When I stand back and take stock of our political culture it often appears counter intuitive and irrational. Let’s start with conservative Americans who need accessible education, healthcare and employment. Why would they support the tea party and rant against taxes and government programs which seek to provide these needed benefits? On the other end of the spectrum, unionists, members of academe and the children of our elite, sprinkled with old sixties protesters and young anarchists, camp out on Wall Street to protest the bailing out of banks. In effect the “occupy wall street” crowd is supporting the very same tea party members who have suffered the most from the non recovery. Yet these conservatives want to leave the bankers unregulated and unscathed.
Billionaires ask to have their taxes raised and are finding ways to give away their wealth. Conservatives of modest means ask to have the taxes of the wealthy remain the same or lowered. The tea party middle class have become our Herbert Hover libertarians. The wealthy and the children of the last “me generation” are the new social democrats.
President Obama is a liberal democrat compelled to conduct his presidency as a fiscal moderate because of the state of the economy and the perceived need to move to the right for his reelection. This is to capture more of the ground vacated by moderate republican candidates. Mitt Romney is a moderate republican candidate who has made a Faustian bargain to become president. He has disavowed his long held policy positions. This permits him to make a primary run as a conservative tea party libertarian in order to win his party’s nomination. At another time and place Mr. Romney could easily serve on the President’s cabinet.
As an example of our social culture also gone whacky, we have the Steve Jobs phenomena. Mr. Jobs was a genius at producing consumer products that by his own admission, no one knew they needed until he produced them. His consumer consumption company is bigger than Exxon but employs very few Americans. He was not a particularly nice man, but knew how to design and market millions of computers, music players, mobile phones and tablets.
Following his death, more media has been dedicated to Mr. Jobs life and times than any individual I can remember. My entire issue of Business Week and much of Time magazine was dedicated to Mr. Jobs. I learned nothing about the euro crisis and a lot about his volatile temper and that he considered taking LSD one of the most important decisions of his life.
Unfortunately lives well lived that I do care about receive almost no attention from the media. Tony Judt was such an individual. When he died in his early sixties from Lou Gehrig’s disease in August of 2010, the world blinked and carried on. A politically engaged but independent and critical intellectual, Mr. Judt cared about people and about learning from history to make the world a better place. My bet is that years from now, his writings will carry more weight than the iphone.
Our political and social culture says a great deal about who we are as a people. When did our political leaders stop caring about what they believe and only about getting elected? What’s wrong with Obama being a one term “progressive values” president or Romney running in the moderate republican tradition? When did we stop caring about educating our children so they could compete on a level playing field as an essential part of the American dream? How did our empathy for the less fortunate shift to the prevailing need to accumulate things, including the newest electronic toys? Why should our culture worship Steven Jobs?
Sometimes I cannot tell whether it is simply the media tail wagging the public dog, deciding what we think and read, or whether our values really are skewed. Maybe it’s a bit of both.
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