gracchusdixit

It should by now be obvious to anyone who isn’t wearing a blindfold or plugging his ears with wax that our system of government, and more particularly our foundational Constitutional arrangements, are broken.  Certainly, that’s what the American people appear to believe.  In a recent Gallup poll, they declared government to be the country’s number one problem, well ahead of the economy, jobs, or even the dreaded specter of Islamic terrorism.  It has taken Americans quite a while to catch on to this dismal and long-standing reality, but as the saying goes: better late than never.

It is impossible to say exactly when things began to fall apart, but if I had to pick a date, it would be July 16, 1964.  That is when the Republican Party, by an overwhelming margin, nominated Barry Goldwater to be its candidate for President.  Goldwater was humiliatingly trounced by Lyndon Johnson in the subsequent election, but his nomination was the first shot fired in a conservative revolution that eventually exterminated the old Republican Party, has now seized control of two branches of our national government, and, unless Hillary Clinton gets her act together, may soon control all three.

The next shot was the election of Richard Nixon.  Nixon was in no sense a Goldwater Republican, but he was cunning and ruthlessly ambitious.  These qualities led him to devise the “southern strategy,” which transformed the Republican Party forever from being a bastion of old-fashioned and understated conservatism, with its roots in the Northeast and Midwest, to becoming the loud and truculent voice of a New Confederacy.

Then, of course, the so-called “Reagan Revolution” came along, which was merely an extension of Goldwater’s original agenda.  It was, however, far more effective in demonizing the federal government, redistributing wealth to the already wealthy, and unleashing the malignant magic of the “market”.

Reagan was followed by the Reagan-idolizing Newt Gingrich, who shut down the national government for the first time in our history and launched an abortive attempt to impeach and convict a Democratic President who was (and still is) one of the popular public figures we have ever had.

All this was bad enough.  But things got infinitely worse when the Supreme Court of the United States made the unprecedented decision to intervene in a Presidential election and, by the narrowest and most partisan of margins, awarded the election to George W. Bush—despite that fact that his opponent had won the popular vote decisively.  With this act, the conservative Justices on the court abandoned all pretense of political neutrality, opting instead to advance their own ideological agenda openly and without shame.

The breakdown got worse again with the election of Barack Obama.  From the start, Republicans simply refused to recognize the legitimacy of his two election victories, doing everything in their power to ensure the failure of his Presidency.

In the last month, this ongoing breakdown reached a boiling point.

First, Republicans invited the now reelected Prime Minister of Israel to address a joint session of Congress—though “address” scarcely describes his melodramatic and deceptive performance.  Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance was not only a stunning breach of long-established protocol, it was profoundly disrespectful to the office of the President and to Barack Obama himself.  During the last Presidential election, Netanyahu all but endorsed Mitt Romney—an act of interference in our internal political affairs that was, and remains, inexcusable.  Despite all this, Ted Cruz hyperbolically compared Netanyahu with Winston Churchill; a comparison with Joachim von Ribbentrop would have been more apt.

A few days later, 47 Republican Senators decided to meddle in ongoing and exceedingly delicate negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities, with the clear intent of undermining those negotiations altogether.  By-passing the executive branch, they sent a letter to Iran’s leaders, lecturing them on our Constitutional arrangements.  This was not only patronizing but gratuitous, since Iran’s foreign minister, having been educated in the United States, where he received both an MA and a PhD, probably understands our Constitution better than the fatuous and smug Republicans who sent the letter.

For years, we have danced around the reasons for this scandalous behavior, pretending to be befuddled by the seemingly inexplicable opposition of the Republican right-wing to the general will of the American people and the specific actions of Barack Obama.  Let us drop the pretense once and for all, because the reasons are crystal clear.

The first is that, for all their talk of patriotism and love of country, the only country Republicans are prepared to love is one that mirrors their own theology: white, conservative, and rigidly Christian.  America as it actually is—sprawlingly diverse, increasingly “brown,” and progressively more tolerant on sexual and social questions—is a country they both loathe and fear.

The second reason is that Republicans abominate any form of government that does not serve their own, selfish interests.  They are quite prepared for the federal government to spend billions subsidizing corporations, waging war, and building prisons for the querulous poor.  But the moment government acts in the common good, its actions are denounced as socialism, a first step on the road to communism.

