The Aerie

What's actually happening

The current political schism in America is plutocratic authoritarianism versus populist democracy. These are mislabled as "conservatism" and "liberalism," respectively, but in actual fact the authoritarians are radicals seeking to change America, and the populists are conservatives trying to retain our constitutional rights.

Unfortunately our discussion of these issues is FURTHER muddled by the assumed alignments of Republican=conservative=authoritarian=wealthy, and Democrat=liberal=populist=working class.

In fact, almost everyone in Congress, Democrat and Republican, is aligned with the wealthy class (and also the political class*). Additionally, MANY Congressional Democrats are authoritarian. And some Libertarian Republicans and Constitutional conservative Republicans would be better aligned with the populists in the Democratic party.

Just as nearly everyone fails to refer to our military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan as "occupations" rather than "wars," the failure of anybody to accurately perceive and describe the politics of the current situation makes it much, much harder to work towards a solution.

Calling Republicans 'conservatives,' rather than 'radical, anti-democratic authoritarians' provides them much more legitimacy and gravitas than they deserve, to their advantage. And calling actual conservative populist democrats 'liberals' is simply ass-backward. There is nothing 'liberal' about insisting on things like the Rule of Law, the re-establishment of habeas corpus, and the observation of anti-trust laws, or the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

Until we start referring to things by their actual names, rather than whatever labels have been sloppily applied by others, we will have a very hard time solving our political crisis. Consider the difference between these two headlines:

"Republicans urge increased funding for the war in Afghanistan"

versus

"Wealthy authoritarians who own defense contracting firms seek increased funding for the occupation of Afghanistan."

Or these headlines

"Obama and Congressional Democrats cave to Republicans on extension of Bush-era tax cuts"

versus

"Wealthy Congressional plutocrats persuade wealthy Barack Obama to refrain from increasing their own taxes, saddling the next generation of working class Americans with a trillion dollars of additonal debt."

Until we describe things clearly, we cannot see the problems, to say nothing of actually finding solutions.

*The political class are those people who identify with each other as rulers over everyone else, regardless of their policy differences. They recognize that their careers will intertwine, that they will hire each other for jobs and help each other get rich and remain powerful. They'll serve in office for a while, then become highly paid lobbyists, then go work on Wall Street, and then if they get rich they will use their money to buy more influence in Congress. So while they make a show of fighting with each other over policy differences, they seek to maintain good relationships with each other over the long haul, because it is those relationships that will help them become rich and powerful. Given a choice between alienating their constituents, and alienating the rest of the political class, they will dump their constituents in a New York minute. Barack Obama is a member of the political class, and his efforts to avoid alienating the rest of the political class are why he capitulates populist positions, such as Single Payer Health Care, so quickly.

Posted by Albatross at December 2, 2010 11:06 PM | TrackBack