Arm Yourself

If you read no other political post this month, let it be this revelatory GOP insider piece, Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult. It's everything you may have ever suspected about today's nightmarish Republican Party, not just anti-Democratic but anti-democracy, instead pro-oligarchy, pro-authoritarian and theocratic:

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill...

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them...

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté...

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.

So is Obama up for the task of calling out these crazies or can he get anything done without compromise? Will the people stop voting for the destruction of America, or are we lost as so many empires past?

Is this first salvo of a wised-up post-deficit crisis Obama, or yet another brick in the road to a GOP-driven American sunset?

Prepare Yourself

Having grown up in the late 20th Century, I've felt that American Exceptionalism myself, and the feeling that it was going to last forever. But now I hear that the 21st Century is all about BRIC -- Brazil, Russia, India, China. Steve Clemons has this:

A widespread view among elite Germans and the non-elite normal types I spoke to is that America is in fast decline -- sort of like Britain after World War II. I think that the impressions foreigners have of this decline is "overshooting reality" as there are many substantive realities about America's ability to deploy force and purpose in the world that remain formidable.

But conversation in some serious circles is turning to what Europe can do to help America stabilize in some position of "lesser global stature." There is also a sense that the nation that is filling much of America's previous geopolitical space is China and that Europe feels tension in its strong alliance with U.S. power in decline and its strategic distance from China clearly ascending.

Just fifteen years before I was born, America had gone over and saved Europe. Now in 2007 we have Europe pitying us?

While this site is nakedly partisan, one of the core reasons, if not the core reason itself, is that the Republican Party has potentially "ruined" America. At home it has undermined the notion of "the common good" and replaced it with "what good for the greedy is good for America"; militarily, for all our death-bringing technology it has laid bare our weaknesses to the world; and overseas it has proven to the world that the most atavistic, exploitative, unevolved American capitalist-imperialists actually do still exist, that they can get control of our most powerful political levers, and that they will kill or allow hundreds of thousands of innocents die to get their way.

Given that last one, why would Europe want to help America, except maybe to make sure we stay in our diminished corner from now on?

It's articles like Clemons' that makes me think the only person who can possibly reverse America's decline, among the current generation of senior U.S. political leadership, is Al Gore.

No one currently running for President comes prepacked with a comparable amount of international respect. No one currently running has shown remotely the amount of vision and translated it into real world action. No one currently running for President showed the level of courage over the decision to go into Iraq that Al Gore did back when the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Rove war machine was setting the country up like so many country fair rubes.

America in decline. We got the 20th Century, maybe China gets the 21st. It didn't have to be that way.

Ultimately the fault is not only in our leaders. We've gotten morally soft, and I don't mean in the way religious conservatives might espouse. We need to recommit to a Franklin Delano Roosevelt type morality, where we know we're all in it together, we act rationally to help rebuild our nation as a whole, not just those with big capital gains income, we have to change our ways.

Al Gore says that the American political will is a renewable resource. He may just have to drum it up himself, and so far he doesn't look interested.

In any case, the Democratic electoral dominance last November wasn't an end, it was only the very start. The Augean Stables of our government and media still need a good, strong flushing. Before it's too late.