Americans love hard-nosed binary conflict. Football has wholly eclipsed baseball as the nation’s pastime, replacing one contentious battle of grit and will with another more grueling, violent one. We were all raised on Disney movies that pit vile, monstrous, heartless villains against flawless, kindly, generous heroes (with two can’t-miss codes to determine the difference: dark and ugly is evil; light and pretty is good). Find me an American who doesn’t love either sports or Disney movies (or both) and I bet you most anything they love something else: politics.
We can play chicken-and-egg games all day about whether American predilections created the manifestations of binary conflict or whether we were fed binary conflicts to the point where we embraced them. The point is that nowhere can hard-nosed binary conflict be found more strenuously contended than in the arena of American politics. Two parties. Two allegedly diametric viewpoints. Everyone must choose a side and stay unflinchingly, unwaveringly, blindingly loyal to one or the other while spouting that everyone in the other camp is some insane species of self-destructive insect.
Despite dire warnings from the founding fathers about the dangers of factionalism, most Americans believe that the great Democratic-Republican binary choice is a fundamental and immovable part of our democracy. Despite periodic efforts to bridge the divide or do an end-run around it – ranging from the Unity08 movement to H. Ross Perot to Ralph Nader to countless third party candidates who slog through pyrhhic campaigns for a few thousand votes – everyone believes that the two parties are inevitable and impenetrable. After all, a majority of American voters exit polled in 1992 would have voted for Perot “if he’d had a chance of winning”. No greater proof is needed of how innately intractable the two-party system is in the American republic.
The problem (well, the main problem) is, of course, that the parties really aren’t all that different. Both parties have had whatever principles they may claim to espouse hopelessly co-opted by special interests, and almost always the same special interests who savvily play both sides of the coin to assure the steady influx of coin. Both parties are essentially centrist, diving toward the middle of the road on most every issue to ensure the appearance of reasonability and thus electability. (Interesting Firefox spellcheck aside: “reasonability” is not listed as a word, but “electability” is. What a perfect illustration of our society.) And the design of our republic is such as to almost guarantee the necessity of compromise on every issue, allowing the parties to present extremist rhetoric against a backdrop of very mild actual disagreement.
It’s this extremist rhetoric I want to focus on, though, because it’s getting so much attention lately. Obviously the poster-child here is Sarah Palin, who has been able to follow up her “palling around with terrorists” line about Obama with an even more quizzical warning against his impending “death panels” allegedly incumbent in his healthcare proposals. Though by no means is she alone (or is her side alone) in shoveling ridiculousness – countless numbers of my Democratic friends announced unequivocally that they would move to Canada if Bush defeated Kerry in 2004. Not one of them made good on this outlandish promise.
The aim of this rhetoric is to vilify the opposition, yes, but its far more insidious impact is to create the illusion of a wide gulf between parties and leaders who espouse and enact roughly the same policies. To hear the pundits, pollsters, and punters talk about it, one could not imagine two more different political viewpoints than those of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Indeed, most everyone accused the United States of complete schizophrenia for being able to elect the two back-to-back. But an examination of their actual policies reveals something different: both have supported nearly identical economic approaches to dealing with the recession (throw as much money at everything as possible, print more, repeat), both have taken identical actions regarding foreign policy (wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and “on-terror” all full speed ahead) with admittedly slightly different rhetorical tones in certain contexts (e.g. when in Egypt), both have continually labeled terrorism (the phantom menace) as the biggest threat to society and acted accordingly (when’s Gitmo closing, exactly?), and both want nothing more than the promotion of free-market corporation-based American capitalism and its propagation across the globe. Yes, there seem to be some tangible differences on the environment, although Democrats and Obama talk a much better game about environmental protection than they enact. There are also some allegedly significant differences on abortion (the issue that itself sort of best illustrates these phantom divisions between D and R) that manifest in state-based policies so marginal they almost defy understanding. Bush put in place the Court that was allegedly going to overturn Roe v. Wade. And as was imminently clear to anyone paying attention, such an overturn would never happen, even with nine die-hard Evangelicals on the Court. But that’s elaboration for another post.
And then there’s healthcare. Since stocks are up and everyone’s thus convinced that a lack of jobs, production, demand, or valuation means the economy is fine, healthcare has taken center-stage on the American political scene. And despite Democrats having a super-duper-crazy majority in the Senate and alleged carte blanche to enact whatever policies they see fit, suddenly the public option has disappeared from the radar of “healthcare reform”. Which means that any bill enacted would only serve to bolster and bailout the existing system of private insurance that enables our broken plutocracy to keep on equating money with rights. Not only is the final bill likely to not be a step toward single-payer healthcare (despite repeated polls showing that a majority of Americans are most interested in single-payer), but it’s probably going to be a very Republican-looking sideways step into mediocrity.
But that’s not how they’ll talk about it. No, one side will claim crushing victory while the other warns against impending Apocalypse. Because we rearranged some line-items in a code that ensures that people’s lives and well-being are a for-profit business in a country that claims life is an inalienable right. Sarah Palin will wag her finger and warn about death panels while Joe Biden talks about how he and his friends single-handedly saved the lives of millions of Americans. And nothing will actually change. Except, maybe, some corporations will get richer while those on the margins get further marginalized and wonder why the media is telling them all of their peers’ lives are improving so much.
Now I’m not saying, necessarily, that the Democrats and Republicans are in league together planning the same coordinated policy and then drawing up outlandish ways of making each other look silly while pocketing corporate money and whoring themselves out. However, I can’t imagine what would be different if they were in league. Surely having every President come out of the same two families was starting to look a bit suspect, but the Daily Show was doing a great job (for a while at least, haven’t seen them in a long time) of running Bush speeches about war and terror back-to-back with Obama speeches about same to illustrate that even the rhetoric on that front is virtually indistinguishable. If you poll most Americans, even most citizens of the world, they would have diametric understandings of Bush’s and Obama’s broad foreign policies. And yet when it comes to actually enumerating those differences, to actually making distinctions in actions, I think people would be heavily challenged to name one.
This is hardly a new phenomenon in American politics, but I do think it’s getting worse. September 11th (or, more accurately, American reaction thereto) certainly served to squash together the walls of what acceptable policy decisions could be, convincing both parties overnight that war-without-end was the only way forward for their nation. John Kerry’s inability to distinguish himself from Bush in any meaningful way was probably his second-biggest reason for losing in 2004 (first, of course, being his cardboard charisma), and Hillary certainly seemed Hawkish and Bushish on most every issue. People opted for Obama because they hungered for change, but what change have we truly seen?
The truth is that Obama doesn’t want change. Not real change. He wants to seem visionary, uniting, to claim credit for making changes. But he declines to take policy stands, instead asking Congress to craft change in its own measly watered-down way. He publicly states that the public option is non-essential to reform. Because all he really wants is to win. Like the football team or the Disney hero, what’s really essential in the end is victory at all costs. Being able to claim that your side crushed the other side, even if you’re really the same lousy side.
Because, as Americans, we know the good guys are the good guys because they win. And because we’re Americans and think of ourselves as eternal winners, we don’t move to Canada, we don’t change our policies, and we certainly don’t admit defeat. So as long as the winners and losers take turns enough, they can both be winners. And thus good guys. And thus hide the fact that they are both, all of them, really the bad guys.
