WHERE TO NOW?

Last week we got rid of a symptom; it remains to be seen whether we’ll get rid of the disease

There had been much talk about the lunar eclipse falling on Election Day last week, people being told to “expect the unexpected.” Many of us went straight for the “Oh no, it’s going to be something awful,” but that was silly of us wasn’t it? As that point we had come to expect something chaotic, so the universe pulled a fast one on us and delivered what actually was unexpected: a normal and decent Election Day

Carlos Manchego

There does seem to be a realignment of the stars going on. It feels at least a possibility that the Era of Trump will one day be looked back on the way we now look at McCarthyism: something bad that happened, and then it ended. The Republican Party looks like it might be going back to the Republican Party as it was before it went nuts. And the Democratic Party will now go through an identity crisis of its own, deciding how to build on last Tuesday’s results in a way that paves the way for a win in 2024.

If Trump announces his candidacy sometime this week or next, then obviously the Republican Party will be thrown into disarray. It will be one of those uniquely American political circuses that you can’t take your eyes away from. And the Democrats are holding their breaths to find out what Biden is going to do now. Will he run? Will he not run?

And the horse race begins.

But it seems to me that we should be thinking about more than the horse race. We should be thinking about the future of the world. Obviously I’m glad the predicted red wave did not appear and that the road ahead will presumably be something other than MAGA chaos. But we need to do more than stave off that particular disaster; we need to begin a new chapter of of American history. What concerns me most are not the things about which the Republicans and Democrats disagree. I’m most concerned about the things on which they do agree, or where their differences have more to do with degree than with substance.

No matter which party is in power, we continue to build on an already grotesquely bloated defense budget. While I support aiding the Ukrainians at this desperate hour, no one has explained why we had to add to the already established defense budget in order to do so. If you’ve already spending $781B a year, shouldn’t some of that be, like, a rainy day fund or something? Isn’t the whole point of defense expenditure that our military be there if we need it? If we’re supporting an ally, shouldn’t that be seen as a military expense to be subtracted from our already established budget?

Neither party is talking about that. Because both are in the thrall of the military industrial complex.

Nor is either party speaking to the fact that we’re currently scheduled to spend up to a trillion dollars “refurbishing” our nuclear arsenal over the next decade, when more than ever we should be having a conversation about nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. The United States already has at least 6,000-7,000 nuclear bombs as it is, any ten of which would be enough to end civilization as we know it. Right now, even as I write this, we’re dealing with a Russian president who is threatening to drop a nuclear bomb if he doesn’t get his way. If Vladimir Putin is going to drop a nuke I can’t imagine it matters much whether we have 100 or 6,000 of them to rain down on him in response. Perhaps the defense posture of Mutually Assured Destruction isn’t quite the guaranteed security blanket we were told it was. A lesson from the Russian-Ukrainian war should be that we must create a path to a world without nuclear weapons.

But neither party is talking about that. Because both are in the thrall of the military industrial complex.

There are many ways to read the message sent by the American people last week. One inescapable read is that extremism is not the people’s choice. But I think the American people are ready to go further than that. The question isn’t just whether or not our democracy will continue. The question is whether our lives will continue. Will toxins in our food, water and earth continue to contribute to an increasingly high rate of chronic illnesses in America? Will Americans continue to die by the tens of thousands because of conditions they wouldn’t be prey to if we had universal health insurance? Will children continue to die in obscenely tragic numbers due to gun violence? Will continued fossil fuel extraction overwhelm our efforts to compensate with the development of green energy? Will military dominance of foreign policy decisions continue to obstruct efforts to genuinely wage peace in the world?

When I was in college, there were 300,000 incarcerated Americans; now there are over 2.3 million. When I was in college, the average American worker had decent benefits, and could afford a home, a yearly vacation, a car, and to send their kids to college; today, there has been such a massive transfer of wealth and opportunity into the hands of one percent - and such diminishment of the power of labor - that yesterday’s reality is but a dream today. When I was in college, the idea of a genuinely upwardly mobile society was actually a thing; today, it’s a quaint and nostalgic notion of a world that used to be. And none of those unfortunate changes had to occur. They were the results of bad public policy, the spawn of neoliberal economic theory that made deregulating corporations; putting more money in the hands of the so-called “job creators” through excessive tax relief, corporate subsidies and obsessive privatization; and the corrupt legalization of buying elections the organizing principles of American government.

Last week we got rid of a symptom; it remains to be seen whether we’ll get rid of the disease. Corporations still run the world.

Yes, it’s great that the unexpected occurred last week in the form of a turn in the direction of more help for more people. But we need to do more than help people; with a third of our population either poor, near poor, or afraid of becoming poor, we need genuine economic reform. We need to put an end to the aberrational influence of neoliberalism, returning the resources of government to at least as much service to its people as to its donors. Even now, we’re still toying with forces that could cause more massive implosion - and explosion - that anything we have seen so far.

We weren’t really saved from any of that last week. We just bought ourselves some time.