united states currency eye- IMG_7364_web (Photo credit: kevindean)
The dominant meme* in contemporary civic life is “I am getting played.” It is what unites the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement. A recent analysis published in the New York Times by pollster Andrew Kohut put it this way:
“The issue here is not about class envy. Rather, it’s a perception that government policies are skewed toward helping the already wealthy and powerful … What the public wants is not a war on the rich but more policies that promote opportunity.”
No matter what happens, people on top come out better than before, and it comes at the expense of the rest of us — they get all the upside and we get all the downside: bailouts, TARP, Solyndra, tax policy. Every stupid thing goes up on their side of the scoreboard every time.
Whenever I hear Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say “Where are the jobs?” I automatically ask “I don’t know, where did you put them, fool?” Whenever I hear a Republican say it is wrong to tax the job creators, I automatically hear “the overseas job creators.” These guys think they can crater the world economy and come back and get reelected four years later by simply pretending the guy after them did it, like a five-year-old learning how to lie. They think they can play us.
Democrats are not much better. They are taking their sweet time in writing and releasing the actual rules that will go into the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill because they need ample opportunity to negotiate favorable campaign contributions, these rules are the Democrats’ leverage, and they know that Democrats do not win national elections without generous support from Wall Street, period. So the new rules will be as toothless as Democrats can get away with — but we won’t know it until after the election. And the whole malevolent cycle of “financial innovation”-to-bubble-economy will start again. They think they can play us.
If the left and right could just see that the enemy is not the other side but the guys at the top who are convinced we can be played every time and all the time, then the majority (the overwhelming majority) of Americans would be able to get what they want: a real opportunity.
On the right, that would mean honestly confronting whatever counterproductive, deeply personal umbrage they seem to take at having a Commander in Chief who is a black man, as well as not allowing themselves to be distracted by meaningless catchphrases like “the liberal media” and “war on religion.” For the left, it means giving up their stupid, reflexive habit — unsupported and unsupportable — to use the mechanisms of American government, particularly the tax code, to redistribute wealth. Both sides need to stop living in Bobblehead America, where people only talk to people they already agree with. Once these things are completely abandoned, both sides will be considerably less easy to manipulate. Then maybe we can begin to define our country at this point in history; what it means and who it is meant to serve, and truly make some progress.
*[meme: "a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes."]