The final reason is blatant racism.  It is racism that lies behind the tea party’s hatred of Barack Obama.  It is racism that lurks behind Republican rhetoric of “makers and takers”.  It is racism that caused the Supreme Court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act and strike down Affirmative Action.  To pretend otherwise, to suggest that legitimate and reasonable political disagreements are the cause, is a sham.

More than a century ago, the poet Walt Whitman, trying to comprehend the unspeakable carnage caused by the Civil War, described a Union that had been “insolently attack’d by the secession-slave-power” of the South.  Now, more than a century later, that same power is once again doing everything it can to break the nation apart.  That power is called the Republican Party, and its insolence will never end until it is broken at the polls for good.

For nearly 500 years, the words, “Justice is blind,” have symbolized everything we wish our legal system to be: objective, impartial, and blind to distinctions of wealth, power, privilege, or race.  Equal treatment before the law is the bedrock of a decent and democratic society.  It is the only thing separating us from societies that are run by thugs and criminals.

No human institution is ever perfect, and our legal system is no exception.   To say that “justice is blind” is to raise a high ideal, one that we must work hard to live up to.

It has become abundantly clear, however, that we are no longer even trying.  Our legal system is not merely imperfect, in the way of all human institutions, it has become fundamentally flawed and corrupt.

The first glimpse of this sad reality came after the financial collapse of 2008.  Our leading financial institutions committed crimes—not errors of judgment or imprudent mistakes, but blatant and deliberate fraud.  The result was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, which cost millions of Americans their jobs or their homes or both.  Eight years later, not a single senior executive in any of the companies that caused the crisis has been indicted, let alone tried or convicted.  We have been told, time and again, that financial crimes are too “complicated” to prosecute successfully.  That’s nonsense.  Hundreds of executives went to jail after the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 80s.  Dozens were convicted after the failure of Enron, and the accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, was forced to close its doors.  But not today.  Now, not only are the companies that caused the 2008 financial catastrophe too big to fail, the criminals who run them are too big to jail.

The second signal of the corruption in our system of justice came when George Zimmerman, the self-appointed “neighborhood watch coordinator” of a gated community in Florida, killed an innocent and unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin.  Zimmerman was acquitted of his crime after local police rigged the investigation and Florida prosecutors bungled the trial because of negligence or intent.  Since then, we have seen countless examples of the same pernicious pattern:  Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York; 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland; and others.  In all these cases, local police unions have rallied around the officers who perpetrated these crimes, demonizing the victims and defending the officers themselves as heroes who “put their lives on the line”.  Since the average cop has no more chance of dying in the line of duty than the typical motorist has of dying behind the wheel of a car, that claim is a shameless distraction, designed to ensure that criminals will never be punished.

And just days ago, we witnessed perhaps the most appalling demonstration of all, when the Senate Intelligence Committee published the findings of its years-long inquiry into acts of torture committed by the CIA at the behest of the highest officials in the land. Those who authorized these acts, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush , insist that the “ends justify the means,” that any action which saves American lives is honorable, moral, and legal.  Those who perpetrated these acts deny that “enhanced interrogation” is torture at all but is, instead, a “useful tool” for defending the nation. Those who should know better, including the current President of the United States, urge us to “learn from the past” and “move forward,” as if such insipid clichés were an adequate substitute for justice.

The acts of torture authorized by Cheney and Bush, and committed by the CIA,  are unambiguous crimes under international law and our own laws.  They are crimes that we have condemned publicly, legally and officially for three decades.  They are crimes that demand, not explanation or expiation, but trial, conviction, and punishment.

Until we punish the most powerful criminals in our society—bankers who steal, police who commit murder, politicians who break our laws and betray our ideals—we will be a nation where justice is no longer blind.  We will have become a nation that is blind to justice.

The separation of church and state guaranteed by our Constitution has never stopped Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, from acting as if their faith were the “established church” of the nation.  The National Prayer Breakfast is merely one example of their presumption.  Though not officially “Christian,” it might as well be, and every year since Dwight David Eisenhower began the practice, the Presidents of our supposedly secular democracy have dutifully shown up to express their allegiance to the predominant religion of the land.  Presidential appearances at this annual ritual have generally been innocuous, with our chief executives confining their remarks to platitudes and predictable pieties,  walking a delicate line between declarations of “personal faith” and the official non-religiosity of the land.

