Every so often, it's important to circle back and restate where we've come so far -- the big picture.  Think of it as a kind of intellectual ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny kind of thing, letting the long meanderings of earlier posts take shape in a tight new space.  This allows us to see the ground we have covered, make adjustments based on what we may have learned along the way, and keep the long perspective that is so crucial in our short attention span culture.

First of all, what's our general position?  Simple: we are screwed.  And I don't just mean the economic meltdown of America that has reared its head in the last few months.  We're talking about multiple levels of catastrophe, what I called "Concentric Circles of Collapse" in an earlier post.  Even if we were to make good strides towards economic recovery, our very way of life has been decimating the planet, with every major natural system in decline.  On the micro-level, our bodies are dumping grounds for bad food and too many legal and illegal drugs.  Culturally, we have been dumbed downed beyond belief, with most of us existing in a stimulant-soaked simulacrum of corporate entertainment, distraction, and titillation.  So even as we take a seemingly positive political step forward with the election of Barack Obama, we're quickly gut-punched with news like the American bombing of another Afghan wedding party, or stories about how surprised climate scientists are with the accelerating rates of polar ice melt.  We're essentially overwhelmed with the sheer breadth of our various crises, so we put our heads down and whistle pleasant tunes to ourselves.  We embrace the tunnel vision of our own particular problems, pretending that micro and macro are unrelated.  After all, who has time to worry about vanishing amphibians when they just got laid off from their job?  But in reality, it's all connected.  Drug abuse, obesity, credit card debt, mortgage defaults, global warming, swelling prison populations, fresh water depletion --- all of these things form a complex but intertwined system of rapid degeneration and collapse.  We ignore the big picture at our peril.  In their bones, people sense this epic theater of catastrophe.  They know things are on the wrong track.  Free-floating anxiety and fear have been on the rise, and not just during the Bush years.  Aided by the Reagan revolution, Americans have grown increasingly suspicious about government and public activity in general, resulting in broad cynicism towards any discussion of collective well being. 

Into this maelstrom of discontent step our two major political parties.  The question for them becomes, "How do we harness this reservoir of negative emotion to our advantage?"  How would Democrats and Republicans tap into these mainstream feelings of anxiety and powerlessness?  The answer, as with all great cultural endeavors, is to tell a story.  Conservatives and liberals have thus created master narratives to explain America's ills, what we can call political theodicies. 

We detailed the Conservative and Liberal Stories in a couple of very early posts on this blog (see posts from early May 08), but we can do a quick review here.  For conservatives, everything was optimally set up right after WW2.  Our economy and society were poised for greatness.  We were the moral and financial leaders of the world, ready to fulfill our national destiny.  Unfortunately, a motley crew of ingrates (feminists, ivory tower academics, radical blacks, gays, hippies, and other nefarious no-goodniks) turned their back on the traditional American values of family, religion, respect for authority, pride in country, hard work, etc.  With their crazy agenda of forced equality, America bashing, political correctness, and atheism, these liberals began the long unraveling of our nation's moral fabric, which resulted in the bankrupt culture of permissiveness and freeloading we have today.  For liberals, we start at essentially the same point.  After WW2, America was not only building on wartime success; we were also poised to fulfill the germ of equality that had been nascent but dormant since our nation's founding, via the various movements for women's, minority, workers', and gay rights.  The 60s and 70s were supposed to spearhead an exciting future of activism and citizen involvement, which in time would smash the barriers of sexism, racism, and classism.  Unfortunately, this liberal dream was dashed by the forces of reaction, by closet fascists, closed-minded fundamentalists, and corporate power brokers.  Through assassinations, conscription for unjust war, union smashing, and government-sponsored harassment of domestic groups, the old guard was able to fend off the liberal movements and lay the groundwork for a repressive conservative future.

Now, these are rough sketches, and certainly not all conservatives and liberals believe every element of these narratives.  But I'm convinced that these are the general contours.  Each main political party has crafted and honed these stories to harness the free-floating discontent in America, to explain why things have gone so wrong.  Because that's what people want to know: How did things go so wrong?  These narratives provide the explanations, and more importantly, the scapegoats.  Conservatives blame liberals for America's decline, and liberals blame conservatives.  These scapegoat narratives allow for several things at once.  First, if you have a simple, pleasing story, everyone can understand.  You don't need to do complex analyses of global currency trends, macro-ecological feedback loops, historical land development patterns, etc.  You can just say, "See, those damned ______s ruined the country with their _______, and their _______."  Everyone can understand that.  Also, these narratives have really succeeded in solidifying whole segments of each camp's base.  Once liberals are branded as the godless, lazy, socialist baby killers who wrecked the country, you don't need to worry about your solid core constituencies who will forever hate all of those things.  And once conservatives are painted as Bible-thumping, ignorant, pro-corporate rubes, you're not likely to find many staunch blue-staters running out to vote for Huckabee-esque cnadidates. 

Finally, these narratives allow the two main political parties to pretend that they really do represent different substantive approaches to national policy.  Of course liberals and conservatives are different, we might say.  Look at how unique their stories about America really are!  We are thus duped into believing that Dems and Republicans have completely different programs for the country, which is simply not the case (we'll get into the converging corporate consensus in the next post).  Real policy questions can then be side-stepped, glossed over, or flat-out ignored, in favor of an obsession with elections and horse race tactics.  The thrill over the contests themselves obscures the relatively empty substantive aspects of the whole charade. 

Next Time -- Part 2: So What's the Real Story, and Can We Fix Things?