Impolite Politics: Why Obama never had a chance

Edmund Burke wrote “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” while the bloody revolution that decapitated the monarchy in France usurped the king and queen, subsequently ending the line of succession at the gallows. The resounding influence of this revolution was heard worldwide as the progression of the French monarchy could so easily be reflected back on the possible progression of an English, or any other, hierarchy. Burke’s concern largely stemmed from the posterity that such a system of inheritance maintains. He writes “All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.” He continues “On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings…laws are to be supported only by their own terrors…On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.” He concludes that without the precept of the monarchy, “Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.”

Our current political climate suffers the worst from the exact sort of horrors that Burke describes. The American democracy, supposedly driven by reason, is being helmed by a mass of uneducated barbarous miscreants who only look to politics as a means to justify their own personal failings. Each of the last three presidents has had their party wither under their “reign.” Bill Clinton, although winning his second term, had the congress switch to a republican majority; George W. Bush suffered the same fate; and it appears that President Obama will fall in line. Merely by nature of possessing power, our politicians fall out of favor.

The divisive nature of our current politics allows for nothing but a stalemate. At least Burke’s “Kings” could resort to tyrannical behavior to affect change when necessary but our figureheads flounder in the quagmires of stalemate, incessantly achieving nothing in the face of the moderation that is being called for in every possible political arena. The influence granted by money on our politics has driven down our quality of life to such an extent that people are no longer being educated. In the current recession, most are opting out of the absurdly expensive but worthwhile private post-secondary institutions and instead veering towards practical community college degrees in which they hone trades but never consider what it means to be an American, what it means to be free. A democracy in which the public is poorly educated is a democracy manipulated by the highest bidder. When a “maverick” and a woman who’s now “Going Rogue,” almost thrust their cowboy image onto America enough to gain the majority of their favor to man the most prestigious and powerful post in American politics, we know that Americans are resorting to vote with their hearts rather than their heads, and, unfortunately, it is their mouths that will suffer the most as a result.

Now, wisely, we have a president who promoted an image of change and hope for his entire campaign. The one word, change, is all that was needed to sell the American people on a young fresh senator from Chicago, allowing him to prevail over any number of candidates steeped in decades of experience. Obama understood that his greatest advantage is that he had not been in the government long enough to have to compromise on anything and so he appeared stronger than the other candidates, more pure. The nature of current politics is comprised of nothing other than compromise. It was not an advantage that Obama possessed by not having compromised, it was a naiveté.

Surprised at every turn, the nation now turns on the man for having to compromise in the face of the fierce ignorant fear-driven moderation that blasts back at him for every idea he may support. And, what is worse, because he lacks the prestige and pomp that a more experienced candidate may have had, the office he presides over is defamed and cheapened. During his own address to congress, who should revere the man as their commander in chief, members called out absurd accusations or completely ignored him on the basis of their politics. Politics do not excuse a lack of civility; but rather, vindicate those who wish to act with a similar lack of civility elsewhere. If the president does not deserve respect in the chambers of congress, then why should a student respect his teacher? Why should a criminal respect his judge? Why should anyone respect a rule that only serves to hinder their own selfish will? Also, within the same year, the president had an address that he wished to be broadcast in all public schools which received pushback to which he immediately acquiesced. His weakness allowing the idea to pervade that, even while already having achieved the presidency of the United States, our leader is merely a leader of a political party and should be deterred by all those who favor a different political philosophy.

The controlled information being provided our youth will merely continue this sort of divisiveness. While our educational system drowns in debt and cutbacks, attempting to fight a war on ignorance with one hand and a butter knife, our military budget continues to explode to allow our continued presence in a war against an idea: terrorism. While our youth, who never had the chance to learn why they fight, die by the droves, they fight an enemy that hates us in a jealous rage largely for the gluttonous ignorance that we revel in. The American “obesity epidemic” rages on while they starve and we meet their hungry mouths with bullets and hand grenades. We uprooted the Taliban in the early 2000’s to put the country into the hands of the greatest heroine dealers the world has ever seen, spending billions upon billions of dollars, hundreds of lives all on a country that had a GDP at the time of approximately 40 million dollars. That coupled with the war with Iraq played into the rebellious political pundits as an obvious gambit for oil. I fear that even that corrupt vision was giving too much credit to those in power. In reality, the gambit was for the minds and attention of the ignorant masses and it worked masterfully. The population suddenly bled red, white, and blue; and yearned for blood in the face of our most catastrophic loss on our own soil, the September 11 attacks while all those who contradicted were pegged with almost the same sort of treasonous “terrorist” rhetoric that met the communists during the red scare.

