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Sunday, September 14, 2008

The California State Budget Crisis and the Crisis of Progressive Democratic Rhetoric

Relatively sane majorities of Democrats -- and even, at this point, our unfunny joke of a Governor -- understand the obvious facts that indispensable government services require funding and that the magic market fairy isn't going to appear in the guise of Ronnie Reagan in a tutu, tiara, and butterfly wings any time soon to solve our California budget crisis for us. California obviously needs to raise taxes so that those who benefit most from living and working in our incomparable State pay their fair share to keep it sane, prosperous, healthy, educated, and secure for all. Nevertheless, as I understand it, here in California, we need two-thirds of both State houses to authorize any tax-increase, and the Randroid Republican minority of no-new-taxes-ever zealots is sufficiently entrenched that this simply never happens.

So, it looks like Senate Leader Don Perata is capitulating to our lunatic Republican fringe yet again, ending the budgetary impasse between the greedy mad minority and sensible timorous majority (sound familiar?) by resigning himself to slashing vital services here in California yet again, screwing over public servants and their unions, betraying all the good government types who have been standing firm against the greedheads this time around, and essentially stealing from local and city budgets to pay off the shortfall, thus kicking the ball forward to ensure an even more catastrophic budgetary crisis next time around with ever more of the allies of sanity coping with the scorched earth of prior capitulations and hence ever less capable of scrambling to protect California from those "public servants" of the Right hell-bent on destroying our State to "save" it from socialism or the brown people or whatever Lovecraftian Strangelovian fantasy drives their broken brains.

The bottom line is that even in the face of the utter bankruptcy of neoliberal and neoconservative ideas over two decades of their interminably reiterated sloganeering they have acquired the steely hegemonic force of commonsense. I do think Don Perata should be forced to resign in the face of the present catastrophe, but I'm not entirely dead to Constitutional and cultural contexts that constrain him here. How many Californians who are suffering unnecessarily and will suffer much more in months to come due to this crisis have any sense at all of what is happening and about the false ideology that drives this crisis? How many people, in casting about for plausibly intuitive formulations to make sense of policy matters would find themselves mouthing the very slogans themselves that form the noose around their necks tightening to choke all the decency and sanity and life out of them?

"Markets are endlessly efficient and government endlessly inefficient and so we must deregulate and privatize public services endlessly…. taxes are a burden, a theft, a kind of slavery rather than the price we all pay to the best of our ability for civilization for all and so we must lower taxes endlessly…. when we lower taxes on the rich especially the benefits from the emancipation of our innovative risk-taking creative-class betters will trickle down to all us, whether we deserve it or not…. market liberalization at home and abroad promotes political liberalization eventually so never mind that gunfire and teargas it's all temporary…. true justice demands market discipline for the undeserving poor and defense department welfare spending that benefits the already rich…." and so on. You know the drill, because it's drilling into your skull through your ears and eyesocket right now, it's drilling into your lifeblood and draining you dry, it's killing you, it's killing your future, it's killing your kids.

Ultimately, there has been a colossal failure by progressive democrats to make a sensible and generally intelligible case for the contrary propositions that good government provides literally indispensable services that markets are utterly ill-suited to serve, that right-wing expressions of hostility to democratic governance are always expressions of hostility to the majority of people with whom these conservatives happen not to identify, that taxes are the price of freedom and investments in the future for all, that trade can only be "free" when it is informed and nonduressed and secured through good governance by a justice truly available to all and by a general welfare that provides reliable information and insulates us from such duress, that equity secures diversity and that diversity not only enriches culture by proliferating it but strengthens society by making it resilient, that the celebration of dissent nourishes the consent of the governed, that the overabundant majority of people will, when treated as peers, freely collaborate with you in the great work of progressive emancipation and that those who say otherwise do so because they fear the risks and demands of freedom or because they hate the loss of unearned privileges they imagine will follow from the progressive emancipation of their peers.

These wholesome, progressive and emancipatory ideas aren't any harder to grasp and circulate than the reactionary, divisive, and limiting ideas that have suffused popular talk-radio, socioeconomic academic theory, public policy discourse, politician's speeches, and on and on and on throughout the long dark night of post-Reagan neoliberal/neoconservative (corporate-militarist) ascendancy, that is to say, throughout my entire life as a voting United States citizen.

