I don’t want to add to people’s misery as they grieve for a nation being consumed by Trumpism, but this nutty situation has been long in the making — and fueled by our unwillingness to come to grips with “progress” in the U.S. having its own kind of fuel: oil. You see, the links between Trump, Russia, and major oil companies are about as thick and clear as the $180 million retirement package that Exxon just earmarked for its former CEO Rex Tillerson, our incoming Secretary of State.
That’s sad and true enough. But what’s sadder is how our nation’s oil addiction has fueled the politics for decades, an addiction that now threatens democracy itself. This is a disaster that has been long in the making — and at its heart is a nation that is fundamentally scared of dealing with the negative consequences of the American Dream- a dream fueled in good part by the economic promises of progressivism that require cheap energy.
Graphs and insights below the fold provide the roadmap of how Exxon and other global energy companies have been calling the shots of U.S. and global politics for much of the past 44 years — and its implications for regaining control of our democratic institutions (or not).
Let’s turn back the clock to the “go-go” U.S. economy of the 1960s. Liberalism is at its peak. President Lyndon Johnson believes that “guns and butter” are a must, so all-out consumerism and all-out war exist side by side. Works great — until the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which ticked off Saudi Arabia and a bunch of other oil producing nations in the Middle East o the point that they stopped shipping crude oil to the U.S. and other Israeli allies. Politics and Middle East oil had been longtime friends before then, but in 1973, the U.S. got the biggest economic shock since the Great Depression. “Important people” realized that corporate profits needed a flow of oil that must not be stopped by politics — at all costs.
The 1975 movie “3 Days of the Condor” captures well the exact price of “at all costs” — an intelligence community that was dedicated to quietly shifting the balance of power around the world to solidify the grip of oil companies on U.S. politics, to the point that U.S. intelligence agents might be killed by their own government if they were not absolute loyalists in this cozy relationship. This wasn’t a new reality, but it was a reality that had begun to turn on democracy itself.
The subsequent oil crisis of 1979 solidified the “at all costs” nature of this undercover war for economic stability. While President Jimmy Carter asked the nation to show patriotism by wearing a warm sweater and driving 55 on highways, the “patriots” of America said, “Bag this, that’s not progress, give me my gasoline, and cheap, please.” Fear overcame true patriotism and progressivism, and the greed at the heart of the American Dream has not let go of our national culture ever since then. Reagan’s 1984 “morning in America” campaign was fundamentally about the U.S. sweeping its radicalization of Middle East regimes under the rug to ensure a steady supply of their oil. Who cares what it took to make things look rosy for us, at least the gas is cheap.
Fear and greed are a toxic combination, and so it’s fair to say that Al Gore’s defeat in the 2000 election was driven largely by his Carter-like embrace of a non-oil future that scared the living pants off of folks who remembered the 1970s oil embargoes. The economy needed cheap oil — and Bush delivered, giving the oil companies the security they wanted in Saudi Arabia to keep the oil flowing fast and furious. And if that required allowing more radical politicians to seize control of politics in the U.S. and other nations, well, so be it — that’s what the oil companies needed to keep the fear and greed feeding their coffers. The balance of power was shifting — no longer was it politicians in a democracy benefiting from oil companies, it was increasingly oil companies that fed politics with whatever politicians would keep oil profits flowing, democracy be damned.
It would be nice to say that the Obama era turned this around, but clearly it was simply a continuation of the government-oil duopoly. The clean energy candidate backed off of huge commitments to renewable energy when T. Boone Pickens counseled Obama on the wonderful benefits of natural gas fracking and cheaper ways to extract residual U.S. crude. Obama became the “drill, baby, drill” candidate, coasted to victory, and renewables puttered along at a much slower pace than Obama had promised originally. The world economy was saved from disaster again, thanks to cheap oil. But in the background, things were brewing on the global stage. Dwindling Middle East oil supplies and the complex politics surrounding them were becoming far more of a liability than an asset for the U.S. and its oil companies, and the limits of the economic renaissance based on cheap oil were becoming more evident.
Enter Russia, a country which, in the era of the Soviet Union, used most of its oil reserves for its own economy. In the wake of the post-Soviet economic collapse, Russia had gobs of capacity for export to Europe and other nations — and U.S. oil companies began to see the potential of cultivating a nation with not only vast oil reserves, but a huge nuclear arsenal, a global propaganda and spying apparatus, and none of the frills of democracy that could stand between them and continued outrageous profits. Just as U.S. oil companies had thrown its Middle East partners under the bus, they began to throw the U.S. itself under the bus — and to start betting on Russia as their primary global political ally. The Chinese are so afraid of this prospect that they are likely to become oil-independent far more quickly than the U.S., with or without global warming as a concern. Obama could have dealt with Russia’s growing political threat more directly, but “drill, baby, drill” Obama had other plans.
So, enter Donald J. Trump, the most perfect President that a global oil company could ask for. A total pawn of Russian business interests already, much as Reagan and “W” were already pawns of core U.S. corporate interests, Trump was the perfect person to sell the fear and the greed to core American voters who could become new clients for Russian oil via U.S. oil giants. Hillary Clinton? Not so much. She was shooting her mouth off to coal miners, and dragging along Mr. No-Oil-Please Al Gore on the campaign trail. Good sentiments, just like Jimmy Carter’s sentiments, but dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers politics.
You see, for a good chunk of the country, progress means getting a new pickup truck — to the point that the top three vehicles sold in the U.S. today are all pickup trucks (yes, Greg Dworkin, there are a lot of sedans out there, too, but car buying in general is a dying art — most wheels are truck wheels today). And as you know, pickups, SUVs, and other big-honkin’ American Dream cars run on cheap fuel. Environmental concerns, ride sharing, all great for city folks — but if you can’t explain what progress means to the average pickup truck buyer, then you’re giving your opponent at least one chance to vote for whatever dumb cluck Republicans want to put up against you. Just ask Massachusetts folks, who laughed at Scott Brown campaigning for the U.S. senate in a pickup truck — until he won.
The average pickup truck driver loves their country, but love of country is not the same thing as love of democracy. “Democracy” is a slippery, elusive thing for these folks — does it help them get a steady job, fill their pickup tank, or respect their “values,” whatever that means? FDR was probably the last Democratic president to understand this well, and he delivered on the value of democracy big-time. But the oil companies have done a very good job over the past forty years in convincing the pickup drivers that democracy is a luxury that the American Dream can afford to put in the back seat most days — at least to the point that it messes up the lives of pickup truck drivers. Now, with America’s political star beginning to sink behind that of Russia’s for benefiting global oil companies, maybe the pickup truck drivers are as expendable as everyone else has been in their pursuit of “shareholder value.”
And that’s the real opportunity — and challenge — for progressives in 2017. How can progressivism make sense to a pickup truck driver? How can the average Joe, just wanting to fill up the tank, get to work, and down some suds, benefit from the democratic virtues of progressivism? Until we can explain that to pickup truck drivers, we’re hosed — we’ll just all be fishbait for oil companies using Russia as their new global big stick. After all, who needs 9/11 when you can have Putin manufacture up fear on demand? Sure, you can wait until all of those pickup truck drivers are calling Uber, but do you really think that’s likely to happen in the next few generations? Let’s get real — the only way to a solid progressive agenda is communicating the benefits of progresssivism to pickup truck drivers — or at least enough of them that the oil companies will lose every time, while there’s still a remnant of democracy left in the U.S. With Russia by their side, though, it’s going to be a tough road ahead.