Strong words for a title, no doubt. But justified, I think. In the short 4 months that I took off from blogging (I didn’t visit my political links at all), I am just shocked at how sharply the environment has changed. Every link I go to, which is, of course, a progressive link (I have no need to go to World News Daily — I know what they think) is full of despair at what has happened to the “promise” of the Obama campaign. I voted for Obama, reluctantly, because I was afraid something like this might happen. Faced with the alternative of McCain/Palin, I had no choice but to vote for Obama. The two-party system in this country makes voting for a third party candidate an exercise in futility. I had hoped that events would prove me wrong, but it seems as though they are not. Now, it looks like we are in the soup.

Years ago, during the Vietnam war, in response to LBJ’s arguments touting the “domino theory“, my father predicted that this country would never fall to the communists. Rather, he said, it would slowly evolve into a fascist state. Sadly, it appears that he was correct.

For another voice from the progressive wilderness about what happened to Obama, here is David Michael Green, who posts his articles on his website, The Regressive Antidote. Mr. Green is articulate, reasoned, and outraged, in a way that every progressive should be. It appears to me that we progressives are just going to stand by, idly, while our once-great country slides down the road to fascism.

Who Won the Ideology Wars?

This week we said goodbye to Teddy Kennedy, the last of a breed.

There are other progressives in the government of the United States, and even some in the Senate with voting records further left of Kennedy’s. But none are as iconic as Teddy. With high admiration and sincere apologies to the likes of Bernie Sanders or Russ Feingold, Lloyd Bentsen would have been the first to admit, I’m sure, that he knew Teddy Kennedy, and these good folks are no Teddy Kennedy.

Does the death of the last great liberal voice in America also coincide with the end of an era? Happy Barack, the nice kid now playing president with his buddies in the big house that’s white, would probably like to think so, as he continues to extend the remaining parts of his hand that haven’t already been chewed off by Republicans, hoping to create a kinder, gentler bipartisan America, where we all just get along.

If that was ever going to happen, Obama would have all his fingers still intact, and his job approval rating would not be rapidly sinking under fifty percent. Not a single Republican in the United States Congress voted for Bill Clinton’s economic package in 1993, and since then they’ve essentially never looked back.

But Teddy’s death gives me cause to consider a bigger question I think about a fair bit, namely: Who won the war of ideology? There has been a struggle inside Western democracies for arguably two centuries now, certainly intensifying in the nineteenth century with the rise of industrialization, and then again in the mid-twentieth century with battles over the welfare state, and yet again in our time with America’s culture wars.

Do we have a winner? Have we achieved the ‘end of history’ as Francis Fukuyama once claimed? Is there any reason to believe that the struggles won’t continue into the future? These are all difficult questions, and my sense is that the answers are fairly nuanced, requiring some analytical complexity to do them any justice.

To begin with, I’ve always thought that it’s a mistake to think of ideology as existing along a single dimension. Consider, for example, Paul Wolfowitz (sorry), who was about as hawkish on foreign policy questions as one could imagine, but has claimed (perhaps disingenuously) to be a liberal on domestic issues. Or, consider the proverbial so-called “fiscal conservative”. Why don’t we simply call this person a plain old vanilla conservative? Because he or she is liberal or even libertarian on social issues like abortion, drug use, or gay rights, while conservative on economic issues. What these folks and many others like them have in common is an absence of ideological conformity across issue domains, thus strongly suggesting that there is not one but several ideological dimensions, over which individuals may mix or match in forging their own particular basket of political commitments.

By my count, there are four main dimensions – or separate sets of meanings – of ideology, though one could surely aggregate the pieces in other ways. The first, and oldest of these, concerns the question of change – how much one favors rearranging society, generally speaking, and how rapidly. The second is the economic dimension, which basically boils down to the question of how much government intervention in the economy – in the form of redistribution policies, government ownership of industry, regulation and taxation – is considered appropriate. On the social dimension, the same question applies with respect to government intercession on questions of personal and social behavior, such as religious practice, sexual orientation, drug use, reproductive matters, euthanasia issues, and so on. Finally, there is the security dimension, which has both a domestic aspect with respect to crime, and a foreign aspect with respect to relations with other countries and sundry international actors.

