DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

What I try to do with these commentaries is look at things from a broader perspective in order to gain a deeper understanding of the pattern made by the rush of daily events. Gaza! Iran! Yemen! Sudan! Ukraine! Afghanistan! Nigeria! Venezuela! Colombia! Jamaica! Hurricanes! Droughts! Floods! Massacres! Assassinations! ICE raids! National Guard sent to cities! AI  everywhere! Mass layoffs! Government shutdown! Scrooge McTrump cuts food stamp program entirely! Gives half of it back–sometime soon, maybe… taking in the pummeling rush of daily tragedies, outrages and occasional advances is like being caught in a rainstorm so intense that the only thing you can think of is seeking shelter.

It’s been clear to me, at least, that, since around the election of Barack Obama, this country has been moving with increasing speed towards a second American Civil War. Obama is the seminal, polarizing figure in this gathering storm for a number of reasons. First, he violated the country’s cultural norms by being an African-American, being named “Barack Hussein Obama,” and becoming the President. American Presidents are supposed to be Protestant white guys with last names you could find in any phone book in England. The Roosevelts, Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Donald Trump (originally “Drumpf“) are the only outliers to that, and, as exceptions to the rule go, they’re pretty vanilla–Holland, Germany and Ireland are England’s closest neighbors, after all, except for France, which is apparently too exotic to provide an American President. Italy? Spain? Eastern Europe? Fuggedabout it! So…a black guy with a very Muslim middle name, whose father was Kenyan. The fact that his Kenyan father had a Master’s Degree in economics and was the senior policy analyst for the Kenyan Ministry of Finance rarely enters the conversation. Those who believed, as my late father-in-law exclaimed, that “A man of Muslim descent cannot be the President of the United States” no doubt pictured Obama’s father spear in hand, clad in a loincloth, squatting around a fire on which a spitted goat was roasting, plotting with his fellow Mau-Mau to terrorize some innocent family of British Christian Kenyan plantation owners. Sorry, folks. The guy had a nice collection of high-end three-piece suits. Nevertheless, this…..African President….violated the expectations of a broad swathe of the population, albeit a swathe that wouldn’t have voted for him because he was Democrat, never mind all that other stuff.

Once Obama was elected, he violated his supporters’ expectations when he chucked all that “hopey, changey stuff,” and made good on his promise to Wall Street: “I’m the only person between you and the people with torches and pitchforks. But don’t worry–I’m your friend.” And he was, indeed, their friend, bailing out most of Wall Street, prosecuting no one for financial crimes that had cost millions of Obama’s rank and file supporters their homes, betraying those millions of supporters for his supporters with million$. The rank and file, “the people with the torches and pitchforks,” were not amused. While they weren’t provoked sufficiently to sharpen ththeir pitchforks and make sure their torches were soaked in flammables, let alone show up thus equipped at their local bank or legislature, any of them defected from the Democratic Party.

There were two basic directions of defection. Some of those disenchanted with Obama gravitated towards radical economic and social analysis, realizing through Obama’s betrayal that there was no point in trying to rework the capitalist system in hopes of improving the condition of the working class.  Those people gravitated towards Occupy Wall Street and the world of cooperatives and mutual aid networks. But they, or should I say we, were, and remain, a minority, albeit a growing one. The vast majority of the working class voters that Obama jilted reacted by becoming, well, reactionary. They embraced capitalism even more fiercely, and demonized others, people they saw as “not like us,” for their problems. They blamed uppity women, African Americans, immigrants, people whose sexual expression is not cisgender, and “socialists,” like an abused woman who never holds her husband responsible for his violence, but instead is fixated on the idea that, if only the kids behaved better, he wouldn’t get mad and beat her.

These folks left the Democrats in huge numbers during Obama’s years in office. They joined the Republican Party, and pushed the GOP further to the right through “The Tea Party” far more successfully than “progressives” or “democratic socialists” have ever been able to push the Democrats to the left. They pushed the whole country to the right, as nearly a thousand elected offices formerly held by Democrats flipped to the GOP during Obama’s Presidency. Perhaps some were initially still open enough so that a Bernie Sanders 2016 candidacy could have caused them to change direction, but watching the DNC systematically sabotage Bernie only made them more cynical and reactionary.

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