It’s a damn fascinating time for the social art of protest. We’re living in an era when coordinated protest is arguably more effective than it has ever been. Even in cases much smaller and less drastic than the instantly legendary Arab Spring, the speed and power of mass demonstration is pretty staggering. Consider the outcry over the proposed debit card fees the likes of Bank of America attempted to institute toward the end of 2011. The protest was so quick, so well coordinated and so plugged into the media stream that it actually compelled change almost immediately. The mass exodus of customers to credit unions and small, local banks helped, but even that direct action wouldn’t have been as vast without the mass communication available to the millions of little guys and girls affected by the fees.

The recent hullabaloo surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act is a similar, though not identical, case. Those two pieces of legislation have been fuel to the fire of Internet activism from the moment they hit newsfeeds, but the blaze burned especially hot this week as the debates in the Senate and House over the bills drew near. It wasn’t just the little folks protesting a perceived injustice this time. Big organizations like Wikipedia, WordPress and Google made sure to put their displeasure in the headlines, some with more drastic action than others. The end result? Both bills have been shelved.

That’s great for the opponents of SOPA and PIPA, but it’s not the end and they know it. The protests aren’t ending because the bills haven’t been killed yet. The few supporters they still have in Congress may try to revive them when the furor has died down. Of course, that’s assuming it will die down.

This gets at the core of why SOPA and PIPA are poorly constructed bits of legislation. The people who wrote and sponsored them simply don’t understand the Internet. Folks on the Web don’t… let things go very easily. It’s not like the mainstream news cycle. Trending stories, however ephemeral they seem, don’t vanish from the docket when they’re no longer fresh. Websites stay live, forums keep fomenting debate and the protest stays active, if even in a semi-dormant form. Right now the lion’s share of the independent video games industry (the fastest growing segment of the games industry as a whole) is coordinating a boycott of E3, the most important and profitable gaming convention of the year. They’re doing so because the lobbyists for most AAA game publishers haven’t withdrawn their support for the now torpid copyright bills. They’re keeping the discussion rolling, which is all it takes to launch an entirely new campaign of protest should SOPA, PIPA or any similar legislation rise again.

Even as the federal government cracks down symbolically on Megaupload, one of countless streaming services on the Internet, there’s a sense that the interests behind Internet censorship are fighting a force that’s too large and well organized to overcome. In America, our legislators don’t know how the deepest parts of Internet culture work, so they don’t anticipate the backlash they’ll receive whenever a corporate body tries to make bank on a new set of laws to the detriment of everything the current Internet stands for. Since it’s not likely the politicians who hop aboard the bad-ideas-on-wheels that are SOPA, PIPA and other such misinformed bills are going to become more Web-savvy any time soon, it seems like we’ll be stuck in the cycle of lobbying and protest for the foreseeable future. The protesters certainly aren’t hanging up their hats yet, or possibly ever.

Finally, some voting! (Well, some caucusing, really, but it’s practically the same thing.) Tuesday’s evening of Republican politicking in Iowa told us little to nothing we didn’t already know about the GOP field, but it did leave a distinct impression about the party’s base – a distinct odor, really. It’s the whiff of desperation, the stench of a mob that has worked itself into a sweat railing against all the stuff it doesn’t want … but can’t begin to agree on what it does want.

And how is a party that can’t answer a simple question – what, exactly, are you for? – supposed to run a country?

The issues that divided the Iowans who voted variously for Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are not small ones, and my guess is that they won’t be resolved quickly or easily. That’s not to say the GOP nominating contest will drag on terribly long, or be particularly suspenseful; my guess is that Romney, coming out of next week’s big win in New Hampshire, will simply out-organize and outspend the poorly funded (and that’s being generous) Santorum into submission by the end of the month. Romney may not win South Carolina – who will win it is anybody’s guess, and doesn’t really matter — but once Floridians vote in late January Romney will be able to coast into the summer, with Paul serving as little more than the belligerent schnauzer nipping at his heels.

That’s the way Republicans do things, organizationally speaking – they coalesce early, and move on to the bigger fight. But that’s the easy part – the establishment settling on a frontrunner and clearing his path. The trouble is that the frontrunner isn’t really the man for his moment. Has there ever been such a disconnect between the obvious passions of a party’s base and the wishy-washy lethargy of its likely standard-bearer? Even John Kerry had more of a purchase on his party’s ideals than does poor Mitt — who, according to a healthy majority of Republicans, may as well be John Kerry.

Iowa did the party no favors by spending six months sifting through one non-Mitt after another before finding a wingnut who couldn’t be grounded before caucus night. Really, it’s just Santorum’s dumb luck that he was the last bit of fetid, right-wing cream to rise to the top after Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich had all been skimmed. (What other metaphors can I offer – musical chairs, perhaps?) It’s not that Santorum is any more electable than the others¸ or less anachronistic in linking tired and failed ideas to bizarre bellicosity. It’s just that Iowans ran out of time while he was taking his turn atop the leader board. My guess is that Santorum’s social-conservative extremism won’t survive a week of media scrutiny or super-PAC bludgeoning – not that it matters, since Santorum is practically penniless and couldn’t begin to staff up in time to take advantage of his moment in the spotlight.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul sits atop his bizarre human pyramid of cranks and contrarians, assured of a steady 20 percent of the GOP electorate … but with no hope of expanding on that rabid base to become a real factor in the national race. Paul is attracting, in a funhouse-mirror sort of way, the kind of devotion that President Obama did back in 2008 – becoming a magnet for young people and anti-establishment types who are (in many cases) simply looking for an alternative to the people and ideas that have been spoon-fed to them. Of course, that’s where the similarities end between Obama’s appeal and Paul’s – not least because, while the power of Obama’s charisma and the mainstream appeal of his ideas enabled him to build a level of support that could beat Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, Paul has all the personal appeal of a dungeness crab, not to mention foreign-policy ideas that are only attractive until one spends five seconds considering their consequences. And then, of course, there’s Paul’s history of racism and the other enormous character flaws that those 20 percent of Republicans can choose to ignore, but no one else will. (Not that Randian selfishness isn’t a character flaw in itself, but I digress.)

Still, Paul’s staunch libertarianism – aside from his hypocritical stance on abortion – represents the id of contemporary wild-eyed conservatism, at least in terms of his domestic-policy ideas. End the Fed! Slash a trillion from the budget indiscriminately on Day One! Delete all regulations from the books! And you can bet that for every Republican who does support him, there are two or three who would love to do so, if only he would throttle back the isolationism and cheer up a little. (Or shave 20 years off his age, or grow a head of hair like Mitt’s, or lose that screech-owl voice. The racism, they can live with.)

As for Senator Holier-Than-Thou, it’s actually surprising that Iowa’s multitudinous social conservatives took so long to come around to him – or at least it’s surprising that they bothered kicking the tires on Cain and Gingrich for four months instead of moving directly from Perry to Santorum as the anti-Romney. Once Perry disqualified himself with his cowboy-Mr. Magoo act during the debates, Santorum became the obvious heir to Mike Huckabee – except, of course, for the fact that Santorum is a far less charismatic (though far more doctrinaire) bearer of the Falwell flame than the Huck was in ’08.

