The "Good" Bad Guys or the "Bad" Good Guys?
With George W. Bush's popularity falling below 40%, it is clear that his administration's ignorance, incompetence and immorality has finally come to the attention of the American people in spite of Bush's pandering to the religious right wing (1). The self-righteous spin and belligerent action (2) taken by the Bush administration on the global stage, in the name of the American people, simply cannot be justified outside of the confines of Old Testament Roman religion.
That is precisely why religion is so important to the Bush administration. Without religious justification, the Bush administration has no justification at all, certainly nothing based on factual knowledge. The same was true for the Roman administrators of imperialism and the European administrators of colonialism. In a fundamental and traditional way, "Social conservatives are hapless GOP dupes" (3).
Confronted with failed responses, flawed initiatives, internal corruption, incompetent choices and dwindling support from even religious conservatives, the Bush administration has little choice but to maintain all of the distortions and fabrications that it used to coerce the American people into a self-righteous and belligerent posture in the first place. In its futile efforts to preserve itself, it can only further open up the holes it has ripped in the fabric of American democracy.
Only "fools and charlatans" (to use Jefferson's words) would seriously entertain the notion that the Bush administration will somehow rise above its crime, corruption and incompetence to lead America on to an American religious capitalism in dominion of the global economic heap. This is, of course, pure self-righteousness coming from a nation that is decades behind the European democracies in the provision of educational and medical needs to their people. Self-righteousness does not buy very much for very long, as the Bush administration has admirably demonstrated.
Only fools and charlatans would tender the notion that there will be a gradual leftward political swing following a liberal defeat of the Bush administration in the voting booth. This would ostensibly restore America to a secular capitalism with perhaps a bit greater concern for national morality and the people. While this would conveniently preserve the capitalistic program that has made both conservatives and liberals wealthy and powerful, it does not constitute the necessary and most likely course of events.
Only fools and charlatans would tender the notion that the Bush administration will somehow return from the values of religious capitalism to the values of science and democracy. On the subject of these values, neoconservatism knows nothing and cares even less, seeing these values accurately as a threat to its dominion. The values of science and democracy have nothing in common with the values of religion and capitalism, never have.
When the Bush administration discredits Old Testament religion and crony capitalism from the global political arena, when its moral bankruptcy reaches fruition in fiscal bankruptcy, there will be many Americans asking the "Why" questions they largely ignored during the Bush administration's assault on the people. There will be many Americans interested in knowing whom to blame for the utter failure of the modern world's first formal democracy. They must do so in order to avoid making the same mistakes again.
The first fingers pointing to blame will, of course, be directed at the obvious causes of America's fall from grace, i.e., the Old Testament conservative Republican party and the incompetence and corruption that the "born again" Bush administration has brought into American government. In discrediting religious capitalism, the Bush administration will have inadvertently accomplished what liberal capitalism could never have accomplished on its own. In the post-Bush era, there will no longer be opposition to original American values and ideals.
Under capitalism's dominion, neither liberal or conservative political factions can be seen as being particularly American. Both are inculcated with the mindless notions that have allowed capitalism's increasingly rapid rise to political dominion. In surviving capitalism's dominion, liberalism has had to accommodate so much greed-inspired nonsense, liberalism is as dead-lost as conservatism is dead-wrong.
The second fingers pointing to blame will, therefore, be directed at the enabling causes, i.e., the utter failure of a compromised liberal electorate to have any moral influence whatsoever on the direction America has been going since its takeover by corporate capitalism following World War II. Well-healed liberals remain entirely dependent on the capitalism that has made them wealthy and, at the same time, forced millions of working American parents into poverty.
Like wealthy conservatives, wealthy liberals see themselves as deserving of everything they have managed to acquire under capitalism. Their children deserve the very best educations in private schools, oftentimes spending more money per year to educate one child than millions of working parents can earn in a year. For that matter, a good SUV can cost more than two working parents can make in a year. Then, of course, there is the vacation home, the sail boat, etc.
Global democracy is the logical extension of America's pioneering and failed efforts to establish a human rights-based government under the direction of the people. Global capitalism, in sharp contrast, is an exercise in both fantasy and futility because capitalism's plan to make the whole world in America's capitalistic image would require the acquisition of several additional planets - and there are none for sale (World Watch Institute).
