Sam
Smith
We
are now looking at the prospect of having to choose between two candidates who
have one striking thing in common: Trump and Clinton are each distrusted by
over half of voters. This is not surprising given their dishonesty,
manipulations, and treatment of issues as having only transitory value. What is
surprising is that they have triumphed over such liabilities with such ease.
To
dissect this grim development it helps to keep in mind that politicians reflect
us more than they lead us. In a society that valued honesty, integrity,
community, cooperation and kindness we would have different candidates. That
this is not the case didn’t happen overnight; it is the result of a long trend
in American society. While recognizing this knowledge doesn’t cure anything, it
may help to understand our plight to understand some of the causes of it. Here
are a few suggestions:
The
corporatocracy: For
more than a half century America has been shifting its views dramatically from
those inspired by churches, community, small business, and an education system
that still included moral values as part
of the curriculum towards those inspired and directed by a corporate America
glorified by the vast expansion of business schools whose highest virtue is greed.
In the 1950s we were turning out less than 5000 MBAs a year; by 2005 that
figure had risen to 142,000.
And instead of valuing once popular books critical of dysfunctional business culture like the Organization Man and Death of a Salesman we would sooner turn to Donald Trunp’s “The Art of the Deal.”
And instead of valuing once popular books critical of dysfunctional business culture like the Organization Man and Death of a Salesman we would sooner turn to Donald Trunp’s “The Art of the Deal.”
As
I wrote of the corporate curse in 2008:
One of the things what used to keep corporate
culture in check was that, whatever its grandiose notions of itself, its most
outward and visible sign was often the salesman, the man Arthur Miller had
Charlie describe in his tale of the trade: "For a salesman, there is no
rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the
law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a
smile and a shoeshine."
This classic character was so ubiquitous that it
seemed every other joke began with, "A salesman knocked on the door and .”
But now we have
moved from considering Willy Loman the opposite to what we admire to having
Donald Trump, riding on a smile and a shoeshine, perhaps becoming our next
president.
This
is an extreme example of the damage of the corporate curse on our culture but
far from the only one. As I noted:
The tragedy is that each of the [now]
infected cultures, organizations and individuals once had their own culture
that often was infinitely more appealing, intelligent, inspiriting and honest
than that which has sullied it. Why is the corporate and business school
tradition preferable to that of the church, the artist, the non-profit, the
political movement or education? Is
politics just branding, is art just a product, is education just a
learning process, would Martin Luther King have done better if he had gone to
business rather than theological school? Each of these traditions have
centuries of wisdom and experience behind them, but all that is increasingly
put aside to fit the corporate model.
Television: In part
because it has been replaced by the Internet in so many ways, we tend to forget
what a major change television made to our culture, not the least of which was
to our politics.
One
major shift was to change the source of politicians. It was no longer necessary
to have a record in some community or state serving a major constituency.
Television effectively eliminated ordinary citizens, actions and places in
politics replacing them with images bought by dollars. This phenomenon has only
grown with time to the point that we now have a “black president” who, in fact,
spent more time at Harvard Law School than with any black relative. And a
leading GOP candidate who failed to show up for most of his Senate votes.
With
television, image became infinitely more important than reality. In the case of
politicians, the media increasingly covered efforts to create their image in
preference to reporting what politicians actually did. For example, where is
the investigative reporting of those victimized by various Trump bankruptcies?
Why the total journalistic indifference to what Hillary Clinton did in
Arkansas?
The
politician, thanks in no small part to television, has become an image like one
finds on American Idol or the Real Housewives of Somewhere. Reality carries little weight and narcissism
carries the day.
The collapse
of liberalism: One
remarkable aspect of the Sanders campaign is that it is the first time in
decades that the party has featured someone who actually fulfilled the
definition of a liberal as established by the New Deal and Great Society. For the past few decades, increasingly
upscale liberals have emphasized issues of personal interest such as gay rights
and abortion while ignoring that former heart of liberalism: economic decency.
It didn’t have to be a choice between one
or the other but it was and, as a result, a vast proportion of the public
became susceptible to the lies of the Tea Party and people like Trump, Cruz and
Rubio. White liberals essentially gave
their own constituency away not just out of indifference to the concerns of
less successful whites, but actually dissin’ them. How easy it is to send
struggling white voters Trump’s way if what they hear from liberals is talk of
“white privilege.” A liberal constituency of less than 15% has tried to gain
power by trashing those it should be attracting and converting., Add to that an
obsession for proper symbolism over prosperous reality - getting rid of
Confederate flags being considered more important than adding to people’s
checkbook – and it is small wonder that liberals are so disliked by so many.
The gradocracy
– The
Democratic programs and legislation have increasingly been designed and written
by those with law, business and economics degrees. These used to be skills that
aided, but didn’t overwhelm, policies driven by social intelligent politicians.
Even lawyers in Congress once came out of communities where their professions
was integrated with their culture. And Lyndon Johnson would never have written
a bill as painfully and masochistically complex as Obamacare. Long gone are Democrats like Eugene Talmadge
who used to say, “You all only have three friends: the Lord God Almighty, the
Sears Roebuck catalog, and Eugene Talmadge. And you can only vote for one of
them.” The people’s Democrat seems to have largely disappeared.
One
central cause was the rise, led in no small part by the Clintons, of a
neo-liberalism that reversed or drained a number of key liberal programs including
such things as social welfare and control of the finance industry. Central to this was the conservative
Democratic Leadership Council, that not only boosted Clinton but helped get
Obama underway. While this effort helped the Clintons, it seriously harmed the
Democratic Party as a whole. Democrats
were losing seats in Congress and state legislatures, even as Clinton was being
dubbed the party’s savior. And becoming
GOP Lite meant the party lost a character and purpose that the average voter
could understand and like.
O
What
do we do about all this? Much is out of our control. But the Sanders campaign
shows that the current system can be shaken if not beaten. We should view it as
the beginning of a long lived movement and not just a contest decided by one convention.
Even if he loses, the more we follow what Sanders has shown us, the more likely we
are to change things at long last.
2 comments:
"For the past few decades, increasingly upscale liberals have emphasized issues of personal interest such as gay rights and abortion while ignoring that former heart of liberalism: economic decency."
Terribly accurate and it's not over; now we have trans rights which, though valid, affect at most 1% when poverty grinds on at over 50%. In Seattle, gays are upset that "their neighborhood," Capitol Hill, isn't exempt from gentrification and its effects. Is it divine retribution that rich, socially-crippled tech bro's are the vehicle? It's liberal madness, but you point that out at your own risk.
Take it away, Phil! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yB-BBVQLnxI
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