Grassroots: The Big Con

My Progressive Populist column:

The Big Con

We have done great violence to ourselves.

I can’t think of a better way to describe the new American era. We have done violence to ourselves, shot ourselves in our collective foot, cut ourselves, inflicted unnecessary but potentially clarifying pain upon ourselves.

Perhaps I’m just a pessimist — or is it optimism, this sense that our retreat from reality may provide us with the first real clarity we as a nation have had in decades.

I write this just days before Donald Trump is to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. I write this as the Republicans begin an aggressive dismantling of the safety net, as nearly 20 million are to be stripped of their health insurance, as undocumented immigrants are about to face a purge, as efforts to ratchet up police power are being promised.

The press is under siege. Conflicts of interest are ignored. The truth — well, the truth has no bearing.

Read more here.

Here is a comment I just made on Facebook, which offers a bit of a preview of an upcoming column:

These are not normal times and this is not a normal presidency. We can’t fall into old habits, which is what helped drive the bus off the cliff in the first place. The simple dichotomy of R and D has blinded us to a pernicious authoritarian creep that has culminated with the current menace in the White House, but has its roots in the expanding powers granted to presidents over the last several decades. At the same time, the media has ceased to focus on things that matter, preferring to focus on the political back and forth, the insider-baseball stuff. the distractions, rather than the real questions of who wins and loses among American citizens when corporate power grows, when we allow a permanent war party to take hold of Washington and when the safety net is shredded. Our debates have been between centrists and the right, shifting the center ever rightward. Obama, after all, had considered a grand bargain to dismantle or severely gut Social Security, and the health care plan he created left the insurance industry essentially in charge. Glenn Greenwald‘s point the other day, which I used as a jumping off point for a column that will run in The Progressive Populist next month, that Trump did not arise out of nowhere is important. Trump is both culmination and aberration, and we have to attack the dangers he poses on both fronts. We have to cut off his political oxygen. He is outside of the mainstream, but also a product of its dysfunction.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet