Political crisis, or just a bad dream

While Senator Evan Bayh's announcement this morning prompts this post, I don't regret the withdrawal of Bayh as candidate for the Senate from Indiana, since I felt he had succeeded his father as a very biased supporter of the state of Israel in the senate. But I do refer readers back to my post of a couple months ago, half-heartedly defending President Obama as attempting to be a centrist, and apprehensively quoting the Yeat's line about the widening gyre.

I caution adherents of the extreme right and their corporate sponsors not to celebrate their successes too soon. The disintegration of the political center amd the inefficacy of political institutions eliminate the hope for solutions of critical questions of social and economic justice.

Federal subsidies will be employed at the local level to support police forces and teachers salaries, as bulwarks against social upheaval, but tens of millions of impoverished and disenfranchised will eventually react outside of traditional channels. As I've noted before, the most desperate of our population are comprised of racial and ethnic minorities, and as those minority peoples act out in anger and frustration, the white middle class will tend toward a reactionary response. Some students and intelligentia will allign with the minorities as civil rights are violated. Whether poor whites allign with the frightened middle class, or with the rioting mob will be a significant factor in this breakdown of social order. Conservative theorists may rely on a white backlash in support of social order, but I'm not sure that poor whites, outside the South, won't also join in violent confrontations against the power structure, due to their recent (over the last thirty years) social and economic deprivation. Neither organized labor nor the Democratic Party have identified in the last twenty years with the interests of the traditional working class, leaving the white working class without meaningful representation during this time of economic deterioration, leading to a diminution of hope that now approaches despair.

A couple of years ago, I posted a number of blogs beginning to explain my concerns about the development in our republic of a revolutionary environment. I didn't complete that analysis, hoping that the then growing tendency toward repudiation of the Bush administration would lead to a reappraisal of socio-economic trends, and maybe to a positive denouement. Obama's election was a hopeful sign, but subsequent developments, and Obama's own vaccilation have dissipated the energy of that moment, leaving me not very hopeful.

I do not consider myself a survivalist or a revolutionary, just a concerned observer.