Re: The Vital Center

(crossposted at the yip blog)

To add to the Chronicler's post on the vital center , this is a great piece by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. I just finished reading a book by Taibbi called The Great Derangement, where he infiltrates various American subcultures and reveals their tenuous grasp on reality-- Pastor John Hagee's fundamentalist christian church; the military; the 9/11 "truth" movement; and Congress itself. His thesis was that as America split further and further apart into various conspiracy theories and religious fantasies, the real threats to our nation--corporate control of government, idiotic wars, energy policy--were being ignored at our nation's peril.

So I was surprised to hear Taibbi sounding upbeat in his latest column, something he does not do once in his 300 page book (published in 2007, before the election). He makes some great points:

Like millions of Americans, I watched Barack Obama's victory on Election Night in a state of amazement.... Of all the problems facing this country by the end of the Bush years, the biggest is the absence of a unifying national idea. Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity. We tried being a "world policeman" in Somalia, which didn't work so well. We tried retaining our Cold War outlook by simply replacing communists with terrorists. We created two bubble economies that blew up in our faces, and headed into 2008 a struggling capitalist state with a massive trade deficit and an overtaxed military that suddenly had to ask itself: For the supposed world leader in the community of nations, what exactly is it that we're still good at? Who are we, and what do we represent to the peoples of the Earth here and now — not in 1775 Concord, or 1945 Paris, or 1969, from the surface of the moon?

When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.

In other words, the momentum has been taken away from the fringes and returned to the pragmatic, forward-thinking center. I might add that my own family has been a microcosm of this evolution. Before Obama came along, one voted for Bush, one was an eclectic libertarian, and a couple were not really that interested in politics. And somehow Obama got us all pulling, and literally working, in the same direction. Not that the Lindquist's are representative of the world, but......its not a bad start.