The Politics of “Can’t”

In 1969, three men rode a sky-scraper sized explosive device to the moon using less computing power to do the math than I currently have sitting in my pocket, and made it back alive. Three years later, in 1972, the most progressive major party candidate lost a stolen election by a landslide, and America turned its back on the future. In 1984, the same party that put forward that progressive candidate, George McGovern, nominated a milquetoast centrist named Walter Mondale, and lost a fair election by a wider margin than McGovern had, and the Democratic National Committee decided to double down on the spineless, milk-water politics that had lost them that election. I was born in 1986, and this morning, the most progressive candidate of my life threw in the towel.

Okay, so wages have been flat for a long time. The point stands.

In 2008, just as I was graduating from college, the then-worst-downturn of our lives happened and the wealthy were bailed out while normal Americans lost their homes. Afterward, the number of jobs increased, but none of them had benefits. Wages stayed flat. America became two countries: the one where the wealthiest among us lived, hidden away from the masses, and the one where the rest of us lived, a missed paycheck away from homelessness and starvation.

Currently, a pandemic is ripping through the whole world – and the United States of America more than any other nation – like a wildfire, locking all of us in our homes and shutting down businesses. We are alone, we are destitute, we are afraid. We are angry.

In November, we have to pick one of two old men with dementia that have both been credibly accused of rape.

All the leadership of this country has to offer are the Politics of Can’t. By this, I mean a political program that seems perfectly designed to kill the largest swathe of its population through deprivation. It has convinced us that we, the very same nation that fired a total of twelve astronauts to the moon and brought them back, can’t provide for the most vulnerable among us, can’t manage a feat that the other wealthy nations of the world have been doing for decades. That we can’t achieve anything significant.

Sorry, the term Business Insider used was ““““Super-Yacht””””.

That we can’t do anything but pick which creepy uncle we want to live in a nice house and tell us that we’re going to have to tighten our belts so that the wealthiest among us can retreat to mega-yachts while we’re under quarantine and can’t make the rent.

The Democrats, I feel, bear a large share of the blame on this. And I’m not about to walk out the fact that centrist democrats lose elections except in extreme circumstances, and that Obama won by masquerading as a progressive, though that is true and anyone who denies it had better come with a solid argument. No, the general approach of the Democratic party for the past half-century is the problem: politics requires negotiation and making deals, and the Democrats seem hell-bent on compromising before they make it to the negotiating table.

Which, of course, means that the American right, which is a reactionary fringe party that has gone on the record many times recently and declared that “we don’t win elections when everyone votes”, gets to pull the ultimate legislation further in their direction. This is considered normal. They do this because we think we can’t do better.

Meanwhile, I never want to hear someone ask how we can pay for something when the government is willing to just create thirty trillion dollars over the course of march to dump into the economy, effectively printing money solely to feed it into a wood-chipper.

I think it’s clear: we’ve been able to do everything we need to this whole time. It’s been possible to house and feed and clothe and care for all of us – not because we want big brother to do so, but because the government is an expression of the will of the American people. If we decide that we want for there to be enough food and housing and healthcare we can make that happen.

He is, admittedly, talking about the stress that young people feel about the state of the world, but I will point out that “give me a break, I have no empathy” is a terrible example of leadership.

We have become convinced that we need to scale back our dreams of the future, that we need to expect lower wages for longer and harder hours, and even the left-ish candidate has declared that he has “no empathy” for young people. We are told, time and again, that we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we can’t provide.

They want you to starve. They want you to be homeless. They want you to work sixteen hours a day and be satisfied to sleep in your car outside your job. Our grandparents had union jobs that could support a family off of one wage. They fought, bled, and died for that.

Our parents were convinced to give it all away. Because we can’t possibly risk another McGovern. We can’t possibly take into account that that election was fucking stolen and the people responsible for it have become synonymous with corruption. We can’t possibly look at an election from twelve years later and say oh, so this is what compromise right out of the gate gets us. We can’t look at the 2008 Presidential contest and say if this is what happens when one of us talks like a progressive, what might happen if we actually put forward someone who is a progressive?

We can’t possibly learn from the past. We can’t possibly work for a brighter future. We can’t possibly acknowledge that everything in our culture is contingent and we can change it if we just try.

No, we have to bow to a ghoulish fucking death cult that openly declares that they can’t win if everyone votes and we have to take a swan-dive right into the abyss so that the economy might go up three percent.

Because that’s what they’re saying. We can’t let the economy stop, so let’s just take steps that could put almost ten million Americans to death.

That’s what the politics of can’t get you.

The most inspiring president, the mock-progressive democrat Barack Obama, won on a message of hope, and change, and “yes, we can!”

It turns out that you can just help people. Crazy how that works.

Let’s reclaim that. We can care for everybody, and if the government won’t do it, we’ll create mutual aid networks and do it anyway. The world wants you lonely and afraid and worried, because it wants us all to be there. The government, as the expression of the collective will, has been captured by those who speak the loudest, and I’m becoming convinced that it will never serve the rest of us.

Look: the wealthiest among us are convinced that they can wall themselves off from what happens to the rest of us, that they can build walls and hire security forces, and maybe design robots to work for them or rockets to take them to Mars, and have decided that this is preferable to trying to fix anything. Because they’re nothing but over-moneyed children who have pissed the bed in the worst possible way and are trying to run away from the evidence. They’ve decided that the rest of us have to sleep in their piss, essentially.

I decide, instead, that I don’t want to do that.

Automation isn’t here yet. They can’t mechanize our jobs out from under us yet. They can’t make the wheels turn without us. The field of active businesses is going to be a lot thinner after the quarantine is lifted. If we don’t return to work immediately, and drag our feet for a week longer, what happens?

I don’t know.

But I’m interested to find out.

※

If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference.