Harold Meyerson reads my mind

Harold Meyerson, on U.S. political institutions and national strength:

I don't mean to sound nostalgic for the Cold War, but we've got to stop conducting ourselves as if nobody is looking.

The Senate has shriveled into a body that routinely thwarts majority rule. The Supreme Court has ruled that big money can dominate our elections as never before. Do we think that no one outside our borders has noticed? Do Senate Republicans realize that we now have a rival superpower, China, that mocks the inability of our democracy to create the jobs that would restore our economy, which they adduce as evidence of the superiority of authoritarianism? Do Supreme Court conservatives realize that China disparages our elections as controlled by big money?

In short, don't conservatives realize that China is making hay in the developing world through a combination of throwing its wealth around and arguing that American democracy is little more than a veneer for plutocracy?...

The Cold War at least compelled us to pay attention to the things our adversaries said about us. Contesting the Soviets for the allegiance of postwar Europe and the newly post-colonial nations of Africa and Asia involved more than economic aid, intelligence operations and military might. It also required us to live up to our ideals, to be that "city on a hill" that Ronald Reagan frequently evoked.

Enactment of the civil rights legislation of the '60s (which, ironically, Reagan opposed) immeasurably bolstered our claim that in the United States all men were created equal. Our assertion that the United States was a land of mass prosperity was surely strengthened by the three-decade boom that followed World War II, during which vastly more Americans went to and graduated from college than ever before, and median household incomes increased at the same rate as productivity. At the height of the Cold War, the whole world was watching us, and we rose to the occasion by expanding equality and prosperity.

With the collapse of Soviet communism, the idea that we were in some kind of systemic competition with another nation or system died for lack of a competitor. Radical Islam may pose the threat of terrorism, but it's hardly a rival for the world's allegiance. And in the halcyon days of the 1990s, China's mix of authoritarian communism and boomtown capitalism clearly struck America's business and political elites more as an investment opportunity than a systemic challenge -- an asinine misjudgment of globally historic dimensions.

But that was then. Today, China has emerged as a global economic powerhouse and political competitor. Unlike the Soviet Union, it does not seek to remake the world in its image, but neither is it a friend of democracy...

The Senate's descent into dysfunction, into a body bent on thwarting majority rule, mocks our democratic values for all the world to see.

In our intensifying contest with China, with much of the world still at stake, our first task is to demonstrate that democracy works. When we don't do so -- and John Roberts and Mitch McConnell, I'm talking to you and your fellow conservatives -- China wins.

Harold Meyerson has read my mind. What happened in the post-Cold War United States is that, without a big threat out there to keep us united, Americans started focusing on dividing up the pie instead of expanding it. That led directly to the sorry state in which we find ourselves today.

And conservatives bear 90% of the blame for this. Democrats have compromised again and again - reforming welfare in the 90s, keeping taxes low and regulations light, supporting the Iraq War, signing on to the Patriot Act, and offering up a health care plan that was invented by a conservative think tank in the 90s and implemented by a Republican governor in the 00s.

It wasn't enough for Republicans. They wanted - and want - nothing less than dynastic dominance, a permanent majority, and they were (and are) willing to use scorched-earth tactics to get it. They impeached Clinton, the most conservative Democratic president imaginable. They cut taxes and raised spending in the Bush years, pushing our country toward insolvency just to win a few elections. They called Democrats traitors and labeled them as weak in the wake of 9/11, after Democrats did their utmost to cooperate on security matters. And now they are pulling out all the stops to freeze government in the middle of our worst economic crisis since WW2, just to discredit the Obama administration.

Republicans are doing their utmost to bring down the American government. And I want to know why.

One possibility is that the Republicans are acting in defense of a single regional culture - the American South - which sees its way of life under critical threat from immigration and the internet. It might be that Southerners largely don't care if America triumphs on the international stage, if that victory costs them the sub-America they know and cherish.

Another possibility is that rich Republican backers care more about their relative wealth than the nation's absolute wealth - they want to turn our country into a Latin American type nation, with placid gated communities sectioned off from the teeming masses of anarchic slums.

But my guess is that most of it is due to a darker, more enduring, more powerful force - that is, force of habit. Conservatives held their movement (and Republicans their party) together for decades by playing up the liberal threat. With the Soviets gone, liberals became the Great Other, an army of fundamentally alien enemies dedicated to overthrowing and destroying all we hold dear. Conservatives worked night and day to convince Red America that it was fundamentally different from Blue America - that the hated liberals looked and talked different, had different families and traditions and values, and were in fact not Americans in the truest sense of the word. All BS, of course, but BS that was essential to holding conservatism together once the USSR went *poof*.

And then, when our magic moment of the 1990s ended, and real external rivals (especially China) once again reared their heads, the conservatives were stuck in civil war mode. They had whipped themselves into an apocalyptic frenzy. It was crunch time, all or nothing - the next 5 years (or the next 5, or the next) would decide Once And For All whether liberalism or conservatism would rule eternally. It was time to throw everything - over-the-top rhetoric, massive deficits, governmental paralysis, even threats of personal violence - into a last stand against The Liberal. The true external threats looming on the horizon were ignored.

This is what happens to countries in civil wars. It is what happened in the Russian Civil War, and in the Chinese Civil War, and in our own Civil War 150 years ago. But we are not in a real civil war today. There is still time for us to come back together and face the very real challenges in front of us. There is still time to knit Red and Blue America back into a single nation.

But conservatives have to want it.