It is the failure of progressive people actually to know their minds and then speak them in a compelling way that is responsible for our present distress. It isn't unreasonable for a State Constitution to demand a two-thirds majority before raising taxes (excessive taxation can indeed be tyrannical, after all), but it is unreasonable that more than a third of our elected representatives can't see reason on this question in the face of our State's present catastrophe, and that the people who elect them are so ignorant of basic notions of good governance that they will support those who act so palpably against their own and the general interest. These deeper failures are the ones that demand urgent redress, and these failures fall to the complacency and bad-sense of progressive people as much as to the greed and sloth and irrationality of reactionaries among us.

There will always be crooks and scoundrels and liars and con-artists and short-term thinkers and hypocrites and bitter puritans and intolerant assholes in the world, and many of these will be tempted to find a place in government to work their mischief there as everywhere else. Civilization exists to protect the fragile intelligence and collaboration and service of the majority from the minority who would despoil it through violence, exploitation, fraud, and humiliation, as well as to nourish in us our own intelligence and capacity for collaboration and service against our own tendencies to violence, exploitation, fraud, and humiliation.

Why have we allowed forces hostile to civilization conceived as the collaborative emancipation of a diversity of stakeholders, peer-to-peer to speak in the "name" of civilization? How have we quit the stage as they willfully demolished the democracy, such as it was, on which they as much as we ourselves have depended for our flourishing and even survival? How have we come to doubt ourselves and the splendid hard-won achievements of those who struggled before us and for us? How have we come to doubt ourselves and the work so palpably present to hand?

I realize that this began as a simple comment on the California budget crisis and Leader Don Perata's probably inevitable capitulation to a know-nothing minority of vandals in Sacramento, and that now I am ranting at a much broader and probably what seems a more useless level of generality. I feel like I am doing that a lot lately. Perhaps this is a professional limitation of people trained in philosophy.

But it seems to me that our proximate problems are abetted in their substance by ill-digested notions, false and yet uncritically accepted assumptions and ways of framing key question, and sometimes simply utter incomprehension of even quite simple basic ideas that seem to me to provide the proper footing without which it makes no sense at all to profess a progressive viewpoint, however fervently one claims otherwise.

Progressive democracy is broken because it was and remains brittle, unsure of itself. Progressives need to know their minds, else how can they speak them and so speak up for themselves and for us all?

I suppose it is my sense that this insurgent voice of progressive sense is arising out of the Netroots that makes me most hopeful in the midst of the ruin of corporate-militarist America, this consummating epoch of rampaging Movement Conservative Republicans and the Capitulation Congress Democrats we elected to end the war and protect our civil liberties from the liars and warcriminals and crony-capitalists in the Washington of the neoliberal Washington Consensus. I suppose it is my sense that Obama is more beholden to this insurgent voice than any President in recent memory that makes me hopeful for his Administration (and all the more appalled at the prospect of his possible demolition by forces that cannot be given any name but evil, plain and simple).

Who knows if it is too late or not for us? Who knows if the corporatists must literally destroy themselves to be stopped in their exploitation and looting, if the militarists must end us all for the lack of wisdom to end their warmaking, if the ecosystem on which we depend for our lives is beyond any remedy that still holds some place for human civilization, if the abundant majorities of people in the world so long constrained and abused by us will unleash their righteous anger upon us in the era of conspicuous economic, military, and social incapacity produced by this era of corporate-militarist folly?

Whatever else happens, whatever else we need to do, whatever provisional solution we find to a budget crisis created by right wing ideology, or to an election crisis created by corporate media consolidation and right wing disenfranchisement and fraud, progressive democratic people need, in Hannah Arendt's terms, to think what we are doing.

We need to know our minds and then to speak them.

This is not a call for leadership, so much as a solicitation for collaborators, peer-to-peer.

We need to suffuse the great and gathering conversation with the simple sensible ideas of progressive collaborative emancipatory democracy. When the conversation has changed, the available solutions will change, and only then will the work resume surefooted and in earnest.

It is happening, I think, but perhaps only just in the nick of time, or perhaps too late after all. I do think Obama grasps the crucial point when he cites the emancipatory notion that we are the change we are looking for. That in itself is an amazing and marvelous thing. But I do know we cannot be the change we need unless we think what we are doing, so that we know our minds as progressive democrats, and so that we speak our minds, peer to peer.

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