Liberal Street Fighter


New Kids in the Neighborhood – Norman Rockwell

So many pressing problems, so many divisions … do we correct them one issue at a time, or should we try to find a way to see what connects them all? It’s seems that the second tack, finding connections and global solutions, has been rendered all-but impossible. With our defanged and ineffective public education system, it doesn’t seem that escaping this trap is in the offing. As I’ve stated in the past, I believe that there was a movement to destroy broad, liberal-arts based learning that began in earnest after Brown v. Education. Better to destroy this vital foundation of the public square rather than to share it.

Plainly, fighting each carefully chosen battle one at a time isn’t working. This isn’t true only for our problems with education, but also in the challenges that we face regarding race relations, the environment, the widening gaps in our economy that are dragging us once again toward a feudal caste system, as stated so well by the Oxymoronic Philosopher:

But America, as these pieces illustrate, has failed her working class. One can no longer pick herself up by her bootstraps and fight for a better life. We make it impossible for the sons and daughters of blue collar labor to get a college degree. Not to mention the fact that the blue collar labor that once meant a hard working job in a mill or factory that provided the family with benefits and a pension now means a job flipping burgers or stocking shelves at Wallyworld for meager pay and little or no healthcare. But what has led us into these precarious waters? Is it a fault of the system? Maybe…if we look to Marx we find capitalism playing out in just this way: a growing proletariat becoming more dissatisfied by the day eventually overthrows the whole shebang. Is it a fault of the people? Most definitely, for we define the system and the institutions. We created the laws that now allow corporate giants to create the laws. We’ve allowed families to maintain fortunes far beyond necessity…because if you earned it you get to keep it, right? Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “What is the most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class.” In this we have failed and failed miserably. We have allowed a class to emerge and now they act as any reasonable ruler would…they protect their power and hoard all other power available. They band together and grow their fortunes. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll trickle down, but I doubt it.

Yes, I’m throwing a lot up against the digital wall here, but I think that this is all related. Our system is broken at least partly because so many of our citizens have NO idea how it works. They were trained to be corporate drones, not taught to be citizens. When these workers are wooed by the political elite in the course, they are fed small problems that act as foci to narrow the debate, to leave the monied classes to carry on with their gaming of other parts of our society. Steve Gimbel over at Philosopher’s Playground calls this trick caging:

Caging is a way to defeat policy proposals on a set of related issues by designing public discourse in a way that makes sure that those issues never get raised. This is the rhetorical version of an intentional walk in baseball — you don’t deal with the next batter in the order, you decide who you want to pitch to. You take a whole segment of the political discussion and put it in a cage, letting out only that single issue you want in front of the public. As long as the chosen topic has an air of contention and you can spark passionate debate around it (the louder, the better), the single issue will draw all the attention and no one will notice everything you’ve artfully kept off the table.

As I’ve noted before, there are issues and political viewpoints that are completely unwelcome in the current political debate. The Professor has given me a word to describe how this happens. As he continues:

We discussed a couple of examples a few weeks ago (see the link for the difference between caging and framing). On the morally wrong side of the civil rights movement? No problem, just make sure that the only discussion around race and justice that you let out of the cage is affirmative action. That will be enough to use up all the activist oxygen in the room and the rest of the concerns just disappear. Getting your moral butt kicked over questions of gender fairness and women’s rights? Just take all of it and put it in a cage, only letting out abortion. In order to defend abortion, women’s organizations and advocates will devote all their time and effort to that fight and not push forward on other fronts. In fact, within the abortion debate itself, we’ve seen caging. Don’t discuss all of abortion, the only procedure worth talking about is D&C that is done in the last trimester. Reduce the whole reduced matter even further. How low will you go? Seen as bad guys for preferring corporate profits at the expense of God’s green Earth? No biggie — just put all ecological issues in a cage and only let out National Parks and drilling in ANWR. All those green groups will have their focus pulled off of the other nasty things the contributor to your campaign are doing to save a piece of land in nowhere Alaska.

The corporate/theofascist right has been playing this game successfully for quite some time, and as of yet NO ONE seems willing or able to break out of this still strong rusty cage they’ve locked the polity into, enabling the kleptocrats and zealots to run free, plundering everything they can get their hands on. Instead of finding common ground, of working together to bend the bars, saw through the barriers, find a way to bust free in mutually beneficial ways, the plebians at the bottom turn on each other, driven by the divisive and meaningless debates that the upper class tosses at us like red meat before starving dogs.

Fighting little battles one at a time over piecemeal problems isn’t going to get us anywhere. It plays into their hands. It keeps worthless Vichy Dems in office to provide fake fights for us as more and more of our infrastructure, our communities, our children and hopes and dreams get crushed by the relentless aquisition of MORE STUFF at the expense of planning for the distant future.

As the situation becomes desperate, the growing bottom of our society will eventually lash out … the question is how. The Lords and Ladies in the halls of government and the boardrooms of the corporate keeps know this, and their Praetorian guards eagerly discuss ways to deal with the eventual backlash. How this counterstrike comes will determine if this country remains a representative democracy. If the left doesn’t find the will or leaders to build a new progressive populist movement, (a REAL one, not the faux “liberal netroots” being pushed by the Democratic Party’s blogheeling snake oil salesmen), someone to the right will emerge as a reactionary demogogue. This eventuality will only strenthen the right’s hand, leading to further dismantlement of the public square, more oppressive policing, more abuses of power. Make no mistake about it, the next two elections look to be contests between the corporatist right represented by the Bush Administration and the further right-reactionary fringe of the racist, nativist present day know nothings. The feeble center-right also-rans being pushed by the “leaders” of the DC Democratic Party will only help solidify the damage done by the Bush-Cheney cabal, and thus offer little hope.

How we on the left do this, how we break free from the caging of vital issues into fake proxy debates is the hard question? The first step toward answering it is to ask the question in the first place. One of the exciting things about the growth of the blogs was the social experiment in broadening the debates that they represent. That broader debate isn’t happening in the bought-and-paid for world of the connected blogs, but in individualistic, creative outlets like the ones I’ve linked to here. Go forth, find some new connections, don’t just run with the pack after the latest bloody chunk of red meat. Down that way lies continued dissolution.

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