The potential of political realignment

The Times' Frank Bruni scratches the thickening surface:

In terms of real progress on jobs creation, infrastructure and other matters central to our economic predicament, we could be looking at a solid year of nothingness, and therein lies another of the moment’s disconnects....

What worries me isn’t the Cain surge or the Bachmann boomlet before it, but the likelihood that when Americans do focus, more and more will see nothing hopeful happening and a motley crew of politicians who are merely blowing smoke.

What happens then?

What happens then, indeed -- both short and long term.

As for the former, there's little reasonable doubt about the politically predictive indictment of "a solid year of nothingness." The GOP has staked its affirmative defense on a weird sort of hazy, free-market nirvana that we never had, and to which it wants a return, while its grilling of President Obama rests on a prosecution of his big-government socialism (as opposed to George W. Bush's even bigger-government plutocracy). With the tea party in primary control, any fundamental change in Republican strategy is exceedingly improbable.

From the presidential and Democratic table we've seen more than the blowing of smoke. The dead end of their job-creation proposals -- thanks to the GOP's arms-folded obstruction of virtually every facet -- may look like smoldering futility, yet serious proposals the Dems have in fact offered, unlike the hallucinatory Republicans in effective charge of this miserable Congress.

In pondering the long-term possibilities, one popular option is to indulge in the shortest of shortsighted perspectives. Yesterday, Bruni's op-ed colleague, Charles Blow, wallowed in the immediacy of our woes as though there was never a doppelganging yesteryear:

We are slowly — and painfully — being forced to realize that we are no longer the America of our imaginations....

We sold ourselves a pipe dream that everyone could get rich and no one would get hurt — a pipe dream that exploded like a pipe bomb when the already-rich grabbed for all the gold; when they used their fortunes to influence government and gain favors and protection; when everyone else was left to scrounge around their ankles in hopes that a few coins would fall.

I resist sobering didacticism, yet Blow's intoxicated economic history gets the better of me. He doesn't explicitly assert that pipe dreams and plutocratic robbery are only contemporary phenomena of the American Experiment, but imply it, Blow does. Gone are A. Hamilton's aristocratic foundations of the American economy; gone are the early 19th-century political wars of small-government Jacksonianism vs. big-government Whiggism; gone is the wretched Gilded Age; gone is the equally wretched Age of Coolidgism-Hooverism and its devastating consequence of vast economic depression.

Yet somehow -- a much, much longer story -- we recovered from each of these execrable ages: in brief, through more sophisticated economic theories and planning, through technological growth, through business rationalization and worker unionization, through a grueling expansion of civil and human rights, through more than cliches of social safety nets, through intense wars and through focused peace, and, perhaps above all, through political realignments.   

Workers' pipe dreams and the rich grabbing the gold and influencing government and gaining favors? Oh my. Do tell. My dear Mr. Blow, that's not modern history -- that's recorded history.

As a cynic -- i.e., a student of history -- I also naturally resist pollyanishness. Yet it seems to my objective me that President Obama is navigating not only a wise course of the long game, but the only course of wisdom, one historically grounded. Shit happens, but things do change -- particularly when presidential leadership conscripts popular opinion to its side. Then, abolitionism becomes possible, Progressivism becomes possible, New Dealism becomes possible, a postwar economic "pipe dream" becomes possible, and so with the 21st century, assuming a presidentially inspired political realignment.

Which is only to say, Let's not get too down. (Not yet.)

Comments

[Dorothy Rissman]

Thanks for some positive thoughts. I found the comments following Blow's piece very interesting. What I took away from the comments was that we all must be very afraid of what the repugs want to do to this country.

The good energy I took from most of the comments is the awareness that democrats are much more concerned about the poor and the neediest in our society.

PM, I do not comment very often, but I come to read. I think about how much you and your family are going through ever time I stop by. Warm regards. dr

[FoxyOldBroad]

I read your comments often and am glad you're here. I would like to tweet your comments but it appears I must cut and paste the url. Can you place a twitter link on your site or would you rather not?

[PM]

Dear FoxyOldBroad: Against my every anti-tweeting instinct, I have created a Twitter account, to which should be posted most of my blog entries. I guess it's not the same as a twitter link button (which I couldn't locate in Typepad's mysterious technological bowels), but it's close, right?
--PM