The person for whom I feel the most sympathy this week is, surprisingly, Bachmann, who saw the writing on the wall Wednesday morning and dropped out. Alone among the discarded anti-Mitts, the winner of the August straw poll didn’t really do anything to render herself unelectable (among Republicans, I mean – she’s horrifyingly unelectable in the real world). She merely was rendered an afterthought when the Perry campaign supernova’d, and she never regained her footing. She was perhaps the only candidate who might have found the sweet spot between Paul and Santorum’s constituencies, but this may not be the year when that particular twain shall meet.

So instead we have Paul inspiring the rabidly anti-government, Remember-Waco! set, and we have Santorum (for now) clutching the barely-beating hearts of his fellow fundamentalist scolds. Where does that leave Romney? The last two “movement conservatives” to win the White House, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, succeeded in tying the GOP’s small-government and social-conservative wings into a tidy bow of shared support – but so far in 2012 both those wings eye Mitt with the sort of suspicion and distaste with which a cotton farmer regards the season’s first boll weevil. As I said earlier, it seems pretty clear that Romney will be able to super-PAC his way to the nomination with little more messaging than “I alone can beat Obama.” But that will leave a key question for the general election: Can a man who inspires no passion – and who instead instills a sort of dread among those who should be a Republican nominee’s most ardent followers – actually pull enough voters to the polls to defeat an incumbent president?

Under fairly similar circumstances – facing presidents who were broadly loathed by the opposition’s base – both Bob Dole (in 1996) and Romney’s Democratic doppelganger, Kerry, discovered that the answer was “no.” (Of course, neither Bill Clinton nor W. was facing the kind of economic doldrums Obama faces, but that’s a topic for another day.) As for this column, I have one more tortured metaphor to offer: As Republicans have finally begun casting ballots this winter, Romney finds himself in the position of an animal trainer at the circus, locked in the ring with a pair of ravenous tigers just captured from the wild. One of two things is going to happen by November: Either Romney is going to figure out how to ride those tigers, or they’re going to eat him alive. At the moment I wouldn’t bet on either outcome, but it would help if Romney had a whip.

One more bit of information worth noting: In a year in which Republicans are supposed to be ginned up beyond belief to flock to the polls and swamp Obama, turnout on Tuesday was very close to what it was for Republicans in 2008 — which was about half the size of the Democratic turnout that year. Is that a reflection on the candidates, or evidence that Republicans are simply far louder than they are numerous?

Last weekend I had dinner with a friend who recently has been surprised to find the ideological ground shifting beneath his feet. A libertarian at heart – fiscally conservative, socially liberal, somewhat obsessed with “freedom” (whatever that is) – he has voted Republican far more often than Democratic. Two years ago he became enamored of the burgeoning tea-party movement because he reviled President Obama and Congress’s plans to spend untold billions on stimulus and healthcare, and especially because he loathed the collusion between politicians and the banks that had tanked the economy in 2008.

More recently, though, he has watched as the tea party’s initial focus has been diluted by religious-right social activism and endless I-hate-Obama partisanship, and as its objectives have been co-opted by the business interests that dominate the Republican Party. While Ron Paul remains his favorite Republican candidate, he finds that his biggest complaint about Obama these days is that the president is too much of a “corporatist” to rise to our current challenges – language that belongs more to Ralph Nader than to the eyebrow-enhanced Paul. And, perhaps most surprising, over the last few weeks he has become an ardent cheerleader for the Occupy Wall Street movement. He likes its focus on corporate misbehavior, an emphasis he wishes the tea party hadn’t abandoned, and says he hopes OWS might somehow break business’ stranglehold over policymaking.

My friend, in all his mixed-up glory, is on to something. When you listen to the mainstream media, you don’t hear much sympathy from tea party supporters for Occupy Wall Street, or vice versa. But ever since OWS began a month ago as a few dozen people refusing to leave a downtown park, I’ve found myself wondering, why not? Might these two groups find areas of common interest on which they can work together? And if they could do that, how much might they accomplish that neither side can hope to achieve alone?

On the surface, the goals of the tea party (such as they have become) and Occupy Wall Street (amorphous as they remain) couldn’t be more different. Tea partiers, after sublimating their early anti-bailouts focus, have targeted their furor in a more traditional, anti-Washington direction — albeit with newfangled “constitutional” trappings and an amped-up concern for deficits and debt. OWS, on the other hand, is chiefly concerned with those Americans (middle class and otherwise) who are left out of the tea party’s calculus: The millions whose ambitions and earning potential are being thwarted by a system that demands a smarter workforce, but doesn’t create enough (or good-enough) jobs to enable college graduates to pay off their student loans. The homeowners who were pushed into suspect mortgages during the go-go ’00s, then weren’t bailed out when the banks were. And the millions whose livelihoods have been threatened by corporations that enrich executives and shareholders while cutting “head count” and benefits, sending jobs overseas, and gaming the government to minimize their tax burdens and avoid accountability for their screw-ups.

The vague outcomes sought by OWS – a more equitable carving up of the economic pie, and a society that values the well-being of the 99 as well as the 1 – would doubtless require a slew of new taxes on the wealthy, new spending to alleviate poverty, new policies aimed at improving the lots of everyone from illegal immigrants to folks whose mortgages are under water, and new regulations that limit corporations’ ability to (generally speaking) forsake the public interest in pursuit of grotesque profits. All of which are anathema to the tea party, of course.

Let’s face one important fact: In the previous two paragraphs, you could replace every instance of the phrases “tea party” and “Occupy Wall Street” with the words “conservative” and “liberal,” and you’d have a fair summation of the ideological chasm that has driven American debate since 1932. Considering the polarization that bogs down our politics, and the near death of compromise as an acceptable policy outcome, it’s difficult to imagine that a tea party-OWS coalition might agree on solutions to the policy issues that vex us.

However, there’s one key trait that links the two movements – one that just might extract us from our corporate/banking/political quagmire — and that is their anti-establishment roots. Tea partiers haven’t been afraid to challenge moderate politicians favored by the GOP poobahs, and tea party congressmen have been giving John Boehner fits all year. Meanwhile, OWS has emerged from the populist left, and the Obama administration has no clue how to harness it – not after turning healthcare reform into an insurance-lobby giveaway, turning the SEC and Justice Department’s attention away from dozens of Wall Street criminals, and giving away most of the store on Dodd-Frank in order to appease the banking interests who funded Obama in ’08. (New York Fed alum Timothy Geithner doesn’t have a populist bone in his body, anyway.)

The GOP establishment may have succeeded recently in distracting tea partiers’ ire away from the banks, but that movement’s “big bang” remains the TARP legislation of 2008, which revealed the unholy alliance between the government and financial institutions – a cesspool of lobbying and shady deals, with execs lining up to pass through an incestuous revolving door linking Wall Street, K Street, and the Treasury Department. The bank bust and TARP — plus three years of watching Congress fail to make economic progress with its lame half-measures, watching business rake in record profits while refusing to re-invest, and watching the nation’s income disparity grow more and more obscene – have now served as the “big bang” for OWS, as well.

