Fundraiser Day Five: Charles Pierce Wonders What Comes Next

Mr. Pierce pronounced Last Rites over the silly, fleeting notion of "Obamaism" and wonders what will take its place:

The End Of Obamaism

By Charles P. Pierce

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Then, of course, there was Glitch-ghazi-gate, the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act's website that occasioned yet another round of mock concern from the Republicans in Congress -- now desperate to change the subject from how they almost blew up the economy -- and from the courtier press -- now desperate to get away from a story in which there was no spurious "balance" to hide behind. NBC, in particular, seemed positively frantic to prove its non-liberalism to the world.

What this very strange period ultimately proves is that Barack Obama, for all his talk about how "Washington" doesn't work, and all his endless praise for the essential goodness of the American people, has to know by now that we are in fact a very political people, easily manipulated, and carefully divided against each other, over and over again, and by people who know how. I never bought the 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention ("We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America!"), never bought a word of it. Now we are seeing it in its fundamental eclipse. Whatever Obamaism really is, it has run its course. The fight now is over what comes next.

Well, since Cholly asked, I'd say that as far as our national political dialogue is concerned, "Liberals" will remain in a state of enforced invisibility, existing only as bogeymen who are either entirely (Fox News/Hate Radio) or 50% (MSNBC/NYT/PBS/NPR/Ad Nauseum) to blame for everything. America's Emmanuel Goldstein: the all-purpose scapegoat for all bad things.

The Liberal critique of the Wingnuts, on the other hand, will continue be expropriated, chopped, stripped, repainted and re-marketed by the hydra-headed David Frum/Ramesh Ponnuru/Andrew Sullivan/Rich Lowry/Michael Steele/Joe Scarborough beast as "Real Conservatism".  They will continue to have many amusing, dick-waving arguments among themselves about who was right about the Crazies first.  None of them will ever mention the word "Liberal" except to sneer.  They will all continue to be gainfully employed.

Everyone associated with the "No Labels" scam will continue to get paid.

David Brooks will return from "book leave" tanned and rested with new insights into why Both Sides are to Blame.

The Poors will continue getting poorer.  The rich will continue getting richer and paying premium prices to keep the Poors the hell away from them.  Liberals will continue to yell impotently outside the castle gates.

Eventually enough old, white, Republican bigots will shuffle off to unquiet graves to change the political reward structure just enough so that we might be able to begin to address actual problems, which by that time will have grown so acute that they will be Huge Horrible Megadeath Crises, which the remainder of the Real Conservative Caucus will go right back to telling us can only be fixed by unleashing the power of the Free Market (Translation: even less regulation, even lower taxes.)

People will wonder Very Loudly what the fuck was wrong with us back at the dawn of the 21st that we refused to rouse ourselves to fix our very real, very immediate, clearly dire problems.

Which is when we will either get genuinely serious about our Huge Horrible Megadeath Crises...or the roundup, deportation and imprisonment of the Liberals (which history as it will be written by David Brooks will prove to have been the sinister force behind every Huge Horrible Megadeath Crises) will begin in earnest.