Where have you been?
This morning, a well-known media critic who I respect and admire – although differ often – wrote on Facebook that he “never felt more depressed and paralyzed about what’s going on in our country than I do right now. I fear that we’re sliding into authoritarianism, driven by one horrifying event after another.” I told him that I hoped he felt better because we really need the work that he does. This person fears Trump; others fear Hillary. But, seriously, this goes back a ways, and I was surprised that he was just realizing this now.
Essentially, the nation has embraced authoritarianism for a long time and it has been a bipartisan clutch, if you will, to a feeling of order amid chaos instead of focusing on freedom and the Bill of Rights.
Some of it goes back to Richard Nixon (if no one has read “The Selling of the President: The Classical Account of the Packaging of a Candidate,” you should).
A lot more can be placed on the head of Bill Clinton and his first anti-terrorism and CRIME bills, and what happened in Waco and even welfare reform while also approving trade bills which gutted manufacturing to the tune of 9+ million low skill, decent wage jobs since NAFTA was implemented and another 40+ million jobs connected to those jobs (People who have jobs – any jobs – don’t throttle the necks of immigrant store owners over a cigar).
W followed with his PATRIOT Act and then Barack Obama failed to repeal – or even work to repeal – that act, as promised, because his side was in power and they use the power for their agenda and friends now.
Even when we are told, point blank, that our own government is spending billions of dollars spying on us in a relentless way, we do nothing; we argue over the semantics of the people who told us the truth and what they did in order to get us the truth.
And lastly, we are now careening toward two major party candidates who will also embrace – and in Hillary Clinton’s case, already embraced in the government sector and Donald Trump, similar mindset in the private sector – that same concept; while 90 to 95 percent of the half of the nation that actual votes is afraid of doing anything to stop them – or anyone in the private clubs – because they might lose this crumb or might gain that crumb.
No amount of more government spending to better educate, better train cops, subsidize people, whatever, is going to fix this because we’ve lost the fundamental things, while not perfect, that I believe, made our country and its experiment so important: Freedom … and the basics laid out in the Bill of Rights.
That experiment, it would appear, is over, as many of us have been saying for a long time.
More about this at a later date.