The Uneasy Compromise of America

Living on the west coast, the origins of the country have always felt bloodless and distant. My impression when I come to D.C. is one of wondrous, tangible incoherence. You walk around the city and you see a country that mythologized its founders as near godlike figures, wreathed in the regalia of Ancient Greece. But walk into the museums and you get the fuller, darker picture. In a town where the majority are black--as are many of the museum staff--we learn of our long white supremacist history, that these founders were as venal and conflicted as modern politicians. On the one hand they mouthed the word of liberty while they passed laws legalizing slavery and limiting those liberties to white, wealthy men. 

Yet the US contains multitudes. It is not possible to slide fully into depression about a country that really does take to heart the effort to create a more perfect union. I visited during pride weekend, so the city was festooned with rainbows, smiles, and, well, pride. The Library of Congress had a wonderful temporary installation of the history of gay civil rights. This, just in view of the Capitol building, where many members want to roll back these rights, and the Supreme Court, where the rights were finally affirmed.

On a stroll down 12th (?) I passed by the President's new hotel, which is as stark a symbol of corruption and decadence as one could imagine. Yet within five months, he's managed to rouse a country that means to check his power, and all the news rumbles with reports about obstruction of justice, lawsuits about emoluments violations, and federal probes. (As I judged cider and beer in Navy Yard--the purpose of my visit--Attorney General Jeff Sessions was being grilled by the Senate.)

What a weird, bloody, contradictory country we live in. It's too big and too populous to ever fall under a single orthodoxy. We live by uneasy compromise, lumbering from one fight to the next, always somehow united by belief in the character of a country that stands for so many different things.

Supreme Court

The Capitol from the Supreme Court.

History by Conventional Wisdom

This Georgian invasion has gotten me to thinking.

1985 - Cold war forever. The balance of power rests on the broad shoulders of bipolarism, MAD, and the nuclear arms lining launching stations from Minnesota to Minsk. A grand, theatrical sense of the sweep of history--and not just a little doom-pervades society.

1995 - Pax American, post-history. Democracy has triumphed, the roles of states is now in question. Newly-formed EU suggests a pan-global democratic united countries. Globalism means riches for everyone! Go NAFTA! In the halls of the Pentagon, strategists remain gloomy and create flowcharts demonstrating the next great states to arise, and the military expenditures the US will make defeating them. No one pays attention.

2005 - Globalism metastasized. States now irrelevant as the power centers shift to chaotic extra-governmental terrorist networks. Huge militaries are useless in the face of IEDs. The US's grand empire has lasted less than two decades.

2008 - The return of something akin to cold war? Russia's again invading Georgia. China looks hungrily at global domination. IEDs and neocon dystopia appear the quaint manifestation of gentle times, when we let the crazy old cranks run the country. Time to get serious again--the Reds are on the march.

Well, just a thought...

Final Thoughts on the Final Primaries

Everything starts anew. All the conventional wisdom must be set aside now that the two candidates come from opposite sides of the political and party spectrum. Obama no longer competes against a woman with whom he almost uniformly agrees; Obama no longer has to elide frontal responses to cheap shots from his opponent. And most importantly, we now have an entire population as the electorate, not just the split electorates of Democratic and Republican voters.

One storyline which the GOP is fighting with every tool in its box is the emergence of the "Obamacan"--Republicans who are crossing the line for Obama, many of whom were erstwhile Reagan Dems. Whether these creatures exist in any substantial numbers isn't clear, but the meme is itself deadly for McCain. And last night, a caller to NPR brought the point home in a way that could be devastating for the Republicans this year.

It was during a post-election call-in show, host Neal Conan had a Republican strategist as a guest. The strategist began by spinning the web of McCain's sure victory and then they went to the phones. The caller was a long-time Republican, who first and last voted for a Democrat in 1976, his first election. In 1980, he became a Republican with so many others. He is pro-life, and anti-gay marriage. And he's an Obama supporter. At the end of explaining all this, he said that despite this, he supported Obama because "he makes me proud to be an American." Both Conan and the strategist were a little rocked by it, and there was no comeback. The strategist tried to explain why this guy would ultimately come back to the reservation, but neither he nor anyone listening bought it for a second.

If Obama starts winning people over for this reason, look out. He could win in a landslide.

Apropos of that, a bit of mostly unpolished, uncorrected verse. I don't really have a good title, so we'll just go into it.

In our discriminating minds:
the tendency to sift among details.
Even in the theater, some of us are
balancing mental checkbooks while
Bogart rattles on about gin joints.
But let not the particularity--
(Another Maine super for Obama!)
(But what about working-class Ohio whites?)
(Webb on the ticket?)
--blind us to the grandeur

Looking back through the events of
time, we imagine and say
if only I had been there! What an
amazing time.
But you are. Right now
is the grand moment. Your
great, great, great grandchildren
will look back and wonder--
what was it like in that long year?

In that time when America forgot
her dark history, her strange fruit?
At that moment when everything changed
again. And a woman, edged by just a nose!
What times! What amazing times.
What it must have been like.

A New Generation's Nixon

There's no way for this to sound worse than I mean it, but Hillary is our Nixon. I mean in a historical sense, leaving aside Whitewater, and I'm not saying she's Nixonian (although she appears to be controlling and possibly paranoid--but that's a different post). I'm pointing to the type of president we can expect to get in a transition election like 2008 will be. I mention this because it may offer some solace to those who have their heart set on a transcendently cool president like the three-letter guys (FDR and JFK). Nixon wasn't the GOP's transcendently cool president either--he was a crossover president that create the conditions for Ronald Reagan.

Let's have a look at the parallels. Nixon's election followed decades of Democratic rule and a liberal revolution. He was elected in the midst of an unpopular war on the promise that he would end it. He was a compromise candidate for the GOP--a liberal who was anathema to the Goldwater wing but who could attract Democrats who had grown alarmed by the ideological experimentation of liberals. In a time when the country was deeply divided, he offered a kind of acceptability to both camps--but he was loved by neither. The situation with incumbency was a little different (LBJ pulled out after New Hampshire, in March 1968--shockingly late by today's standards), but the general situation was quite similar--the incumbent party was in terrible disarray and featured several strong candidates who might have won the nomination. Nixon, on the other hand, was the only serious candidate in the Republican primary, and he won an easy nomination.

Compare that to a 2008 election of Hillary Clinton. A period of long GOP rule and a conservative revolution--check. An unpopular war and the promise to end it--check. A compromise candidate who attracts independents and Republicans--more the party than the candidate, but check. A candidate whom both parties can accept but which neither will love--definitely check. And even the situation is eerily similar--the Republicans have no serious front-runner, and the Dems seem to have had one since about 2005. There was even a Romney in both elections.

The upshot is that democratic revolutions come with the sway of opinion, and absent some major catastrophe like the Depression, this change will happen in increments. From the liberal point of view, the antidote to Bush may be Kucinich, but a candidate like Kucinich is the end-point of the revolution. You have to have your Nixon and Hillary to kick things off.