It All Feels So Past Tense

David Michael Green, professor of political science at Hofstra University, writes (read the whole thing at the link--it's well worth it):

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which proposing
a new and better version of corporate-plunder masquerading as national
healthcare gets you burned in effigy for being a socialist stooge by gun-toting
angry mobs.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which the
same people who hate you for being a socialist simultaneously hate you for being
a fascist.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which angry
mobs of supposed anti-socialist demonstrators scream at their congressional
representatives to “keep your government hands off my Medicare”.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which claims
that the government is going to start killing off seniors are taken seriously by
tens of millions of people.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which people
are all worked up about government czars, but sat silently while the Bush
administration destroyed the Bill of Rights and used a thousand signing
statements to write Congress out of the Constitution.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which deficits
have all of a sudden become the source of enormous anger among people who said
nothing about them previously, as the tax cuts for the wealthy, off-budget wars
based on lies, and unfunded prescription drug Big Pharma giveaway transmogrified
the biggest surplus in American history into the biggest deficit ever.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which
politicians can rant incessantly about other peoples’ sexual morality, get
caught screwing prostitutes, and then still be reelected to the highest ranks of
government by trashing the president.

I could go on and on, but what would be the point? The positions of
so many Americans on so many policy questions are truly inane – yes, for
sure. I wish that was all that concerned me. But it all goes so much
deeper than that.

The entire premise of a self-ruling democracy rests on some reasonable
degree of rationality and some reasonable degree of an ability to discriminate
between real information and falsehoods. Today’s American democracy seems
to lack these qualities in increasingly abundant amounts.And yet it goes deeper
than that still. The entire premise of a society – any society, democracy
or not – is that it possesses a certain degree of shared community, a ‘we-ness’
that transcends narrower tribalisms and self-interest in critical ways and at
critical moments. That too has unraveled of late. Think of the nice
white men with shotguns blocking the exit from flooded New Orleans during the
worst moments of Hurricane Katrina.

Looking at America today, it all feels so very past tense to me.