The current President of the United States, however, kicked over a hornet’s nest when he addressed this year’s National Prayer Breakfast.  Barack Obama decided to turn his attention to the horrific acts of radical Islamists in Iraq and Syria.  He observed that extremism is not unique to Islam, that many religions, including Christianity, have at various times incited or justified similar atrocities.  For uttering these incontestable truths, the President was immediately assailed from both right and left.

Critics on the right pilloried him for daring to draw any comparison between Islam and Christianity, because they would have us believe that Christianity is morally superior to every other creed on the planet.

Critics on the left were more fastidious, carping that Christianity’s lapses—the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials of the 17th and 18th centuries—happened long ago, before Christianity was “reformed” by Enlightenment values, the discoveries of science, and the steady march of modern progress.

Let us put aside for a moment the reality that both these points of view are at best questionable and focus on the more consequential fact that most of the President’s critics chose to ignore his central point.  His central point was that radical extremists like ISIL do not represent the “true Islam,” just as the zealots of the Inquisition did not reflect the  “true Christianity”.

Barack Obama is not the first to have expressed this anodyne thought.  George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, among many others, preceded him, and it has been parroted around the globe by political elites who do not wish to be seen criticizing religion.

In any event, the notion that radical extremism is a distortion of the “true” Islam is undoubtedly well-intended.  But it is also naive and—worse than naive—flatly wrong.

Radical extremism is not a distortion of Islam—it is an intrinsic part of any religion that claims a monopoly on the truth, whether that creed is Islam or Christianity or the Judaism on which both are based.  Absolutist religions breed intolerance and—inevitably—persecution.  The Christianity that gave us Saint Francis and Pope Francis also spawned Torquemada and the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.  The Bible that gave us the Sermon on the Mount also glorified the murder of Isaac and the slaughter of the first-born of Egypt.  A faith that glorifies the “martyrdom” of its own believers is by definition prepared to condone the murder of non-believers.  Martyrdom and murder are interdependent and inseparable.

Thus, there is no way of separating good religion from bad religion, of pretending that one religious vision is “truer” than another.  Nor is there any way of imagining that any absolute religion can be reformed by Enlightenment values, tamed by the modern world, or sanitized by science.  Like some infinitely adaptable virus, such religions are immune to these curative forces.  They may lie low for a while, pretending to be quiet, until they inoculate themselves against the cure and come pluming back with explosive force.

In the United States, deeply unenlightened evangelicals have all but highjacked the political agenda of the Republican Party.  In the name of “life,” they want to return the lives of women to the Middle Ages, and they have incited the murder of physicians and health care workers who provide women with abortion services.

In Israel, orthodox extremists have undermined that country’s noblest secular and civic traditions, making any prospect of conciliation with Palestinians and Israel’s Arab population all but impossible.

In Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holy places, Wahabi fundamentalists stole the country from its infinitely more tolerant Hashemite rulers a century ago and have imposed a stern and violent vision of Islam on its population.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, a country founded on the principles of secularism and cultural diversity, a new prime minister was recently elected by promising jobs and growth.  The man who made these convenient promises is first and foremost a Hindu demagogue, who not long ago incited the murder of thousands of Muslims.

The President of the United States was incontestably right to remind us that radical extremism is not unique to Islam, but he was sadly wrong to suggest that radical extremism is a perversion of  the “true” Islam or any other religion.  There is no doubt that radical Islam is a problem.  The infinitely greater problem is the radicalism of religion itself.   Pretending otherwise will not help us solve the problem.

The premeditated assassination of two New York City police officers two weeks ago was a tragedy that every decent person in the country should deplore.  No less deplorable, however, is the fact that this tragedy has been exploited to distract attention from the plague of widespread police violence and to excuse criminal behavior on the part of police officers themselves.

Those who declared that the Mayor of New York had “blood on his hands” because he dared to speak up in behalf of protestors questioning police behavior have no claim on our conscience and should be spurned for the shameless provocateurs that they are.  Foremost among these are the top officials of the police unions, not only in New York but everywhere police have killed unarmed and harmless citizens.

