Why America is Starting to Burn: Political Gridlock and Violent Insurrection

Just the other day I wrote a letter to my representative in Congress, a Democratic with a solidly left-of-center voting record. The letter was about a bill called the Clean Water Protection Act (HR 1310), which would severely limit the egregious practice of mountaintop removal in Appalachia and help ensure better access to clean drinking water. Though not an Appalachian resident myself, I live in a state – California – with constant water problems, and thus could appreciate the need for the legislation. Yet as I dropped the letter in the mailbox, I couldn’t help but feel that I had probably wasted my time with my little exercise in the democratic process. What good was my letter going to do? If HR 1310 is brought to a vote in the less gridlocked House of Representatives it will probably pass, and my representative will probably vote for it. But what chance does it have of escaping Republican filibuster in the Senate? The GOP caucus there, which has made a point of blocking almost every bit of Democratic legislation no matter how moderate, will surely not have mercy on an anti-corporate bill such as this. And when you look at it that way, the hour I spent at my computer describing the evils of mountaintop removal was an hour I could have spent doing almost anything else and probably getting better results.

The American people as a whole have far less esoteric political concerns than the environmental destruction of Appalachia, but they seem to share my feelings of despair and hopelessness over the issues that matter most to them. On every topic of relevance to the average, everyday American citizen – especially health care reform and the economy – there has been almost no movement from our perpetually deadlocked government. It has become such a regular ritual that the script for it is a cliche-ridden as any big budget summer blockbuster. Whatever the issue of the moment is, the Republicans in Congress will shriek and moan about deficits and socialism. President Obama will try to act statesmanlike and above the fray, while Democrats in Congress will try to appease their colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Then, once the concessions are made, the Republicans will stop cooperating and the Democrats will be left scratching their heads as to why their friends refuse to play nice with them. To official Washington this is all game. It has lengthy written rules but comes with an unofficial strategy guide that tells players how to get the most points – er, votes and campaign contributions – by using lobbyists and the media to maximum effect. And through the ability of lawmakers to become lobbyists themselves, or to sign up with corporate America afterwords, it’s rarely “game over” even when they lose. The rest of us, those who need health insurance or who were dependent upon the continued unemployment benefits that Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) decided he wanted to block, have no guarantee of a second chance.

It is the gridlock of our political system, with those never ending games and the inability for anything constructive to get done, that breeds frustration, disillusionment and cynicism. And it is increasingly breeding violence. It is an ominous moment when a nation’s collective mood can be measured by the number and severity of violent, politically motivated incidents, and by that standard we can fairly judge the American people to be both angry at the government’s inability to get anything done and yet confused about what to do with that anger. The recent small wave of violent attacks, the latest being the March 4 attack on the Pentagon, has shown the anger that is boiling out there, but the manner in which they have been carried out – all were committed by lone perpetrators who managed to inflict relatively little damage – show the confusion, for the man who who shot two police officers at the Pentagon and the man who crashed his private plane into the Austin, Texas offices of the IRS both chose to go out like mosquitoes daring to challenge a bug zapper. Both of them betrayed, in their individual ways, a belief that that the United States was controlled by elites who did not care about the lives and well-being of common men like them. “Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?  Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies,” wrote IRS kamikaze Joseph Stack, while Pentagon gunman John Patrick Bedell believed that the United States was controlled by a “coup regime” that had been running the show for decades. While Bedell has mostly been written off as a nut who seems to have suffered from mental illness, Stack’s furious actions led to praise from plenty of right wing commentators and even a sort of sympathy from many liberals.

The danger that we now face as a nation is the danger that those who are inclined to violence, those who are willing to attempt murder, revolution and insurrection, will not only realize that they can do much more damage by working together but that they will also find support from a growing section of the population. The active support of the population, or at least a section of it, has always been the sustaining force for an insurgency. And if political progress is not made, if the political system remains paralyzed and unable to address the needs of the citizens of America, radical anti-government groups will eventually find that support. We progressives can talk about racism, anti-government paranoia and religious fervor all we want. These forces may sustain the hardcore base of the Tea Party movement, but it is the sense of abject hopelessness that I felt in mailing my letter that has allowed the movement to grow beyond that core. How else do we explain the fact that Tea Party groups are full of adherents who were never particularly interested in politics, but who got involved after they lost their jobs or their homes? “…Some Tea Party groups are essentially appendages of the local Republican Party. But most are not,” wrote David Barstow in a lengthy expose of the Tea Party movement for the New York Times. “They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.”