The root of all those evils – and the issue on which the anti-establishment twain just might meet – is the confluence of money and politics. It’s time to recognize that the damage done to American democracy by our pay-to-play system of campaign financing and interest-group lobbying, which first exploded during Watergate, is at a similar crisis point now – exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s absurd, plutocratic decision in the Citizens United case. We actually may be in an even worse place than Watergate, because it’s not simply an administration that’s on the verge of going down. It’s our entire economy.

We The People occasionally rise up on Election Day and believe we have overturned the political order — in fact, it’s happened twice in the last five years — but then we watch helplessly as our politicians and business leaders resume their mutual lap dance. It’s an arrangement that benefits incumbents in both parties who have elections to win, sweetheart deals and earmarks to offer, and little time to make up their own minds on the issues of the day … much less write their own bills to police the financial and industrial sectors. It benefits the banking and corporate elites – and occasionally, depending on who holds power, the labor unions and various interest groups — who have money to burn on campaign contributions and lobbyists, and who are constantly in search of ways to leverage that cash to manipulate lawmakers. And it benefits … just about nobody else. Not the working class, certainly. And, these days, not even the middle-class families once so fetishized by politicians from Reagan to Clinton.

Just as, two years ago, the more conservative among those middle-class voters gravitated toward the tea party, right now the more progressive ones are getting ginned up over OWS. Each group wants a profoundly different outcome – but neither is going to get anywhere near it as long as Washington and Wall Street continue to 69 on the other side of a very pricey peephole.

Considering the current Supreme Court’s antagonism toward middle-class interests, even a broad-based alliance between tea partiers and OWS types is unlikely to forge real campaign-finance reform – at least not without a constitutional amendment that bans large donations and institutes strict public-financing rules. (As anyone who watched Ken Burns’ Prohibition documentary knows, fomenting support for such an amendment from the grass roots is possible, but can require decades of struggle.) In the meantime, though, both sides working together might use their populist strength – and the power of the primary election — to force lawmakers into implementing outright bans on gifts, junkets, plane rides and other goodies provided by lobbyists, and also into disbanding their own political action committees and unilaterally rejecting campaign funds from corporations and special-interest PACS, if not big checks entirely.

Getting big money out of politics certainly appeals to OWS activists, who seek to deny corporations their current kung-fu grip over our legislative process. It should also appeal to tea partiers, who repeatedly express interest in curbing the power of incumbency and who insist that politicians “listen to the American people.” If these two groups could recognize this shared interest, perhaps their joined forces could remake American campaigns and governance, and restore a modicum of political power to the masses. Then they could go back to ideological war, and let the most convincing arguments (rather than the most cash-infused candidates) win.

Will it ever happen? Probably not. Too many Americans have their ideological blinders too firmly attached to find common ground on even this one issue. And asking the voting multitudes to see through the Matrix of money and power in Washington is like asking the entire nation to subscribe to the Utne Reader. It’s one thing for the tea party base to push back so instinctively against the corporatist Mitt Romney that even Herman Cain can lead the polls; it’s another thing to imagine them joining forces with folks they’re currently mocking with calls to “put down the bongo drums and get a job.” And those crowds in Lower Manhattan might relocate en masse to Denmark before they’d make a deal with that rabble who get off on depicting their president with a bone through his nose.

What’s more likely is that, just as the tea party is slowly but surely being subsumed within the GOP, Occupy Wall Street eventually will become the activist arm of the Democratic Party. Lawmakers will pay increased lip service to the populism on both sides, while continuing to rake in dollars and watered-down drinks from the corporations, banks and special interests who really control our politics. In exchange, we’ll continue to get watered-down domestic legislation that can’t break a filibuster, and wouldn’t really change anything if it did. And the rich will get richer, and the middle class will shrivel like Barry Bonds’ balls.

Somebody, please, prove me wrong.

I’m not going to launch into an elaborate introduction about Steve Jobs’ death. You know it happened; you can consume facts and opinion about it, and share your own thoughts, here at Popdose and all over every communications medium around the globe. What I’m interested in, for the purpose of this column, is: Why have we invested so much (figuratively, though also literally) in this guy? And why does his loss resonate so deeply among us?

The easy answer is, because he made our lives better. Here was a guy who basically invented personal computing as we know it, then 15 years later transformed the way we listen to music — and then, within a decade after that, gave us a pair of devices whose functions expand infinitely upon those two previous innovations, and whose implications we’re only beginning to figure out. (Of course, he also practically invented “planned obsolescence,” but that’s another story.)

OK, simple enough. But some questions remain: Why have we attached such importance to the loss of this one individual, when we know that Apple will continue as a multinational conglomerate that dominates the field of hand-held communication and personal entertainment? Why, at a time when Americans’ default position is to suspect the worst of practically every prominent institution and powerful person, do we lionize Jobs to the degree that we do? And why does the timing of his death only seem to magnify the profound meaning of his life?

The cynical, yet indubitably correct, answer to the first two questions is: marketing. Steve Jobs was Apple, in the public’s mind – and that’s precisely the way he and Apple’s marketers planned it, over more than a quarter century of invention, manufacturing and selling. Intuitively, we all know that Jobs didn’t spend his days donning that white spacesuit folks wear when they head into the clean room to play around with computer chips. Yet, thanks in large part to a cadre of marketing geniuses (and his willingness to attach his own face and reputation to his products), he will go down in history with the greatest of American inventors, with Benjamin Franklin and Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Nobody knows the names of the R&D guys at Sony who invented the Walkman or the Trinitron; Bill Gates, household name though he is, has an altogether more complicated legacy. But Jobs will live on in our hearts, as well as our earbuds.

As for that third question … I find it profoundly interesting that at the moment of Jobs’ death, the news media are abuzz over a nascent movement that is calling into serious question the efficacy, and indeed the morality, of American business. Sure, Occupy Wall Street is primarily about the banks and bankers who have enriched themselves through risky and fraudulent ventures while bringing the economy to the brink of ruin. And it’s about the politicians who have allowed this to happen, through deregulation and fiscal policies that for three decades have benefited the few at the expense of the many.

But it’s also about every large, faceless corporation that has spent the last decade downsizing, moving jobs overseas, slashing worker benefits, and otherwise gearing its operations to enrich shareholders and top executives rather than to keep American employees working and thriving. It’s about every corporation that’s currently hoarding giant wads of cash that it should be investing in new plants and equipment, and new hires that might help get this nation’s economy moving rather than stagnating. It’s about overpaid CEOs whining about “uncertainty,” which is code for “we’re holding the economy hostage until somebody in Washington guts our industries’ regulations and guarantees our taxes won’t go up, ever.”

