David Michael Green: My "Michelle" Moment--America Does Itself Proud

[Demeter]

http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/My_Michelle_Moment.html


...To be an American means to suffer serious anguish, not only because of the horrifically stupid things your people can do, but precisely because of the unique potential of this country to do better. There actually is something to the idea of American exceptionalism, in ways that are completely antithetical to those used by regressives when they hijack the idea, but also in ways that progressives are often blinded to because of our laudable compulsion towards egalitarianism. But this country is unique in that it is founded on ideas, not geography or ethnicity or some other form of empty primordialist affinity. And that uniqueness still resonates today in the standards we hold for ourselves. To have violated them so egregiously of late is all the more devastating than to have never held such standards at all, as is often the case elsewhere. To be American means not having the easy comfort of jaded cynicism to resort to when your government or your fellow citizens break your heart.

We talk a lot about democracy here, but I’m wondering how much of it I’ve ever actually witnessed in my lifetime. Sure, there were decisive elections in 1964, 1972, 1980, 1984 and 1994. Voters were presented with real alternatives in those races, and they went heavily one way, suggesting that the fundamental democratic principle of rule by the people was truly at work. But in every one of those cases, I would argue, there was massive deceit on the part of the winning team, to the extent that voters didn’t really know what they were choosing after all. Lyndon Johnson campaigned as a guy who would never “send American boys off to fight a war that Asian boys should be fighting for themselves”. But the reality of his Vietnam policy, which came slamming home less than a year after the election, could hardly have been more different from the promise he made as a candidate. In fact, it was a monstrous lie, since Johnson knew full well before the election what he was going to do in Vietnam. Then, not much later, Richard Nixon used every dirty trick in the book to win in 1972. Both of these guys ultimately got caught and lost their presidencies because of their deceits. They got off easy. We did not...Reagan began the onslaught of the new conservatism (aka the old regressivism) in 1980, a tradition which carries forward to this day, right through from his two elections and terms, the Gingrich abomination of the 1990s, and the Bush horror of this decade. Regressives won a lot of these elections hands-down, but in every case employed weapons of mass deception in order to fool voters into assisting economic elites in the picking of their own pockets. I don’t believe for a moment that George W. Bush cares about terrorism, or that he ever thought Iraq was a genuine threat. I don’t believe for a moment that Newt Gingrich was morally offended by Bill Clinton’s lies about getting a blow-job in the White House. I don’t believe for a moment that Ronald Reagan cut taxes on the wealthy because he thought it would be good for the economy. Using racism, red-baiting, homophobia, xenophobia, bogus tax cuts, national security crises real and imagined, and horrid swiftboating smear tactics, regressives have been able to steal elections – literally, when they couldn’t do it figuratively – by tricking voters into enabling the kleptocrats to come into power and grab everything not bolted to the floor. As well as the floor itself, if necessary.

And then, of course, added to these elections in which the people have spoken without actually knowing what they’re saying, there have been the stolen national elections of 1960, 2000 and 2004, each of them, by definition, as genuine and powerful an abuse of democratic principles as one might imagine, and therefore as deep a body blow to the polity as could be construed. Put it all together, and it’s enough to make a fella cry. As many of us have, on many an occasion these last decades.
...All of which could have ground the country into a despair and cynicism from which it would be impossible to emerge. But it didn’t, and if it isn’t too smarmy to regurgitate the word yet one more time (at least we won’t have to hear ‘maverick’ anymore), in this election I saw an outpouring of hope the likes of which I can’t remember in my lifetime. This was the most I’ve ever seen Americans engaged in the choice of who will manage our shared public domain, a function we’ve largely divorced ourselves from in a fashion so remarkable it was as if it was the government of some foreign land in question, and these were other people’s lives at stake. According to one preliminary estimate, however, this election produced 136 million voters at the polls, or 64 percent of those eligible, the highest turnout since 1908.

Moreover, this was the most broadly emotional election I’ve ever seen. People were engaged in it at a very personal and profound level, and there were a lot of them. There was a radiance in the air about the election that was unique and powerful and pervasive. Everybody everywhere seemed to burst into tears Tuesday night, whether they lived in America or not. People seemed unable to stop talking about it, before and after. I was sitting in a doctor’s office examining room earlier in the week, rather impatiently overhearing the doc and another patient going on and on about election politics for fifteen minutes. After a while he finally comes into my room, whereupon he and I proceeded to go on and on about election politics for thirty minutes. Finally, his receptionist banged on the door to remind him that he had two other patients waiting. I had the feeling that this was not the first time that had happened in his office, and it certainly wasn’t the first time I had observed ordinary, non-political-junkie citizens engaging deeply in this process. I’ve never before seen so many people so plugged in to their national politics. I’m pretty sure we can thank George W. Bush for that, above all.

For this reason, and several others, I had a Michelle moment during election week. For the first time in a very long time, I felt a little pride about what my country was doing. This election felt to me like nothing so much as a reclaiming of our country from some truly evil predators who had hijacked it, and a restoration of democracy – and, really, sanity – to our political sphere. Of course, those notions can be overstated. There’re still a lot of adherents to regressive politics in the mix. Quite a lot, actually, and many of them have big microphones, and many more listen to what those bloviators say. But the same notions can also be understated, as well. This is not likely to be a victory of just a single election. The more subtle but also more powerful effects of a successful Obama presidency – and I have very high confidence that it will be the most successful presidency since FDR – will be to renormalize American political culture around a mix of classic and contemporary values of genuine virtue, and to bury forever the toxic ideological experiment in regressivism we’ve endured these last thirty years. The skill and dignity and seriousness of purpose that Obama will bring to the White House will quietly but massively enhance the damage to the right’s reputation that they’ve already well begun inflicting upon themselves. People will look back on this Cringe Decade and wonder – just as the rest of the world has been doing all through it – “What the hell were we thinking?”...The answer, of course, is that we weren’t. We were feeling, instead, and what we were feeling was frightened and selfish and small-minded. And what politicians like Reagan and Bush were masterful at was making those importunings from our darker angels seem legitimate. It was okay to feel like America was better than the rest of the world, and we should go out there and kick some ass on inconvenient brown people who happened to be sitting on top of our oil. It was okay to put a little chump change in our pockets, even if it meant handing over massive debts from our little party today for our children to deal with tomorrow. It was okay to kill even pathetically small efforts at remediation for less privileged members of the society so that the middle class could put a few extra pennies in their pockets. And, worst of all, it was okay to remain willfully ignorant about what we were doing, its impacts, and why we were really doing these things. What’s more pathetic than a complicit marionette?

CONTINUES AT LINK

.....It was a good day to be alive.