As we are wont to do every so often, let's take a bit of time to take stock of where we are, compare conditions on the ground to the general interpretive framework running through this blog, and highlight some areas of hope for the future. I guess my posts do tend towards the pessimistic, so we'll try to find some bright spots on the horizon.

Clearly, we're in the depths of a hellish maelstrom.  The DOW plunged to its lowest level in 12 years yesterday. The public is furious over AIG getting more bailout money after posting the largest loss ($62 billion) in US corporate history.  Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, will reportedly lay the blame for the global recession on the US tomorrow, in a speech before Congress. Ford reported auto sales declines of 48% today, and home sales were down almost 8% in January. Oh yeah, and just for fun, global warming is proceeding much faster than all recent estimates indicate. In an earlier post, I described our situation as Concentric Circles of Collapse, a kind of Russian nesting doll set of interlinked and embedded catastrophes.  On the surface, climate change might seem unconnected to mortgage foreclosures, swollen prisons, and strife in Gaza.  But all of our problems are actually connected, ultimately tracing back to the unsustainable lifestyles, economies, and social forms we have been building in the industrialized world over the last few decades, especially in America.  

Into these negative news waters news wade the scions of the American Right and Left.  Lacking the intellectual tools and/or moral courage to tell the people the truth about the bankrupt American Algorithm, and shackled by a primitive winner-take-all electoral system with its two-headed-hydra party structure, our public leaders spin pleasing scapegoat narratives that demonize the opposition and pander to the still substantial but deeply unfounded popular pride in all things American.  Conservatives trace all of our troubles back to FDRs socialism and the hippie abandonment of God, Country, and proper penis-in-vagina sex. Bobby Jindal warbles the old refrain of hard-workin', honest, gumption-oozing regular folk, besieged by the demon bureaucrats at every turn.  Liberals, for their part, blame Reagan, Gingrich, the Bushes, and evil corporations for derailing the liberal project that had steadily expanded the rights of women, minorities, and other marginalized groups. Despite mountains of evidence that, for decades, the Democrats have sold their constituents down the river for easy corporate cash, they still have the gall to pose as populists and reprimand conservatives for their backwardness.

These scapegoat tales rage on today, and are better described as theodicies than as ideologies per se. Their function is to acknowledge popular outrage, channel it into an explanatory framework, and then blame lack of substantive change on the obstructions of the enemy.  They are essentially theological explanations for sociopolitical evil in the world -- evil which will never, like its actual demonic counterpart, go away. The Republican and Democratic schemes, whether presented as "reform" or "progress," are really about place-holding and protecting entrenched power, while the underlying mechanisms of technology, economy, finance, and ecology work out their long-term internal logics.

So that is where we are today.  Obama and company are trying a massive New Deal Redux, in a desperate attempt to "restart" the frozen, poisoned system.  And predictably, conservatives are applying Reaganism Redux, pounding their fists into their palms and railing forth about wasteful government bureaucracies and American socialism. The general public sentiment right now is that American Conservatism is temporarily bankrupt of substantive ideas.  After all, how many Ann Coulter screeds can one read before finally reaching intellectual exhaustion.  I mean, we get it: you think that liberals are evil, or traitors, or godless, or whatever. Great.  But aside from selling millions of books, and raking in tons of dough, is Coulterism or Limbaughism really doing anything constructive? Not really -- and public opinion is reflective of the general populace's frustration with faux outrage and snarky bullshit.