Forest for the trees
by Tom Sullivan
Escapologist Andrew Basso. Still image via YouTube.
Misdirection is perhaps the magician’s most powerful tool. With it, they make us believe one set of events is taking place when the truth is something else entirely. Magicians manipulate human attention to mystify and entertain. Propagandists manipulate it to misinform, confuse and divide. Politicians use misdirection to avoid accountability for acts they’d rather not see the light of day. Bright, shiny objects, even metaphorical ones, sometimes have a way of drawing our attention all by themselves.
The nation’s capitol, for example. While many of us focused on what happened inside the Beltway, others were winning seats in state houses, redrawing state and congressional districts, and neutering democracy.
After 40 years of foreign policy and economic failures capped by the collapse of 2008, the Great Recession, and “inequality at century-high levels,” one might think Republicans — and Democrats — would question neoliberalism’s laissez-faire approach to politics, global trade, and social philosophy, writes Ganesh Sitaraman (“The Great Democracy”). Especially on the right, the response went beyond “ostrichlike blindness” to doubling down on failure.
But look! See! A record-high stock market. Shiny!
Neoliberalism’s radical individualism fostered a fracturing of the social contract and a balkanization of the political community. Demagogues rushed into the vacuum “to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism, which only further fuels the divisions within society.” Not to mention undermining “the preconditions for a free and democratic society.”
Missing the forest for the trees, instead of contemplating rejection of failed premises and looking for new solutions, Washington sought instead technocratic tweaks to the prevailing status quo, Sitaraman writes at The New Republic:
The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to confront the collapse of the middle class and the spread of widespread economic insecurity. The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to address the corruption of politics and the influence of moneyed interests in every aspect of civic life—from news media to education to politics and regulation. The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to restitch the fraying social fabric, in which people are increasingly tribal, divided, and disconnected from civic community. And the solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to confront the fusion of oligarchic capitalism and nationalist authoritarianism that has now captured major governments around the world—and that seeks to invade and undermine democracy from within.
That does not mean no minds ever change, Charles Blow explains for the New York Times. The decade has brought more change outside the Beltway. Being gay went mainstream. Support for marijuana legalization became so mainstream even former speaker of the House, John Boehner, became a spokesperson. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, the Women’s March, March For Our Lives, climate activism, etc. reawakened civic activism.
Blow adds:
Mass shootings have become part of the American motif. Republicans and the gun lobby have resisted efforts to address the epidemic of gun violence in this country, so the carnage has become an ambient terror in our society. The mass shootings have not only increased in frequency, they have become more deadly.
In September, The Los Angeles Times analyzed more than 50 years of mass shootings and found:
“Twenty percent of the 164 cases in our database occurred in the last five years. More than half of the shootings have occurred since 2000 and 33 percent since 2010. The deadliest years yet were 2017 and 2018, and this year is shaping up to rival them, with at least 60 killed in mass shootings, 38 of them in the last five weeks.”
But are these shootings dismissed as terrorist attacks or the work of individual madmen trees in a larger forest? Shiny distractions from what’s really going on?
Are the dominant governing structures of the last 40 years, those faulty ideas that exacerbated social disintegration, global instability, the undermining of democracy, and record economic inequality causing (or at least contributing to) the social unraveling? Are technocratic tweaks insufficient to meet the historic moment?
Sitaraman concludes:
In 1982, as the neoliberal curtain was rising, Colorado Governor Richard Lamm remarked that “the cutting edge of the Democratic Party is to recognize that the world of the 1930s has changed and that a new set of public policy responses is appropriate.” Today, people around the world have recognized that the world of the 1980s has changed and that it is time for a new approach to politics. The central question of our time is what comes next.
But like the old light-bulb joke, first the political class has to want to change. Or is making them change our job?
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