Occupy Wall Street somehow doesn’t feel like it’s about Apple, though, and it isn’t about Steve Jobs. (It is about Gates and Microsoft, and our long memories of that company’s attempts to monopolize the market for operating systems and internet browsers, and otherwise thwart competition in the Silicon Valley.) No one has ever gained much traction painting Apple as a poster child for bad corporate behavior. We have tended to forget, or ignore, the fact that iPods and iPhones and iPads are made in China, just like so many other all-American products. We ignore the reports of terrible conditions at the factory that manufactures those gadgets – workers earning 51 cents an hour, even below normal Chinese standards, and guards carrying machine guns. Those conditions are so bad that last year more than a dozen workers took their own lives by jumping off the roof. (So many others attempted to do so that management strung netting between buildings to catch the jumpers.) Now the company is planning to put all those malcontents out of work … and move its plant to another part of China where employees will accept even less than 51 cents.

We largely ignored Teamsters president James Hoffa, just last month, when he noted that Apple has been sitting on cash reserves of $76 billion while investing practically nothing in the U.S. (those sleek and absurdly busy stores in every major shopping mall notwithstanding). And we certainly didn’t begrudge Jobs his personal fortune of $6 billion or so, which will now be distributed by his estate – rather little of it to the government through “death taxes,” no doubt.

Somehow it seems painful, blasphemous, disrespectful of the dead, just to mention this stuff. Nevertheless, it’s all there in the public record. But we won’t pay much mind to it as we memorialize Steve Jobs in the coming days. Perhaps Apple’s long standing as the underdog in the computing industry, with sales lagging far behind PCs even as everybody acknowledged the higher quality of Apple’s products, inoculated the company against the ill will we’re happy to heap upon Microsoft. (Or upon Dell and Hewlett Packard, which share that Chinese factory complex with Apple.) Perhaps Jobs’ long and public illness gave him a halo that extended to his entire company.

More likely, we’ll forgive Jobs his sins – heck, we don’t have to forgive them; we’ve rarely even noticed them – because he gave us what we want. Every year or so, we could count on him strolling out on a stage and introducing some new (or newly revamped) gadget that would become our national obsession, and that would conquer all competitors via its intuitive design and sheer ease of use. He did this better than anyone else ever has, really – and, more than we do with any other product on the market, we have associated our enjoyment of (and increasing reliance on) our Apple toys with Jobs himself. Because of him, Apple has not been a faceless corporation whose Up in the Air outsourcing we impugn or whose anonymous machinations we suspect; because we are so devoted to the products of his invention, we’ve never been inclined to look our (pricey) gifts in the mouth anyway.

So what do we do with ourselves now? It’s somehow fitting that, the day before Jobs’ death, Apple executed a product rollout that seemed anticlimactic, if not disappointing. Who wants an iPhone 4S for Christmas when we all thought an iPhone 5 was coming? Perhaps Jobs might have put it across more effectively, if he rather than some other guy had strolled out onstage to introduce it Tuesday afternoon. But now that Jobs is gone, we have already begun to suspect that Apple’s innovation is bound to lag – and if our fears prove correct, perhaps the time will come to look into that Chinese factory and $76 billion bank account a bit more closely.

For now, though, rest in peace, Steve. From this day forward, I dedicate my every game of Angry Birds to your memory.

One of the most common tropes in the action-adventure film – particularly the comic actioner – is the car (or train, or bus) that careens toward the cliff/riverbank/unfinished bridge and screeches to a stop just before it’s too late. As the vehicle dangles on the precipice, the passengers scramble out the back to safety, then turn around to contemplate the disaster that might have been. Sometimes their ride home stays put … and sometimes it tumbles into the abyss.

Teafoxlicans were gambling on that first outcome this summer as they played out their scenario over the debt ceiling, putting the pedal to the metal on the nation’s financial well-being and demanding a ransom in the trillions (spending cuts only!) before they would hit the brakes and avoid a devastating default. Early last week they finally got their deal, left the car teetering on the brink, and climbed out the back, fully expecting that they’d be able to drive home later. Instead, it now seems clear that the car has gone over the cliff – with your 401k and mine inside.

Of course, there are other action-pic metaphors I could have chosen – the bitter climax of the atrocious Perfect Storm, perhaps, when the sun comes out briefly but then disappears, and Clooney turns to Wahlberg and grimly intones, “She’s not gonna let us out.” (Those of us peering into the bleak future might quote John C. Reilly’s so-bad-they’re-horrible final words before being swallowed up by the drink: “This is gonna be hard on my little boy.”)

Right wingers have lashed out in fury this past week at those who have taken to calling them “hostage takers” and “economic terrorists.” Still, to beat the action-flick metaphor just a bit more firmly into the ground, I might suggest that when GOP leaders famously showed their House colleagues a clip from The Town to gird them for the final debt-ceiling battle, they might have been better off showing the climax of The Dark Knight. After all, the Joker’s amoral brilliance in pitting two ferryboats against one another, and daring each to blow up the other before he sends both to oblivion, is a nice metaphor for the Teafoxlicans’ play here: pitting the full faith and credit of the United States against recovery-killing spending cuts.

Sadly, in this case, it seems that both boats have now exploded. But I can guarantee you that Democrats will never stoop to creating Photoshop images that morph John Boehner or Eric Cantor’s face with the Joker’s. That’s not how progressives roll; frankly, we don’t have the balls.

OK, so I stand corrected. Anyway … and I promise I’m finished with the film references … one can’t help but wish that a middle-of-the-road alternative had been found to this latest fiasco. Imagine that cooler heads had prevailed all the way around, and that in a couple years — after the 2012 election, and after an economist-approved second effort at stimulus that focused on job-creating measures such as infrastructure banks and/or Tom Friedman’s pipe dream of green-tech manufacturing – Democrats and Republicans had agreed to implement a debt-reduction plan modeled on Simpson-Bowles. That plan might have bent the entitlement cost curve via retirement-age adjustments, means testing and an end to caps on payroll taxes, while also bringing spending down from its current historic highs (25 percent of GDP) and taxes up from their current historic lows (just over 15 percent of GDP), to an equivalent share of GDP set at approximately 19 percent. There’s no guarantee that the economy would have sprung back to life under such a scenario – we had all better get used to the likelihood that times will never again be as good, nor the help-wanted listings ever again as voluminous, as they were in the late 1990s – but at least the world’s political and financial systems would have more confidence in our nation’s ability to solve problems than we currently deserve.

Unfortunately, the politics and the economics of our current fiscal meltdown are nowadays so intertwined that they cannot be analyzed separately, even by Standard & Poor’s or our creditors in China. It has already been documented that the Tea Party Caucus and the House GOP leadership spent at least eight months strategizing how they were going to use brinksmanship on the debt ceiling as a catalyst for their agenda. You would think that in all that time they might have, at some point, entertained the possibility that acting like lunatics right up to the last minute might somehow shake the confidence of both Wall Street and the multitudinous Main Streets in the U.S. and abroad. Apparently not – and instead they did such a bang-up job carrying out their half-assed plan that they’ve exposed themselves as entirely too irrational to participate in governing a country. What’s more – and what’s worse – they’ve managed to convince the markets, our creditors, and at least one rating agency that any government with Teafoxlicans grasping one of the reins of power cannot be trusted to maintain even a minimum baseline of economic stability. Even Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolutionaries didn’t screw the pooch this badly, or this quickly in their brief reign of (t)error.

