Adam's blogbox: my take on the midterm elections - our long conservative nightmare is fading, and liberalism will triumph in the end

What can we take away from the GOP’s shattering defeat? From the fact that the popular vote for the Senate, even though it yielded a Democratic majority of only 2, actually reflected a popular vote of 55% for the Democrats vs. 43% for the Republicans?

Here’s what we can say: the GOP is dead. Look forward to Democratic Party rule for the next 12 years -- at least. The long conservative revolution started by Ronald Reagan is dead.

The so-called party of ideas has run out of ideas.

Not that they had that many ideas to begin with. The conservative cornucopia of “ideas” was really one idea: to destroy the New Deal. Their idea of “personal responsibility” was raw capitalism – every man for himself, screw the poor, screw the unions, I’m not my brother’s keeper, government is for the rich, welfare is for corporations not people, let’s have fun in our gated communities.

The last leftover of this conservative nightmare is the preposterous salaries CEOs earn, with their illegal back-dated stock options and obsequious company boards, and their hundreds of million dollar payouts, even when their companies lose money.

The last regional holdout in America is the South, now the only place where the conservative agenda of run-rampant corporatism can still be sold via the flimflam of conservative social values. No wonder -- the South represents the dumb-fuck region of the nation. Always has, always will. The rest of the nation had to fight the South in a Civil War to stop slavery, and today we fight our barbaric backwater of the South in a culture war to stop their persistent ignorance and hate. What are conservative “family values” code for? Besides racism (represented by GOP pols like Trent Loft and George ‘Macaca’ Allen), they mean pro-life hatred of women, anti-gay marriage hatred of homosexuals, and religious hatred of science, as in stem cell research and evolution.

Karl Rove’s strategy of energizing the base worked because of these dumb-fuck ‘family values’, but only when the independents didn’t vote. When more people vote, this base shrinks. And when your evangelical base represents 40% of your votes as it did in 2004, and they start realizing that you’re cynically hyping “family values” only to get your economic program of tax breaks for the rich over, with no intention of actually doing something concrete to help your campaign of hatred against women and homosexuals, you lose them, too.

The Democrats don’t need the South anymore to win elections, because they have the Northeast and the Midwest sewn up. The Republicans are stuck with the South. If the Republicans want to win back votes, they’ll have to think of something that’ll appeal to the Midwest, and they’re going to need at least 12 years to think of something, because their larder of conservative ideas is empty.

The so-called culture war is purely a trade in symbols, because it has long been won by the liberal left. Witness the ubiquity of porn, and the sexualization of TV. By now, Americans know that fucking is good for you, even fucking each other up the butt, no matter what Southern evangelicals may say in their fundamentalist Taliban rage. Gay marriage will be ubiquitous in 10 years time. After all, it’s a matter of civil rights.

The economic battle, however, now begins in earnest. Stupid pundits on the right are claiming that the Democrats won because they fielded a bunch of conservative Democrats in Republican strongholds. They’re right when it comes to the social values aspect – many of these Blue Dog Democrats are pro-gun, anti-gay marriage and pro-life (all the flim-flam issues).

However, all of these Blue Dogs are also economic populists. They want to raise the minimum wage, take back tax breaks for the rich, hammer subsidies for the oil industry, bring back the right of the government to bargain down big pharma drug costs, strengthen unions, and have a more economically equitable society.

And that is where the next fight for the soul of our nation lies. Will we be a country in which the common good wins against individual greed? Where “social responsibility” means as much as “personal responsibility? Will we be a country in which the military-industrial complex reigns untrammeled, able to easily start wars to divert our tax money away from the common good into their coffers – or will we be a nation that takes care of its own? Will we be a Katrina/Enron nation, or a nation in which we treat each other as family?

There are things that serve the common good that should never be privatized. Healthcare is one. There’s a reason our healthcare is the most expensive in the world -- double that of the other industrialized nations -- while our life expectancy ranks 46th in the world, and our health care overall ranks 37th. Privatized healthcare can’t deliver. Sooner or later, we are going to have to instal a single-payer system, like the rest of the industrial world has.

What we have now, hobbles the competitiveness of our businesses. Every American car costs $1,500 more than it should, because that’s the health care cost per car that our car companies have to carry because employers have to fork out for healthcare instead of the taxpayer. If the cost of the roads on which cars run, can come out of our taxes instead of out of car company profits, why shouldn’t the cost of healthcare? If the roads aren’t privatized, why should healthcare be?

Healthcare is one of the things -- like education, defense, the police, the legal system and shared infrastructure (roads, electricity, water, bridges, sanitation) -- that should not be privatized.

They represent the common good, and they should be paid for out of everyone’s taxes, in a proportional system, in which the rich pay more than their fair share. Why? Because they can afford it. Because they’re rich. No other reason. With great riches come great responsibility. When you’ve made use of your opportunities to get rich (or been lucky enough to have been born rich), you have a duty to use your riches to make sure everybody else has the opportunities you had. It’s that simple. This is how you get an equal-opportunity instead of an “ownership” society.

Otherwise you get a society in which poor kids get a worse education than middleclass and rich kids, because schools are paid for out of property taxes -- which currently means that better-off neighborhoods have better schools –- instead of out of our general taxes. This is how you get a society in which kids who can’t afford to go to college, or whose education was so bad they can’t get into college, end up working for McDonalds and selling bad food and eating it and die as diabetics -- or go into the Army and die in Iraq.

This has to change, along with healthcare, and corporate welfare, and letting the rewards of greater worker productivity go to owners only instead of being shared with the productive workers.

Ever since the New Deal, the rich have fought tooth and nail via the Republican Party to destroy all its good things, starting with Social Security, which they’ve wanted to turn over to Wall Street.

Today, this ongoing attack on the common good leads to such excesses as the Iraq War, in which our defense has been privatized to the point that Halliburton supplies our troops with meals, and private companies supply security (i.e. mercenaries), and the entire Iraq War is simply another form of corporate welfare, in which kids who had no other option in life but to join the Army, die as IED fodder to enrich the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel.

But the midterm election is bringing this march of privatization, greed and social Darwinism masquerading as “personal responsibility” to an end.

In hindsight, the Bush Administration and its panoply of ills – Katrina, Enron, the corruption of Congress by lobbyists, Fox News, conservative hate talk radio, amplifying the faux enemy of “terrorism” to some bizarre existential threat, calling political opponents traitors, spending us into more debt than all other presidents combined, which means we pick up the tab for the rich to get richer – all this will be seen as the last gasp of the conservative revolution started by Ronald Reagan and carried forward by Newt Gingrich, the neocons and Bush/Cheney.

This revolution has now been unmasked as the corrupt, bankrupt and cultural dead end it always was. From now on, Americans will be less inclined to fall for the BS of rich, elitist guys like Bush whose real base is the rich elite. Americans will know how empty is the conservative blather of “ownership society” and “exporting democracy and freedom” and “patriotism” and “strong on security” and “keeping America safe” and “globalization” and god knows what else they gibber to cover their rapacity, greed, selfishness, and Ivy League contempt for the intelligence of the American people. Katrina and the Iraq War have shown us what conservatism really means –- a philosophy of the elite, for the elite and by the elite. A philosophy which casts the poor aside in favor of the rich.

Today, after the midterms, we can all breathe a sigh of relief, folks. The American people have spoken. Listen up, conservatives. Your revolution is dead. Liberalism will win in the end.