The Left Right Paradigm is Over: Its You vs. Corporations

From the Big Picture, courtesy of Occupy Wall Street's facebook page:

For those of you who are stuck in the old Left/Right debate, you are missing the bigger picture. Consider this about the Bailouts: It was a right-winger who bailed out all of the big banks, Fannie Mae, and AIG in the first place; then his left winger successor continued to pour more money into the fire pit.

What difference did the Left/Right dynamic make? Almost none whatsoever.

How about government spending? The past two presidents are regarded as representative of the Left Right paradigm – yet they each spent excessively, sponsored unfunded tax cuts, plowed money into military adventures and ran enormous deficits. Does Left Right really make a difference when it comes to deficits and fiscal responsibility? (Apparently not).

What does it mean when we can no longer distinguish between the actions of the left and the right? If that dynamic no longer accurately distinguishes what occurs, why are so many of our policy debates framed in Left/Right terms?

In many ways, American society is increasingly less married to this dynamic: Party Affiliation continues to fall, approval of Congress is at record lows, and voter participation hovers at very low rates.

More here.

Well, that's what I've been saying for years now. More or less.

The reality is that there continue to be vast differences between liberalism and conservatism, as far as political and economic philosophies go. But the above linked essay is absolutely correct in that the two terms, liberal and conservative, have, to a great extent, divorced themselves from any real connection to such philosophy in common usage. It's all about tribalism now, us and them, and apologetics for what Chris Hedges accurately calls "the corporate state."

That is, for decades now we've been hearing rhetoric, from both the left and right, that very much sounds as though it's liberal or conservative, but actually lays the intellectual groundwork for rule by corporations. Conservatives, for instance, are always going on about business, and how the government needs to get out of the way so the economy can flourish, and that's fairly run-of-the-mill philosophy for conservatism, dating back to before the American Revolution. But this pro-business rhetoric has ultimately been used to allow corporations to gradually increase their control over the government, doing an end run around the Constitution and the electoral process in order to exercise power indirectly, by way of lobbying and campaign contributions: real conservatives, the ones who actually admit what's happening, are outraged by this...because real conservatives greatly value the Constitution and the electoral process!!! Somehow, though, most Americans who self-identify as conservative won't allow themselves to see how their centuries old pro-business stance has been warped to usurp the very democracy they love.

And you get the same bullshit from liberals. They support the Democrats no matter what they do to empower corporations while disempowering individuals. A couple of years ago I played an open mike night at New Orleans' Neutral Ground coffee house. It was a few days after Obama politely asked the bankers to start lending again now that they had been bailed out with trillions of tax payer dollars. In between songs, I asserted that this was disgusting behavior: when you essentially own the banks, you do not ask politely; you fucking dictate terms. An aging baby boomer hippie type engaged me in discussion after my set. Actually, it was more of a dressing down. He told me that the President had so much on his plate after the Bush era that it was totally unreasonable for me to make such assertions. He was a patronizing asshole, and totally loyal to President Hope And Change, all in spite of the fact that I was completely right and he was completely wrong. I didn't even try to argue with him. But his behavior is fairly typical of liberals. You know, Bush was my fault because I voted for Nader.

We now live in an era when we can read essays by conservatives such as Paul Craig Roberts or Andrew Bacevich that come off very much like something that Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky might have written. We see the Tea Party, a right-wing social movement motivated by outrage over the bank bailouts; we also see Occupy Wall Street, a left-wing social movement motivated by outrage over the bank bailouts. Everyone's confused. Everyone's angry. Everyone's getting fucked over. And neither the liberal party nor the conservative party appear to give a shit about anything but being reelected.

I don't know if all this really means an end to the liberal/conservative dynamic, but it may very well signal an end to these terms being hijacked and redefined by the corporate state. If so, democracy in America might have a snowball's chance.

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