Letting the hard right takeover

“Those who have the privilege of knowing have the duty to act.”

Albert Einstein

If you are going to follow politics, you will be invariably drawn into feeling some responsibility for outcomes - as miserable as they often are. Passivity is not an option - especially if one is sufficiently infuriated. And it's easy to be angry once one realizes that most of the havoc we witness daily is caused by real decisions by real people.  Compulsion to act, to participate on some level, sets in even if it is merely just to vote.

To some voting is wimpy and indirect as compared to 'direct action'. Furthermore, the candidates are often all bozos. Once politicized, the young often have no patience for the plodding, setback-ridden process of “formal democracy."  Especially when one realizes that large corporations and the very rich more or less control both political parties (but one a good deal more than the other.)  So they often opt for more direct activities and more radical political stances. However violent acts toward property while romantic and exciting (and fodder for the nighty news) usually play right into the hands of the powers that be – since they usually control all the institutions of authority: the main stream media, the courts, the cops and the military. Yet direct action through peaceful protest can be a powerful. tool. But it must jump the hurdle of attaining if not critical mass at least impressive numbers, which is difficult when most people won't even vote. And it is dependent on the media which has been known to ignore mass marches (i.e. the 2003 buildup to the Iraq invasion.)

In this last election there was such widespread apathy and cynicism that only 36.3% of eligible voters even bothered to vote.   And the Repubs triumphed in almost every race. While non-white minorities, blacks, Asians and Latinos, participated (and again well over 1/2 supported the Demos), younger voters, 18-24, voted in lesser numbers than in 2012 (also giving a slight majority to Demos.)  However white working class males, responsible gun loving "conservatives" as they like to think of themselves, and their brethren, the rabid Tea Party reactionaries, showed up in significant numbers.  Apparently the moderates who voted for Obama in 2012 stayed home. The midterms are always difficult for the party in power. Many people, the young especially, only vote in presidential elections. They naively see an incoming president as some kind of messiah. When he turns out to be just another pol who must scheme and back pedal just to survive, their callow interest in "politics" flags.

Public perception is often wrong. Obama's is not a failed presidency. As a centrist and deal maker with the devil - health insurance companies and big Pharma, the Affordable Care Act was a Republicanesqe creature (which they immediately disowned and unified to defeat.) But in it's own clumsy "free-market" friendly way "Obamacare" is working. And in terms of the economy under Obama it has recovered (look at the stock market and corporate profits.) It is not Obama's fault that once the jobs returned the pay was still flat-lined, at least not his fault in terms of his counter-cyclical policy. The (too small) stimulus worked. It's just that the average 'Joe six pack' didn't feel it.  There are more complicated forces at work here involving the evolution/devolution of global capitalism.
 

Yet even as the hard right dry washes its hands in gleeful anticipation of taking over the US Senate and re-enforcing its control over the US House of Representatives, other forces for positive change are emerging.

・ Identification by a respected by a non-Marxist orthodox economist, Thomas Piketty, backed by overwhelming empirical evidence, that global capitalism is in trouble at a very fundamental level (thus weakening its ever-lauded 'invisible hand' dynamic.) In short over its 250 year history capitalism has allowed too much wealth to concentrate in an elite class which now has inadequate incentive to either share it or invest it productively.

・ The litany of race based murders in which the whites 'walked', the most prominent recent ones being deaths of Travor Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner has finally tipped a scale in the besieged, hapless black communities which is now rising up like a sleeping giant to confront its amorphous adversary – institutionalized racism in America.

・ Centrist President Barack Obama with no “blue dog” Democrats to aid in re-election and two years to face down an always intransigent Congress can now afford to take chances politically – elimination of the embargo on Cuba, blocking XL pipeline (hopefully) and confronting global warming in general and (hopefully) a more assertive reigning in of corporate irresponsibility.

・ Center-right Democratic NY State Governor Mario Cuamo out of nowhere suddenly announces the banning of the highly profitable but environmentally hazardous practice of fracking for oil and natural gas in his state to the immense joy of tree-huggers everywhere.

Are we seeing the early stages of a sea change of the seemingly moribund left in the US (and globally) or are these just random outlier events in an otherwise death march toward a new 21^st Century global corpor-facism? Time will tell.