I can't help myself. Despite knowing that it will lead to grief, I can't help looking below the fold, or below the article, to the comments on media websites. I shouldn't. I shouldn't because the majority of what I read there is enough to make my blood boil in anger, my eyes roll in disbelief, and finally my head explode at the meanness, selfishness, arrogance and hypocrisy. More often than not, I will also see posts that I agree with, even admire, occasionally which will truly enlighten me. But the ratio is not a good one, even on media sites where readers could be expected to share my views. And lately, it's got me wondering what needs to be done to fix the sorry state of our post-democratic nations. (By post-democratic, I mean the state of affairs which has a bare majority or fewer voting, political parties which offer nothing of substance except caricatures of their opponents, media which are now responsible only to the powerful elites and not the citizenry, and all of the concomitant social effects from these and related issues. It's certainly nothing like democracy as practiced up until the middle of the 20th century, even up to the 1970s. The impact of this post-democratic reality is that parties offer little of substance to the voter, the media misinforms and propagandizes, and the whole process is denatured to the point that, as often as not, the actual votes are cast are cast in order to send a message of dissatisfaction, rather than elect a positive candidate.
But back to these egregiously pompous, cruel posts. There seems to be a mixture of mindless triumphalism/tribalism, purposeful manipulation of "facts", demonization of the opponent, and occasional self-serving rationalizations. The old directions of Left and Right have ceased to mean much. Today, "The Right" and their supporters, the media, characterize the Right as being values-oriented, Christian, earnest, hard-working and individualistic. In truth, they covet their entitlements, they are anything but Christian (or moderate), their hypocrisy is boundless and selfish (and ultimately, self-defeating), they lie whenever they feel it necessary, and they are the most Socialist commentators out there, provided it is Socialism for the powerful elite, not the society as a whole. "The Left" constitutes anyone that they disagree with, and are caricatured as lazy, jobless, stupid, weak, indecisive, without values, Godless and pandering (I'm sure I've left out an awful lot). Most of "The Left" today doesn't even closely resemble the left of 1970. So these labels mean very little except as dog-whistles to certain groups. Nothing has brought this out clearer than the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has had most media outlets scrambling to disavow any connection to, or reasonable consideration of, the protests and/or protestors. So if we are to recapture democracy for the 21st century, the first thing I suggest we do is eliminate the adulterated use of these epithets, since they serve no semantic purpose, and their political value redounds to only one side.
Chris Hedges put it rather brilliantly in his "interview" with O'Leary on the CBC (yes, even the CBC is starting to sound like Fox/Sun News, since it erroneously believes that the public likes what they're getting). The protestors, he said, could better be characterized as conservatives, since what they want is the conservation of the rule of law, and what Wall Street wants is an unimpeded free-for-all (-the 1%ers). That was just a moment before he mentioned that he would never appear on CBC again because he was, rightfully, disgusted at O'Leary's character assassination and grandstanding. But what's truly astounding about the upside down world O'Leary and the 1%ers live in (and many who are not in the 1% sympathize with their point-of-view, for reasons mentioned above), is their feeling that, as conditions deteriorate ever more rapidly, we should all be grateful to them "for giving us a job". Without them, there would be no jobs (Kevin O'Leary actually says this--see this for the whole charade on CBC), see?? And I saw more of this on the Globe & Mail's article describing Mark Carney's robust (if shaded) defense of the Occupy Wall Street movement as a desire for needed change. To whit, the old canard was advanced that the widening gap between rich and poor is of no significance, because the poor are still better off.
In fact, the argument they are trying to advance depends on a whole lot of bad logic, faulty parallelism and plain inaccuracy. For one thing, who constitutes "the poor"? How can we tell if they are "better off"? Are you better off if you have a TV (which you are still paying for) but can't eat a solid meal every day? And does it matter that the poor are actually becoming more numerous since the middle class are sliding into that group? These are the people who admonish those complaining about working conditions to "Be glad you don't live in Communist (China/Russia/Cuba...)" In other words, let's not even address the substance of the complaint, let's instead introduce some kind of self-serving relativism which makes it okay. This from the group most likely to object to other kinds of moral relativism. But it's impossible to even know the actual state of things, because even if the poorest of the poor are somewhat better off than they were, the introduction of so many formerly middle class individuals and families to the ranks of the poor surely counters that. Judging simply by the number of people now living on the street, or consuming food bank meals, the poor are certainly worse off in a few categories.
The next problem is that, for their argument to work, there would have to be evidence that the poor have benefited while the inequity has grown, which certainly is not the case. The average working class wage (adjusted for inflation) in 1970 was $31,000. In 2010 it was $28,000, a drop of nearly 10%. Meanwhile, the average salary of owners and CEOs was over $650,000 in 1970 (just over 20 times the workers' wages); in 2010 it was just shy of $6,000,000 (or over 200 times the workers' wages). So the lower and middle class have suffered, at least in terms of real income. And anecdotally this is a no-brainer: how many families have two working parents today compared to 1970? Yet for most the standard of living has either stagnated or declined. And even if measurements of well-being in terms of consumer goods show some improvement, it's come at the cost of active parenting and the loss of time with ones' kids, and all of the social impacts that have resulted. So that argument is simply false.
The last problem is that coincidence (which is a condition not met anyway) is clearly not causation. Even if the poor were better off while the inequity widened, it wouldn't offer proof that it was because of the widening gap that they were better off. Is it really not possible for "The Right" to imagine a world in which the poor were better off, society was better off, the economy was better off, and the gap shrank?? There's only one reason not to countenance such a thing, and that's a vested interest in maintaining the self-serving rationalization that one's outrageous wealth is a good thing. Or at least not a bad thing.
So where does that leave us? Well, it seems to me that we won't get anywhere trying to fight battles against true believers and those so captive of the corporatist paradigm that they can't understand basic logic or facts. When one is part of the problem, one is unable to recognize the problem. My own feeling is that we need to start working immediately to create a new, post-democratic democracy, where the lessons of today are applied to prevent parties and views being corrupted by power. And that means fixing the media above all. And to do that we will need to start reaching citizens in a meaningful way, and enlist them in the effort to fix things. Occupy Wall Street is a great start, and it certainly has created momentum, but we need to build on that momentum with infrastructure and ideas. To borrow an idea from business, we don't need simply a democratic advantage, but a sustainable democratic advantage. Now I have to think about how to go do that. I'd start by disallowing any kind of political spin whatsoever. And make TV news as it was in the 1960s/70s--sober, serious and largely unattractive. It's the news, goddammit, not a variety show! And get rid of 99% of the "pundit class". Both of these things can be made possible with simple regulation, including making 24 hour news illegal. It's not good for individuals, newsmakers or the body politic, as 30 years of chasing OJ should have taught us.
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