Over the last few years, I burned a lot of bridges: first on private e-mail lists and second on twitter (and a little bit with unwelcome posts here.)
After Obama got into office and made it clear that he was going to ramp up drones (which I knew and could not publish); and that he was going to drive the West into permanent depression (which I knew and wrote repeatedly); and my compatriots, by and large, fell to their knees and lauded him, even in places which later turned on him, I became, not angry, but enraged.
There were three camps on this:
1) Those who knew Obama was going to be a disaster and would not say it, because he was popular and speaking against a popular president who had just bought the Netroots and who most netroots citizens believed in, seemed like a way to lose readership or followers.
2) Those who believed that Obama was the Panglossian choice: this is the best we can get, the best of all possible worlds. That didn’t mean good, that meant bad, but better than terrible, so suck it up. Billmon falls into this camp on economic policy (the bailouts were the only politically possible policy and this is the best of all actually possible worlds), and I had a huge blowout with him last year about on twitter. He’s brilliant, but…
3) Those who believed and many of whom still believe that Obama was just swell; FDR reborn, who would (and has) accomplished more than FDR every did!
We all have our own truths and determining truth is a problem. I thought then that Obama might well be a one term president, and was wrong. But on the economics I was exactly right; and on foreign policy I was generally right: I knew that foreign policy was going to be a fiasco when he put Hilary Clinton in charge, because the one major area Hilary was to his right on was foreign policy. (Plus the whole drone thing. The only major candidate to say he didn’t believe in the war on Terror was Edwards, but when the unions decided not to back him (largely from gutlessness, in my opinion) he was done.)
I also predicted, following Stirling Newberry, that on civil liberties and constitutional issues he would institutionalize Bush. He was not the anti-Bush people imagined, but Bush’s heir, despite being a Democrat.
I got into blogging to, as the terrible cliche goes, change the world. I did not get into blogging to be a courtier to power, kissing the feet of those in power when I knew they were doing or going to do terrible things.
Add to this significant undiagnosed health problems, and I spent years angry.
I’m not someone who thinks that anger is always bad: often it gets people up off their asses. In the same way that hating your job means you should change jobs, and being unhappy may be a sign that something is wrong with your situation not with you, and you shouldn’t self medicate (you cannot explain the massive increase in depression and many other mental illnesses over the past century using individual factors, it is clearly a social problem, with social causes).
And so, for years, I cut people dead, and cut myself off from much of my old network (though certainly not all.) I look back now, calmer, and wonder “were these fights I needed to engage in?” I think—probably not, and yet, and yet: we lost and too many people just wouldn’t admit and made excuses for terrible policy.
We got a president who is worse on civil liberties than George Bush, who is still destroying countries, whose policies in combination with the Fed have lead to more than 100% of all gains going to the top 10% (and really about the top 3%); with a decrease in wealth and income for the majority of Americans and a ton of Europeans.
Obama may have given Americans a shitty version of universal health care (sort of), but in virtually every other way he is an unmitigated disaster.
And it was obvious way back, or it should have been. And people didn’t say who knew it; or didn’t know who should have because, let us be frank, they wanted the first African American president, no matter what, even if he was a right authoritarian and they wanted to live in a fantasy land where just electing a Democrat, any Democrat would fix things.
The simple truth is that the baby boomers are done. Their positive legacy is the improvement of women’s rights and gay rights (African American rights were won by the Silent and the GI generations.) Their negative legacy is an erosion of every other type of civil liberties that matters, right back to the Magna Carta; the vast erosion of America’s real economic power; the end of American egalitarianism and huge numbers of needless wars and deaths that have made America hated in large parts of the world.
As usual, some of my readers will object to this broad brush, but take it another way: old and middle aged people (Gen Xers too, a noxious generation politically); have had their days at bat, and those of us on the left have failed and failed and failed.
So it’s going to be another generation’s job to fix the huge mess that has been created: politically, economically and environmentally. That doesn’t mean there’s no job for older folks: but the young people will choose which older folks to learn from, follow and emulate. The job of those of us who are older, who lost, is to prepare the ground for the next war; the next battles.
If we do so, maybe we can keep the death toll from what is coming as low as a billion people.
Maybe.
So be it.
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