class” by putting in place a rescue operation for a “third of a nation” and a safety net for the rest. His ideological successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, turned the attention of the nation to a war on poverty that was tragically compromised by his other war.

Ever since then, the United States of America has been on a head-long dash toward an economic oligarchy supported by legislation favoring business and corporate interests over those of the working class, and a jurisprudence that increasingly parses the law to establish wealth and privilege at the same time as disenfranchising those who had not much power to begin with.

One watches in dismay and disbelief as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney swagger around the world, as a convicted perjurer and obstructer of justice is spared a well-deserved prison term, as the U.S. Supreme Court hands down rulings that clearly favor corporations and partisan causes over the legitimate needs and desires of the American people, as elections are stolen outright by big money and high-tech malfeasance.

Many who agree in part or in full with my analysis may be making the mistake of putting all the eggs of their hope in the one basket known as the 2008 election – hoping, of course, for the emergence of a Not Bush who will stand like Horatio at the bridge to turn back the horde of evil doers and their deeds.

Given how the political system works in this country at present, such a hope must surely come to grief before the acquired pusillanimity common to presidential candidates who make it into the semi-finals and finals. They will not have made it there because of courage. They will make it there largely because of their willingness, yea eagerness, to trim their sails to a favorable wind with all the compromises that must be made in doing so.

Thus will it be a long Sisyphean process taking the kind of organization, discipline and doggedness to which liberals are generally disinclined by nature. We will have to find our own Karl Rove, develop strategies to get our people elected and re-elected, draft a clear message that resonates with root American values of fair play, economic and social justice and, above all, democracy.

Just look at the ages of the nine Supreme Court justices and do the math. John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are nearing retirement, if sickness or death doesn’t take them out first. The conservative cabal – the five votes you hear about a lot these days – is, by contrast, in the bloom of youth. Reason enough to elect a liberal Democrat President in 2008 and to re-elect a Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress.

In the meantime, we’re a bit more than 15 months away from possible deliverance. The carnage and catastrophe go on in Iraq with George W. Bush reminding greater numbers of people of that legendary Roman fiddler who played while his city burned.

Doubtful that the cries here and there for impeachment will be heeded by those who would have to do it, I’m counting the minutes, hours and days to Jan. 20, 2009, when, if we’re very, very lucky, we can begin to clear away the wreckage of the previous eight years and reconstruct some semblance of democracy in America.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.