Charles Pierce: The Powder Keg

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33720-focus-the-powder-keg

Shortly before his death, Thomas Jefferson described the issue of chattel slavery as the equivalent of holding a wolf by the ear—you can't hold him and you can't let him go. Jefferson, being fundamentally a white supremacist, misread the problem. It wasn't slavery that was the wolf. That was only the most outward manifestation of the wolf. The wolf was racism, and we're still just barely hanging on. It has become vivid in the past seven years, since the country had the audacity of electing a black man to be its president. The election of Barack Obama changed the context of the events that occurred during his presidency. All of those events—from the arrest of Henry Louis Gates in his own home, to the rise of #BLM in the wake of the killings of Trayvon Martin and all the rest, to the mass shooting in Charleston—took place in the context of racial opposition to the idea of Barack Obama's election. It sharpened the racial edge of the political dialogue on virtually every issue. (Ever stopped to count how many synonyms for "uppity" have been used in connection with this president? You wouldn't think there was a thesaurus that comprehensive.) The grip we have on the wolf is weakening.

There is a wildness in our politics that goes back beyond this administration. But the election of this president—and his stubborn insistence that he be allowed to act like a president—has brought a focused volatility to that wildness that is unprecedented in the years since the turmoil of the 1960s. The lost illusions of American exceptionalism, and the loss of the dominant postwar American economy, make the results of that poll sadly unsurprising. But that basic disillusionment has been percolating around American politics for decades. There is something different about it now that is the result of years of exchanging history for desperate propaganda, a yearning for a past that never was, at least not for all Americans. In the 1960s, protests like those going on at various universities, and like the one that's ongoing in Minneapolis, would have been completely unremarkable.

Now, though, thanks to 50 years of steady drum-beating about how it was in the 1960s in which the country began to slide into decline, and how it was in the 1960s that the power drained away from You in the direction of Them, a culture of victimization has arisen despite all the data proving that the victims in question have not been victimized at all, at least not in comparison to their fellow citizens, anyway. What has victimized them are economic and trade policies that have drained the country of decent paying jobs, the decline of organized labor, and a lot of sleight-of-hand political jibber-jabber that continues to this day. It's just easier to get people to blame each other. And that's what's coming to a head in the country now.

That poll is chilling in its detachment from actual empirical reality. The people polled in it are chilling in their certainty. That certainty makes them believe that the police are their Myrmidons holding back the power of their fellow citizens who happen to be black, and who wield so much power that any means of resisting that power is wholly justified. That certainty makes them believe that protesters on a campus in Missouri are some kind of threat against the dwindling promise of a real American middle class. That certainty makes them jump at shadows, predictably. That certainty eventually curdles into a rage that lashes out blindly at all the wrong targets. For too long, too many people have been willing to believe that which is not true. At some level, people rebel against the nonsense they've come to believe. They feel stupid. They feel like suckers. They look for easy targets. Rage is general, like Joyce's snow, all over this country. It is not a good time.

[Akamai]

1. Add to this the asymmetric hate the Republicans have for Obama and all things

Democratic -- systematically amplified by "The Caucus Room Conspiracy" (and the media's intentional ignorance of this) we see a perfect brew of hatred that the Republicans have vomited forth while the "refs" declare a false equivalence.

Nonsense! The refs are worse now than my brother and I saw on tv wrestling when we were ten and eleven years old.

[eridani]

2. Indeed they are. And welcome to DU n/t

[rusty quoin]

3. i wish it wasn't this easy to manipulate people into rage.

It seems that it takes something like the Great Depression to get their heads straight. And then years after it happens, they get us fighting amoung ourselves again.

[phantom power]

5. We got lucky in the 1930s. We ended up with FDR. But it could easily have been our own Hitler.

Assuming people "will at least come to their senses when things finally get bad enough" is whistling past the graveyard.

[rusty quoin]

6. Wow. What you said is very good. You put my hope level down a bit.

But I know we were lucky with FDR. It's a good post, and it makes me think more.

[phantom power]

4. "That poll is chilling in its detachment from actual empirical reality"

He's right. It's frightening.