On Impeded Progress and Our Broken Political Class
Our fearless (feckless?) leader has returned. Compelled by moral duty, former President Barack Obama returned to the political stage last…
Our fearless (feckless?) leader has returned. Compelled by moral duty, former President Barack Obama returned to the political stage last September at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign to warn against the direction the country is headed in and stress the importance of the coming midterm elections.
Obama began by offering a fairytale rendering of America’s past. If there was a word to describe it, it was “progress.” Everything that has occurred in the past has occurred in the name of progress. Racial progress, gender progress, sexual progress, technological progress, and economic progress. Progress, progress, progress. Everything is better now than it was then. Yes, there were occasional setbacks — “we made mistakes,” as he put it — but the story of America was one of continued growth and betterment.
Today, that progress risks being undone by Trump, and Americans of “goodwill” and “honesty” were implored to overcome their partisan proclivities to stand for an America committed to reasserting the progress that we all care for so deeply.
Aside from that, there were a few potshots at Trump, the occasional joke to loosen up the crowd, and high-minded rhetoric calling for “change” (I guess some things never change). But the general message was a tired one. There were no acknowledged downsides to high volume immigration. The expanding landscape of technology and our growing dependence on it was taken as self-evidently positive, and although Obama acknowledged that many have lost their jobs or been put in a place of financial insecurity, the only solution offered was ‘raising taxes on the wealthy.’ Obama observed, of course, that some of those pushing back on America’s path to progress are “people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change.” However, the majority resisting America’s embrace of her ideals are “powerful and privileged” people consumed with maintaining the status quo.
Although the speech was delivered with eloquence, the content was, at its core, entirely vacuous. It offered little more than unoriginal platitudes and tropes repackaged into a vision of political transcendence. And yet despite its vacuity, its theme and essential motifs stand as dogma for those committed to establishment politics. Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Nancy Pelosi, Joseph Lieberman, Chuck Schumer, or George Bush could (would?) probably have given the same speech with only minor modification to policy proposals. These actors will all insist that what we are experiencing today is an aberration. Impulsive ‘conservatives’ feeling economically despondent and culturally threatened have lashed out, but the door is steadily closing, and their last “hurrah” will come to an end soon enough.
However comforting this explanation sounds, it is defied by reality. Obama was keen to take credit for economic growth during his speech. He was not as interested in taking credit for the rut we find ourselves in today. The political elites do not sit outside of the pigsty. It is they who have constructed it with their bare hands, spread filth along its floor, and then feigned surprise by the mess we are all witnessing. They have shown a disregard for the family with nothing but snide ridicule for those who objected to mass abortion, marriage redefinition, and sexual objectification. They have propped up elites as our saviors, subordinating themselves to the rich and powerful while deteriorating whatever cultural inheritance remained from a premodern, theocentric era. They have eviscerated foreign countries in futile wars, killing scores of innocent people and subjecting millions of others to a life of famine and despair. They have allied with dictator after dictator. All in the name of “progress.”
The rapid rise in suicide rates and suicidality, decline in marriage and reproduction rates, staggering statistics involving sexual assault, militarizing of our police forces, mass incarceration, corrosion of our privacy and civil liberties, rising contamination of our environment, naked disregard for the poor and indigent, abysmal treatment of animals and livestock, etc. Cannot be resolved with politics as usual.
What we have in Trump is in keeping with this tradition. He is a meaningful departure in only one sense: he lacks composure and is generally intemperate.
As the midterm elections approach, this rhetoric will ramp up. This is the ‘most important election of our lifetime.’ Many will tell us to vote Democrat, and some will insist that it is fard to vote. Politicians will posture, each trying to show how large the chasm is between them and their opponents. Each will claim the mantle of progress, and none will have a vision that provides it.
Of the current state, Chris Hedges portends imminent political demise. He writes:
It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.
May Allah guide and protect us during these times. Ameen.
Allah Knows Best.