Grassroots/Hank Kalet

The Day After

Part one is complete, if not completely successful. Democrats have taken back control of the House of Representatives, ensuring a small check on the excesses of the Trump administration

But they lost seats in the Senate and they have done nothing to alter the public narrative. Donald Trump remains president and will remain so for at least two more years. He continues to control the bully pulpit and has a rabidly loyal base, a potent combination that has unleashed the violence and hate that has festered within the foundation of the American body politic for much of our history.

This single fact should be enough to drive us to act in more creative ways than just casting an annual ballot and then turning our attention to “Dancing with the Stars” and the NBA.

Nov. 6 was just the first step in what has to be a much larger project that, ultimately, must realign American priorities away from corporatism — and the complacency it breeds — to a worker-centered economic and political system that raises the well-being and intellectual and emotional growth of individuals above the profits of American businesses.

Removing Trump from office in 2020 is imperative — he poses an existential threat to the nation. But his removal will not address the underlying rot that allowed his political rise.

Chris Hedges, speaking to Jeremy Scahill on the Intercepted podcast, describes Trump as a symptom of a diseased political and economic culture.

“Trump is what rises up from the bowels of a decayed and degenerate system,” Hedges said. “And you can get rid of Trump, but you’re not going to get rid of what the sociologist Emile Durkheim called ‘that anomy’ that propels societies to engage in deeply self-destructive behavior.”

The pathologies — “diseases of despair” like the opioid crisis and the ailments that are the natural products of capitalism, like the growth of the police state, deindustrialization, homelessness, environmental degradation — predate Trump. Bill Clinton used the same language and endorsed the same policies that were offered by even the most conservative Republican, and Barack Obama did little to dismantle the national security state. These issues are linked by a singular thread, the need for corporate capitalism to boil all things down to dollars and cents.

There are real differences between the two parties, especially on social issues. There are radically progressive (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and liberal (Elizabeth Warren, Sherwood Brown) Democrats who understand the malaise at the heart of the system and have been working to expand the promise many of us still see in this nation.

The modern Republican Party, on the other hand, has made the widening of divisions its primary goal — a divide-and-conquer strategy that allows it to win elections and maintain control with a minority of voters. One can see this in the political ads aired in the run-up to the most recent election, which featured hysterical claims about alien invasions, terrorism, and violence, along with distortions of the actual words and actions of their Democratic opponents. Even the very real violence perpetrated by the right — assassinations by white supremacists of blacks and Jews, along with the failed bomb plot against major Democrats — gets reframed by Republican operatives and loyalists as somehow the fault of Democrats and progressives.

Hedges sees this narrative as evidence of social atomization of the kind he witnessed covering civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere, which should terrify us.

“Until those social bonds are reknit, until that anomy is confronted, not only are things not going to get better but especially as we are on the cusp of another financial breakdown they are going to get worse,” he says.

Reknitting those bonds has little to do with the bogus calls for unity and decorum the political classes have foisted upon us. Civility, in their construction, is a call for control, a demand that our politics stay within the narrow boundaries that pundits who populate and profit from cable news have drawn. Civility as a political goal is meaningless. Civility, bipartisanship, compromise — these are useful tools, but are not political philosophies. When we conflate the tool with thought — as we too often do — we make actual debate and discussion impossible, we narrow the bounds of possibility, and entrench the status quo.

We must continue to focus on the vote, both local and national, with the goal of routing Trump from office, but we have to remember that voting is only one tool. If our democracy is to survive this fascist moment, if we are to maintain some semblance of a free society, we have to make use of more than the ballot. We must use our voices to expand debate beyond the received narrative, and we have to find ways to unify, to demonstrate how American capitalism has used racism and sexism to divide, to divert attention from the grand theft that the system endorses.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist from New Jersey. You can find him online at The Medium at medium.com/@newspoet41; tumblr at hankkalet.tumblr.com; Instagram @kaletwrites; Facebook at facebook.com/hank.kalet; and Twitter @newspoet41 or @kaletjournalism. His email is hankkalet@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2018

Populist.com