Sept. 9, 2009 | What a difference a month makes!
When my last controversial
column posted on Salon in the
second week of August, most Democrats seemed frozen in suspended
animation, not daring to criticize the Obama administration's
bungling of healthcare reform lest it give aid and comfort to the
GOP. Well, that ice dam sure broke with a roar. Dissident Democrats
found their voices, and by late August even the liberal lemmings of
the mainstream media, from CBS to CNN, had drastically altered
their tone of reportage, from priggish disdain of the town hall
insurgency to frank admission of serious problems in the healthcare
bills as well as of Obama's declining national support.
But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too
little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am
outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic
consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the
administration's strategic missteps this year. I suspect there
had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses
failed to speak out when they should have -- from week one after
the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress
pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats
protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly
emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have
made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the
gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive
enough to believe that Obama's plan would be deficit-neutral?
Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic
rationing?)
By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform
to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have
managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and
that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection,
let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames
by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically
possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong
speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of
grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point,
Democrats' main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that
Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the
GOP's facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well
happen.
This column has been calling for heads to roll at the White House
from the get-go. Thankfully, they do seem to be falling faster --
as witness the middle-of-the-night bum's rush given to
"green jobs" czar Van Jones last week -- but there's
a long way to go. An example of the provincial amateurism of
current White House operations was the way the president's
innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic
support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to
"help" the president (a coercive directive quickly
withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was
stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class
this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full.
Comically, some major school districts, including New York City,
were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp
national healthcare?
Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize
that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a
genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a
staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many
political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows
are the central forums of national debate. But the truly
transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the
Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened
to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill
of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows,
history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I
was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the
deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single
minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed
monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that
I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the
town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity
of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching
staged, manipulated TV shows.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly
detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for
the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the
party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with
journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical
absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given
their worship of highly individualistic, secularized
self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly
credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social
problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and
intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn
away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of
authentic 1960s leftism.
How has "liberty" become the
inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? (A
prominent example is radio host Mark Levin's book "Liberty and Tyranny:
A Conservative Manifesto," which was No. 1 on
the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months
without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.) I
always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party --
but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob
Dylan's 1964 song "Chimes of
Freedom," made famous by the Byrds? And
here's Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock
with "Freedom!
Freedom!" Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song
"A Different
Drum," with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring
motto for that decade: "All I'm saying is I'm not
ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins
in on me."
But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be
complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe
everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new
professional class is a glossy product of generically
institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical
analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the
U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college
application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so
pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy
League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds
good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed
approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when
confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been
marinating so long in those clichés that it's
positively pickled.
Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the
self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions
in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of
articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal
mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like
10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more
detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were
supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather
than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a
glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and
forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences --
in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications
and gross invasions of privacy -- of a massive single-payer
overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous
as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world,
divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and
management.
But dreaming in the 1960s and '70s had a
spiritual dimension that is long gone in our crassly materialistic
and status-driven time. Here's a gorgeous example: Bob
Welch's song "Hypnotized."
which appears on Fleetwood Mac's 1973 album "Mystery to
Me." (The contemplative young man in this recent video is not
Welch.) It's a peyote dream inspired by Carlos Castaneda's
fictionalized books: "They say there's a place down in
Mexico/ Where a man can fly over mountains and hills/ And he
don't need an airplane or some kind of engine/ And he never
will." This exhilarating shamanistic vision (wonderfully
enhanced by Christine McVie's hymnlike backing vocal) captures
the truth-seeking pilgrimages of my generation but also
demonstrates the dangerous veering away from mundane social
responsibilities. If the left is an incoherent shambles in the
U.S., it's partly because the visionaries lost their bearings
on drugs, and only the myopic apparatchiks and feather-preening
bourgeois liberals are left. (I addressed the drugs cataclysm in
"Cults and Cosmic
Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American
1960s" in the Winter 2003 issue of Arion.)
Having said all that about the failures of my own
party, I am not about to let Republicans off the hook. What a
backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of
traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to
sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians
sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces
and sexual escapades by the truckload. They assail government
overreach and yet support interference in women's control of
their own bodies. Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that
yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very
pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring
thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned
our national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily
exacerbated the illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the
hallucinatory Dick Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked
Bush into a pointless war, continues to be lauded as presidential
material.
Which brings us to Afghanistan: Let's get the
hell out! While I vociferously
opposed the incursion into Iraq, I
was always strongly in favor of bombing the mountains of
Afghanistan to smithereens in our search for Osama bin Laden and
al-Qaida training camps. But committing our land forces to a long,
open-ended mission to reshape the political future of that country
has been a fool's errand from the start. Every invader has been
frustrated and eventually defeated by that maze-like mountain
terrain, from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union. In a larger
sense, outsiders will never be able to fix the fate of the roiling
peoples of the Near East and Greater Middle East, who have been
disputing territorial borderlines and slaughtering each other for
5,000 years. There is too much lingering ethnic and sectarian
acrimony for a tranquil solution to be possible for generations to
come. The presence of Western military forces merely inflames and
prolongs the process and creates new militias of patriotic young
radicals who hate us and want to take the war into our own cities.
The technological West is too infatuated with easy fixes. But
tribally based peoples think in terms of centuries and millennia.
They know how to wait us out. Our presence in Afghanistan is not
worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.
In response to persistent queries, I must repeat:
No, I do not have a Facebook page, nor am I a "friend" on
anyone else's Facebook. Nor do I Twitter. This Salon column is
my sole Web presence. Whatever doppelgänger Camille
Paglias are tripping the light fantastic out there (as in the
haunted bus-station episode of "The Twilight Zone"), they
aren't me!
Camille Paglia's column appears on the
second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to
reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column
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