Living in the Future

Sarah Palin appears on The Masked Singer (screenshot via YouTube courtesy of Mic)

My faith's been torn asunder
Tell me is that rolling thunder
Or just the sinking sound
Of something righteous going under

Don't worry, darling
No baby, don't you fret
We're living in the future
And none of this has happened yet

—Bruce Springsteen, "Livin' in the Future"

I had a strange moment as I was driving home last Friday. My thoughts were jumping around the way they usually do on night drives like that one. The main thing on my mind was the COVID-19 pandemic. Much more would come of that outbreak over the next few days, as restaurants and bars were forced to shut down and my state's primary election was ultimately postponed to stem the spread of disease. My thoughts also drifted to another, much stupider recent event: the completely surreal appearance of former governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Fox's already-ridiculous show The Masked Singer. Earlier that week, Palin, dressed in a pink bear costume, had spat reworked lyrics to Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" in an event that no sober person could have imagined back in 2008 when she first came on the national scene. There was no obvious connection between these two things, a deadly global pandemic on the one hand and washed-up politician's last gasp for relevance on the other. But considering them together, as two wildly dissimilar but contemporary news stories, an ominous question emerged: what if this is just how things are gonna be?

Start with the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States at least, we are not faced only with the disease itself but also with a society that seems almost perfectly designed to let it flourish: a state that has been hollowed out by neoliberalism over the past few decades, and is now presided over by a former reality show host whose reign has been marked by open incompetence and corruption; a private healthcare system that has little incentive to focus on testing and providing proper treatment to those who need it; and a culture where misinformation readily spreads among a populace that has grown rightfully distrustful of its own government and mass media, as well as of "experts" of any sort. And now that the seriousness of the new coronavirus outbreak is starting to be understood, the deep dysfunction and irrationality is beginning to make itself known: supermarket shelves left barren as people start bafflingly stocking up on toilet paper in large quantities, travel bans enacted against China and Europe over the objections of health experts, the stock market thrown into chaos, lives disrupted as universities and places of employment shut down.

COVID-19 is not the first global pandemic, and it certainly won't be the last. As the planet's climate is progressively altered and the permafrost—home to all sorts of dormant bacteria and vira—melts, and as our globalized culture continues to become more and more integrated with people and cargo traveling from all parts of the world with regularity, it's likely there's more where this came from. While some places, like South Korea, have done an admirable job of responding to the coronavirus pandemic, taken as a whole the global response does not portend terribly well for how these future outbreaks will be handled.

Obviously, the greatest tragedy of COVID-19 and any future pandemics will be the many lives lost to them. But it's fair to also ponder the cultural impact semi-regular outbreaks would have on the vast majority of us who survive them. The irony of the term "social distancing," the practice now being encouraged to prevent the spread of disease, is that it could just as easily be applied to what we've all been doing, willfully or not, over the course of the past few decades. As the collective institutions and groupings that, for better or worse, provided some sense of community have disintegrated (in accordance with Margaret Thatcher's proclamation that "there's no such thing as society"), societies have more and more resembled collections of atomized individuals. We've hardly had much choice to but withdraw further and further into ourselves as practically everything—jobs, homes, acquaintances, marriages—became more and more temporary by necessity. The personal relationships and face-to-face interactions that were once central have become increasingly supplanted by social media, which often encourages the meanest, dumbest and most narcissistic impulses, leaving people more alienated and less empathetic than they once were—not, of course, that we should wax too nostalgic about the "good old days," which were full of their own problems and injustices. And now, if every so often, we must worry that face-to-face interaction might help spread life-threatening illnesses—and cope with the inevitable disruptions to day-to-day life the response and reaction to such outbreaks will entail—that will just be one more factor pushing us towards personal isolation.

It's that same atomization that has helped give us bizarre scenes like Sarah Palin rapping on TV—or a former game show host being sworn in as president for that matter. For politics to be participatory or democratic in any profound sense, collective institutions and organizations—not to mention just some general sense of community—are necessary, and all of those are what's been getting power-washed away like an old coat of paint. So when politics based on mass organization and participation becomes obsolete, what happens? Politics must glom onto some other sort of cultural phenomena, effect some kind of merger. That's where the entertainment industry comes in.

