Susan Sarandon was WRONG!
Eating my words … mummmummmumm…
Two years ago I posted a piece arguing that Susan Sarandon was right in saying that we might as well vote third-party because the public would never wake up and get involved with politics, on the liberal side, until things got very, very bad. (My interpretation of Sarandon’s comments.) Today I’m eating crow, because I see how wrong Sarandon and I were. Things did get very, very bad, but here we are, still teetering on the brink of total collapse of our democracy and our civilisation.
I’m sure I don’t need to justify my judgement of where we’re at as being very, very bad, but, just for thoroughness, I will list a few things:
- Well over half a million dead of COVID-19, in the USA alone, and counting
- Too many people too ignorant or pig-headed or misinformed to take the life-saving, pandemic-ending vaccine
- An ongoing insurrection against the American democracy, without decisive steps being taken to stop it
- No punishments meted out to the criminal political leaders of the last four years, paving the way for future corruption
- A trend toward right-wing strong-man autocracy in the USA and much of the rest of the world, thanks to late-stage capitalism failing to provide for the welfare of its citizens
- Global climate change
If you want more thorough analysis, I recommend reading some posts by fellow Medium author umair haque.
How did things get so bad? I want to blame Fox News, a 24-hour propaganda network interested only in its own ratings and profits. But then I have consider corruption of the news media in general, starting from the breakdown of the Chinese wall between the networks’ news and entertainment divisions, and the repeal of the equal-time rule. But then I have to go back to corruption of the political process by big money, which enabled the corruption of the news business. But then I have to go further back to Reagan in the 80’s tilting the playing field toward big business, busting the unions, and preaching that “government is the problem” not the solution. But then again, the country was in the same bad shape in the Guilded Age of the railroad robber barons, and only FDR’s New Deal saved democracy at that time. The political right and the wealthy (to be redundant) have been fighting to reverse the New Deal and get back to the Guilded Age ever since, a project that has finally succeeded. And this time they’ve taken down the entire planet’s ecosystem as well.
And yet… democracy has the power to cure these ills, as it did once with the New Deal. If only people understood… but they don’t, because of Fox News, and the corrupt news media, and a broken education system that no longer teaches civics. And so, Sarandon and I were WRONG. As bad as things have gotten, and the much worse it will get, the system seems to be too broken and corrupt to self-correct.
Maybe we’ve just become too soft. Maybe the left doesn’t understand that the struggle to build a just and healthy society is an ongoing, serious, bloody fight to the death. The deaths of activists, the death of society, the death of civilization itself. That, just as America’s founders fought and died for independence, workers fought and died for fair wages and working conditions. Citizens black and white fought and died for civil rights. A whole country fought and died to eliminate slavery. Just voting isn’t enough. Hey, I’m soft, I’m guilty. I just vote. Well, vote and occasionally write something perhaps marginally constuctive. It’s not enough.
Maybe the Sarandon hypothesis has some truth to it, and the people will rise up when things get bad enough; it’s just not bad enough yet. But the longer we wait and the worse it gets, the more difficult and the bloodier the revolution will be. (By revolution, I mean a hard swing to the left. Democratic Socialism with a light dusting of regulated Capitalism and a strong dose of environmentalism.) Worst of all, unfortunately, it may just come too late this time. The world is already in flames.
