The vote lays bare a people unwilling to cast off the shroud of consumerist excess and strive for conscience and national renewal
Tuesday’s mid-term elections hang over the heads of the American voters like an executioner’s sword – halfway through President Donald Trump’s second term in office, the elections are not simply a referendum on the state of the union, but perhaps more importantly, a hearing on the fate of the president himself.
The first two years of Donald Trump’s come back tour have not gone anything like the American people who voted him into office two years ago were led to believe. They were promised an end to the endless wars in the Middle East, yet the US finds itself embroiled in an endless war in the Middle East which clearly did not need to be fought, and perhaps worse from the perspective of the psyche of the American voter, is a war America is losing badly.
Failed military adventures in the Middle East and Southwest Asia have been a regular feature of the American experience for the past three decades, and elections – especially midterm elections where the president’s name is not on the ballot – do not normally hinge on foreign policy or national security issues, but rather local issues – the domestic agenda, so to speak. And there is no greater barometer for a consumer-driven society like the US of the success or failure of a domestic agenda than American economic health. The age-old question, “Are you better off today than you were two years ago?” is very much the talk of the town, and the answer should send shivers down the spine of every Trump loyalist scanning the polls as they would an EKG, desperately looking for evidence of viable political life: Americans most certainly are not.
“It’s the economy, stupid” is a famous American political aphorism attributed to James Carville, a Democratic strategist who helped manage Bill Clinton’s successful run for the US presidency in 1992. It is as valid a point today as it was 34 years ago, something Donald Trump and his supporters seem to have forgotten. “Short term pain for long term gain” has emerged as the Trump counter to Carville’s words of wisdom, a reflection on the price Americans are paying at the pump when putting gasoline into their cars or diesel into their trucks.
America is a land defined in large part by the automotive industry – when Bruce Springsteen belts out the opening lyrics to ‘Racing in the Streets’ (“I got a ‘69 Chevy with a three-ninety-six, Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor”), there isn’t a man among us who can’t close his eyes and envision the machine as described. Whether singing along with Bobby Troupe about getting “our kicks on Route 66” (the iconic American highway that connected Chicago to Los Angeles), or nodding knowingly at the title of Bob Dylan’s classic album ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ (named after the stretch of concrete and asphalt connecting Minneapolis to New Orleans which gained fame as the ‘Blues Highway’ and gave perch to the Freedom Riders of the American Civil Rights movement), the American Highway system and the machines that traverse them have defined the hopes and dreams of successive generations of Americans. But when rising gasoline prices eat into the slender margin of comfort most American paychecks provide at the end of a hard month of work, and spiking diesel prices raise the cost of transportation such that the price of the very things that defines American quality of life – food, electronics, clothes – rise as well, the American way of life becomes unsustainable, and the American people begin looking for someone to blame.
And that someone generally is the man whose desk once famously bore a sign reading “The Buck Stops Here.”
“It’s the economy, stupid” is a sad condemnation of what America, and Americans by extension, have become – a land of consumer-oriented individuals who long ago abandoned any notion of the kind of collective citizenship which once served as the bedrock of the nation known as the United States of America. This mantra reveals a harsh truth about the American people – as long as politicians keep them wrapped up in a cocoon of perceived comfort, where they are led to believe they can coast from one day to the next awash in a sea of consumer excessiveness, the American people will ignore just about anything, regardless of what it says about them as a people.
We ignore the fact that our lifestyle is built on the back of a colonial system disguised as a “rules-based international order,” which to provide the American consumer with the goods they crave, requires American industry to acquire resources at far below fair market value. This leads to the kind of exploitative economic relationships that produce child labor in Africa to harvest the rare-earth minerals that give us the smartphones our culture revolves around, or the sweat shops of Asia that make the clothes we drape around our bodies and the shoes we prance around in as if on parade.
We ignore the fact that our economy operates on a foundation of debt that would be unsustainable for any rational economic system, but which is kept alive by the printing of money whose only hope of viability is sustaining its status as a global reserve currency while the US government simultaneously seeks to leverage this reserve status to blackmail and bully nations into maintaining their status as American economic colonies.
In our greedy embrace of personal consumerism and the artifice of prosperity it creates, we turn a blind eye to the corporate greed that has seen the personal wealth of our nation gravitate exclusively toward the top 1%, while the rest of us wallow in a swamp we’ve convinced ourselves is paradise.
How strong is the narcotic of greed and avarice?
Strong enough for Americans to ignore a president who sells access to his social media postings so that those who seek to profit from their manipulative effects (which have taken on the role of instruments of declaratory policy), or the empowerment of friends and family to conduct national diplomacy as little more than a front for the enrichment of the president’s inner circle.
Strong enough for Americans to turn a blind eye toward the facilitation of genocide of the Palestinian people by America’s “friend and ally”Israel.
Strong enough to allow this very same “friend and ally” to lure us into a military disaster in the Middle East, where our leaders committed an act of perfidy as the opening act of an illegal war of aggression, which simply put should never have been considered, let alone fought.
Strong enough to ignore historical truths by supporting the hate-filled progeny of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi German regime, in the form of Ukrainian nationalists who embrace the odious ideology of Stepan Bandera, all in support of rampant Russophobia that has seen us turn our back on the ally who made the defeat of Nazi Germany possible.
As long as the American spirit is greased with the lubricant of perceived wealth and the fantasy of comfort it affords, then the American moral compass once guided by ideals and values enshrined in a constitution long since abandoned by those who govern, and those who empower them through their vote, can no longer stand in the face of evil.
We are collectively dead as human beings, economic zombies infected by greed and all that accompanies this affliction.
Which is why “It’s the economy, stupid” is more than a political warning. It’s the epitaph of a nation.
The American people will go to the polls tomorrow and vote. They will vote their pocketbooks. Which means it will be a bad day for Donald Trump and those who have embraced and facilitated his failed policies.
But they will not vote with their conscience. Which means that the executioner’s sword will not be stayed regardless of the outcome.
Their votes will solve nothing, because their votes seek to solve a problem that has not been accurately defined.
The high price of fuel and the resultant rise in the cost of living for the average American has burst open the cocoon of comfort we have wrapped ourselves in for far too long.
Tomorrow we should be voting to liberate ourselves from the narcotic of this cocoon. Instead, most Americans will be voting for putting the cocoon back in order. And this will be an indictment not of President Trump, but of us.