This ignorant nationalism, so shamelessly harnessed by the previous administration, is a tactic that Obama is unwilling to soil his hands with now that he has taken office. On the campaign trail he unyieldingly tapped into the fervor that the nation explodes with at the mention of its achievements, its greatness; the fervor that allows only pride as the humility of the individual is dissipated over the entire country the same way that the responsibility to help an innocent person being murdered is dissolved across an on-looking crowd. The ideas he molded with clouds during his campaign could never be shaped with the clay of real legislation, not because they did not hold merit, but because the politicians strive to take every bit of credit that they can muster, regardless of their involvement or commitment to the ideas at hand, and avoid blame like the black plague that the H1N1 virus is threatened to become. It is no fault of Obama’s ideas, but practically speaking, those ideas never had a chance unless he was willing to sully his hands in the dirt of modern politics. He needs to heap thick helpings of blame with his presidential butter knife across the entirety of congress, as their inability to take even the remotest of chances will kill our nation the same way that a person will die if he does not risk the bacteria from the food he puts in his mouth. He needs to trap them in their failure so the country can see their inefficacy for what it is, a big room full of pigs too busy reveling in the loot from their lobbyists to risk getting anything done, especially anything that could hurt the companies those lobbyists represent.

Our foolish reverence of the major corporation as a job creating structure will suffocate our nation from any sort of international competition. It is the entrepreneur willing to risk a small business on a new idea that allows our economy to thrive on innovative new technologies, improvements on every day life, the building of wealth with those who do not possess it. The small businesses have no chance in the current economic climate though. Wal-Mart has been given free reign to saunter into any town, open up several stores to give people jobs, kill all the local businesses and then shut down most of those stores; effectively sucking the soul out of entire regions. Microsoft and Apple have created a false dichotomy over all computer software between PC and Mac that rivals the false dichotomy between our two political parties. Other options are out there, we’re just not allowing for them to exist. Consider these other false dichotomies that allow for duopoly over entire segments of our economy: Pepsi or Coke, Amd or Intel (which was just Intel until Amd successfully sued Intel recently over their predatory and unfair practices) and that’s for the parts that are lucky enough to have two options. Look at sports, there’s one football league, one baseball league, one basketball league, one hockey league and one soccer league in America. In Europe there are competing soccer leagues all over the continent, competition increasing the level of play and making the global events all the more exciting.

When one has a foreseeable influence on the company for whom they work, they are always more productive employees. Major corporations, on the other hand, are the only place where people feel comfortable as they provide security that small business cannot. They provide insurance benefits at a cheaper cost, retirement benefits, paid time off, all of which are amenities that every American deserves but only those granted positions at huge institutions actually receive. A generation of brilliant thinkers, having been trained to pursue a “safe” option for their careers, subsequently entered the fields of finance and business. The raising of the business world’s IQ has brought all of the innovation that should have gone to curing cancer and interplanetary space travel has, instead, allowed these corporations to brilliantly circumvent all the pre-existing laws regarding monopolies and fair trade resulting in a slew of banks and companies that are “too big to fail.” Ironically, the bubble has burst on these companies and their imminent failure has prompted our government to dole out more money at one time then ever in the history of our country, merely to prop up the sagging deflated carcass of the bubble that was our dysfunctional economy.

Now the brilliant youth of the boomerang generation, previously harnessed for shadows and facades of success in business, are unemployed and living back with mom and dad. A gross failure by the standards of the explosive growth of the 1990’s and even the mid 2000’s, the boomerang generation faces some difficult choices. They have experienced first hand the suffering from being laid off on a whim by a giant monolithic corporation that never really cared about them; yet the public image in America is that the only “safe” job is with one of those giant monolithic corporations that so quickly threw them out with the bathwater in the first place. The dismay they face causes many to go back to school--cheap schools: community colleges are being flooded as a result.

My hope is that the boomerang generation, when they come out of the shock of the economic meltdown, look to each other to create new innovative companies out of mom and dad’s basement, new companies where their friends can get jobs and help them to create an overall, community-invested, caring and prosperous nation again. I hope that they return to school for liberal arts, to remind them of why each person deserves respect and to prove Burke wrong when he says about the democratic revolutionary of the 1790’s that “Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal.” Hopefully, a growth of education in the liberal arts will allow us to prove that we have progressed beyond the fears of more than 200 years ago to a new era of polite democracy where atheists can be trusted without the ethical backing of a religious schema, where academics can be trusted for their intelligence, where politicians can be trusted to do what is best for the country rather than their party, where liberty can return to being liberal. Burke claimed that “there ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” I hope that from the ruins of these card-house companies we can build a lovely country that returns to form, rising above the cold unfeeling tentacles of capitalist greed to see the humanity that we should all be truly striving to achieve. Obama possesses the capability to solicit that kind of humanity from us in American politics but we have to be willing to buy it first, we have to trust him.