Each of these dimensions of ideology has moved to its own separate rhythms, and in some cases even in opposing directions at given moments in time. American society assimilated substantially large volumes of political, social and cultural change beginning in 1950s, peaking in the late 1960s, and ending in exhaustion by the middle of the 1970s, leaving in its wake powerful reactionary attitudes seeking to re-invert a society that appeared to disoriented conservatives to have been turned on its head. This regressive element seems, if anything, even more powerful today. While its ranks are probably shrinking, the sheer hostility and volume of the dispossessed – what might be called the Limbaugh cohort – still makes it a force to be reckoned with, as the current healthcare nightmare masquerading as a policy debate well attests.

Economic liberalism peaked at roughly the same time, albeit for mostly different reasons. By the end of the 1970s both American hegemony abroad and the economic growth of the middle class and its prosperity at home were beginning a long period of erosion, though the signs were not always clear at the time. Among other things, this set of events produced a new hostility to taxation and anti-poverty programs that was sometimes ripe for regressive politicians to exploit, and was at other times created by their exploits. This greed-encouraging focus was always the core of Reaganism-Bushism, and remains so to this day. Bolted on to it was a set of predations masked as principles – such as economic globalization, union busting and regulatory slashing – that were never anywhere near as popular with the public, but which could be attached to the more basic tax and spending expressions of naked greed by a set of clever marketing gunslingers hired by elites for the sole purpose of reconfiguring the distribution of wealth in the country. To, that is, launch what regressives accuse anyone else of doing who catches them in the act of actually practicing it themselves: engaging in class warfare.

Along the social dimension of ideology, however, constant attempts at blocking or rolling back the equality agenda have largely failed, and the liberal project of opening society further and wider to guarantee the participation and dignity of all has not only been among the greatest successes of the ideology, but continues its march up through and including this very day. America is hugely imperfect in this regard, and countless lives have been lost and tears shed just to bring us where we are now. But anyone who doubts the efficacy of this agenda should compare the place and especially the societal claim of minority groups today with fifty years ago, let alone in the late eighteenth century. Only a generation or two ago, African Americans could barely vote, women were at home, barefoot and pregnant, and gays were never even spoken of in polite company, let alone legally protected from discrimination. There is, of course, much to be done, and the continual set of regressive rearguard harassment actions continually to be countered, but the very moral standing of these questions makes clear the achievement realized. Whatever they may say in private, and however they may act with respect to legislative particulars, no national political figure – no matter how paleolithic in disposition – argues that it is morally correct for these groups to be subjected to discrimination. That’s a big leap from where we were not so long ago.

Attitudes along the security dimension are to some degree subject to real events on the ground, such as actual foreign threats or the rise in violent crime at home. That said, history is littered with cases of politicians exploiting and often fabricating just such threats in order to advance their careers. Unfortunately, it works all too well, and such shamelessly nefarious techniques are not going away anytime soon. And yet one has the sense that regressives have jumped the shark – in the currently all too ubiquitous parlance – by advocating one too many failed and bogus wars. Even public support for the US presence in Afghanistan – supposedly the good war of the last decade – shows signs of weakening substantially. Regressives still love to play the national security card, but increasingly they get less and less traction from doing so, especially when the wolves baying at the front doors of middle American homes are economic in nature, rather than national security oriented. Americans may even be showing signs these days of fatigue in the fame we’ve achieved as the undisputed incarceration capital of the world, if only because the costs are strangling the country.

Altogether, we find ourselves today in a moment of the Two Hundred Years’ War of ideology which might best be described as a period of precarious stasis. The stability aspect seems to derive as much from exhaustion on both sides as from any sort of broad consensus or victory. With the exception – astonishingly enough – of George W. Bush’s prescription drug legislation (which, truth be told, was actually pharmaceutical corporation enrichment legislation) and the quiet revolution integrating gays into full status in the society, American liberalism has achieved little since hitting its high-water mark in the early 1970s.

