Losing My Religion

Well. The last couple of days have been quite the eye-opener as I spent too much time commenting and reading comments over at Glenn's Place on this Citizens United Thing that the Supremes botched royally.

I hardly even went out at all, except to get a new monitor when the old one died in the middle of a heated argument.

The first day, Glenn proposed What the Supreme Court Got Right, based largely on his understanding of the First Amendment and how the ruling upheld the First Amendment, which was the right thing to do in any case, regardless of outcome. And apparently regardless of the process to get there. According to Glenn the Court decided correctly that the campaign finance laws that were overturned were unconstitutional infringements on the First Amendment by interfering with Corporate rights to poltical speech. Rights which were, according to the majority, guaranteed to Corporate "persons" just as they were to natural persons. Rights which were, as far as Glenn was concerned, essentially "absolute."

To say that Glenn was taken to task is putting it mildly. His defense of the ruling and of his philosophy took a beating from many of his regulars as well as from a wide range of legal commentators who apparently just popped over for the day. There were some truly exquisite take-aparts of both the majority's opinion and Glenn's defense thereof. It did keep me engaged to say the least. And I tend not to be fond of legal persnicketyness on the Internet. Scotusblog and Balkinization (to name just a couple) give me a migraine on a good day. And even some of the legal nitpickery that turns up on Glenn's blog from time to time is aggravating. And he tries to keep it down.

But these were really strongly argued rejoinders to Glenn's and the Court's position, clear, plain, and devastating. By the time the day was done, his argument was basically destroyed and in tatters. Those who continued to defend him and the Court majority on this matter tended to be confined to a small (and shrinking) circle of "Libertarians, Propertarians, and Randians of all stripes" as I put it, a fringe of a fringe in political terms, which to me was very enlightening about Glenn's actual political leanings. It wasn't pretty. But I never expected anything else.

It's the kind of politics of Individualism that got going, ironically, during the upheavals of the 1960's, the Politics of Liberation and led directly to Reaganism. Which in turn opened the floodgates to Libertarian, Propertarian and Randian nonsense of all stripes, which is still "fringe" politics, but which has a strong influence in the halls of Power, though perhaps not as strong as it once had.

There were two strong political threads in the 1960's revolts and upheavals, one of Liberation, one of Community.

Liberationists were more inclined to make trouble, shall we say, for the authorities and everyone else and to call for major reordering of society and government based on principles Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness found in the Declaration, as well as on the fulfillment of the promises of the Constitution that had been long, long delayed for vast numbers of Americans. Liberationists were about Rights and Freedom more than anything else. Which, at the time, was the primary energy behind the Anti-War Movement which became huge and almost mainstream.

The other side of the '60's revolt was far less Individualist and much more Communitarian. Those so inclined tended more to withdraw from society than to try to remake it through demand and revolt. Communes of various kinds cropped up all over the country, attracting apparently like-minded people who wanted to work and live together on behalf of mutual interest and establish a viable social alternative to the American Way of Life.

Both of these threads seem to originate in the Progressive Era.

The Genius of the Reaganite Revolution was to find ways to both harness and suppress the energy of the revolts that were roiling the nation, and to preside over the dismantling of Progressivism as the commonly employed operating system for government, first in California, later in the whole country. Many of the Liberationists ultimately became Reaganites; the Communitarians mostly faded away after some truly horrible commune-experimental societies that went grossly awry. We needn't detail them here.

Glenn was born late in the 1960's and never experienced any of the ferment of the era directly. At one time, he enjoyed expressing his contempt for the Failures of the 1960's Movements, much as many of the punks his age tend to do, but he seemed to moderate his stance as the Decade of Insanity under the Busheviks wore on. My position was always that the Busheviks were Revolutionaries (or Counter-Revolutionaries as the case may be) who were engaged in one of the most radical efforts to subvert and transform the American Government as had ever been attempted. And they were succeeding. This is something Glenn and many others didn't seem to understand at all. They saw what the Busheviks were doing as of a piece with the past, and as incremental change, to be met with incremental mitigation and progress, not open revolt and principled but modest opposition. Sometimes, even principles could be abandoned. It wasn't all that different from the Democratic Party opposition to the Busheviks -- which was essentially accommodationist most of the time, punctuated by episodes of OUTRAGE!!!!™

When I noticed that this attitude was common on the Internet, it became clear to me that many of the so-called Progressives online were actually not that opposed to Bushevism. Most of them certainly didn't and don't see it as a mortal danger to what's left of the Republic as I do. If anything, they are more OUTRAGED!!!!™ at the cautious mitigationism of the Obama Regime. They attack the Democrats much more lustily than they do the Republicans.

Some of the specific things the Busheviks did were wrong (like the Iraq invasion) but there is really not that much online Progressive opposition to the overarching ideology of the Busheviks: Corporatism and Imperialism ruled through Autocracy. At least until recently, there wasn't even a recognition that that's what the Busheviks were up to -- or if there was, it wasn't considered all that important compared to the specific errors needing opposition. "Unnecessary war" in particular. Focus on more Rights and Freedom issues, less on ideological "purity."

In essence, this is Liberationism. And it's not that far from Libertarianism, Propertarianism, and Randian bullshit of all stripes.

Which is a very round about way of getting to the Second Day of the Supreme Court dervish at Glenn's Place.

It became something of a dirgy spectacle. So to counter my funk, I post another video of R.E.M.'s really outstanding show in Toronto all those years ago. By the time I'm done, I'll have ransacked all my R.E.M. shit and all of it on YouTube too. Post-Adolescent angst rules! [sings: "That's me in the spot. Light. Losing my religion..."] How old is Michael Stipe now? Oh, who cares.

On the Second Day, Glenn acknowledged that he'd been run through the wringer by his commenters, but rather than acknowledge the stupendous merits of his opponents' case, he decided on a course of insult and contempt on the one hand and showy tautology and logical fallacies on the other, over and over again.

Well, this had the interesting effect of dragging some of his defenders off the sidelines to comment that his superb argument in favor of the Supreme Court decision was so tightly and comprehensively put together and presented that though they were initially opposed to the Court majority opinion, he had by wit and strategy, convinced them they were all wrong and Glenn and the Court majority were right. "Thank you, Glenn, for opening my eyes!!"

Yeah. Sure. Quite the contrast from the day before, that's for sure.

They all said the said the same thing in essentially the same way. Hm. Fascinating. How does that work on the Intertubes?

Every now and again, another hot-shot legal mind would turn up to demolish Glenn's and the Court's arguments again, and do so beautifully, but I noticed that Glenn did not respond to any of these outstanding rebuttals, on either day. What he would do, instead, is offer up some occasional snark to this or that commenter who questioned the ruling and his defense of it, or who went off on what he thought were tangents about potential "outcomes," which in his view were not germane. He lit in to me angrily when I brought up the fact that he is an expat and doesn't have to live with the consequences of this or any other SCOTUS ruling if he doesn't want to, which might be coloring his overall dismissiveness toward those who thought the consequences of the ruling could be devastating to what's left of American democracy. He accused me of using right wing attacks, ad hominem and worse, scraping the bottom of the barrel for whatever filth I could find. Oh! My! Our Glenn is a little bit pissy, isn't he? But the point stands. When you have the option not to live and you don't live with the consequences of a rule you are defending, your approach to and attitude toward what you are observing, let alone defending, is different. He can deny it all he wants. From Rio de Janeiro. But I analogize it in my own mind to how I regarded events in California when I lived, say, in Florida or Alaska. I was interested, of course, but since what was happening didn't directly affect me, nor could it, my point of view was different by definition than those who were in the midst of what was going on.

That's as may be in any case. The upshot of the Second Day's examination of Glenn's position and the Court's ruling was that it's getting pretty grim, night is falling, it's nearly over, the American experiment in Self-Rule has self-destructed, the Corporations have won and Glenn, for all his posturing otherwise, is just as happy it is so. He's not playing on Our Team. He's on Scalia's team, the Destroyers and Punishers. Yeeks!

This seems to be a dawning but not yet confirmed revelation. He will say it's the Constitution, but we know...

Yes. Well.

Ultimately, we Americans who don't have the option to emigrate outside the country face some real, and I think fundamental, questions. Yes, the Corporations have won. We are outside the gates of the Palace, and it doesn't matter if we get "inside" or not, Rule doesn't depend on The People, or even need acknowledge The People anymore.

So what to do?

Most people, I am convinced, just as our Rulers are convinced, will simply submit and comply with whatever Our Rulers command. That's the ground that was laid under Bush and Cheney, and we aren't going back to some Halcyon way things used to be. It won't happen.

So what to do?

For most, the answer is a given, "Yield." For others, the answer is, "Accept internal exile. Try to start anew." For still others, the answer is, "Fight..."

I'm of a mind of what happened when Native Americans came to realize that they had lost their struggle with the invaders, and fighting any longer was simply going to destroy what little remnant was left of the First Peoples... and they stopped. Submitted. It was taken for granted at the time that Natives would soon be extinct and would disappear altogether, never to be seen or heard from again; their time was done.

And I look around now, and the descendants of the survivors who yielded to the invaders are probably more numerous than Indigenous peoples ever were in the land, more and more are hopeful, industrious, thriving, some are wealthy beyond imagining thanks to casino gambling among other things, their culture is by no means dead or dying, in fact it is reviving in many ways and many places, and their place in American society is still not secure, but it is far more so than ever before.

I'm of a mind of what happened when African Americans were faced with the awful truth of Jim Crow, and too many their leading voices were saying "Don't fight. It'll be OK. Or if you fight, do it through established channels. Don't make a ruckus. You'll survive." Of course many didn't survive. But when the Civil Rights struggle was resumed in earnest generations later, African Americans won, largely through appeal to the better angels that were still so much a part of American consciousness and conscience.

I look around now and a Black man is President, working hard on the Corporate Agenda, and though the position of African Americans in society is still not secure by any means, it is far more so than ever before. So long as ...

Is it now the turn of ourselves, that pseudo majority of Americans who believe in Community as well as Liberty to yield, submit to Our Generous Corporate Overlords, since now, all the institutions and avenues of Democracy have been overwhelmed by Corporate Interests?

I can't answer that question right now.

[sings: "I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

But that was just a dream
That was just a dream

But that was just a dream
Try, cry, why try?
That was just a dream
Just a dream, just a dream
Dream ]

Fade to black.