For the past two years, I have been encouraging friends and acquaintances in general to turn off all forms of passive entertainment (television, radio, Interweb Google machine, iPod) and to sit down in a noise and interruption-free, serene environment, so that they might consider for several minutes the contemporary state of American socio-economic/political discourse. More accurately, I have been encouraging friends and acquaintances to consider the absurdity of the above-mentioned discourse and how such absurdity has come to be accepted as normal now that we all live in a post-factual, Fox News-created bizarro universe.
For the past 3 years, (since December 2007 according to the National Bureau of Economic Research) America has been mired in a savage recession that has destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth, tens of millions of jobs, and pushed the world economy to the brink of annihilation. That recession, which shows no signs of ending anytime soon, is the product of 30 years worth of financial deregulation (conservative governance pet project), a toothless and cartoonishly inept federal regulatory structure (conservative governance pet project), voluntary ignorance on the part of conservative elected officials who chose to spend the better part of a decade illegally wiretapping American phones and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of brown people in Iraq and Afghanistan in a not-so-thinly veiled effort to appropriate fossil fuels, and obscene white collar crimes committed by ultra-conservative investment bankers and hedge fund managers (inevitable outcomes when conservatives are allowed to advance their pet projects in the course of governing).
The initial response to the conservative-manufactured economic catastrophe was to elect a slightly left-of-center African-American named Barack Obama to the White House and a slightly left-of-center Congress in 2008. This was entirely understandable given the fact that conservative governance had been exposed as a disgraceful failure for the umpteenth time in the past century. George W. Bush had scarred the Republican Party's brand in a way that only Herbert Hoover could understand over the course of 8 years. Americans had seen enough of deficit-exploding tax cuts for millionaires, endless, unwinnable, unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and unapologetic law-breaking by incompetent Fox News enthusiasts in the Justice and Defense Departments.
The initial collective response made perfect sense. Surely conservatives, humbled by electoral defeats and nightmarish incompetence, would stand aside so that reasonable policy solutions could be crafted and used to solve the economic ailments that plagued the American body politic. Or at least that's what would have happened in a fact-based reality universe. Instead, Americans have spent the past 2 years watching a poorly-written John Milius movie unfold on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the airwaves of corporate talk radio, and (most significant) in the studios of Fox News. Conservative governance and public policy did not leave the room after they received a gentle nudge towards the door. Instead, red state America engineered a pathologically mendacious return to center stage and snatched the microphone away from their far more timid NPR-loving opposition.
Conservatives have worked with fanatical zeal to make governing impossible in the Obama presidency. They have turned the Senate filibuster into a weapon of mass obstruction, placing anonymous holds on all manner of presidential nominations. They have opposed ideas that they once supported (individual mandates in health insurance, cap and trade, immigration reform) prior to Barack Obama's arrival in the White House. They masterminded overwhelming electoral victories in 2010, seizing a majority of governors' mansions and state legislatures, by employing naked class warfare and appealing to hysterical, shrill white racism in ways that would have made George Wallace blush. And most of all, conservatives have used the perpetual bigotry and ignorance factory of Fox News to blanket American televisions with unending policy myths and head-scratching lies (death panels, ACORN conspiracies, Black Panther conspiracies, George Soros conspiracies, birth certificate conspiracies, Muslim Brotherhood conspiracies) that have made reasonable policy discussions unthinkable.
To summarize, conservatives have turned America into a place in which objective facts do not and cannot exist, because such facts would be evidence of liberal bias. The current state of affairs is the product of more than 40 years worth of conservative ideological machinations, with interns at the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Chamber of Commerce, and the American Enterprise Institute doing the heavy lifting. Long before George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck were spewing outlandish, easily-disprovable assertions on national television, speechwriters and media consultants for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were hard at work, attempting to put a friendly veneer on otherwise wildly unpopular policy ideas. Unaccountable presidential authority, bigoted attacks directed at non-whites, women, and homosexuals, and tax cuts for millionaires designed to undermine vital social insurance institutions have been normal conservative ideological cuisine long before Barack Obama's name was mentioned on the national scene. The fact that conservatives have taken a long view of electoral politics is obviously important in understanding how and why America ended up in its current state of economic pain. What's more important is the matter of how America will untangle itself from the web of conservative-produced lunacy in the future.
As we speak, conservative governance is still holding the microphone and is standing center stage, blasting audiences with high volume crack pottery. Republicans in the House of Representatives, led by pseudo-intellectual and faux deficit-hawk Paul Ryan, are promising to release 2012 budget proposals that privatize Social Security, eliminate Medicaid, and eliminate Medicare in the name of balancing the federal budget. There are problematic realities to confront in that Paul Ryan's proposals won't balance the federal budget (http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/03/paul-ryans-budget-doesnt-balance-the-budget/), result in increased taxes for almost all Americans with the exception of the wealthiest 10%, (http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/03/paul-ryans-budget-doesnt-balance-the-budget/), and will be laughably unpopular with the overwhelming majority of the American electorate (because nobody, not Republican or Democratic voters, are protesting government by burning their Social Security and Medicare cards). The mere fact that conservatives feel comfortable in putting forward such proposals should be alarming evidence of how disconnected from reality the American electorate has become in the past 30-40 years. Our post-factual society has allowed crazy to flourish, which means that there is a reasonable possibility that Americans will have to pay a heavy economic price for their poor electoral oversight if a President Romney, Palin or Huckabee finds his/her way into the White House in 2013.
So again, think about what that would mean. Consider the state of the American political discourse after the past 3 years. Conservatives destroyed the American economy, created two catastrophically unpopular, trillion dollar wars, and are now in the process of refusing to apologize for any of their prior mistakes. Their electoral platform has not changed at all, and they are promising to implement each and every single failed policy of the past 30-40 years. You would be hard-pressed to find a more confusing state of affairs anywhere in the world, short of Rod Serling rising from his grave and creating a spin-off of his earlier work. I tend to think that The Post-Factual Zone would not do well in head-to-head matchups with American Idol and Dancing With The Stars. Sigh...
Carson Starkey
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