Meanwhile, the regressive movement of the last three decades has had fantastic success in accomplishing what it really came to Washington for – the upward redistribution of wealth from the middle class to elites. At the same time, however, this achievement has come with some serious costs attached. The Bush administration was the absolute apotheosis of regressive politics. It was also so disastrous that the right is forced today to virtually pretend it never existed. All that was needed during the last five years was a moderately bold set of progressive politicians to condemn regressive ideology in overtly ideological terms in order for it to have had to face the same fate it did in the 1930s, namely, a total repudiation of its policy failures, ironically driven almost entirely by the success of its politics.

But no such cohort is on the horizon, largely because the Democratic Party has become coopted by the same corporate forces that own the Republicans. A Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama will surely put on a kinder and gentler face than a Bush or a Cheney, but Wall Street could nevertheless hardly ask for more from what was once the party of the people. The most astounding thing about the moment we live in is that progressive politics could beg all day and almost not possibly be dealt a more winning hand to play, and yet no one is picking up the cards. The utter and absolutely complete vacuousness of the right, on the other hand, is revealed daily in the desperation of its current daily diet of inanities, which are shocking precisely for how inane they truly are. Obama’s a “socialist”. No, wait, he’s a “fascist”. He’s a socialist and a fascist! He wasn’t born in the United States. His healthcare plan (which the hapless president, ever deferential to Congress and the GOP, didn’t realize he even had) will kill grandmas and Sarah Palin’s children. And so on. What will be left for next week? He’s a cannibal? He’s going to sell his daughters into a Muslim slavery ring in exchange for Gaddafi allowing him the privilege of apologizing for America’s sins, live in Tripoli?

The only two things more astonishing than watching this nonsense being purveyed are that so many people believe it, and that so many people get furiously worked up about it. I had a seeming out-of-body experience this last week, observing Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma at work, talking about healthcare at a town hall meeting. Some poor old lady stood up and utterly fell apart into hysterical sobbing pieces, asking the senator how she was going to be able to care for her sick husband now that their healthcare plan was refusing to do so. Though I’m sure this sort of thing happens thousands of times a day in households across America, we’re not often exposed to it, and it was one of the most heart-wrenching and searing displays one might be unlucky enough to witness. Coburn’s response was astonishing. To begin with, he displayed all the compassion and emotion of a slab of solid granite. Then he vaguely volunteered how his office would try to be of assistance, followed by a lecture to the crowd on the false hope of reliance on government. Both he and his appreciative audience seemed completely unaware of the profoundly incongruous irony entailed in the senator – as big a part of government as anybody short of the president could be – offering to help this lady out while simultaneously warning people of the perils of reliance on government service to the public.

As if that weren’t sick enough, Coburn then lectured the audience on the importance of communities pitching in together to solve problems, rather than turning to government for solutions. I felt the need to be violent well up within me, along with the need to be violently ill. Let’s assume that this family’s medical expenses run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, a very reasonable assumption because it happens so commonly. How the hell is this poor elderly woman going to get that kind of money scrounging around in the neighborhood? By holding bake sales? Tea parties? Passing the hat at church? And even if she could actually pull it off – while simultaneously caring for her husband ‘round the clock, of course – who would pay for the next person in the area to get sick, and the next one after that, once the cookie jars had all been emptied? And how much would Good Neighbor Coburn himself like to contribute to the woes of this member of his community? Does he have $10,000 lying around with which he’d like to back his regressive principles? How about $100,000 of his personal money for this neighbor, and every other one who finds themselves in similar circumstances? What a sickening display, literally and figuratively. This is what so-called conservatism looks like today.

Meanwhile, there went Teddy during the same week. I can’t say I ever felt particularly moved by the Kennedy brothers. Perhaps it was their sense of entitlement and their opportunistic tendencies, their ability to be vicious to get what they wanted, or my general aversion to celebrity worship in America and the vicarious living it seems to engender among millions who would do so much better to live their own lives rather than living through others’. And yet, nevertheless, the contrast between this man, who had everything and yet devoted so much of his personal and professional life to assisting those who had less than nothing, versus the heartless grinding destruction of ordinary Americans in pursuit of the further enrichment of the already wealthy, so vividly on display courtesy of Tom Coburn, says everything about the American political condition in late 2009.

