Friday, September 20, 2019

29 Years Ago Today


I'm having a hard time putting pen to paper these days.  Or pixel to screen.  Or whatever.  It seems every time I sit down with clean hands to write that one, true sentence about whats happening in our world, I am suddenly flattened by the memory of having written exactly the same thing five or ten or fifteen years ago.  Because things haven't really changed at all: they have just gotten exponentially but predictably worse along the same, awful trajectory they have already been on for decades.

Meh.  What are you gonna do?

And then this fell into my lap.  And it's so sad and so perfect that I had to sit down and write about it.

I'm not writing for you or me, of course.  We're fucked.

No, this is for some future generation of historians who are sifting the rubble of our civilization trying to figure out what the hell happened.

First the setup.

Today, The New York Time published a thing about OMFG!  The Republican Party is losing its mind!  They're resorting to the kind of reckless slash-and-burn politics that could be really dangerous.  Like torch-our-democracy dangerous!  Somebody really oughta do something!
Why Republicans Play Dirty

They fear that if they stick to the rules, they will lose everything. Their behavior is a threat to democratic stability.

The greatest threat to our democracy today is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win.

The party’s abandonment of fair play was showcased spectacularly in 2016, when the United States Senate refused to allow President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. While technically constitutional, the act — in effect, stealing a Court seat — hadn’t been tried since the 19th century. It would be bad enough on its own, but the Merrick Garland affair is part of a broader pattern.

Republicans across the country seem to have embraced an “any means necessary” strategy to preserve their power...

Constitutional hardball can damage and even destroy a democracy. Democratic institutions only function when power is exercised with restraint. When parties abandon the spirit of the law and seek to win “by any means necessary,” politics often descends into institutional warfare...

Why is the Republican Party playing dirty? Republican leaders are not driven by an intrinsic or ideological contempt for democracy. They are driven by fear.

Democracy requires that parties know how to lose. Politicians who fail to win elections must be willing to accept defeat, go home, and get ready to play again the next day. This norm of gracious losing is essential to a healthy democracy.

But for parties to accept losing, two conditions must hold. First, they must feel secure that losing today will not bring ruinous consequences; and second, they must believe they have a reasonable chance of winning again in the future. When party leaders fear they cannot win future elections, or that defeat poses an existential threat to themselves or their constituents, the stakes rise. Their time horizons shorten. They throw tomorrow to the wind and seek to win at any cost today. In short, desperation leads politicians to play dirty....

So like the old Southern Democrats, modern-day Republicans have responded to darkening electoral horizons and rank-and-file perceptions of existential threat with a win-at-any-cost mentality...

Liberal democracy has historically required at least two competing parties committed to playing the democratic game, including one that typically represents conservative interests. But the commitment of America’s conservative party to this system is wavering, threatening our political system as a whole. Until Republicans learn to compete fairly in a diverse society, our democratic institutions will be imperiled.
Sound's pretty bad, right?

Well here's the punch line.

Exactly 29 years ago today the same newspaper, The New York Time, published virtually the same article.

OMFG!  The Republican Party is losing its mind!  They're resorting to the kind of reckless slash-and-burn politics that could be really dangerous.  Like torch-our-democracy dangerous!

Somebody really oughta do something!
The Politics of Slash and Burn

Published: September 20, 1990

''Sick.'' ''Traitors.'' ''Bizarre.'' ''Self-serving.'' ''Shallow.'' ''Corrupt.'' ''Pathetic.'' ''Shame.'' The group that urged political candidates to use these epithets has since regretted suggesting the word ''traitors,'' in response to inquiries from the press. But the others were allowed to stand; they appear in a glossary that a conservative Republican group recently mailed to Republican state legislative candidates.

The group is Gopac, the G.O.P. Political Action Committee. Its general chairman is Representative Newt Gingrich. With the pamphlet, ''Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,'' comes a letter from Mr. Gingrich himself. Its message to candidates: Step up invective. Use words like these to describe opponents. These words work.

...
The Gopac glossary may herald a descent into even lower levels of discourse. It comes blessed by a politician of some influence - the Republican whip in the House - and it is intended for candidates on the state level, many of them presumably running for the first time. Even though Mr. Gingrich himself may not have seen the list before it was mailed, this is a disturbing document.

The nakedness of the Gopac offering also makes it useful. There must be limits to the negative politics that voters will bear; the bald appeal to invective will certainly probe those limits. For now, it should be said that some adjectives in the glossary aptly describe the glossary itself: shallow, sensationalist and, yes, shame(ful).

But the lords and ladies of the establishment -- the people who had the actual power to change the catastrophic trajectory we were on -- did nothing.  Even though, for more than a full generation, it was abundantly clear exactly where the Republican party was headed and exactly how bad it could get, they stood pat and waited for someone else to sweep in and solve the problem/

So, Young Historians of Tomorrow, you may well what the lords and ladies of the establishment  of the American political media -- including The New York Times -- were doing as this existential threat to our democracy that was zooming straight at us?