The rhetoric from these demagogues has been virtually identical, as if they were reading from a prepared script.  They have assailed their critics as traitors, cowards, or ingrates—traitors when the criticism comes public officials like New York’s Mayor, Bill de Blasio; cowards when it comes from reporters or the media; ingrates when the criticism comes from the general public.  One union official after another has proclaimed, in a tone of righteous and angry indignation, that cops “put their lives on the line every day,” as if that existential declaration were irrefutable proof of heroism and moral rectitude, sufficient to inoculate their members against scrutiny, and, ipso facto, a reason to shut down debate and shut off complaint.

No one doubts that most police officers are responsible professionals or that their work can at times be dangerous.  We didn’t need the killings in New York to remind us of that.

But the assertion that cops “put their lives on the line every day” is another matter.  It is a rhetorical exaggeration, an emotional sleight of hand, designed to advance the self-interest of those who would have us believe that officers of the law should be above the law.  Far worse, this rhetoric not only gulls the public, it deceives police officers themselves into thinking that they are in greater danger than they actually are, causing them to act and react with excessive and disproportionate force.

The facts are these.  There are more than a million state and local law enforcement officers in the United States, and last year, 111 of them died on the job.  The average American is therefore more likely to die behind the wheel of an automobile, and the average coal miner is 40 times more likely to die in the pits.  More to the point, of last year’s 111 police fatalities, only 27 were “felonious,” i.e., the result of confrontations with criminals.  Twice as many police officers died in traffic accidents, some of which they caused themselves.  Almost as many died in training or gun-related accidents that had nothing to do with criminals.  Each and every one of these deaths is lamentable, but their number and their nature scarcely justify the rhetoric of exceptional heroism in the face of extraordinary danger.

The greater danger lies elsewhere.  In the year that 27 American police officers were killed “feloniously,” somewhere between one and two thousand ordinary American were killed by police officers.  The exact number is something that we will never know, because every independent examination has uncovered systematic underreporting and obfuscation by police departments. Some police departments don’t bother to keep records; many fail to report the relevant statistics even when they do.

Nor will we ever know how many of these killings were (to use the parlance of the FBI) “justifiable,” because few police departments admit to any unjustified killings, and the number of cops who are indicted (let alone tried, convicted or punished) for such killings is negligible.  The absolution of Darren Wilson, the cop who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, was exceptional solely because he appeared in front of a grand jury.  Most police officers who kill civilians never endure even that much.

Although we will never know exactly how many people are killed by American police officers, we do know that it far exceeds the numbers in other so-called “civilized” societies.  In Germany or France or Italy, the number of people killed by police each year can be counted on the fingers of one hand.  Last year, British police fired their weapons exactly three times—and killed no one.

There are many reasons for this jarring difference, of course, not the least of which is the ubiquitous presence of guns in our society, which threaten police officers and ordinary citizens alike.  But that neither explains nor excuses the sheer scale of American police violence.  Nor does it justify the awful reality that black Americans are 20 times more likely than whites to be killed.

So, the next time we hear the self-righteous claim that cops “put their lives on the line every day,” let’s remember that it is ordinary Americans, particularly black Americans, whose lives are really on the line.  The death of two police officers in New York was a tragedy.  But it did nothing to change the greater tragedy.

If you are sick to death of talk about the 2014 mid-term election, which you have every right to be, you may want to skip these comments and spend your time with an episode of Madmen. Nobody would blame you.  On the other hand, this election did dramatize one of the most maddening but little discussed aspects of our public life—the peculiar institution we call the “two-party system”.

It is profoundly strange that we are stuck with two political parties defined by the crude and largely meaningless characterizations, “liberal” and “conservative,” when every other advanced democracy in the world has at least three—and in most cases, far more than three—parties to choose from.  The largest European nations each have half a dozen significant political parties, representing a wide range of political philosophies and practical interests.   The United Kingdom, whose political traditions are closer to ours than any other, has three major parties and shows every sign of getting at least one more.  Our neighbor Canada likewise has three major parties, and if you count the Parti Québécois, it has four.  Even the “little country” of Europe, Denmark, with a population smaller than that of Massachusetts, has ten.

The disparity between our political arrangements and those of other nations cannot be explained by fact that we are a “constitutional republic” rather than a “parliamentary democracy”. Several of the parliamentary systems I just mentioned had, once upon a time, only two parties, but ultimately decided that two wasn’t enough.

