The Supreme Court decisions on healthcare and gay marriage are signs that we are moving into a post GOP ghost dance era, but what is striking and troubling is the lack of a strong progressive movement to replace it. This leaves the future quite unstable. As i noted in my piece:
What will happen next is another story that the end of last one doesn’t necessarily foretell. For example, we have, over the past few decades, slowly disassembled our constitutional democracy without the need for any dictator at all. Corporatized, institutionalized and atomized, we needed only to follow bureaucratic process, administrative regulations and the political commercials we call the news to end up miles from where this country was supposed to be. Our two parties have served as fellow enablers, with concerns for civil liberties, peace and justice as concerns largely left to those outside of the system....
The GOP ghost dance is almost over. But, at present, there is no hopeful alternative other than a continue drift towards a dictatorial culture of impunity for the powerful. The one thing that could make a difference is for the young to discover once again how strong and wise they can be and reintroduce America to the dreams it once had.
3 comments:
O-Care = RomneyCare = HeritageCare. Far from signaling the decline of the GOP, it signals that the GOP has won.
Both parties have embraced the GOP agenda. Even "socialist" Bernie Sanders is slightly to the right of Richard Nixon. Ghost dance my ass.
Gay rights do not affect corporate profits, it's just a dog whistle issue for the GOP base. Did you really believe that closet gay Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Larry Craig were sincerely concerned about the gay issue?
As a political demo segment, gays play the same part as blacks and illegal immigrants: puppies who can't socially compete with liberal whites at the top, but who can be used as sticks to beat down working class whites who could compete.
There isn't any future. As Piketty showed, the past (long term accumulated capital inherited by the super-rich) is the future. Michael Hudson says there's no reason to believe the current collapse back into feudalism won't last as long as the post-Roman dark age did. Even industrialism sufficient to disrupt planetary well being, could not get enough escape velocity to dsiplace the rentier classes. If you need to fixate on one solution then it would be the phasing out of the nobility as was tried unsuccessfully by Madison and the founders. The nation ran into the problem of phasing out slavery, then policing the world, and perhaps only now is getting to the central problem addressed by Independence. Closing the global inequality gap is doable within one generation and is a US project for the next generation since it is the US that lacks the political will to let go of its military-financial-technological- media-resource advantages, currently doubling down on inequality as in Greece and Ukraine.
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