As it was four years ago there were several “congratulatory” emails from my friends in Europe and Asia in my inbox this morning. They had written earlier about how concerned they were about this election. They are relieved, they understood, better than the nearly half of the American electorate who cast their vote to be governed by an arrogant rich guy what his victory would have meant.
There is going to be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking about this one, so I will join in with my own perspective which is this: what makes the United States (at least) the number one most entertaining country in the world’s is the way that the “dog of democracy,” however halted and hobbled by money and chicanery, sometimes stands up and bites America in the ass.
The Greek word, ΔΕΜΟΣ (the people), is the root for two of the relevant words for the (often painfully protracted and annoyingly ugly) process we have just endured. Demos is the word that forms the basis of, and the connection between, democracy and demography. It was demography that was the central determinative variable in the political process we have just seen played out. It was ΔΕΜΟΣ, the dog that, rather than being strapped to the roof of Mitt Romney’s car, reared up and bit him in his plutocratic ass. [OK, obviously I might like that image a little too much, but stay with me here.]
Didn’t Mitt, the self-anointed master of the universe see this coming? Didn’t he look out there at his all-white crowds of mostly old people at his rallies and at the Republican national convention? Didn’t he get what might happen when he talked of giving more tax breaks to his rich friends to trickle down through the social classes to those people in the moocher 47 percent and those pesky illegal immigrants and their American-born spawn who won’t “self deport”? Didn’t he get it when there were not enough young women in his audiences who might run the scenario through their minds of needing the services of Planned Parenthood, or an abortion if they are unfortunate enough to have been the victim of rape or incest? Apparently not. Because among the many things that Mitt Romney demonstrated he does not understand, is that he does not understand demographics. Because it was demographics that were the angry teeth in the dog of democracy’s canine maw.
I have grandchildren who, in addition to their Italian/Irish heritage, are part Japanese, Filipino, and Syrian, cousins who are half African-American, joined by the recent addition of an adopted Chinese grandniece.. That makes me a voter who will advance and defend the interests of grandchildren with whatever it takes. I will not abide insults or social limitations to their tutti-frutti/polychromatic ethnicity by a class of people who still think “white” equates with being the ruling class with four-fifths of the national wealth. My grandchildren, cousins and grandniece, have lots of company in America these days; they are the new American demographic. Add to that my educated and economically self-sufficient daughters who tolerate no notions of male supremacy (for which I have a few painfully personal empirical data). They are not going to accept a Mormon–culted Romney world, or a Roman-Rand Catholic nut house designed by the likes of Paul Ryan.
The Republicans and their plutocratic ruling echelons apparently thought that super PAC dollars and the munificence of the Koch brothers and the Adelson’s casino profits would outnumber and overwhelm the demos, and keep the dog of democracy tethered to Mitt’s car roof. It didn’t happen. They miscalculated, and it cost them an awful lot of money to learn a lesson they might have appreciated had they read their American history.
Why? Because in some sense this has happened before.
It was called the era of the “political machine.” Back in the 19th century, especially from the 1840s up to World War I, American cities were swelled with enormous influxes of immigrants—”the wretched refuse of the earth, yearning to breathe free” (and dig subway ditches) like my grandfathers. We all know about these demographic changes in a rough way because most Americans have a genealogical link to the days when the Irish, Italians, Swedes, Germans, French, Chinese, etc. came and built American cities and linked them (yes, they, not Mitt, built that!) with transport infrastructure. Soon enough, their numbers became politically influential and the incipient political systems of urban America recognized the power of this demographic tide. The political machines enlisted these Americans to overwhelm the ruling Dutch and English American aristocracy of the time.* To be sure, this was democracy by raw numbers more than it was by noble principles, but it was a lesson that high immigration/birth rates, coupled with the franchise, is the first law of political thermodynamics.** (The political right, of course, uses the “political machine” –infamous in the case of Chicago politics—as a negative image they like to, along with ACORN and community organization***, to bludgeon Obama with)
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So set aside all that short-lived, “conciliatory” bullshit of the acceptance and concession speeches. This next four years will be war and there will be blood. There will not be much more bi-artisanship; this will be about political muscle and dominance. There is too much at stake: the economy, jobs, health, housing, education, new energy and the environment, and how we can return to regaining international respect. There was no love in this election lost because there was none to lose; the racists, bigots, greedsters, and misogynists are still here this morning. Admittedly, the political right has to re-calculate; they left the dynamic, growing future young, multi-ethnic, multi-gendered, multi-colored of the demos out of their value-set and political equation. They have painted themselves into an extreme, far-right corner, but it is just a likely to breed a nasty desperation as cooperation and conciliation.
In these pages I have been critical of Barack Obama on a number of issues. I probably will continue to be on some issues. But I hold out hope (contrary to some friends who see Obama as fundamentally a centrist political animal) that he might be a “game changer,” that he might use power (and lame-ducky-ness) judiciously to protect the social policy advances of the New Deal, the political rights advances of the New Frontier, and add health care, gender rights and return of the country to the hegemony of the new demos. After all, demography has its own politically-disinterested “rules.” Darwin never promised “progress”; that is something the demos must reach for elsewhere. Even democracy does not guarantee it.
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© 2012, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.7.2012)
*Who soon after moved their money and political influence to the state legislatures.
**These demographic realities are not just happening in America (cf. The Imperial Boomerang)
***By the way, right-wing idiots, “communuity organization” seems to work pretty well when applied to grass-roots political organization, doesn’t it?