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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Americans May Be Too Uneducated to Grasp and Too Spoiled to Undertake What We Know to be the Solutions to Our Socioeconomic and Ecological Problems

Recent budget battles and debt ceiling games of chicken are just symptoms of the deeper problems posed by our longstanding ignorance and privilege.

Managing to raise the debt ceiling after protracted pyrotechnical posturing and last-minute seat-of-the-pants legislative half-measures of the kind that characterized the recent 2011 budget and government shutdown battle would be only a marginally better outcome than not managing to raise the debt ceiling at all, to the extent that what is being played with here is whether or not we can justify institutional confidence that the United States will make good on its promises to creditors.

The reason failure to raise the debt ceiling is regarded as "unthinkable" by actually serious lawmakers and administrators is because the loss of the full faith and credit of the United States in a global context translates to the altogether pointless loss of a whole host of advantages (many not actually deserved) and tools (many once lost never to be regained) on which the United States has to count if it hopes to claw its way out of its manifold vast and deep structural socioeconomic problems any time soon.

Those who are now posturing as "serious" in their worries about long-term budget deficits by holding the debt ceiling hostage and are making with this posturing what they take to be an essentially symbolic theatrical gesture, but in so doing they are behaving in ways that could provoke a radical loss of confidence that pushes interest rates into the stratosphere (even if the debt ceiling were raised, after all, "just in time") making the address of precisely those epically swelling long term deficits incomparably more hopeless.

The Republicans who are indulging in such fun and games are patently irresponsible to the point of lunacy and are clearly just a kind of organized insanity or infantilism at this point, a klatch of folks who don't understand even remotely what they are playing at or whose politics are so sociopathic that they don't care about avoidable catastrophic outcomes or even fancy they can actually use such outcomes to their parochial advantage.

Meanwhile, Democrats who fail to grasp what Republicans are now capable of or who suavely behave as though a pretense of "business is usual" makes it so are functionally a complementary organized insanity enabling these Republicans at this point.

I suppose such feel-good pretenses have their reasons, as we observe Obama's poll numbers dropping now presumably because the permanently spoiled adolescent ignoramuses denominated "independents" apparently found his recent even minimally truth-telling speech on the budget "partisan" and "divisive" and also because they are upset that gas prices are going up (man, are these jigheads gonna behave well for Peak Oil for real or what?) -- in other words, any realism about our circumstances will yield uncritical spasms of punitive tantrum as likely to be directed at those who are struggling to serve their interests as not.

Needless to say, many Republicans will be more than happy to lie loudly to the electorate when the consequences of their irresponsible posturing come due, and will declare macro-economically illiterate pieties to the effect that wholesome stimulus measures enacted in an economy in freefall and in a liquidity trap by Democrats caused the deficit Republicans created in fact with their tax-cuts for the rich and their war adventures and their stubborn allegiance to surreally inefficient for-profit healthcare spending.

You better believe that Republicans won't let a good crisis of their making go to waste, and will be more than happy to use the resulting catastrophe as a pretext for the further dismantlement of our notionally equitable and representative civic institutions, the better to usher in the anti-democratic neo-feudalist order they have been crowing for since the New Deal for anybody with ears to hear.

America, I begin to fear, is simply too uneducated not to fall for their charlatanry on such complex questions (macro-economics, environmental science, harm-reduction administration), and too spoiled from too protracted an insulation from the consequences of their bad behavior to sustain the will for any substantial address of the problems at hand.

America will remain the beneficiary of its comparative geographic isolation, the richness of its resources, the diversity of its population, and so this failed empire probably won't be the worst notionally representative authoritarian plutocratic backwater in the world to live in while the world goes to hell -- and in any case if the United States finally fails to rise to our promise as a sane sustainable secular social democracy the world is probably better off for the eclipse of our prevalence anyway, though I can't say the candidates on offer to assume such prevalence fill me with much confidence about out earthly prospects.

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