In other words, these are people who have belatedly woken up to the fact that Washington does not particularly care if they live or die, starve or prosper. They have woken up to the fact that any initiative that benefits them is going to fail. They have woken up to the realization that anything that’s good for them is going to be blocked by the vested interests who really run this country. These are realizations that progressives have been trying to convince these ordinary people of for years. Now the extreme right wing has beaten us to it. And now, by their refusal to seriously address the problems that plague our nation, official Washington has all but handed the initiative to the extremists who increasingly advocate violence. If you are suffering from injustice, if you no longer feel that the normal mechanisms of democracy are worth anything, if you feel that your life is controlled by a cartel of elites out to better themselves at your expense, if you feel that normal political activism is impotent to solve these problems, then violence doesn’t start to look so unreasonable. We may shake our heads at the craziness of the Tea Party crowd, but the fact is that this sense of hopelessness has become prevalent within the progressive movement as well. Every progressive reading this knows what I mean. After eight years of Bush the traitor and a full year of Obama the coward, it can be expected that a lot of us feel like there is no longer any point in trying to change things through the democratic process. So the risk is not just that conservatives will turn to violence, but that frustrated liberals will eventually join in. After all, both the progressive movement and the Tea Party movement share an agreement that elites have hijacked the United States, even though we often disagree on who those elites are.

In large part it was the stagnation of politics in the United States that led to the American Civil War, for the question of slavery became impossible to resolve through ordinary democratic means. Contrary to what the grade school history books might imply, slavery was not a single issue that could be put it a box and isolated from everything else. It was an issue that overlapped with many other areas of policy. When the slavery question become so red hot with partisan rancor that it became untouchable and unmovable it was those other areas of policy that became gridlocked as well. The slavery question affected interstate commerce, law enforcement and judicial policy and even foreign policy (should we recognize Haiti, a country that gained it independence through a slave uprising?). But it was the expansion of the United States, the acquisition of new territories and the process of preparing them for statehood that caused the most problems. Keeping in mind the ability of Congress to eliminate slavery and the tenuous balance of power between them and the free states, the slave states fervently worked to make sure as many of the new states as possible became slave states. Northern activists wanted them all to be free states, but the south would settle for the addition of new free states only if new slave states were added to counter-balance them, and only reluctantly at that. The abolitionists could make no headway in eliminating slavery and the slavery advocates could only defend the status quo, and felt increasingly insecure about doing that. Even when Congress was able to enact major legislation on the slavery issue – particularly the compromises of 1820, 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 – the results still failed to placate the growing number of hardliners on either side for very long.

Through their inability to deal with the slavery problem, what the politicians essentially did was hand the initiative to the extremists on both sides, who turned to violence with the passing of the aforementioned Kansas-Nebraska Act. That legislation allowed the question of slavery in the Kansas Territory to be decided by the settlers there, with the result that the territory was invaded by both radical abolitionists and pro-slavery zealots. “Bleeding Kansas” it was called, and dozens on both sides were killed in the years that followed. One of the abolitionist fighters was a man named John Brown, who would resurface in 1859 as a failed revolutionary when he and a small band of followers seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, and was then ignobly captured by a military force under the command of one Robert E. Lee, then a colonel in the United States Army (Brown was eventually hung by the state of Virginia). Brown’s goal had been to destroy slavery by freeing plantation slaves and arming them, collapsing the economic system of the south. He didn’t even come close to achieving that with his “revolt”, but the fact that he had even attempted was enough to push the southern states closer to secession, and to spur them to start modernizing their militia system, which is considered by historians to have been the real start of the Confederate Army. It should also be noted that, like the fawning admiration over Joseph Stack’s suicide attack on the IRS, John Brown’s raid was publicly applauded by some men who should have known better.

Of course, one can make the argument that, had the abolitionists been making genuine political progress it would have simply pushed the south closer to secession earlier, or, had the south been expanding slavery more successfully, it simply would have pushed radical abolitionists to become more militant, more early. Both of these assertions are probably true, but they also irrelevant at the moment. Both sides were reacting to the fact that politics could no longer provide the means to address their most pressing concerns. I certainly do not imply any moral equivalency, in any direction, between abolitionists, slavers, modern progressives and the Tea Party movement. But what happened a hundred and fifty years ago still holds relevance today as an example of the consequences of political stagnation.

While I hate their violent rhetoric and some of their more extreme beliefs, I can’t but help admire the Tea Party movement. These are people who have realized that they are being screwed by someone and are actually willing to stand up for themselves. The contrast with our pathetic, de-energized progressive movement could not be more stark. Even if the Tea Party is blaming the wrong people for the screwing, their determination and organization has been admirable. And even though I am contemptuous towards much of their ideology, I am far more contemptuous towards those narcissistic, self-serving politicians that continue to play their games at the expense of everyone else and do nothing while the country starts to burn. As distasteful as hate and paranoia are, I find the greed and hypocrisy of official Washington to be far more loathsome. If the Republicans and Democrats don’t wake up and get the country moving again, a second civil war may indeed be our fate. Perhaps what is most ominous is the way that so many Republican leaders, in their smarmy, I-know-something-you-don’t manner, seem to gleefully regard the Tea Party movement as their ace in the hole, something that they can control and manipulate for electoral success, in spite of the fact that large swaths of the Tea Party crowd have come to (correctly) realize that the GOP isn’t really their friend. If the day ever comes when war tears across the fabric of American society, I have a feeling that a lot of those Republicans will be shocked to discover that the guns are pointed at them as well.