The truly disturbing thing about contemporary American politics, to me anyway, is that for the last dozen years or so it’s been possible to win – or at least to prevail – without having the most votes. Starting from 2000, when Al Gore lost the election on a 5-4 Supreme Court vote and a glitch of the Electoral College despite a popular-ballot winning margin of half a million. George Bush never broke 50% approval his entire second term in office. Somehow 60 votes has been normalized as what it takes to pass a bill in the Senate, with the record for filibusters being shattered in 2007-08 and then shattered again in the ensuing term.
But more than that, it’s the way things seem to be going in reverse. Cap and trade on greenhouse gases and an individual-mandate health insurance plan were Republican ideas as late as 2008 – now they are suddenly beyond the pale wackadoo socialism, if you believe the cable news yukfests. In the last six months, some folks have suddenly decided that freedom of religion means an employer must be able to refuse contraceptive coverage to his employees. And now we have a mall-cop wannabe who shoots dead an unarmed kid in his neighborhood after being explicitly told by the 911 dispatcher not to follow said kid – and “news” figures are saying it’s the kid’s own fault for wearing a hoodie?
What the fuck is going on here? How is it possible that we can keep jerking the country further to the right – and further back in time – when you can poll people and get majority support for almost all of the things being decried as liberalism run amok? Are we actually going to fight the 2012 election on the morality of a contraceptive that came into the world fifty years ago?
Or is this the Karl Rove offense on acid and steroids – amp up the venom and vitriol, whip your base into a frenzy, count on the indifferent middle being too turned off by the whole nasty process and then have just over 50% of whatever is left? Keep feeding the paranoia that the scary colored Muslim atheist foreigner is going to take away your guns and your daughters and bank on chaos?
This is some scary and irresponsible shit. Largely because there are a lot of rednecks out there who want to need those guns that they’re convinced Obama is taking away, and I’m not persuaded that they will accept a loss in November – enough hype about “ACORN” and “Black Panthers” and “voting fraud” and all manner of code words, and just like that, a certain segment of the population assumes that there is no way Obama could legitimately win re-election. And if you take the Nixon-Bush “Anything goes” approach beyond just campaigning, that’s when shit turns ugly.
Twenty years ago, if you’d told me we’d be battling the 2012 campaign out on birth control pills and whether to help Israel bomb Iran…well, I would have laughed my ass off. Not so funny now, is it?
Of which more later.