Here is the subtle self-righteousness inculcated into well-healed people by capitalism's monied dreams and mindless demands. It is, self-evidently, not so much a problem of conservatives versus liberals. It is, as it always has been, more a problem of the "haves" versus the "have nots."
Well-healed liberals see conservatives as the bad guys and they see themselves as the good guys. The problem under capitalism's one-sided dominion is that both sides are sinners in the eyes of Jefferson's God, i.e., in the eyes of the people. Both sides comprise the beautiful people who traditionally get what they want before the people get what they need.
In other words, both conservative and liberal capitalism survives at the expense of poor working people, a fact of capitalism that has stifled meaningful human progress in America for half a century. Liberal capitalism is still capitalism. It abides the ludicrous right wing notion that sharing and socialism are on the path to hell on earth. It implicitly champions the ludicrous notion that competition and capitalism's corruption are not on the path to hell on earth.
Liberal capitalism guarantees that the liberal electorate, in dealing with conservative crime and corruption, will be self-restricted to doing too little, too late. It can be seen as being entirely complicit in the crimes of conservative capitalism and it too will be abandoned in favor of progressivism's greater concern for the people and the values of democracy, e.g., honesty, integrity and compassion, values which embrace and transcend the values of liberal and conservative capitalism (4).
In other words, there is a good argument that both self-righteous conservatives and politically-correct liberals are the direct and indirect causes of America's fall from grace, both at home and abroad. There is a good argument that there will be no political survivors in America following the collapse of religious capitalism, i.e., no conservatism, no liberalism. There is a good argument that both sides will crash and burn in moral and fiscal bankruptcy, right along with the Bush administration.
There is a good argument that Old Testament religion and crony capitalism are already politically dead in the eyes of the world's people. Their advocates in America just don't know it yet. This political death is necessarily the way it will have to go in order to provide the people with a collective, national-cum-global, learning experience. The people of the Gulf states have already received their collective learning experience in witnessing the Bush administration's incompetent response to climatological terrorism.
Relearning the principles and values of democracy is simply prerequisite to re-implementing the values that made America the envy of the world, the human values that capitalism has denigrated in the name of a corrupt, corporate aristocracy. Either we relearn these principles and values on our own, or we will likely be relearning them at the request of the European Union (5).
In the final analysis, it will be the people who will pay all the bills being rung up by the Bush administration. The people who encouraged Bush's religious capitalism and the people who remained silent and allowed it all to happen are uniformly culpable, because both were supposed to honor the values of democracy, not the values of religion and capitalism.
With the fall of religious capitalism, conservatives and liberals will be reunited as a people, and they will have little choice but to pay the bills of the Bush administration, insofar as they are even payable. There is no way to pay off many of Bush's bills. How do you say that you are sorry for tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the Middle East? In this evolutionary progression from national corporate democracies to a global people's democracy, America will finally become what America was intended to be, a light unto itself and the world.
God bless the people. What would we do without them? They pay for everything. The people have always paid for everything. Moreover, the people have been here all along. They were here before Bush and they will be here after Bush. No wonder Jefferson could see the people as deserving of rights that transcend the daily desires of the wealthy and powerful.
When Bush says, in his self-absorbed way, "We'll all be dead," he speaks only for himself. Today's children will dance on his grave, not for the evil he has done, but for the good that will come from the end of his evil.
The question for the American people is this: How much more human insult and injury and death will the Bush administration impose on you before you take America back? It is, after all, your country. When you take it back, don't ever give it away again.
Readings
1) Eric Alterman, Corrupt, Incompetent and 'Off Center', The Nation, October 20, 2005.
2) Howard Fineman, When White House spin spins out of control, MSNBC, October 20, 2005.
3) Jonathan Chait, The religious right's raw deal, Dallas Morning News, October 23, 2005.
4) Gerry Lower, Progressivism and the Two Americas, Axis of Logic, August 30, 2004.
5) Mark Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, Mother Jones, October 20, 2005.
© Copyright 2005 by AxisofLogic.com
Dr. Lower is an Axis of Logic Columnist, residing in Eugene, Oregon. He can be reached at: tisland@blackhills.com.