And thus too the stasis in the ideological wars at the moment. The right is utterly bereft of ideas for governing, in no small part because it never really had any other than those that were used as covering fire for the looting of the country. Liberals, on the other hand, maintain a stock of public policy responses that have weathered well across the decades and remain every bit as relevant today as they were in the middle of the twentieth century, yet these folks utterly lack the courage of their convictions, even on the rare occasions when they actually have convictions. In short, the right has all the passion now and none of the ideas, while the left has all of the ideas and none of the passion.

But the current stasis feels all too reminiscent of that found in trench warfare. The levels of violence remain high, though the battle lines don’t move much over time. More importantly, though, when there ultimately is a surge, it breaks through powerfully, and the war is over in a rout. This is why the stalemate of the moment feels precarious. American society is under considerable pressures – economic, environmental, demographic and more – and these pressures are unlikely to relent anytime soon. Meanwhile, the utterly inept and thoroughly conservative Obama administration is every day more ruthlessly savaged from the right as some sort of alien predatory pretender to the throne, even while it continues to serve the interests of economic elites in a fashion that could make George Bush proud of the achievements of his third term.

Obama could never have hoped to have sustained the support of regressives in America (good god, surely he isn’t that deluded?), who suffer today from a mental illness that is broad and deep, such that perhaps 100 million Americans are more or less completely impervious to persuasion based on fact and logic. Centrists, on the other hand, seem basically interested in voting for whoever will lower their taxes the most. Since Obama is spending gobs of money – in part to save the country from the plunge over the cliff brought on by the Bush administration – the president is rapidly losing their support. And, because he has literally not done a single thing to satisfy those in his progressive base, while continuing to pursue policies indistinguishable from the hated Bush administration, Obama is rapidly losing popularity on the left as well. Moreover, if there are any personality characteristics that are most discernible at this stage of his presidency, they seem to be, first, always choosing the least bold course of action, and second, always empowering everyone else and then negotiating with them, including those trying to destroy him.

The upshot is that a year from now United States could find itself in a scenario reminiscent of 1994 – in which a failing presidency resulted in the loss of control of both houses of Congress to the Republicans – only worse. Obama doesn’t even have the luxury of turning to the right, as Bill Clinton did, because he’s already there, and because those policies don’t solve the problems increasingly bedeviling the American public, however much temporary satisfaction they might bring to those who crave a good foreign war, the occasional execution of a condemned inmate, or a bit of racist violence, in order to feel better about themselves. Meanwhile, regressives are having a field day trashing yet another Democratic president who refuses to stand for anything, even if that just means fighting back to preserve his own presidency.

Who could have imagined, six months ago, that the ideology of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would be poised for a comeback, perhaps in an even more toxic form than what we suffered through these last eight years? But that is, indeed, precisely where we find ourselves. The danger in America for some sort of radical ideology to take control of the government and society – yes, I guess I’m inevitably talking about fascism here, despite trying to avoid that overused term – seems all too potent to me now, even in this moment of stasis. Americans are already angry, and they’re all too often shockingly stupid about where they direct that anger. Imagine the sort of sentiments that might be coursing through the veins of the body politic twelve or twenty-four months from now, should the economy continue its downhill slide or sustain only a tepid jobless recovery, should the right maintain its relentless drumbeat of vitriolic and escalating deceit, and should the so-called left of Reid, Pelosi and Obama continue to offer in response its porridge-bland menu of non-solutions, pulled from the fridge and served piping cool at room temperature.

That’s a lot of ‘ifs’, but do any of them seem far-fetched? I think not.

My gut tells me that, however ludicrously inflamed is the current political discourse, relatively speaking, it’s probably pretty quiet.

Relative, that is, to what comes next.

Quiet, that is, as in the quiet before the storm.