Thom Hartmann certainly seems correct that there is a lot of anger on left and right, but we've grown so accustomed to the sniping between left and right that we've almost not noticed that there is a common enemy. (Maybe try up and down instead?) Hartmann:
The Great Depression of 2008 – or what was billed as such – and the election of an African American president who used a ground-up instead of a top-down campaign caused high information voters to emerge again for the first time in 30 years.
Many, of course, were high with the wrong information. They showed up at tea parties and Palin rallies. But their passion is real, and their grievances are mostly legitimate. Thirty years of Reaganomics/Clintonomics has destroyed the labor movement, hollowed out our industrial sector, put us on a permanent war footing, wiped out the equity of the middle class, and created an entire generation of college-loan-indentured-servants. Who are now fully awake and seriously pissed.
…
President Obama, sir: Meet what is in large part your own creation – the High Information Voters of 2009/2010.
We’re awake, we’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it any more. Natalie Portman to Matt Taibbi to Arianna Huffington to Bill Moyers represent the span of our four awakened generations; generations who have figured out how the game is played. And don’t like it.
Hartmann has explored at length the uber-elephant in the room that I brought up yesterday. He wrote in 2002: "Although corporations can't vote, these new conservatives claim they should have human rights, like privacy from government inspections of their political activity and the free speech right to lie to politicians and citizens in PR and advertising."
And that particular brand of corporatism, for my money, is the common enemy of tea partiers and progressives alike, but good luck convincing your local tea partier of any common ground–they're likely to call you an elitist and move on. If somebody actually manages to bridge that gap, however…
Via a Dec. 7 Rasmussen poll about the "Tea Party" compared to the GOP: "In a three-way Generic Ballot test, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Democrats attracting 36% of the vote. The Tea Party candidate picks up 23%, and Republicans finish third at 18%. Another 22% are undecided."
There are clearly an awful lot of angry people in the country of many political stripes who haven't figured out just where they should really be directing all that populist power. And the obtuse battling that always sets in between left and right is a major preventative. It's too bad we can't stop shouting about only the issue du jour and figure out a way to get back to Lincoln's "government of the people, for the people and by the people."
With numbers like that, something is brewing in the political climate. It will be interesting to see if it's possible for it to mean something besides eternal flip-flopping of parties who are near-useless shadows of each other. Maybe, as I saw mentioned recently, someone who snipes at both parties a la Ross Perot will arrive. It seems pretty certain somebody is going to fill the void, and their party identification is likely to be secondary if they tap into all that anger. Moments like these are pretty much nailbiters since Bush and Co. threw open the doors to some very undemocratic ideas. On the other hand, really good things can happen. But I'm certainly not going to be placing a bet one way or the other.