Nor can it be explained by the fact that we are “federal” union of separate states that somehow need to be brought together under two big political “tents”.  If anything, the opposite should be true.  Switzerland also has a “federal” system, one that is more complex and potentially fractious than ours, because the Swiss speak four languages and hail from half a dozen distinctly different cultural traditions.  This hasn’t stopped the Swiss from developing a dozen major parties to speak for their interests all the while the Swiss federation hangs together quite nicely.

The irony is that our Constitution doesn’t mention political parties at all.  As far as the Constitution is concerned, we could just as easily be governed by ten parties—or none.  Indeed, the Founders abhorred the very idea of parties or “factions,” as they preferred to call them.  In his farewell address, George Washington, the “father of the nation,” warned against them in the severest terms.  And yet here we are, two centuries later, stuck with two parties, and two parties only, which are forever at one another’s throats and increasingly held in contempt by the electorate.

If there was any doubt about the depth of that contempt, it disappeared on November 4th.  Republicans weren’t swept into office by a “wave” of popular support, as the pundits proclaimed.  Instead, they crept into office, like thieves in the night, “elected” by fewer than one in five eligible voters  The vast majority of the electorate voted for someone else or didn’t choose to vote at all.

Nor did the 2014 election herald rejection of Barack Obama and the Democrats, as Republicans are now thundering.  It signified a growing rejection of the entire two-party system. Voter turn-out was the lowest in more than half a century,  but it has been dwindling for decades.  Even in Presidential elections, scarcely more than half the electorate any longer casts a ballot.

Our governing class routinely blames voters themselves for this, castigating them for their indifference or lack of political engagement.  That is a shabby rhetorical trick, which diverts attention from the real problem.

People will vote—assuming that they are allowed to vote at all—if they have something, or somebody, to vote for.  They will make choices if they are offered real choices, which speak to their interests or their convictions.  Unfortunately, our two-party system provides neither.

If it were true to its principles, the “tea party” would stand on its own two feet instead of surreptitiously co-opting the Republican Party to which it pretends to belong.  Progressives would abandon the Democratic Party for its craven obedience to big donors and organized special interests.  Environmentalists would go their own “green” way and rally their supporters to the cause they believe in, which is precisely what the various “Green Parties” of Europe have successfully done.

We are bridled with our crazy system for one reason and one reason only—the unbridled power of big money.  Nearly every other democracy in the world regulates political spending more rigorously.  Nearly all require full disclosure.  Nearly all underwrite elections with public funds and ensure media access to legitimate candidates and parties.  We do none of these things.  Big money wants big results, and you can’t get big results when “the little people” are given a voice.

The ultimate madness of our system may be that we take it so much for granted, as if it were an inevitable act of God or an irreversible calamity of nature. It is neither—and we would be a lot better off if it disappeared.  The wickedly funny British comic, Russell Brand, recently asked:  What if nobody voted at all?  The way things are going, we may soon find out.

One of the most curious aspects of the 2014 mid-term election was the Republican Party’s obsession with the Keystone XL pipeline.  They made its approval one of their main campaign issues, and now it has become their top legislative priority.  This extravagant passion is not new.  When Mitt Romney was running for President, he went so far as to say: “I will build that pipeline even if I have to do it with my own hands.”  Quite a boast from a man who, judging by his manicured fingernails and pressed jeans, has probably never done a lick of physical work in his life.  Lucky for him that electoral defeat relieved him of the need to get his hands dirty.

The newly elected Republican majority in Congress made no such ridiculous promise, but they quickly moved to get the pipeline pushed forward, challenging the President of the United States to play ball “or else”.  Republicans in the House had already passed a bill designed to override a reluctant White House, and their counterparts in the Senate just did the same—helped by Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and a dozen equally craven Democrats from states where the oil and coal industries call the shots.

It has to be asked: why all this desperate urgency, especially at a time when the country faces a host of issues that are infinitely more consequential?

It is not as though there is any shortage of oil or likely to be one anytime soon.  On the contrary, there is a glut, reflected in the fact that oil prices have plunged more than 25 percent in less than a year.

It is not as though Keystone will add to domestic oil supplies, even if there were any need to do so.  It will carry Canadian oil to refineries on the Gulf, from where it will promptly be shipped abroad.  Not one drop will heat one American home, fuel one American automobile, or lower the price at the pump by one cent.

