Will that degree of responsibility motivate Americans to get off their arses and vote? I guess we'll see.
if you asked most Americans about our global responsibilities, you'd mostly find the country divided between the isolationist pole (we have no responsibilities - we can barely take care of ourselves) and the neocon position (we have a responsibility to kick the shit out of the bad guys and bring "freedom" to the teeming hordes), because that's pretty much the spectrum of mainstream American cultural responses to the outside world. certainly, there are progressive American voices, but they're totally marginalized.
the US mainstream is pretty much united in believing that the developing world is uniformly a totally fucked-up place universally dominated by rampant poverty and oppression. the idea that the US could even possibly be in any way responsible for that fucked-up state of affairs has zero traction with the voters and never, ever comes up in political debate.
i'm going to break down the American political consciousness as i understand it.
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it is beyond question in American public discourse that the world is fucked up, poor, and oppressed because the world has always been fucked up, poor and oppressed. that's just the default state. America is a special place because we overthrew our tyranny, and established the first and best free country in the world where the American Dream of prosperity and peace thrived. by hard work we have earned our two cars and houses in the suburbs, and by the blood of our patriots has our freedom been preserved.
oh, and your freedom has been preserved, too. we saved your asses (and by "your," i of course mean "everybody's") in WW II and defeated the Commie menace during the Cold War. we did it all, simply because we believe in freedom and want you to be able to free yourselves the way we freed ourselves and enjoy the benefits thereof.
however, you don't seem to be capable of doing that. the reasons for that can be hotly debated between several options: corrupt and/or dictatorial leaders, a servile tendency to expect the government to do things for you, adherence to primitive local non-Christian religious beliefs, wallowing in resentment of our freedom and prosperity, or some combination of the above, are the usual big ones.
now, ideally, the poor folk should get off their asses, stop feeling sorry for themselves, work harder, and overthrow their own tyrannical masters or die trying. however, the political realist is forced to concede that that's not likely to happen. so the questions become: how best to encourage them to do what we have already done, and how far should we be willing to go and how many sacrifices should we be willing to make to help them?
clearly, we've already made a lot of sacrifices. we allow millions of people from poor countries to come here, first of all. second of all, we saved your asses from Hitler and Stalin, as mentioned above. how much more should we do to alleviate the suffering of the world?
the pessimist position is that the world is beyond our help, and we should just close the borders, refuse to intervene in troubles abroad, and basically do nothing other than provide moral support when people in the developing world decide to finally get their act together. this is the Pat Buchanan position.
the optimist position is that the world is fixable, and we should be involved in fixing it to some degree. the more moderate faction believes that we should work through the system to the fullest degree possible, and resort to war as the last resort only and should try to work within the law. outside of that, we should try to help through support for international institutions and the spread of American capitalism and the attendant opportunities for development. this is the Kerry/Clinton/Gore/etc position.
the less moderate optimist position is that the entrenched bureaucracies and legal red-tape and corrupt international institutions are serious impediments to getting the job done. these liberal/Euro elitists they live in luxury and effete, European decadence, comfortably isolated by the sacrifice of brave men and women in uniform from the harsh realities of the world to such a degree that their brains have gone soft with socialist claptrap and they've lost their moral center. such bodies should be appeased only to the degree that it's expedient to do so, but we can't allow their diktats from the Ivory Tower to get in the way when there are tyrants to be overthrown and people to be freed. this is the Reagan/Bush II neocon position.
anything outside of these positions, especially anything that even suggests that American power may have something to do with poverty in the developing world, is America-hating nonsense peddled by drug-addled college students going through a phase, resentful minorities who should spend less time bitching and more time working, conspiracy wackos, opportunists making money off peddling lies, and tenured eggheads who are suckling at the public teat and using that support to spew their insane diatribes.
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as long as that's the spectrum of political debate, what chance do we have of making real progressive change? the vast majority of the voters just do not see the problem, and you can't make them see the problem when the debate is framed in this way. i can vote for whoever i want, but the terms of the debate more or less rule out a candidate i could actually vote for actually getting anywhere. changing the terms of the debate means changing the way people see the world on a mass scale, and doing that would require a hell of a lot more access to money, media power, and the education system than we have.
yes, theoretically, everyone could get up in November and elect decent people, but since they don't see things the way they would need to to conclude that that was even necessary, it's not going to happen, and the small group of people who get it are a drop in the ocean of American ignorance.
it's easy for people outside the US to criticize US progressives for not doing more, but if you're in the developed world, chances are you've got an electorate which is leaps and bounds more politically sophisticated and more informed about the way the world outside your own borders works then we do.
getting more control of the media requires political power we don't have, and getting political power requires media access we don't have. there's no way to break in.
so.... what do you suggest we do? i really have no fucking idea, personally. i voted for Nader last time to build up support for a third party, but i wouldn't have if i had lived in a swing state. i'm voting for Kerry because Bush is just beyond the pale, but that's about it. |