It didn’t have to be this way. There has rightfully been a lot of discussion the last few weeks about the lost art of compromise, in the wake of the Tea Partiers’ utter recalcitrance in refusing a “grand bargain” on debt reduction. They had the opportunity, weeks before the deadline was reached, to accept a deal that would have enacted big spending cuts, and even instituted entitlement reform, in exchange for a minimal amount in “revenue enhancements” – i.e., tax hikes on the rich, or even (eventually, as Democrats did their best to negotiate away the store) merely a few loophole closures. They might have been able to portray themselves as shrewd bargainers who took a very small hit to their own anti-tax “values” in order to achieve a major push forward for their agenda, all while keeping the markets calm and our creditors happy.

But, of course, the House GOP blew it. They had to hew to their no-new-taxes orthodoxy, and they had to drive all the way to the edge of that cliff to see how much booty they could extort before they slammed on the brakes. And what did they wind up with? A smaller deal than they could have gotten otherwise, a “super-committee” with practically no chance of success, and a “trigger” mechanism likely to blow gaping, and indiscriminate, holes in both the entitlement and defense budgets. Not to mention a resounding no-confidence vote from Wall Street and the Chinese that seems to have put us right back where we were in September 2008, with hundreds of billions of dollars of lost wealth in the marketplace and millions more Americans losing job opportunities, postponing retirements yet again, or otherwise being forced once more to adjust their standards of living downward.

But this time, of course, there will be no attempt to stimulate the economy from Washington. Another key element of Teafoxlican orthodoxy holds that the half-hearted, nearly half-tax-cuts 2009 stimulus “didn’t work,” and that job-creating investments in infrastructure, clean-energy manufacturing, or new technologies represent foolish attempts to “spend our way out of recession.” Government must be shrunk further and further, the “thinking” goes, no matter what the circumstances or the impact on the broader economy. Never mind the historical precedent of 1937, when a contraction of government spending turned a recovery into a double-dip depression. And never mind the opinion shared by every smart economist that now is the time for government to fill the role abdicated by a business community that simply will not hire, not to pull the rug (or, rather, the safety net) out from under tens of millions who are in danger of falling into poverty if they have not already done so. That argument is rarely heard anymore, consumed in a conflagration of Teafoxlican harping on debts and deficits.

That harping represents their one clear success – their ability to transform the political narrative from what it should be (a slow-but-steady effort to clean up the financial and political messes of the last decade, and make sure they won’t be repeated) to what they want it to be (an endless rant about debts that supposedly have only spiraled out of control over the past 2½ years). The right wing have moved the entire conversation in their desired direction, thanks in part to the loudness of their voices and in part to the fact that they, and they alone, were willing to put a gun to the nation’s head and threaten to shoot.

Please note that nowhere in the above sentence did I write “because they have a point.” They don’t. Yes, deficits will need to be brought under control eventually, and yes, both discretionary spending cuts and entitlement reform (along with tax increases) are absolutely necessary to put our financial house in order. But putting a stopper on government spending shouldn’t have happened now, in the midst of a continuing recession marked by a singular unwillingness of the nation’s businesses to contribute to recovery. And deficit reduction should never have been attached to a game of Russian Roulette with the debt ceiling.

The refusal to make these points, and to fight valiantly for some measure of sanity over the last seven months, is the signature failure of Barack Obama’s presidency. On Sunday the author and psych professor Drew Weston detailed, in a brilliant New York Times op-ed, the ways in which Obama – who had been, up until the day before his inauguration, the new century’s greatest orator – failed to use his prodigious skills to create a narrative for his presidency that might have withstood the Teafoxlican revolt. By identifying (early and specifically) the sources of the nation’s troubles, by describing how he was going to act to bring those responsible to account and how he was going to repair our broken financial and political systems – and then by making every one of his initiatives (healthcare included) fit within that narrative – Obama could, and should, have driven the public dialogue the way Ronald Reagan did, no matter how effective the Gipper’s zig-zagging policies turned out to be.

Instead, Obama has turned too much policy-making over to the congressional sausage-grinder, and his far-too-frequent abdication of the bully pulpit has allowed right-wing nutjobs to fill the vacuum created by his silence. Too often, as well, he has pursued bipartisanship in the face of unrelenting evidence that he had no partner in his efforts at conciliation – most recently in his willingness to give up tax hikes far too early in the debt-ceiling negotiations, and in his unwillingness to use the 14th amendment to defuse the Teafoxlicans’ threats to plunge the nation into default.

While watching Obama give away entirely too much of the store in recent months, I have often thought of the deal Jackie Robinson cut with Branch Rickey back in 1945: Robinson would turn the other cheek in the face of insults and intolerance for three seasons in the majors, but would be turned loose to fight back and retaliate after that. Is it possible, now that this utter disaster has exposed the Teafoxlicans’ inability to participate rationally in our governance, that Obama will finally take off the kid gloves and destroy them rhetorically the way he should have two summers ago? Will he now, at long last, grab the reins of leadership fully and finally from a Congress that is universally distrusted and clearly at its wit’s end? Is Obama even capable of being that kind of guy? Does he want to be?

If not, we need to find a leader who does. And here’s where I break my earlier promise, and conclude with one more film reference – paraphrasing a line delivered repeatedly by Dan Hedaya’s character in the lackluster Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle Joe Versus the Volcano. We know Obama was impressive enough to get the job. We know he’ll probably be able to keep the job. But can he do the job? The jury’s still out on that one, and unless he proves himself up to the task of truly seizing control of this mess, America may still have a way to go before we hit bottom.

In the hours since Wednesday night’s thwarting of democracy in Madison, a repulsed nation has focused its attention on the immediate question: How the hell did this happen? How did a newly elected governor and legislative majority, flying in the face of heated opposition from most of the state’s residents, manage to circumvent the state’s constitution and enact a law with no purpose but to disempower the state’s public workforce? How did Wisconsin remake itself as Libya … or at least Arizona?

It’s an interesting question, to be sure, and the answers are full of strategizing and subterfuge and hubris. But the question of how Wisconsin’s Republicans took their state’s labor laws back to the 1920s is not the one we should be asking. What we should want to know is why they bothered. Why was Scott Walker’s first substantive act as governor a move that he had kept secret from his voting populace as he was campaigning to lead them? Why did he bother to strip collective-bargaining rights from a union that had already agreed to the wage and benefit givebacks he had demanded so he could pay for his tax breaks for the wealthy? The answers to those questions are complicated, and they have profound ramifications for the entire nation as we head into the decade.

Sometime over the last two years, one imagines, a group of wealthy white men sat down for a series of hush-hush meetings in a conference room somewhere – my guess is someplace like Karl Rove’s Washington office, or the Koch Brothers’ digs in Wichita — to plot out a way to make sure a political year like 2008 will never happen again. (Sure, this sounds like conspiracy theorizing – but how else can we explain how a dozen Republican governors got the same idea at the same time, and sprung it on horrified electorates who had no idea it was coming?)

