E Pluribus Unum

by shep

After reading David Broder’s piece on Sunday (I know), coming off of reading Matt Stoller on Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Fox News, I got to wondering why Rupert Murdoch and David Broder, ostensibly representing different center-right to right-wing perspectives, both seemed at least amenable to Clinton’s frontrunner status. Actually, no I didn’t. I know they both want the most establishment (read: corporatist) candidate from either party.

But I did start to wonder why so many Democrats were so wary of Clinton (Republicans are easy, they hate whomever they are told to hate). Her negatives, even among progressives, now seem fundamental. Yet overall, Democrats like the Clintons. They have both charmed us with activist rhetoric and framed many Democratic successes against Republicanism since the Reagan era.

A Hillary Clinton presidency would certainly be an agent for evolutionary change. She’d make a fine president, no doubt, in the context of the previous Clinton administration and, obviously, in stark contrast to the criminal enterprise now ensconced in the executive.

Yet, so far, Hillary is offering only incremental changes in policy: fewer troops in Iraq, corporate-run healthcare that is universally available (eventually) and, shockingly, not much at all about reducing fossil fuel consumption, rolling back the Republicans’ treasonous assault on the Bill of Rights and the rule of law, or the outrageous unfairness of income distribution and tax policy in America.

The trouble is, we may no longer have the luxury of incremental change. We’ve blown the last thirty years of opportunity to do something about fossil fuel consumption leading to climate change and now it may be too late to prevent utter catastrophe. We may have already traded our children’s future for a 3,000 sq. ft. builder’s special in the ex-urbs and driving around alone in a 3/4-ton truck.

Our healthcare system is killing us and that is not hyperbole. It directly kills 100,000 people a year just from mistakes in hospital care, many more from prescribed drugs, with a widely reviled tort system as its ultimate remedy. It is unaffordable for both individuals and employers, further undermining our competitiveness in world markets. It does little to help prevent disease. It is barely accessible to 46 million Americans, yet it is expected to collapse under the weight of the baby boomers (we are many and we are huge).

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration, aided and abetted by the most partisan and corrupt congress in generations (no small feat), have functionally gutted the Bill of Rights and the rule of law: the preeminent centuries-old law to protect citizens from tyranny – habeas corpus – gone in the blink of Alberto Gonzales’ eye, government torture, for god f*cking’s sake, unprovoked war and foreign occupation, the politicization of our justice system from top to bottom and corruption of our electoral system from coast to coast.

Finally, Republicans have so successfully deployed authoritarianism to demonize liberals and Democrats and otherwise corrupt the thinking of their followers; America is now so politically polarized we can no longer agree on the observable reality before us.

I am not overstating when I say: these things require immediate and radical change.

The non-authoritarian-following public, amazingly even the mainstream press, are awakening from the narcotic effects of 9/11 and WOT fear-mongering and seeing what the Republican movement is doing to wreck the government, the people’s instrument of power against industry-generated threats. They are anywhere from anxious to angry at what they see. Democrats may be selling everyone short if we fail to offer them a revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, opportunity for change.