America’s System Failure: Only a Wave of Democratic Participation Can Save This Country
by Christopher HayesLink to article
This is an excerpt from Alternet.org. Click on link to read entire article.
As welcome as it was, the removal of George W. Bush was not enough to cure what ails us. It goes to the root of our political system.
There is a widespread consensus that the decade we’ve just brought to a close was singularly disastrous for the country: the list of scandals, crises and crimes is so long that events that in another context would stand out as genuine lowlights — Enron and Arthur Andersen’s collapse, the 2003 Northeast blackout, the unsolved(!) anthrax attacks — are mere afterthoughts.
We still don’t have a definitive name for this era, though Paul Krugman’s 2003 book The Great Unraveling captures well the sense of slow, inexorable dissolution; and the final crisis of the era, what we call the Great Recession, similarly expresses the sense that even our disasters aren’t quite epic enough to be cataclysmic. But as a character in Tracy Letts’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, August: Osage County, says, “Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm.”
American progressives were the first to identify that something was deeply wrong with the direction the country was heading in and the first to provide a working hypothesis for the cause: George W. Bush. During the initial wave of antiwar mobilization, in 2002, much of the ire focused on Bush himself. But as the decade stretched on, the causal account of the country’s problems grew outward in concentric circles: from Bush to his administration (most significantly, Cheney) to the Republican Party to — finally (and not inaccurately) — the entire project of conservative governance.
Tags: August: Osage County, failure of america's political system, Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling, Tracy Lett
February 6th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Perhaps President Obama’s plight, and by extension, our collective plight, resembles the one Gorbachev faced in the USSR in the late eighties. You’ll recall the Soviet leader ushered in a bold new era of openness which he termed “glasnost” and “perestroika;” and by using these quasi-democratic mechanisms, he hoped his precarious state would survive intact. But the groundswell of higher expectations he prompted swept him out – and soon dashed the Soviet Union itself.
Mr. Obama, with his stirring campaign oratory and chant of “Yes We Can,” ignited the long suppresed democratic hopes of millions of Americans. Because on some level, virtually everyone recognized Bush’s tenure had severely damaged the country; and that our system of governance had become detached and ineffective from the concerns of most Americans. Like Gorbachev, our new president fostered a heightened sense of possibility, the widespread belief, however unrealistic, that a fresh stirring leader could, almost by the strength and pull of his vision alone, remake America. And none too soon.
Yet the past year has clearly demonstrated the chronic gridlock and entrenched special interests that dominate the Capitol will not cede easily.
Overall, Obama’s once compelling vision, and the policy directives that would clearely follow, have encountered both the Party of No (the GOP) and the No Party (the Tea Party). The American people are bereft and bewildered. No time to mourn though. Organize instead. Mr. Obama gave a tantalizing hint of what’s possible; now it’s up to the American people to insist on it. But unlike most everything these days, relief won’t be instantaneous. So our “sunshine patriots” can forget it. Reclaiming this land will be a slog, but a worthy one nonetheless.