Hope and the Clock

The clock is running out on the "permanent Republican majority" so sweepingly orchestrated over the last generation. This grandiose plan resembles the rise of every tyranny in history, combining public rhetoric that idealizes tribalism with backroom powergrabs that care nothing for anyone outside the inner cadre of rich and powerful influence peddlers. Whoever wins the presidency on Tuesday, this assault on republican (as opposed to Republican) freedoms will receive a grievous injury. The impulse behind it will not die, any more than the age-old battle between good and evil can ever be decisively ended. But at least my generation will not be the one surrender to the ignorant, hate-filled clannish straightjacket that keeps the masses enslaved by their own passions to the very rich and powerful.

This is the hope triggered by the Obama campaign and his steady, unruffled calm has been no small element in this uprising. Whether Obama can become a great president or not is almost irrelevant. His power is that he brings home the message of community power rather than injured helplessness. Lobbyists do not own Washington any more, not when individual donations can topple both the Bush and Clinton money machines. More importantly, our few dollars, like drops of water, can swell to oceans of cash for candidates we feel speaks to and for us, not special interests.

This empowerment of voice - for the courts have ruled that money is a form of "speech" and so giving it is a right under the Constitution - this takes us out of the dependent child role in the political family and puts us all on a more nearly equal footing. Corporations and PACs can no longer make my few dollars insignificant by comparison. And so I have hope that I will be heard in the same way an adult with her own income is listened to over the demands of children who want things but do not contribute to the family income.

We are becoming 'adults' in a system that has infantilized us to make us regress in our thinking about public life so that we look to the wise big 'fathers' to do what's best for us. Fear and scapegoating work on children and dependents, whose emotions are more volatile and exploitable. Adults are less afraid than children, in part because they have more personal power. Autonomy gives weight and weight is a key in keeping one's equilibrium. The public has grown up enough to see during the S&L crisis that Oz, far from watching over us, the "man behind the curtain" of deregulation didn't know any more than the rest of us about the forces of capitalism.

As Election Day nears, I think about the month-long recount in Florida eight years ago and the what-to-me-was-obvious machinations of the Republican operation to deliver the election by hook or by crook to George W. Bush. That they succeeded was an almost mortal blow to my sense of security and trust in our system. Until that moment, I had believed that truth would out and that, in the end, cheaters would not prosper.

Now, as I watch the arc of this election season, a bit of that faith is being restored. Not that people are any better, but that reality, as they say, bites. And once bitten by Republican methods, twice shy.