Stasis and Super Bowl LII

"The Schiff memo released Saturday is in every respect a right-wing document. It graphically illustrates the fact that the Democratic Party has shifted so far to the right that it has become the most subservient defender of the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and the entire repressive apparatus of the American capitalist state." 

Barry Grey, "Democratic memo defends FBI’s illegal spying on Trump campaign"

"Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are also back, after a weeklong recess. They face intense pressure to act on gun control, but, as our reporters note, 'If the past is prologue, Congress will do nothing.' "

Chris Stanford, "Xi Jinping, Winter Olympics, Weinstein Company: Your Monday Briefing"

Stasis is stagnation. It is usually called "gridlock." One of the first great works of Western literature, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, was devoted to it. A society will collapse if stasis goes on for too long.

That's where we are now. We are in our fourth decade of neoliberalism. It is well past time for a change, but the rich don't want to change, don't even want modest reforms. So we're headed for, are actively experiencing, a crackup.

It has been three weeks since Super Bowl LII, a wonderful game that had a wonderful outcome. The match-up featured the stalwarts of the corporate ruling class, the very white New England Patriots, versus the upstart, and very black Philadelphia Eagles.

The Eagles ran on the field Super Bowl Sunday to Meek Mill's "Dreams and Nightmares." "Dreams and Nightmares" is the number one track off the album of the same name released in 2012. New England ran on the field to that hoary headbanger classic "Crazy Train." The Patriots have been making their field entrance to Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train" for years. "Crazy Train" is a single off Osbourne's debut solo album, Blizzard of Ozz, recorded and released in 1980.

It would have been as if one of the teams at the first Super Bowl in 1967 ran on the field to a song by Rudy Vallee and his Connecticut Yankees, while the other entered to the sounds of "Good Day Sunshine" by the Beatles.

It said everything about the stasis gripping our society. The corporate exemplars clutching their totem from the outset of the age of neoliberalism; the upstarts, a hip hop anthem of the underclass.

What is truly noteworthy about Super Bowl LII is that the suits of the National Football League got it. They understood the dynamic at play. For all the scapegoating of Colin Kaepernick, they are aware that the ratings drop that has plagued the league the last two seasons is a problem of their own making.

So what did they do? They actively came down on the side of the Eagles. There were two booth reviews of touchdowns during the game that would have gone against the Eagles during the regular season but instead they were upheld. In other words, if Super Bowl LII would have been officiated like any regular season game, the Patriots would have won.

Prior to the game wherever I went whomever I spoke with wanted Philadelphia to win. I must have talked to 20 people. The league no doubt was receiving the same message.

Nonetheless ratings for the game were still down. But at least the league made a correction. There is no evidence that the political system is capable of such a move.

As I was telling a coworker last week, the Parkland massacre is a basic test whether we have a functioning democracy. We have a single issue that everyone understands, and a simple legislative fix that was recently on the books that everyone understands. If we cannot ban assault weapons, then we have concrete proof that we don't live in an open society.

There is an argument that congress will ban bump stocks and strengthen background checks, both of which were promised after the Las Vegas massacre, as a sop to the high school kids; that way leadership in the House and Senate can pretend to be responsive to the popular will.

On the other hand, why change anything when you control everything? That's the sentiment on high.

Under neoliberalism it appears that we have more power as consumers than citizens. Political reform appears impossible in the current dispensation. We know from Thucydides where this leads. And it is not pretty nor is it pleasant. A collapse is coming.

Stasis

Columns this morning by David Brooks and Paul Krugman each highlight stasis. Krugman argues in "The Excel Depression" that despite the discrediting of the main pro-austerity study by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, "Growth in a Time of Debt," the anti-deficit mania of ruling elites will continue as before:

So the Reinhart-Rogoff fiasco needs to be seen in the broader context of austerity mania: the obviously intense desire of policy makers, politicians and pundits across the Western world to turn their backs on the unemployed and instead use the economic crisis as an excuse to slash social programs. 