Well, believe it or not, they were very busy larding every political talk show, every newspaper op-ed page and every national magazine with Beltway-media-approved Republicans who, week-after-week, year-after-year, assured millions of God-fearing Americans that everything was fine.  That the establishment had everything under control.  That the loud, deranged, racist voices bellowing madness from the Right (and that kept getting louder and more deranged and more openly racist) were merely a raucous fringe of an otherwise perfectly healthy party and, anyway, they were no worse than the fringe in the Left, right?

The lords and ladies of the American media did all of this as a matter of corporate policy.

The lords and ladies of the American media also marginalized and unpersoned anyone who said otherwise as a matter of corporate policy.

In fact, to this very day -- even as we now live among the ruins of their failure and malfeasance -- the lords and ladies of the American media continue to commend to the public's attention the opinions of exactly the same hacks and frauds and liars who led the country, step-by-step, into disaster.  They continue to lionize them.  Continue to reward them financially and professionally as if no public record of their lies and fuck-ups existed.

Like any other unregulated corporate polluter, the corporate media continues to privatize the huge profits they glean from wrecking out democracy, while socializing the cost of poisoning our politics.

Like any other unregulated corporate polluter, cleaning up the mess they made is always someone else's problem.

And that, Young Historians of Tomorrow, is what happened.



Behold, a Tip Jar!

6 comments:

Ramona Grigg said...

You know what I think when I read this? That EVERYONE should be reading this. Important, incredibly well written, resonant--and how many comments will you get? How much attention?

How do we get it out there? What do we have to do to get it out there? I wish I knew.

But I can't thank you enough for writing it.

Robt said...

Most of corporate press is does not deserve the US Constitution 1st Amendment protections because they are not providing what the protections were created for.

They do not even blink an eye when SON of the late fantastic great Justice Scalia , who rose in the ranks of greatness because his father . Who despite big government so much they profit like Lobbyist leaches off it. Only to be nominated and confirmed to high government socialized positions.
Confirming son of Scalia to labor Secretary from his position of corporate lobbyist. is like Confirming David Duke as the top Justice department official solely in charge of the Civil Rights Act'

You never see a Jimmy Hoffa type confirmed to the U.s. Chamber of Commerce, do you?

It is not far away for republicans to confirm Roy Moore to a position at a female prison as Warden.

Neo Tuxedo said...

this is for some future generation of historians who are sifting the rubble of our civilization trying to figure out what the hell happened.

Bold of you to assume future generations of historians will have access to the internet. Or electronic media. Or even electricity. Hell, at this point, it's a flip of the coin whether there will be more than one future generation of historians.

They continue to lionize them. Continue to reward them financially and professionally as if no public record of their lies and fuck-ups existed.

You left out, probably because everyone here knows it, "Continue to relegate those of us on the Left who had the bad taste to be right about the Right all along to Outer Darkness, where we can wail and gnash our teeth all we like without disturbing them." (Or words to that effect, anyway.)

Pagan in repose said...

My first thought, way back when, when Dan Rather took over the spot that Walter Cronkite held for many years, was that the 2 million dollar salary Rather was to be paid seemed like the beginning of Corporate news for profit modus operandi. I mean wasn't that much money a temptation to not say anything bad about CBS in regard to actual news involving CBS and where that could evolve to.

Then we get Citizens United that equated into enormous amounts of cash coming from the million/billion class getting their way into our government and what that should be for them, plus there was lots of money stashed away in the form of our tax dollars that they could get their hands on.

Now we see the current narcissist sociopath masquerading as president lining his pockets with our tax dollars and him giving the billionaire class a tax cut that giving them more of our tax dollars. All of this is fully supported by the republican party going back many decades with the idea that they pay for their theft of our tax dollars by cutting back on the social programs that serve the actual tax payers.

Corporations have been and always will be out for the quickest way to more profit, and where is that pot of money to be acquired, well our tax dollars. They always want more, they can never get enough.

When where and how do we stop them?

The lawyers filled a brief to stop NY from acquiring trumps tax returns by foisting the idea that the president can and should be the authoritarian leader, not even held to investigation about anything. If this idea is upheld then pack up the bags because that would be the end of our constitutional democracy and the beginning of the authoritarian rule in our country. "If the president does it it can't be wrong."

We be fucked baby! Forever and a day.

MadisonGman said...

Goddamn this is all so perfectly stated. I'm going to share it far and wide. The wealth inequality gap from massive tax cuts and citizens United is growing by the day and tamping down our voices.

Watching the loudest voice sure shows how it all was allowed to happen. There aren't enough maggots eating the corpse of roger ailes for my liking.

Kitty said...

"So like the old Southern Democrats, modern-day Republicans have responded to darkening electoral horizons and rank-and-file perceptions of existential threat with a win-at-any-cost mentality..."

These are the SAME people. Nice bothsiderism.