"Revolution Time"

When Sarah Palin talks about "the big ideas," it is time to get nervous. Really nervous. Ms. Palin wouldn't know a big idea if it bit her on the behind. That said, she is right about "revolution time." The problem is that she is absolutely clueless as to the kind of revolution that this country needs. In fact, Palin and her fellow Tea-Partiers would send this country ever deeper into the clutches of the Imperial Presidency and the National Security State. She wants to take the Rovian politics of jingoism and fear to a whole new level. She inveighs against Washington as Bush II did (as he cynically layered on new levels of "national security" bureaucracy) and as Ronald Reagan did before Bush II--while, again, expanding with naked cynicism, corporate entitlement programs at the federal level as no one, not even FDR, had done.

Palin is simply the latest shill for the Neo-Fascist revanchement of white folk who are angered whenever anyone in government suggests to them that God did not give them the world as a private fiefdom to do with as they please.

Good manners and good taste would suggest that people of average intelligence and above simply ignore Palin and her fellow Tea-Partiers--as you would ignore the tantrums of any spoiled child in an effort to avoid giving it the attention it craves. The only problem with such an approach is that it also ignores one of the most insistent facts of American political life in the early 21st century: the perception on the part of many Americans that our government operates independently of the will of the people.

This is not an inaccurate perception. And the emotions it generates are not come by dishonestly. Palin and the TP's are tapping into that perception and those emotions and, like the German National Socialist Party of the 1930's, are prepared to use democratic processes in their bid for power. If they succeed in their quest, it will only be because people of good will turned a blind eye to the pain they are feeling.

People of good will must acknowledge that pain. It is the pain that comes from disillusionment--a disillusionment that owes a great deal to the hopes that the Obama campaign raised in the hearts and minds of many Americans: that, at last, authentic change was on its way to Washington.

It is time for people on what passes for this country's "Left"--despite what they tell themselves, Liberals are not Leftists--to stop making excuses for the Obama Administration. It is time to put down the kool-aid jug and admit to ourselves that, once again, our hopes and dreams for a better America have been betrayed. Barack Obama is not an easy person to dislike. Don't even try. Continue to think well of him and to wish him and his family all the best. At the same time, abandon the illusion that he will somehow come through for us all. That is not his project and it is not his historical role.

Obama's role in American history is to present the American people with the opportunity to wake up and recognize that he was the last, best hope we had for working for change through the system. The disappointment that is the Obama Administration must serve as our wake-up call that the system is broken. We are ruled by a militarized corporatocracy that insinuated its way into power during the Second World War and that has spent the last half century or so strengthening its position. That corporatocracy is not only the enemy of American democracy, it is the enemy of the people of the world. It has co-opted our political parties, turned our elections into mere referenda of its policies, shifted the wealth of this great nation into its own treasuries, made a mockery of our system of justice, and turned what ought to be open discussion on the issues of the day into a cynical theater of the corrupt--where stooges like Palin and Bush strut their poor hour upon the stage to the detriment of us all.

And, if that weren't enough, the corporatocracy rules by fear and violence. The Fourth Estate, which it all but owns, is its willing accomplice in this tyranny. The Pentagon, the F.B.I., and the C.I.A. serve as its private militia. "Homeland security" is its domestic spy-network. The police and the courts do its bidding. And we, the "citizens" of this country, are but pawns in its game.

You will not hear this kind of talk from Palin and the T.P.'s. They're too busy genuflecting to the flag and cultivating a nostalgia for a white Protestant triumphalism (both religious and political) that is completely out of touch with the material realities experienced by the rest of the world. This is what our dear Sarah means when she refers to the "big ideas." She is dangerous.

But Palin is only as dangerous as the rest of us permit her to be. The antidote to Palin and her ilk is a real, live, Left that offers an alternative vision to the American people of what this country has to offer its own citizens and to the world: bread and roses. But bread and roses will not come to any of us by working through a broken system. It will come if and when we, the people, take to the streets, en masse, employing the time-tested methods of the non-violent general strike, and demand a Constitutional convention, a multi-party parliamentary system, and a social democracy.

A better world awaits if and only if we the people can find within ourselves the political will to act as if we believe that the prerogative for self-governance is our birthright as human beings. We can choose Palin's jack-boot revolution, where the rich get richer and the middle class cheers them on because Jesus loves them and, besides, what's better than a "happy meal" for lunch and a shopping spree at Wal-Mart? Or we can choose the sort of revolution that has actually produced stable, wealth-producing democracies in other parts of the world: where all the people can afford to see whatever doctor they wish and to live in a decent home, to have their children educated in safe and intellectually challenging schools, and not fear that, after a lifetime of toil, they will spend their old age in poverty.

We trusted Obama. We had better not trust Palin. The time has come to begin, at last, to trust ourselves.