Rove’s long-held and widely publicized dream of a Republican “permanent majority” had been crushed, at least temporarily, by the party’s own incompetence, corruption and bad ideas. And in the wake of the Democrats’ ’08 sweep, as Washington Republicans flailed away but failed to stop the stimulus and health-care reform, the mainstream (and I use that word loosely) of conservatism suddenly seemed to have been co-opted by Tea Party populists who were almost as angry at the GOP establishment as they were at the guy in the White House whose race/religion/nationality (and maybe even policies) they couldn’t stomach.

But while guys like Dick Armey were rousing the rabble, back in that conference room the brain trust of the Republican establishment began figuring out how to turn the Tea Party’s rage into a renewed power grab for themselves. They identified the sources of the Democratic Party’s new strength, and began devising ways to cut those sources off at the knees. First they focused on the remnants of organized labor, and particularly the public-employee unions, which could mobilize manpower and money to match the GOP’s own power base within the energy industry and the evangelical community. Then they noted the Democrats’ overwhelming majorities among minorities and young voters, both of whom had flocked to the polls in larger numbers than ever before to make history by electing Barack Obama.

How could these three pillars of Democratic triumph be decimated, or at least held in check enough for Republicans to regain power? Well, Republicans were already expert at diminishing voter registration and turnout among African-American voters, via the wanton purging of voter rolls (see Florida, 2000) and other forms of intimidation and trickery (see Allen Raymond’s 2008 book How To Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative). Having already made considerable headway during the fall of ’08 toward de-legitimizing ACORN — the organization whose efforts to empower inner-city residents proved most offensive to conservatives because of its success in registering many thousands of black voters — destroying the group proved relatively simple in 2009. An overblown “sting” operation here, a bit of Fox-ified outrage there, and public funding for ACORN was history.

The next move would have to wait until after the 2010 midterms, when the Tea Party’s trumped-up outrage and the customary, two-years-in reversion to the mean placed Republicans back in power in the House of Representatives as well as statehouses across the nation. On election night, pundits pondered the impact of new GOP dominance in the formerly industrial Midwest, where traditionally pro-union states needed to confront the reality that they could no longer afford the financial commitments they had conceded (in better times) to their unionized public employees. The unions confronted that reality themselves in the late autumn, and prepared to bargain their way to a deal that would balance their members’ livelihoods with the need to keep their states solvent.

But the new governors of Wisconsin and Ohio, among other states, had a different idea – one that, as events have unfolded, can only have emerged from that conference room somewhere. Why stop at the demand for union concessions – a demand on which Gov. Walker did run for office last year – when they could use the current rash of state-budget crises (and the outrage of the Tea Partiers) as an excuse to demolish the public-employee unions entirely? Without the unions’ skills at organization to get hundreds of thousands of folks knocking on doors and turning out the vote … without their ability to translate members’ dues into millions of dollars in soft-money contributions and independent ad expenditures … the Democratic Party and its candidates could never keep up with the hundreds of millions sure to be spent each cycle by business interests and super-rich individuals in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court travesty decision in the Citizens United case.

The way Walker and the state-senate Republicans finally pushed through Wednesday’s legislation – divorcing the union-busting provision from the rest of the employee-giveback bill, in order to get around rules that prohibit votes on money-spending issues without a quorum – exposed the move for what it always has been: an anti-democratic (not to mention anti-Democratic) power grab. It was not intended to save money or create efficiencies for the people or their government; it was intended purely to disembowel a crucial source of Democratic power, and to eliminate a key obstacle to Wisconsin becoming a one-party state.

Whether their audacious move will succeed long-term in the courts, or with a disgusted state electorate, remains to be seen. But Walker’s efforts no doubt will be emulated in other red states, just as GOP statehouses are lining up measures that copy Arizona’s Show-Us-Your-Papers intimidation law. Meanwhile, get ready for the next plot to emerge from that Rove/Koch conference room: a concerted effort to stymie college-age voters and depress turnout among the young people who might re-elect President Obama in 2012.

As the Washington Post reported a couple days ago, increasing numbers of elected Republicans have stopped hiding their disdain for those pesky young voters. The new GOP speaker of New Hampshire’s state House, for example, recently told a Tea Party meeting that “foolish” college kids need to be stopped from voting because they’re “voting as liberal[s]. That’s what kids do.” He also said they don’t have enough “life experience” to be trusted at the polls, and “they just vote their feelings.” His solution? A new law that would allow students at, say, Dartmouth to vote in Hanover only if they (or their parents) had established permanent residency there. All other students would have to vote in their hometowns. Another bill moving forward in New Hampshire would eliminate Election-Day registration, which makes it convenient for students to vote – because, as we all know, more voters means more fraud.

Ah, yes, “election fraud” – the conservative canard that imagined a nationwide New Black Panther movement that doesn’t actually exist … the one that routinely sends right-wing lawyers into inner-city polling places to mislead and intimidate black voters out of exercising their franchise … the one that contests as illegitimate any electoral result that doesn’t go the GOP’s way. Curbing supposed “fraud” is the guiding principle behind the efforts in three dozen states to implement Voter ID rules that would mandate (but not sufficiently facilitate) the obtaining of an official identification card by those who don’t already possess a driver’s license. And who among the voting-age populace are statistically least likely to possess local driver’s licenses? Minorities and college kids, of course. Make voting more difficult (or, better yet, impossible) for them, and elections can be yours … if your primary appeal is to those whose political views encourage the denial of rights to others.

The states in which these student-limiting and voter-ID battles are being fought most intensely are swing states – New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin (Wisconsin!) – where the demographic makeup of 2012’s electorate could swing the entire national election in one direction or the other. Republicans, by working so hard to destroy the Democrats’ power base and to stop various groups of people from voting, seem considerably more interested in their own power than in Americans’ basic rights or the other precepts of our democracy.

My guess is that there are a number of shoes left to drop in this new GOP gambit. Conservative vitriol toward immigrants has driven the vast majority of Hispanics into the Democratic column … which will require Republicans to dream up even more draconian measures than Arizona’s in order to keep them from turning a whole lot of states blue. Rep. Peter King’s vile crusade against the supposed extremism of American Muslims is likely to achieve the same effect, particularly in states like Michigan; how will Republicans try to put a lid on Muslim participation?

One area in which we’re sure to see action over the next couple years is redistricting. Expect to see numerous Southern red states – and some of the newly red Midwest legislatures as well — imitate Texas’ outlandish, Tom Delay-instigated mapmaking of 2005, in hopes of limiting the number of Congressional seats available to Democrats. Expect a plethora of court challenges to those redrawings … and expect Republicans to steer those challenges toward district courts where judges who share their ideology are liable to put politics before law, the same way judges in Virginia and Florida have done in striking down elements of the Affordable Care Act.

After all, that’s the Republican strategy for the 21^st century. When your policies have proven immoral and inept; when your method of governance has proven incompetent; when your leaders have proven corrupt – that’s the time to circumvent the will of the people by any means necessary. The election of 2008 stopped conservatives just short of their goal of transferring the nation’s wealth and power into the hands of the very few; now it seems they’ll have to pull out all the democracy-thwarting stops in order to get the rest of the way there.

