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Four of the merely six words in the title of Pew Research Center's latest poll results (pdf) are "distrust, discontent, anger" and "rancor."
That sort of says it all, doesn't it? A concentrated, supermajority of fuming, "a perfect storm of conditions," said Pew's director, Andrew Kohut -- "a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials."
All of which, I suppose, was inevitable. During the 2008 presidential campaign, one of the more common observations was that the unluckiest candidate would be the winner. For nearly a decade the Bush administration had labored mightily to pile-drive the nation's distrust and discontent, while throughout, its chief political strategist -- Karl Rove -- cultivated partisan anger and rancor as electoral insurance, whose costly premium has now come due.
Theirs was a conscious, unconscionable effort to split the country -- plus one -- to achieve what they confidently envisioned as a permanent majority. Hyperpatriotic global adventurism and partisan scapegoating would hold it all together, while any domestic discontent would be decisively confronted with the Reaganite shibboleth that government is the problem, not the solution.
Their objective was a kind of impotent überstate -- a sort of controlled anarchy in which the militaristic protection of Big Brother would subsume the internal vulnerabilities of plutocratic whim and socioeconomic decline.
And in this, the Bush administration accomplished its one splendidly executed job: it hugely reinforced the erstwhile moderate American belief that government, where not in uniform, is spelled s-n-a-f-u.
Best of all? If that permanent-majority thing failed to work out, some other poor schmuck would have to cope with the enduringly miserable consequences. The Bushies and their politico-economic class could take their misbegotten gains and head for the hills of material comfort; the opposition would be left the herculean task of reassembling a disintegrated nation.
Which, for President Obama (as well as his admittedly hapless but passably well-intentioned allies on the Hill), became a thankless chore. The year 2009 wasn't 1933, which now, bizarrely enough, seems a golden political age, a time before lunatic cable-news hosts and lunatic radio talk-show hosts and lunatic bloggers -- all absolutely ubiquitous, and the crazier the more successful.
Yet a good deal of today's thanklessness loops back, I think, to that splendid job performed by the Bushies: their jackhammer, propagandistic insistence that government is unfailingly inept, so what might you expect?
To the contrary what the body politic did expect -- unschooled as it is in the grinding parliamentary process of reversing determined decline -- was nothing short of a miracle: virtually instant betterment. Obama would simply stroll into the Oval Office, I can only presume, and snap his fingers and issue executive commands and presto -- within, let's say, a year, our city on the hill would gleam again.
Eight years -- indeed, several decades -- of unprecedented, deliberate neglect and suffocating decay would be erased. Theoretically. And when the theory failed to hold? Why of course, thought the electorate: Government is unfailingly inept. Why -- against the Bushies' admonishments -- did we ever expect otherwise?
Much easier, then, to revert to the former administration's finely cultivated zeitgeist of distrust, discontent, anger and rancor: reactionaryism's best friends.
During a presidential campaign such an apocalyptic foursome is not only acceptable, it borders on the acceptably advisable. For nothing concentrates the democratic mind like motivated revenge.
Yet what appeared to be relatively short-term distrust, discontent, anger and rancor had in reality become a new way of American political life. Except for one's closest ideological allies, everyone's a vague kind of enemy; plus government's a joke, hope's a pipe dream and real and upwardly robust change is not only unattainable, it's a liberal mirage, QED.
That is the Bushian DNA of our political ghosts -- Bush's truest legacy; a sour, fuming, disoriented, thoroughly disenchanted electorate which -- the result of relentless, top-down repetition -- can always land on at least one identifiable enemy: inept government.
And irony of ironies, who's paying the political price? Why of course. The unlucky winner of 2008, who is only trying his damnedest to ept the inept.
That sort of says it all, doesn't it? A concentrated, supermajority of fuming, "a perfect storm of conditions," said Pew's director, Andrew Kohut -- "a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials."
All of which, I suppose, was inevitable. During the 2008 presidential campaign, one of the more common observations was that the unluckiest candidate would be the winner. For nearly a decade the Bush administration had labored mightily to pile-drive the nation's distrust and discontent, while throughout, its chief political strategist -- Karl Rove -- cultivated partisan anger and rancor as electoral insurance, whose costly premium has now come due.
Their objective was a kind of impotent überstate -- a sort of controlled anarchy in which the militaristic protection of Big Brother would subsume the internal vulnerabilities of plutocratic whim and socioeconomic decline.
And in this, the Bush administration accomplished its one splendidly executed job: it hugely reinforced the erstwhile moderate American belief that government, where not in uniform, is spelled s-n-a-f-u.
Best of all? If that permanent-majority thing failed to work out, some other poor schmuck would have to cope with the enduringly miserable consequences. The Bushies and their politico-economic class could take their misbegotten gains and head for the hills of material comfort; the opposition would be left the herculean task of reassembling a disintegrated nation.
Which, for President Obama (as well as his admittedly hapless but passably well-intentioned allies on the Hill), became a thankless chore. The year 2009 wasn't 1933, which now, bizarrely enough, seems a golden political age, a time before lunatic cable-news hosts and lunatic radio talk-show hosts and lunatic bloggers -- all absolutely ubiquitous, and the crazier the more successful.
Yet a good deal of today's thanklessness loops back, I think, to that splendid job performed by the Bushies: their jackhammer, propagandistic insistence that government is unfailingly inept, so what might you expect?
To the contrary what the body politic did expect -- unschooled as it is in the grinding parliamentary process of reversing determined decline -- was nothing short of a miracle: virtually instant betterment. Obama would simply stroll into the Oval Office, I can only presume, and snap his fingers and issue executive commands and presto -- within, let's say, a year, our city on the hill would gleam again.
Eight years -- indeed, several decades -- of unprecedented, deliberate neglect and suffocating decay would be erased. Theoretically. And when the theory failed to hold? Why of course, thought the electorate: Government is unfailingly inept. Why -- against the Bushies' admonishments -- did we ever expect otherwise?
Much easier, then, to revert to the former administration's finely cultivated zeitgeist of distrust, discontent, anger and rancor: reactionaryism's best friends.
During a presidential campaign such an apocalyptic foursome is not only acceptable, it borders on the acceptably advisable. For nothing concentrates the democratic mind like motivated revenge.
Yet what appeared to be relatively short-term distrust, discontent, anger and rancor had in reality become a new way of American political life. Except for one's closest ideological allies, everyone's a vague kind of enemy; plus government's a joke, hope's a pipe dream and real and upwardly robust change is not only unattainable, it's a liberal mirage, QED.
That is the Bushian DNA of our political ghosts -- Bush's truest legacy; a sour, fuming, disoriented, thoroughly disenchanted electorate which -- the result of relentless, top-down repetition -- can always land on at least one identifiable enemy: inept government.
And irony of ironies, who's paying the political price? Why of course. The unlucky winner of 2008, who is only trying his damnedest to ept the inept.
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter
Let The Sun Shine In......
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