It is not as though Keystone will bring us closer to realizing that fantasy called “energy independence”.  Two-thirds of the oil we consume already comes from domestic sources, and half of the rest comes from Canada, which, the last time I looked, posed no threat to our independence or way of life.

It is certainly not as though Keystone will contribute to our economy.  Instead of creating the “thousands” of jobs that its supporters tout, it will create fewer than 100 permanent jobs.  The rest will be short-lived, evaporating the moment the oil begins to flow.

In truth, the Keystone pipeline is nothing but a monstrous boondoggle.  It will pump a river of toxic tar-sands oil through the very heart of the country, exposing millions of productive acres and precious aquifer to the possibility of catastrophic contamination.  Given the abysmal safely record of the oil companies, such a catastrophe is likely to come sooner than later.

Despite all this, we are being told by the new Republican majority in Congress—emphatically and with a straight face—that the Keystone pipeline is somehow crucial to the nation’s economic future.

Again one has to ask: why?

There are those who say it is because Keystone has become a “symbol” of everything Republicans believe to be wrong about “big government” in general and Barack Obama in particular.  That may be the case, but the reason is simpler than that.  The reason is money—specifically the money of Charles and David Koch.

Keystone will make the Koch brothers even richer than they already are, a notion that is difficult to fathom, since each of the Koch brothers is already nine hundred thousand times richer than the average middle class American.  But I suppose no amount of money is ever enough for such people.  Which brings us back to Keystone.

Koch Industries is a major owner of the Canadian tar sands that will pump oil into one end of the pipeline and of the refineries that will process that oil when it comes out at the other end.  If construction goes forward, Keystone will be subsidized by a billion dollars worth of tax breaks, thousands of landowners will be displaced under the rules of eminent domain, and its completion will net Koch Industries 100 billion dollars.

Even so, you may still be asking yourself why the Koch brothers want to expand oil production in the face of declining consumption and falling prices  The answer is: because time is running out.  Oil—and coal—are quickly being replaced by natural gas and renewables, which are catching on faster than anyone imagined.  If the Koch brothers can’t exploit the tar sands they already own, if they can’t get their oil to market before time does indeed run out, they will be left holding a very big bag of worthless sludge.

Whatever else Charles and David Koch may be—none of which is very pleasant—they aren’t stupid.  As they wag their libertarian fingers in the air, even they can sense which way the wind is blowing.  That is why they—through their phony institutes, think tanks, and Superpacs—funneled $300 million into the 2014 election and, for all intents and purposes, bought the Republican Party.  With $100 billion at stake, that investment was chump change.  And because of it, the chumps are now in charge.

In 1964, the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater of Arizona as their candidate for President.  In accepting the nomination, he famously proclaimed: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”  Goldwater and his party went on suffer one of the greatest electoral bloodbaths in our history.  Innumerable pundits and prognosticators declared the Republican Party all but dead, hobbled forever by the extreme conservatism Goldwater embodied.

Yet here we are, exactly fifty years later, and a national election has been won by a Republican Party more extreme than anything Barry Goldwater could have imagined or would have wanted.  All across the land, liberals are wringing their hands and shaking their heads in numb disbelief.  How could this have happened, they ask?  How is it possible that the promise of “change” which swept Barack Obama into office six short years ago evaporated so quickly?  Is there any hope left that our country can ever, someday, become the decent, tolerant, generous place they wish it to be?

In responding to the results of this election, the President of the United States struck a conciliatory note.  “I hear you,” he said.  I suppose that was the only politic or polite thing he could have said.  But it wasn’t what needed saying.  For the truth is, the American people never heard him.  They did not see or hear Democratic candidates step up, stand up, and—with a single voice—speak up for the fundamental principles they believe in.  Instead, they got conciliation, compromise, and confusion.

Allison Grimes in Kentucky criticized the so-called “war on coal” instead of telling her constituents the truth:  the coal industry isn’t worth saving, and the sooner it dies, the better off we will be.  Michelle Nunn in Georgia talked about “fixing” the Affordable Care Act instead of telling voters that the Act, however imperfect it may be, was designed to “fix” the worst flaws of the utterly bankrupt system it replaced.  Mark Pryor of Arkansas jumped on the right-wing band wagon of fear by demanding a travel ban against West African countries instead stating the obvious truth that such a ban would achieve nothing except to make it harder to control the disease in the one part of the world where there actually is an Ebola epidemic.

Worst of all, one Democratic candidate after another pretended that the President of the United States didn’t exist.  The aforementioned Grimes even refused to say whether she had voted for the man, a transparent and embarrassing dodge that probably ended her candidacy there and then.

Did Democrats honestly think this would work?  Did they expect voters to believe they had been hiding under a rock during the last six years of the Obama presidency?  Did they imagine they could win an election by running away from the principles of their party and its elected leader?  In the end, their only reward for this hair-splitting evasion was humiliating defeat.

I, for one, greet this election, not with despair, but with combative joy—because liberals in general and Democrats in particular need to wake up.  They have an all-or-nothing fight on their hands, and it’s not going to be won with “conciliation” and “compromise”.  The Republicans swept to victory Tuesday night not by compromising but by standing their ground.  I abhor everything they stand for, but I respect their spine.

When Mitch McConnell talks about “working together to get things done,” he isn’t being gracious; he is laying yet another trap.  The Republican agenda hasn’t changed, and it isn’t going to change now that they control both houses of Congress. In the name of “getting things done,” they intend to impose that agenda on the country and will smear anyone who stands in their way for being unwilling to “compromise”.  They are out to lower taxes on the rich, deregulate corporations, gut environmental protections, destroy unions, scale back and privatize Social Security, eliminate Medicaid, and, if they can, repeal the Affordable Care Act.

This is not an agenda that very many Americans support, and it is not an agenda that calls for one inch of conciliation or concession by Democrats.  Either Democrats stand up for their principles or they stand for nothing.  And if they aren’t going to fight for those principles tooth and claw, they don’t deserve to be elected or to govern.

Barry Goldwater said something else in 1964 that people now barely remember:  “And let me remind you,” he told Republican convention delegates, “that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”  It is now up to Democrats to defend social and economic justice against those who intend to destroy it .  In waging that fight, let them heed the words of Barry Goldwater: moderation is no virtue.

In scarcely more than 24 hours, the polls will be closing around the country, and the 2014 mid-term election will be history. By all accounts this may be one of the closest elections we have ever had.  It will certainly be one of the most dishonest.

The outcome of this election will be determined not by how people vote but, rather, by how many people are even allowed to vote.  Since the Supreme Court decided to gut the main provision of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans have been scheming to make sure that those who oppose them, particularly people of color, will not get that chance.  In states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Ohio, in one state after another, they have imposed sweeping measures designed to deny the right to vote to those who inconveniently just might vote for somebody else.  They’ve cooked up every crooked obstacle one can imagine: ridiculous voter ID laws, restricted voting hours, the elimination of early voting, the curtailment of absentee ballots, the closure of polling places on college campuses and in minority neighborhoods.

Their excuse, in every case, has been the phony specter of “voter fraud,” which they have never been able to document, let alone prove.  The real fraud, of course, is their own chicanery.

The tragedy here doesn’t lie in the outcome of the election itself, because there are only two possible outcomes, neither of which can amount to much.  Whatever else may happen tomorrow, Republicans are certain to retain control of the House of Representatives, which will mean another two years of the stalemate and dysfunction we have grown accustomed to.  If they also take control of the Senate, they will try to undo whatever the dreaded Barack Obama has accomplished in the last six years but will likely fail.  It is doubtful that a Republican majority in the Senate will be large enough to override the President if he decides to veto their mischief.

The real tragedy of tomorrow’s election, therefore, will have little to do with its dismal outcome. It will, instead, have everything to do with a far more important fact—the fact that our democracy has been stolen, bit by bit, one larcenous step at a time.

The first act of larceny took place in 2000, when Al Gore, having won the election by nearly half a million votes, was denied the Presidency, thanks to the finagling of a blatantly corrupt Florida official and a cooperative Supreme Court.  Florida’s electoral votes were thereby awarded to George Bush—enough by a whisker to turn his popular defeat into an electoral victory.  People grumbled, dimly aware that the obsolete idea of the electoral college hasn’t made sense for at least a century, but then went on with their business, accepting the verdict as if it were an inevitable act of nature.  Of course, no one knew at the time how disastrous that stolen election would turn out to be: two utterly useless wars, trillions of dollars and countless lives down the drain, and a financial collapse rivaling the Great Depression.