Well, that was a bit anticlimactic, wasn’t it? House Republicans had hoped that their scheme to force a vote repealing last year’s health care legislation would capture lightning in a bottle – giving voice to the anger of the Tea Party movement, fulfilling the GOP’s principal 2010 campaign promise, and ensuring that health care would continue pitting Americans against one another all the way to 2012. But in the wake of the Tucson shootings, as we continue to mourn the dead and root for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ remarkable recovery, the pettiness and empty symbolism of the repeal vote clearly ran counter to the national mood. And in the end, news of yesterday’s vote was buried beneath the pomp and circumstance (and immediacy, in terms of our economic future) of President Obama’s summit with Chinese president Hu Jintao.

Instead, House Republicans will have to be satisfied with the attention devoted to the other empty symbol of their rise to majority status: their insistence upon devoting a day of the House’s time to reading the U.S. Constitution aloud. It was a reminder that the Tea Party has spent the last two years complaining that every Democratic initiative of 2009-10, from the stimulus to health care to Obama propping his feet on the Oval Office desk, was a direct assault on that Constitution. (To help drive their point home, they turned every protest into a Revolutionary War re-enactment, complete with “Don’t Tread On Me” flags and tinfoil tricorn hats and threats to “water the tree of liberty.”) More important, reciting the Constitution was the culmination of the Teafoxlicans’ moderately successful efforts to claim the document as their own, and to portray liberalism as not merely “socialism,” but unconstitutional socialism.

Never mind the irony inherent in conservatives demanding fealty to (or even claiming an understanding of) the Constitution, after they spent the entire Bush administration cheering as our government ran amok over the Bill of Rights (torture, wiretapping, rendition, suppression of dissent, etc., etc.) and launched a couple of long-running foreign conflicts without obtaining congressional declarations of war. (That’s Article One, Section Eight, in case you’ve forgotten.) The most intriguing – and, really, hilarious – irony about this month’s dramatic reading was that Republicans, in their headlong rush to establish constitutional absolutism and strict-constructionism as their guiding principles, refused to read the actual … you know … Constitution in its entirety.

They couldn’t. Because if they did read the whole thing – including those uncomfortable parts about slavery being okey-dokey, and blacks counting as three-fifths of a person, and indirect election of senators, and property ownership (including a penis) being required to vote, and all that – they might have to face the fact that for 220 years we’ve treated the Constitution as a malleable document, open to interpretation and selective ignoring and wholesale change. Such a recognition just wouldn’t jibe with conservatives’ current fashion for constitutional sanctimony — using the document (and particularly the 10th Amendment) as an all-purpose weapon against perceived big-government tyrannies, and wrapping themselves up in arguments about “the framers’ original intent” as a way of portraying themselves as more law-abiding, more freedom-loving, more founders-following, more American than their opponents.

Of course, we’ve seen conservatives play this sort of game before. For decades now, ever since a few leftists committed the cardinal sin of burning the American flag to protest the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and other issues during the 1960s and ’70s, Republicans have found great success wrapping themselves in that flag. They’ve pimped it out at every opportunity in order to symbolize their supposedly superior patriotism — touring flag factories, adorning their “news” channel’s onscreen logo — while forcing the left into a permanent defensive crouch, even when it comes to frivolities like lapel pins.

Liberals largely respond either by taking the bait and playing defense, which never works, or by pretty much ceding the flag to the GOP. It is a sad fact that Republicans have succeeded in politicizing the flag to such an extent that progressives have been forced either to attempt to “reclaim” it from its attachment to the conservative values we oppose, or else to downgrade it (in our own minds, at least) as a symbol of what is good and true about our nation. When we’ve chosen the latter course, we traditionally have fallen back on the Constitution as the still-universal evidence of American, yes, exceptionalism. It is probably the greatest governing document ever created, and – from a liberal perspective – the improvements made to it over time, via amendments and judicial review and landmark court decisions and whatnot, exemplify our nation’s ability to change, to progress, to make substantive strides along the way to becoming A More Perfect Union.

Focusing on the Constitution also appeals to liberals because it is about ideas and ideals, not just nationalism. I’ve written about all this before, back when Obama’s failure to wear a flag pin created such a trumped-up furor during the ’08 campaign; I discussed it in terms conjured by a professor of mine at Penn, Carolyn Marvin, who posed the dichotomy of Constitution and flag as a metaphor for the mind-body problem. To oversimplify her thesis, one serves as the brains of the republic, the other as the body — beginning with the earliest symbolism imparted by paintings that depicted the flag emerging fully formed from Betsy Ross’ lap, as though a literal birth were taking place. Anyway, if there is to be tension between the mind and body, as a liberal I’ve long rationalized that it’s just as well if conservatives take the flag and leave us with the Constitution, for all the reasons enumerated above.

Now, of course, conservatives believe they can (and must) hoard the Constitution as well. In the wake of their own failures of the last decade and their sweeping defeats in two election cycles, they sensed the need to find another way of marginalizing progressive policies — and Obama’s entire presidency, which many of them would have you believe is unconstitutional in itself. At the same time, they’ve found the Constitution a useful shield against accusations that they’re Just Saying No to Obama’s policies, without offering coherent alternatives. Better, I suppose, to hide behind a set of two-centuries-old ideas than to offer any new ones of your own.

But the Constitution over which Teafoxlicans now wish to claim dominance is not the one that’s flexible enough to invite interpretation and allow for progress (from the freeing of slaves to Brown v. Board of Education, from women’s suffrage to abortion rights, from the striking down of laws that banned interracial marriage and sodomy to the inevitable approval of same-sex marriage). No, conservatives demand that the government obey what they believe was the framers’ original intent – the words in the document itself, or at least as many of them as John Boehner is willing to have read aloud.

This strict-constructionist pageant of politicizing the Constitution may have reached its apex with the recitation in the House, but it began with the Tea Party protests and, before that, with years of rants about “judicial activism” that supposedly has betrayed the founding fathers’ virtuous (and apparently infallible) intentions. The trouble with such absolutism is not just that it requires ignoring the many ways in which the founders were, indeed, fallible; it also requires ignoring some of the wording that directly pertains to the Constitution’s flexibility, and it requires utterly (and ironically) ignoring the history of the document’s creation.

If you remember that history, you know that the phrasing of the 10th Amendment was the subject of considerable consternation among the founders. Article One, Section Eight (mentioned above as it relates to war powers) also gives Congress the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper” (my emphasis) to carrying out the Constitution’s other instructions – a phrase that some framers found dangerous because it seemed to give Congress an unlimited mandate. To tame that wild beast a little bit, states’-rights advocates pressed for inclusion of the 10th Amendment, which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” During debate on the amendment, those same advocates pushed hard to include the word “expressly” – i.e., “powers not expressly delegated to the United States” – which would have made the Amendment similar to a clause that had severely limited federal power under the ineffective Articles of Confederation. That word was rejected, however, and the imprecision of the 10th Amendment has served the nation remarkably well through the years, from John Marshall to … at long last … the previous Congress seizing the reins on health-care reform.

