Two days out from the 2010 election the widespread expectation is that the Reds will take control of the House and the Blues will hold the Senate. Of course, given the uncertainty surrounding the available polling data and the sheer number of close races, the Blues holding or losing both houses of Congress won’t be surprising in the least. Nor is there any point in speculating or predicting how it’s all going to shake out. The bets have been made and the wheel is spinning and we’ll know roughly how it turned out by Wednesday morning.
So for right now let’s look back over how we got here from two years ago. If you follow the political paparazzi press, you’re basically confronted with a choice between two (here I have to use a bad word, forgive me) “narratives”. The first is the preferred chronicle of the angry right, which has temporarily rebranded itself the Tea Party. They see a radical leftist government that’s about to be punished electorally for its overreach. The other is that Obama and company have done about as well as could be expected given the shit swamp they walked into two years ago and have failed to communicate effectively all that they’ve done. The result is that no one likes them even though they accomplished more legislatively than pretty much any administration since Johnson. You usually hear that second explanation accompanied by the word “economy” with some sort of negative adjective, ranging from “anemic” to “shitty”.
The cynical reality is, not surprisingly, a little bit different. Yes, the economy is terrible, and yes the Administration fucked up badly by, take your pick: not fighting for a bigger stimulus, barely addressing the housing crisis, passing a health care bill that doesn’t do anything for years, not holding the banks accountable, etcetera. But even if the unemployment rate were half of what it is the right wing nuts would still be stirred up, they’d still be getting unaccounted millions in astroturf money from god knows who, and they’d still have captured the imagination of the nitwits in the byline brigade. This election is about exactly what those right wingers say it is: taking their country back.
Obama is the first president since Kennedy who is neither a Republican nor a Southerner. Pelosi, in addition to being a woman, is the most socially liberal Speaker the country has ever had. Together, they tried to nudge the country back, just a little bit, from the plutocratic Christian brink to which Bush the Younger and company had pushed it. The people who like money and the people who like Jesus were bound to push back.
That pushback is what Tuesday and, no matter what happens, 2012 are about. This is the last gasp of the old order, the final push of the unholy alliance between money and fundamentalist religion. There’s no mistaking what that America looks like. Employees and parishioners are told how to vote by their respective betters. Hypocritical standards of decency and law are upheld as sacred truths. Most importantly, the rich, no matter how tiny their overall numbers, are held up as salt-of-the-earth exemplars and exempted from all but the most trivial taxation. Their America is not a place where money is everything, but it is the closest thing humanly possible.
It’s also an America where having resources – even if they were inherited or ill gotten – allows openly buying the laws:
Every last one of these wealthy donors are basically buying themselves a get out of jail free card from all politicians of either party. They are outright buying the Republicans (who are selling themselves like street corner hookers)and threatening the Dems with more where this came from if they fail to cooperate. Sure, there are some down and dirty sleazebags like this guy who’s punishing the Attorney General, but all of them — every last one of them — are doing this to ensure that their interests, whether legal or economic, are taken care of above all else. If there’s time and energy left over they will let the rubes play with women’s uteruses and punish some immigrants and minorities. But job one is making damned sure that nobody touches their ill gotten gains and nobody even thinks of holding them responsible for their crimes.
This same thing, by the way, has been going on with judicial races.
In short, it’s a place where money buys everything and can only be acquired by those that already have it. Everyone else is a fraudulent usurper, and if those who don’t Have attempt to Get, well, then you see incidents like the ones in Kentucky and Washington State, where big men beat small women in the name of political righteousness.
The problem with the hidebound forces of the almighty dollar taking their country back is that it is no longer theirs. The mousy little women who took beatings are both in their twenties, their attackers are old men. The bullies who so long ruled this country are dying out, and even a win beyond their most salivatory dreams on Tuesday won’t stop that from happening. The America where white men and their trophy wives were unquestioned lords and masters isn’t coming back long term.
Gays are going to marry and live without shame. Contraception and abortion will remain available. People of every skin tone will continue to ascend to the highest heights of American society. The only thing those braying about taking back their country can do is make sure that those rights remain restricted to the affluent.
In the meantime, the planet needs immediate action if we’re going to avoid a century of horrors that will make the 20th look like child’s play. The economy needs immediate action if we’re going prevent tens of millions of Americans from wasting their productive lives. The country needs immediate action if we’re going to stop crippling ourselves with wars and policies that only benefit a tiny few and humiliate us on the world stage. Those things cannot be ignored indefinitely, however hard the American right shakes its fist at them. So for all the hullaballoo, the only question that’s getting decided on Tuesday is how much pain and suffering the old guard gets to inflict on its way out.