Entertainment, after all, is yet another thing that must fill the gaps left behind by the neoliberalization of modern society. The fact that it's become increasingly available over the past few decades is not simply a fortunate coincidence—and, if possible, it will only become more ubiquitous the further social atomization progresses. How else can you keep a populace of increasingly alienated individuals from either rebelling against the system or simply imploding altogether? It's no wonder that politics and entertainment appear to be merging, up to and including a sort of revolving door that now connects the two of them: at the same time the old forms of politics have died off, entertainment dominates the cultural landscape more and more, and it naturally has to evolve to keep its consumers' attention. If religion was the opium of the masses in Marx's age, something must take its place in an increasingly post-religious landscape.

Not that we will ever reach the levels of, say, the societies imagined in Mike Judge's Idiocracy or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where every form of mass entertainment is artless vulgarity or overwhelming absurdity. No, far from it: people have to get intellectual stimulation from somewhere. There are, and will always continue to be, many shows, movies and books that are intelligent, well-crafted and of serious artistic value. But that's just it: soon enough, the only place that level of profundity or thoughtfulness might be found is in the realm of entertainment, where it's safely directed away from any use that could end up threatening the status quo and serves as just another temporary distraction from the alienation of modern life. It's something of a cold comfort to know we will always have prestige TV and cinema when they serve only as a break from the chaos and irrationality of everything else.

This is the nightmare future we are faced with—not some radical deviation, but merely the worst and most frightening (as well as the most ridiculous) aspects of the past few years and decades made regular, turned into the new "normal." The feelings of isolation and fear we're experience we're all experiencing right now could become just another part of day-to-day life, while politics is finally reduced to the level of a spectator sport—just one more reality show to waste some time on.

Of course, it's not yet inevitable. While Bernie Sanders now stands little chance of becoming the Democratic nominee, the movement he helped to build with this campaign and his 2016 one is a promising deviation from the long-term trends we've seen in politics and society. And the coronavirus epidemic plus the economic turmoil it's already wreaking could prove enough of a shock that we're forced to confront the ominous direction we're headed in, and find a way to change it. Those glimmers of hope, however small, do not have to disappear regardless of who ends up winning the 2020 election. But the window of opportunity is closing. Let these past weeks and the months ahead be a warning that spurs some sort of action, and not a preview of what the future will be.

The Vampires Strike Back

Well, no one said it would be easy. We knew that the Democratic Establishment was in full panic mode after Bernie Sanders scored a trio of victories (at least in the popular vote), in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada—the first three states on the primary calendar. Now we're seeing the full extent of their desperation. After Biden managed to score a big victory in South Carolina and became the first candidate to defeat Sanders anywhere, the wagons have circled: Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar unexpectedly called it quits, along with billionaire donor Tom Steyer, leaving Biden as the only remaining candidate in the "moderate lane" aside from Michael Bloomberg.* Shortly after, they threw their support behind Uncle Joe, and were joined by one Robert "Beto" O'Rourke, who long-time viewers will remember as yesteryear's Hot New Thing in the world of Democratic politics, as well as former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. It looks like Mr. Hope and Change himself, former president Obama, may have even played some role in at least Buttigieg's decision. Now, as I'm writing this, it's Super Tuesday, and Biden looks positioned to stage a major comeback.** FiveThirtyEight already gives him a 31% chance of securing a majority of delegates in the primaries, while Sanders has fallen to just 8% after being the favorite for weeks (the most likely possibility, with 61%, is still that no one secures a majority).

Shirts sold by the Biden campaign, celebrating his latest
endorsements (via Team Joe Store)

This comes just after Biden got caught in an astounding lie about getting arrested while trying to visit Nelson Mandela, a new spin on his old fabrication about marching in the Civil Rights movement. Of course, it might be unfair to call it a lie for that matter. Joe's been having his share of innocent slip-ups lately, such as saying that he's running for Senate and that if voters don't like him they can "vote for the other Biden," and apparently forgetting the quote from the Declaration of Independence about all men being created equal—the one every third grader knows—about halfway through his attempt to recite it ("All men and women created by the—you know—you know the thing.") None of that matters when there's a chance the peons might actually storm the Bastille and nominate someone who really means it when they use the old Democratic Party talking points (those ones about creating a fair economy and looking out for working class people).

No—the one thing the Democratic Party power brokers care about is right there in their name. For anyone who suffers from any other illusion, what we're seeing right now should be the equivalent of Winston Smith's shock treatment in 1984:

"You are ruling over us for our own good," he said feebly. "You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore—"

He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.

"That was stupid, Winston, stupid!" he said. "You should know better than to say a thing like that."

He pulled the lever back and continued:

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power...We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end...The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

Of course, poor old Joe is just a pawn in their game, to borrow Bob Dylan's turn of phrase—and in a just world, elder abuse would added to the list of charges against all the insiders and hacks pushing Biden's campaign along. There's a poetry to it all. You couldn't ask for a better embodiment of the decrepit, decadent Democratic Center that's been in power for decades: the wizened old moderate who once gave Strom Thurmond's eulogy and was to the right of Ronald Reagan on criminal justice, and who now struggles to go a week without messing up a news anchor's name or forgetting which president it was that he served under. Who needs Thomas Nast anymore when the politicians are already their own caricatures?

There's, of course, no point in whining about fairness in all of this. All's fair in love and war, and in politics, one might add. The tactics the Establishment is relying on aren't even particularly shocking or outrageous. A bunch of losing candidates dropping out and rallying behind the guy whose views are most like theirs hardly seems like any great moral travesty or attempt to squelch out democracy. Even the attempts to prey on electability fears or to paint Sanders as some out-of-touch utopian (or cyrpto-Communist) are hardly some Nixon-style ratfucking. The real scandal is the continuing existence of the Democratic Establishment itself, given the miserable failure of its brand of politics in actually creating any sort of decent society, the way it's broken every promise it ever made to the poor and working class people across the country and the fact that just four years ago it helped give us Donald Trump by sticking us with another uninspiring centrist who epitomized its disgusting lack of any moral center. It doesn't much matter what rules the Establishment plays by—as long as it's winning, the rest of us are losing.

And sweeping all of this aside in the name of defeating Trump is just doing the Establishment's work for it. If there's one thing you can say about Donald Trump and the Democratic power elite, it's that they deserve each other: just one big band of unprincipled, cynical elitists with nothing but contempt for anyone outside of their social tier—especially if, God forbid, those unwashed masses actually start trying to take some kind of control. In the long run, failing to shatter the hegemony the Democratic Party elites exercise will be a far costlier mistake than reelecting Donald Trump would be, anyway. Crises like increasing inequality, uncontrolled climate change and the much-discussed shrinking of the "middle class" threaten to push us toward some kind of quasi-dystopia, what Sheldon Wolin called "inverted totalitarianism"—maybe within a few decades, in my non-expert estimation. Maybe more, maybe less. If these issues aren't seriously addressed soon, Donald Trump may just be the first in a line of authoritarian demagogues to gain power, and the next one might make him look like an amateur.

It would be delusional to think these problems disappear if Bernie Sanders is elected, but electing establishment picks like Biden all but guarantees they will only get worse. But, as I've previously discussed, Biden's far from certain to beat Trump anyway. The video montages of his most unflattering moments ("150 million people have been killed [by guns] since 2007," "Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids") that I predicted in my last post have already materialized, spread by Big Don and his right-wing media allies. Anecdotally, the anger I've seen from younger voters and leftists over the past few days, as it's become clear the party elites will pull out all the stops for Biden, does not bode well for his ability to turn out former Bernie supporters. Low youth turnout alone—or a significant defection of left-leaning young voters to third party candidates—could leave Biden's odds as good as dead. But there's no need to tarry on when I've covered this ground before.

What it all comes down to is that the most important battle to be fought is not, as many would have it, between the Democratic and Republican parties. It's between the Democratic Party establishment—the network of wealthy donors, fundraisers, party insiders, political consultants, and other blood-suckers whose ilk has helped gift us with our current politico-economic nightmare—and those who refuse to accept the rule of these self-proclaimed experts for any longer. The only way the Democratic Party can effectively combat not only Trump and right-wing "populism" in general but also the many other grave threats we face is to become an authentic working class party—one that has a meaningful connection with, and is responsive to the needs of, the poor, displaced and struggling that have been betrayed by our political system and by the dynamics of twenty-first century capitalism. Nominating Bernie Sanders would only be the start of this process. Nominating Joe Biden means we make no progress at all.

*After winning only American Samoa on Super Tuesday, Bloomberg has also dropped out and thrown his support behind Biden. 

**With Super Tuesday over, it's fair to say this happened as expected. Biden how has a 65-delegate lead, though many more still remain to be allocated.