Dark Horizons

The stimulus ended and Republicans took over the House, so we're in the shitter. This is not exactly surprising.

Nor should it be surprising should Americans react by enabling Republicans to take over the Senate as well to enact outright job-destroying anti-government anti-investment anti-tax anti-stimulus, so we'll all be deeper and more devastatingly in the shitter. This is not exactly unpredictable.

Republicans in this "Movement Conservative" phase of theirs are by far the single most dangerous organized force in the world today. That is because what they are doing and what they can do to this country, given its unique resources and situation, given the role it could play for ill or for good in the address of climate catastrophe and the implementation of less or more democratizing global governance, has an incomparable planetary significance, even though it is also true that US hegemony is in conspicuous eclipse in this historical moment.

If Democrats don't call Republicans out, repeatedly and in very clear terms, and don't make a contrary case for good government (tax the rich, redistribute toxic wealth concentration, regulate reckless enterprise, invest in infrastructure, end the goddamn wars) and job-creating stimulus (no, not always, no, not forever, but absolutely yes in the very special circumstance of the zero lower bound) and, again, do so repeatedly and in very clear terms, it is truly Failed State Christian-Taliban Gun-Nut Depression time in America and things become highly dangerous and seriously ugly around here, with worst case global weirding climate change and resource descent very much in the mix. This is not exactly something to look forward to.

(ADDED: when I say "Democrats" need to "call Republicans out" I do want to make it clear that I do not mean President Obama needs to scold them in terms that sound more like the things Krugman and Maddow say -- though I like what they say very much. Obama is making deals and one of the things you do when you are making deals in the real world with the actual awful people who are actually on hand to make those deals is to do so in a way that gives them room to sell the deal themselves to the people they have to sell them to. I think the fixation on Obama by both Republicans and Democrats and across the spectrum all the way to the extremes is a bit bonkers -- Congress is primarily responsible for domestic policy, you know, and given its utter dysfunction Obama is making deals rather than gestures because if he doesn't things will get even more out of hand than they are. I'm amazed at some of the corners Republicans have backed themselves into over the last six months given the Randroid Ryan budget and the flabbergasting very public video-ready corporate cocksucking the GOP has indulged over this debt-ceiling madness, and the administration has positioned itself adroitly to capitalize on that stuff over the next few years one after the other, especially if we can get back the House (even the extension of the idiotic evil ruinous Bush tax cuts for two years is more than forgiveable if it sets the stage for a tide-turning re-progressivization of the tax system and hence demolition of the anti-tax main rhetorical plank of batshit-crazy Movement Conservatism since Reagan sometime between 2012-2014, for example). There has been a painful tradeoff between base demoralization and long-game realpolitick going on inside the White House since last November, and it would be nice if the left blogipelago would help out on the education-agitation-organization front, and ideally managing to do so without indulging Obamabotic foreclosures of situationistically practical demands of the impossible, another painful tradeoff easily as hard to swing as the first one, but that's where we are.)