The comfortably bipartisan display of disdain for the needs of a group of essential railroad workers—led by Lunch Bucket Joe of Scranton—is yet another reminder that the fibers that bind our multicolored rulers together are far more durable than the hues of their respective ribbons.
It was truly a Bastille Day moment to see the assembled millionaires and beneficiaries of generous federal benefits, exhorted by “Labor” Secretary Walsh and Mayo Peter the transport minister (fresh from his multi-month paternity leave), smash rail workers’ fight for adequate sick leave in the wake of a HEALTH epidemic that killed off a million of us.
Not that anyone is digging up cobblestones for an assault on the headquarters of Berkshire Hathaway where railway tycoon Warren Buffett can now add a few billions to his unspeakable fortune. We’re too busy hating on either the “libs” or the “fascists” to realize that the great 99% without control over our own lives have a lot in common: the fact that we’re being equally screwed by our insatiable neo-feudal elites powerless over their addiction to acquisition.
Before this week’s tragicomically crude display of ruling class greed, we were living in a curiously insouciant time after the popcorn fart of the midterms when the Republican blowout did not occur. For a few days, the two factions, the reds and the blues, stared hatefully at each other in roughly matched hemispheres. It was easy to think that nothing much was going to change.
Although the current temporary lull is unlikely to last, the treatment of the railroad workers was a bracing reminder of what a puppet show we’re getting from these folks. The barons of late financialized capitalism are accelerating their class war, and on that score they’re fully on board with each other and against us.
Our inflamed national discourse, full of denunciation and alarm on either side, obscures the superficial nature of the political differences at the top. Do the two bands truly disagree about the country’s future course? If so, in what ways? Do they truly represent distinct social forces? If so, what are they?
On the surface, public policy disagreements are expressed in increasingly hostile language, suggestive of profound and fundamental differences on all manner of issues, things like abortion access; crime control and policing; social benefits and their expansion (or reduction); lately, public health measures; perhaps the content of education and educational materials; the eternal blame for the cost of everyday necessities. But how much do the two teams really diverge in their proposed responses once we look past the rhetorical variants?
Who represents the working classes in the face of economic turmoil and suffering? Republicans classically carry hod for big business, but the world of big finance has tilted toward Democrats in recent years. Both insist that long-standing elements of the New Deal are or soon will be on the chopping block as amply demonstrated this week. Workers are expendable, and the bosses have no problem shoving that fact in our faces because the much vaunted “resistance” promptly collapses when they do. (Some “progressive” email lists and FB sites leapt to the defense of Biden so quickly I had to be careful not to drink coffee while reading. The DSA camp, mercifully, is having none of it.)
We shouldn’t be surprised. For years unions have backed Democrats and got very little in return while rural voters and angry blue-collar workers cheered Trump and got even less. Whichever party is in power, the beleaguered masses face impossible housing costs, medical bankruptcy, educational debt peonage, and only by accident a bit of economic relief via an accidentally favorable job market.
Republicans beat the drums of crime and capitalize on people’s fears, steadily inflamed by tabloid-style coverage of the day’s horrors. For their part, Democrats go defensive and backtrack on any nuanced approaches to public safety and criminal justice—New York City is a prime example. They fall back on demagogy, call for more police, more jail time, and harsher conditions, so while the rhetoric shifts a tad this way or that, the end result is largely the same: violent crimes continue to plague us, and prisons bulge with ever more discarded lives.
Which is the party of peace? Which is the party for reining in the military industrial complex, for seeking savings in our bloated military budget? Republicans denounce the Democrats in power as too stingy with cash for the Pentagons and the arms industries; Democrats in power now outdo them in shoveling money to new initiatives and break all records with multi-billion-dollar packages for their failing adventure in Ukraine.
Which is the party defending our privacy from the intrusions of the security state and the snoops of Silicon Valley? Neither. Which is the party against regime change in foreign countries? Trump made noises against that idea, then hired a passel of neocons dedicated to keeping it up. Democrats openly claim America’s right as the shining guardian of virtue against foreign despots and criminals, conveniently defined to justify the next war, the next invasion, the next militarized hotspot.
Which party promises to preserve our civil liberties and the rule of law, the party that established dungeons in Guantánamo where detainees languish without criminal charges for 20 years or the party that promised to abolish them and never did?
Which is the party for fair terms of trade, for protecting American workers from foreign quasi-slave labor? Which party is prepared to face down the monopolies and cartels that are gobbling up the economy and turning us all into serfs?
Which is the party for preserving Medicare benefits, for protecting Social Security? The party that encouraged deep invasions by private insurance to extract juicy profits from government reimbursed programs? Oh, that would be both.
No doubt partisans of each camp will insist that they represent virtue, and the others, vice. They will point out areas where their side actively works in favor of one policy item or another that clearly distinguishes them from the others. Democrats could credibly argue that the antitrust awakening engineered by Biden appointees is a concrete break with decades of past practice. Republicans could claim they are the ones truly hostile to monopolies, especially those headed by Silicon Valley moguls who ban Trumpian speech on social media.
But which of the parties will resist the mountains of cash available at the commanding heights of the finance sector, ready to rain down on the favored to crush the rebellious? Which will defy Northrup Grumman and Raytheon and dare to propose a modus vivendi with Russia and China in a world slipping from decades of U.S. domination?
The cheers of World Cup fans at the entry of a spherical object into a net are comforting. The goals act as substitutes for the desire of our clannish biped race to plunge knives into hated foreigners, and as such I enjoy seeing their energies dissipate harmlessly. In the end, though, what do we celebrate when our team, in hockey, basketball, politics, or synchronized swimming, emerges with the gold or the trophy or the Senate seat? Those who live for “owning the libs” or crushing the Trumpian meatheads can expect only temporary relief from the gnawing doubt that our creaking, hyper-financialized, irrational economic system headed by experts in propaganda and not much else is capable of navigating the ship of state increasingly lost at sea.
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