What the Reinhart-Rogoff affair shows is the extent to which austerity has been sold on false pretenses. For three years, the turn to austerity has been presented not as a choice but as a necessity. Economic research, austerity advocates insisted, showed that terrible things happen once debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. But “economic research” showed no such thing; a couple of economists made that assertion, while many others disagreed. Policy makers abandoned the unemployed and turned to austerity because they wanted to, not because they had to. 

So will toppling Reinhart-Rogoff from its pedestal change anything? I’d like to think so. But I predict that the usual suspects will just find another dubious piece of economic analysis to canonize, and the depression will go on and on.

David Brooks in "The Second Wave" limns the current state of the GOP. He discounts any long-term impact to Republicans for blocking gun control legislation. Brooks sees a rift in the party that, based on recent history, will likely scuttle any immigration reform legislation:

The main reason the gun issue won’t significantly harm Republicans is that it doesn’t play into the core debate that will shape the future of the party. The issue that does that is immigration. The near-term future of American politics will be determined by who wins the immigration debate. 

In the months since the election, a rift has opened between the Republicans you might call first-wave revolutionaries and those you might call second-wave revolutionaries. The first-wave revolutionaries (the party’s Congressional leaders) think of themselves as very conservative. They ejected the remaining moderates from their ranks. They sympathize with the Tea Party. They are loyal to Fox News and support a radical restructuring of the government.

The second wavers are much more tactically aggressive, favoring filibusters and such when possible. What the party needs now, they argue, is an ultra-Goldwaterite insurgency that topples the “establishment,” ditches immigration reform and wins Hispanic votes by appealing to the evangelicals among them and offering them economic liberty. 

The first and second wavers are just beginning their immigration clash. A few weeks ago, I would have thought the pro-immigration forces had gigantic advantages, but now it is hard to be sure. 

The immigration fight will be pitting a cohesive insurgent opposition force against a fragile coalition of bipartisan proponents who have to ambivalently defend a sprawling piece of compromise legislation. We’ve seen this kind of fight before. Things usually don’t end up well for the proponents. 

Whether it’s guns or immigration, it is easy to imagine that the underlying political landscape, which prevented progress in the past, has changed. But when you actually try to pass something, you often discover the underlying landscape has not changed. The immigration fight of 2013 might bear an eerie similarity to the fight of 2007.

High unemployment, an unresponsive political system, a perverse concentration of wealth, a distracted and harried populace -- the classical understating of stasis, that it results in civil war and/or tyranny, merits attention in our current situation.

Gun Control Fails in the Senate + "The Buried Quilt"

There is a full postmortem in today's paper on the Senate's failure to pass gun control legislation in the wake of the Newtown massacre last December. I began with the unsigned editorial on the Opinion page, "The Senate Fails Americans":

For 45 senators, the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School is a forgotten tragedy. The toll of 270 Americans who are shot every day is not a problem requiring action. The easy access to guns on the Internet, and the inevitability of the next massacre, is not worth preventing.

Those senators, 41 Republicans and four Democrats, killed a bill on Wednesday to expand background checks for gun buyers. It was the last, best hope for meaningful legislation to reduce gun violence after a deranged man used semiautomatic weapons to kill 20 children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Conn., 18 weeks ago. A ban on assault weapons was voted down by 60 senators; 54 voted against a limit on bullet magazines. 

Patricia Maisch, who survived a mass shooting in Tucson in 2011, spoke for many in the country when she shouted from the Senate gallery: “Shame on you.”

Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer each have informative pieces today as well. And Obama's media address yesterday is illuminating in its focus on the anti-democratic nature of the U.S. Senate:

Senate rules are not set in stone. A straight up or down vote could have been held without a 60-vote requirement; this would have allowed expanded background checks to pass.

Stasis is not a balance of power. Stasis, in the sense that Thucydides wrote about it in History of the Peloponnesian War, is an artificial block in the body politic that is the result of feuding aristocrats. Stasis leads to things like civil war and tyranny. I was listening to The Celestial Septet (2010) by Nels Cline with the Nels Cline Singers and the Rova Saxophone Quartet as I read the news today. The final track, "The Buried Quilt," felt appropriate: