2014: The World Has Stubbornly Refused to End

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

01 January 14

ell, it's going on two years now, so the Mayans must be finished paying off all the bets by now. The world has stubbornly refused to end; shortly before Christmas, Harold Camping, who made his career predicting that the Faithful all would be raptured off to glory on various shifting dates in 2011, cashed in himself at the age of 92. The world, at the age of 4.5 billion years, more or less, and increasingly depending on whether you're a Republican or not, has spun merrily around the sun one more time, and all of us are still here. We survive, but it's an open question whether or not we evolve.

It's not just the newly quantified stupid inherent in one half of our political system that bothers me, although knowing that an ever-increasing slice of one of our two political parties adheres to the biological principles of 1838 is worrisome. (What, for example, are they teaching their children? What will their children teach their own children? And on and on until half the country is painting in caves again.) It's that it's always been my conclusion that human evolution -- political, cultural, and social -- is tied to the impulse toward cooperation, or, in the case of our politics, the inclination toward commonwealth. Since I opened this pop stand two years ago, and since the Mayans were wrong and it kept going after 2012 closed, I have seen the country take a startling, and alarming, turn away from what I believed was an irresistable movement and, indeed, I have seen people actively campaign against it, conflating in their fevered minds what drove the signers of the Mayflower Compact with the ambitions of the Bolsheviki, and translating the first three words of the Constitution from "We, The People," to "I Got Mine."

This isn't another gloomy reiteration of the Bowling Alone argument, and it certainly isn't a call for the kind of "bipartisan" Tipandronnie moments that bring a flutter to the heart of David Gregory and a shiver up the leg of Chris Matthews. Politics is supposed to be loud. It is supposed to be rough. The marketplace of ideas is supposed to be a Moroccan bazaar, and not a quiet boutique along Rodeo Drive. We have differences, great differences, some of them (perhaps) unresolvable, about how this country should be governed through its politics. But what we cannot dispute among ourselves is that the country must be governed, and that it is our job to do it, and that we must find away to do it together. That's the charge laid upon us by the first three words of the Constitution, no matter what you read on Sarah Palin's Facebook page, or in the collected works of charlatan history produced by David Barton or Glenn Beck. We must take the job seriously; primary races like the one going on in the Republican party in Georgia, where the "moderate" candidate is the one who wants to put poor children to work as janitors in exchange for the school-lunch program, cannot continue to be allowed to be the rule, and not the exception.

We cannot allow the country to slouch further in the direction of plutocracy,an organized and gathering force in our politics that masquerades as a series of individual events, all of which (curiously) seem to move in the same general direction and produce the same general results. The foul tsunami of dark money into our politics that results in state legislature restricting the franchise, and courts that see the process producing those restrictions as being evidence that the country has reached the day of racial jubilee. There are still avenues available to us through which we might break the power of big money to break apart the political commonwealth, but big money is closer to doing that now than at any time since the last Gilded Age, and it is narrowing those avenues -- the courts, the state and national legislatures, the franchise, and even, through our increasingly privatized and militarized police forces, the power of direct action -- almost daily. We are coming to the hour of checkmate faster than we think we are.

We must a demand a national economy that recognizes the value to itself of a viable political commonwealth, that measures its success less in stock prices, and clever financial instruments, and private wealth, and the number of exploding unregulated fertilizer plants can be brought into a state by its sublet politicians, and more by the simple fact that businesses sell more of their products when people have money in their pockets to buy them. We must demand a national economy that belongs to us. And our politics are the only way for us to do that, so the battle against the power of organized money in our politics must have as its end a reabsorption of the national economy into the creative act of building the political commonwealth we must have to progress as a self-governing people.

We must demand a national government that works for us, that recognizes that, in a self-governing political commonwealth, "honesty" is not defined merely by refusing a bribe or declining to sell a political office. It also is defined by the recognition within the institutions of that government -- all the institutions of that government -- that they work for us, and that we have not only a right but also a positive obligation to know what is being done in our name. Everybody works for us, from the president to the mail carrier to the drone operator to the guy with the headphones in a cubicle at the NSA.

There is no way to do this without participating in our politics, which is the essential vehicle through which the creative work of building a political commonwealth is done, and which also is the primary fuel by which we keep what we build for us viable against the threats to it, which are unceasing, and which have not changed very much from the days in which the powdered wig crowd got together in Philadelphia in order to plot self-government in secret. This country was born in the conundrums it is still trying to solve, and it is in the act of working toward those solutions that this country is at its best. Those conundrums rarely have been more starkly drawn than they are today, at the dawn of the second year after we all proved that the Mayans miscalculated. We are a stubborn people in a stubborn country on a stubborn, spinning world. And we are all in that hard, bitter, but necessary work of being stubborn together. We should begin it again.

Here's to all of us.