After pulling off such an audacious caper, the election thieves bided their time, ready to pounce again the moment their next opportunity came.  It came in 2010, with a new census, which gave Republicans in the states the chance to redraw legislative districts to their own advantage.  This they did, with a display of shamelessness that still beggars belief.

Their larceny led in turn to the perverse election of 2012.  Barack Obama was reelected—decisively.  More Americans voted for Democratic candidates—by far.  Then what happened?  We got another Republican majority in the House of Representatives and two more years of obstruction, inaction and right-wing hounds baying at the moon.

Tomorrow’s results may produce a few surprises, a “blue” victory popping up here or there, where none was expected.  But the fundamentals won’t change, because the 2014 election has already been stolen.  Like our democracy, it was stolen long ago.

Election junkie that I am, I would normally be up until the wee hours, watching until the very last vote trailed in.  Not tomorrow night.  Instead, I will crawl into bed, pull up the covers, and pop an old movie into the DVR.  I can’t quite decide, though.  Will it beThe Great Bank Robbery or George Orwell’s 1984?  I suppose that will depend on whether the mood of the night calls for a good laugh or a good cry.

Less than a month after the United States announced a “strategy” of using air strikes to “degrade and destroy” the terrorist organization called ISIL, it is already clear that the strategy is failing.  Not only does ISIL remain undaunted and unchecked, its fighters are threatening the Iraqi capital and have pushed to the border of Turkey, where the Turks in their tanks sit, watch, and do nothing.

The war mongers who criticized the inadequacy of air strikes in the first place are once again, as they have all along, hollering for the inevitable next step, “boots on the ground,” as if we hadn’t already wasted several trillion dollars—not to mention countless lives— putting “boots on the ground” in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  That earlier “strategy” was no less an abject failure than the present one.  Even worse, it was in large part responsible for fueling the rise of very terrorist organization we are now trying to obliterate.

The delusion that yesterday’s failure can somehow become today’s success is captured in the empty cliché that we hear so often from our political and military leaders, to wit, “failure isn’t an option”.  This glib bit of management-speak is arrant nonsense.  It implies, first of all, that success can be willed into being by the simple act of choosing it.  It assumes that better options and more successful choices are “out there somewhere” if only we had the wisdom to find and act upon them.

Success and failure aren’t choices or options.  They are consequences.  And in this case, failure is the inescapable consequence of our protracted and completely disastrous involvement in the Middle East.  The war in Iraq failed; the war in Afghanistan failed; and now, the “strategy” for dealing with ISIL is failing too.  By now, you would think we might have learned that, when it comes to further military intervention, it is success that “isn’t an option”.

This hard truth runs against the grain of everything we Americans have come to believe about ourselves and our country.

We are a “can do” people, aren’t we?  We are the richest, most powerful nation on the planet.  We have more guns, tanks, ships, and planes than the rest of the world put together.  For God’s sake, we put a man on the moon.  Surely, we can quell a rag-tag band of scruffy and vicious barbarians if only we set out mind to it.

We are also a “good” people, aren’t we?  Our hearts are pure.  Our “values” are superior.  Our “way of life”—a car in every garage, a smartphone in every ear, an iPad on every lap—is envied by everyone.  Surely, the rest of the world can see that.  Surely, other peoples and cultures can’t deny or resist it.

Or maybe they can.

No nation has a monopoly on values.  No nation can impose its way of life upon another.  No nation can “build” another nation.  No people can make moral or political choices for another people, whose cultural and political traditions pull them in a different direction.  We have tried all that, time after time.  And time after time, we have failed.

Like it or not, the people of Iraq and Syria—not to mention Egypt and Libya and Jordan and Saudi Arabia—will have to make their own choices, and those choices may not be what we would prefer.  We may deplore the choices they make.  We may even find ourselves threatened by them.  But we cannot alter or direct them.

Those who proclaim, “We have to do something; we must act,” should consider the possibility that all the military power in the world isn’t enough, that wishful thinking can’t change reality, that sometimes nothing—absolutely nothing—can be done.  It may well be that our only remaining “option” is:  Just do nothing.  Maybe, just maybe, if we left them alone for once, they might leave us alone.