We can’t help ourselves. As much as we desire to emulate the Tea Party, we simply can’t dumb ourselves down that much. They are incapable of irony, reason, research, rational self-interest, and spelling. Brute outrage and fear have been their only weapons.
As the dust settles from November’s nuclear explosion I have been heartened to see our outrage manifested worldwide with increasing precision, logic, gallows humor, factuality, and correctly spelled signage.
We are not only starting to form a coherent strategy of resistance, we are beginning to see the big-picture terrain of what a return to sanity could look like.
True, President Bannon can still do a lot of damage — and I don’t mean to minimize the very significant threats to our world this administration brings. But there is hope when we recognize the global impact of the seismic changes here in the U.S.
I.e., shit got real for the whole world real fast.
Ultra-right percolations in Europe seemed almost fanciful as long as the center of gravity — the good old, boring, middle-of-the road, imperfect U-S-of-A — kept chugging along as expected. But when our ship of state lurches and lists, the whole world is knocked off balance. Facile, hip, Assange-style cynicism about how stupid and corrupt everything is has to give way to pragmatic, sober, communalism — a recognition that we’re all in the same boat — because most people actually prefer the world doesn’t blow up.
If I’m correct, we will start to see the evidence very soon. The forward march of right-wing destructiveness (culminating with Brexit, then Bannon) will reverse itself, despite our sense today that it has never been stronger. Marine Le Pen will not prevail in France. The AfD will not rise in Germany. There will not be a wholesale abandonment of the Eurozone. And, rather than follow our example, the rest of the world will increase its commitment to aiding refugees.
Forget, for now, Obama’s goal of restoring civility to Washington. That’s way too quaint. He could not have known in 2008 how huge the fever would become — or what would eventually break it. But now it’s time for the hallucinations and intoxicated thrashings to gradually give way to Obama’s most lasting legacy: a national character of solidness, constructiveness, rationality, empathy, humor, spelling ability.
We all have a ton of work to do — protesting, obstructing, ridiculing, preserving, etc — but we will do it our own way, not like the Tea Party dumb-asses who would shame us into abandoning our “elite” rationality and ironic sensibilities.
In the process, we will gain some fresh, sober clarity about the ways we ourselves contributed to the worldwide fever with our own hyperbole and hysteria. (Compromised global trade deals are debatable, but they are not Satan’s way of punishing the working class. The Eurozone, like Obamacare, needs to be continually improved and repaired, while recognized for the historic accomplishment that it is.)
The post-fever world will acknowledge that Democracy is always an imperfect work-in-progress — and anyone who contributes to a blow-up-the-system meme is facilitating the feverish conditions that brought about our current abomination. Such memes are shallow, non-reality-based, and antithetical to everything Obama stands for.