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America
appears primed for a political revolution, but will it happen? Or are we too glutted with middle
class amenities to put creature comforts at risk? A similar theme permeated Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1980?, an important essay published in
1970 by Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik. Amalrik predicted
revolution would come despite the seductive appeal of the middle-class life
that many Russians were beginning to experience in the post-Khrushchev
era. With so many households so
close to owning a Lada automobile, a washer/dryer
and a color TV, why would anyone risk rocking the boat? The average Russian
had lived like a serf for centuries, after all, and so the promise of
significant improvements in the standard of living was no small thing.
Such
concerns may be no less relevant today in the USA, where the economy even in
recession has sustained bourgeois luxuries at levels not far below the civilizational peak achieved in 2008, just before the
Great Financial Collapse. Indeed,
even as joblessness mounts and the country continues to wallow in what has
cynically come to be called The Great Recession, one needn’t leave the
couch to enjoy a surfeit of bread and circuses that puts Rome at its most
decadent to shame . However, and ironically, the
escapist trash of, reality TV, has distanced huge swaths of the populace from
reality itself. In such a climate
of hedonism and shop-till-you-drop hubris, the Founders’ concerns with
liberty and the tyranny of government hold about as much interest as a
philosophical treatise by Plato, Mill or Emerson.
And yet,
even for those who care more about Snooki and the
Weiner affair than about the state of the union, there is no ignoring the
by-now overwhelming stench emanating from Washington, D.C. We have watched
the most liberal president in the history of the Republic secure the fortunes
of the bankers, even as the working man has seen his income erode in real
terms, his debts mount to the point where tens of millions of homeowners may
eventually face bankruptcy. As the economic plight of the average American
has worsened, the lies we’ve been told about the economy’s
supposed recovery have become increasingly brazen. This has widened the gulf between
Americans and their elected leaders.
But is the disconnect severe enough to
provoke a revolution at the ballot box?
The answer, unfortunately, is: Not yet. What more proof of this do we need
than the failure of Fox News to take Ron Paul seriously? Putting aside the issue of whether or
not he is electable, his ideas have come resonate deeply with
Americans’ sense that, economically and politically, things have gone
dreadfully awry. And yet, Fox
treats Paul as a political non-entity at best, as a crackpot at worst. If the
Libertarian stalwart cannot stir things up at Fox, then what hope has he of
emerging from the tapioca served up each day by the other news outlets?
Still, a
quote from Amalrik provides hope that we will break
free of our inertia and bring about the changes needed to put America back on
track: “There is another powerful factor,” wrote Amalrik, “which works against the chance of any
kind of peaceful reconstruction and which is equally negative for all levels
of society: this is the extreme isolation in which the regime has placed both
society and itself. This isolation has not only separated the regime from
society, and all sectors of society from each other, but also put the country
in extreme isolation from the rest of the world. This isolation has created
for all—from the bureaucratic elite to the lowest social
levels—an almost surrealistic picture of the world and of their place
in it. Yet the longer this state of affairs helps to perpetuate the status
quo, the more rapid and decisive will be its collapse when confrontation with
reality becomes inevitable."
Rick Ackerman
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