Of course, it remains to be seen how much of last year’s legislation will survive the legal challenges currently working their way through the courts. Conservatives insist that the 10th Amendment precludes such elements as the individual mandate to purchase insurance; Democrats, and most constitutional scholars, believe there’s ample precedent to suggest that the phrasing of the “commerce clause” in Article One, along with the “necessary and proper” clause, give Congress the power to regulate a national industry like health care pretty much any way it wants. As usual, such questions eventually will be decided on the whims of the nation’s second-most (or perhaps first-most) powerful man, Justice Anthony Kennedy.

In the meantime, as Republicans continue to press their supposed superiority when it comes to all things patriotic and moral and freedom-loving, it’s interesting to note that “The Constitution Tells Me So” has largely replaced “The Bible Tells Me So” as the state-of-the-art absolutist argument of mainstream Republicanism. Both are intended to cut off debate, rather than to encourage it – after all, who wants to be seen as anti-Constitution, any more than he wants to be seen as anti-Bible? Yet, as an impediment to progress toward equality and real individual rights, this new absolutism is unlikely to prove any more successful than the old one over the long term. After all, times change – and just as our attitudes have shifted dramatically concerning biblical precepts on stoning and slavery and bigotry and pork, our interpretations of the Constitution inevitably will continue to shift as well. And no matter what strict-constructionists say, that’s exactly – nay, expressly – how the framers intended it to be.

Anyone who reads this column regularly knows that, like many folks who are politics-obsessed, I am prone to a certain rhetorical schizophrenia. Frequently I have castigated conservatives, and far less frequently I have turned my ire against progressives, who escalate beyond all reasonableness their criticisms of and vitriol toward those with whom they disagree. Yet I am hardly innocent of engaging in such harsh language myself; on more than one occasion I’ve referred to someone’s words or actions as “un-American” or “despicable” or “wingnut” or some other such epithet. It’s an intellectual flaw, and a character flaw as well; it’s also, regrettably, the way our politics currently function most effectively. When I think of the snowballing imprudence of our public discourse, and my own place within it, I’m reminded of a comment my friend made at a concert a quarter-century ago, as the audience pummeled a perfectly good opening act with verbal abuse: “If these people get any more violent, I’m gonna have to hit somebody.”

It’s fitting, as well as ironic, that I quote my friend’s bon mot in the wake of Saturday’s senseless events in Tucson. After all, I’ve quoted it in this space before. About a year and a half ago — as part of the nation recoiled from, and another part celebrated, the incivility of the 2009 “town hall” meetings over health care reform – I wrote a column titled “Inglourious Democrats?” in which I used a viewing of Quentin Tarantino’s then-current film as a springboard for a discussion of that incivility. I bemoaned the inability of liberals to offer effective, gut-level responses to conservatives’ overheated rhetoric, and I imagined some elaborate revenge fantasies to pay back the birthers, the inventors of “Death Panels,” and others who had taken their opposition way too far.

I was proud of that column. It was imaginative, and it was funny – mostly because imagining Democrats using Tarantino-esque methods to put the kibosh on conservative tantrums was so patently ridiculous. (I mean, these are people who didn’t – and still don’t – have the spine to defend the sensibility of end-of-life counseling against a fallacy like “Death Panels.”)

Yes, the notion of taking revenge against various conservatives was unthinkable … except, perhaps, to the one real nutjob who might have come across my words while randomly surfing the Internet. In the wake of Saturday’s events, however, it’s clear that such a caveat constitutes a risk that’s no longer worth taking.

Over the last two days there’s been plenty of debate over whether it makes sense to lay part of the blame for a deranged man’s actions upon individual or collective instances of vitriolic rhetoric – upon Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs” poster, or Sharron Angle’s “Second-Amendment remedies” statement, or a piece like “Inglourious Democrats?” for that matter. But the most compelling argument I’ve heard was a simple metaphor offered by pundit Josh Marshall: The most likely victims of a flu epidemic are the very young, the very old and the infirm. But that doesn’t mean the flu is acceptable as long as the most vulnerable are the only ones affected, or that we shouldn’t try to stop it until it starts wreaking havoc on the hale and the hearty.

It’s going to turn out that Jared Loughner has spent years on a downward spiral, psychologically, and it’s going to turn out that he had some sort of bizarre personal vendetta against Representative Giffords. Of course it’s going to turn out that way. But nothing we’ll learn about Loughner’s peculiar troubles (and they’re sure to be peculiar), and nothing we’ll hear from the predictably spooked classmates and authority figures who have dealt with him over the years, will absolve those of us who participate in the nation’s political discourse from our responsibility for creating this toxic tone. Through our demonization of those who disagree with us, we have made targets of public servants and anyone else who chooses to become involved in politics, as staff members, as advocates, or merely as involved constituents.

It’s particularly (but not exclusively) at difficult times like these, with the economy still suffering and political passions running rampant, that we must recognize the impact our words and actions may have upon the least stable among us, not just the most. And Saturday’s shooting should offer a sobering epiphany to all of us who contribute to the political discourse: that the climate we have created is a destructive one, not just intellectually but physically. We need to accept that crosshairs and Hitler references, and cockamamie revenge fantasies, aren’t just metaphors – not to the folks at the margins, the unbalanced or dangerous people who are most likely to act upon their own non-metaphorical interpretations of such imagery.

Thankfully, as one of the few and the proud with “editor” privileges at Popdose, I have the ability to erase my own misguided content, if not to undo the mistake of posting it to the site in the first place.  So don’t go looking for “Inglourious Democrats?” in the archives. You won’t find it. I recognize now that my words of September 2009 were potentially just as damaging – to the extent that anyone even read them – as the words and deeds of the people I excoriated in the column. So I have taken it upon myself to remove those words from the public record, to the extent that I can. I don’t think it’s necessary to scrub every piece I’ve ever written of such ill-tempered remarks, but there was something I could do about the single most egregious column I’ve left floating around the internet, and so I did.

I know I’m not the first person to offer such a mea culpa this weekend, much less the most eloquent, and I certainly don’t claim that erasing a largely unread column makes me any kind of hero or martyr to civility. However, I do hope that anyone else who has written or said words as regrettable as mine is currently feeling the same sort of remorse over them. And I’m not just talking about professional or armchair pundits, or politicians for that matter; I’m not just talking about the usual suspects whose names have been bandied about this weekend, with good reason.

I’m also talking about those readers whose hate-filled snipes litter the comments sections at many news and opinion websites, most obviously The Washington Post‘s. (Personally, I think the Post should rein in the unfettered opportunities it provides for readers to call each other names and toss about idiotic epithets like “libs” and “repugs.”) And I’m even talking about some of the comments that have been posted in this space, occasionally, over the last few years.

If one little glimmer of good has come out of Saturday’s events, it is that we have gotten to know quite a bit about Gabrielle Giffords and federal Judge John M. Roll. She’s an effective legislator whose moderation is a terrific match for her district’s divided political sentiments; he was a highly respected, conservative judge; both have been exemplary public servants. Though high-profile members of different political parties, they considered themselves friends and colleagues – to the point that Roll found it appropriate to head over to the local Safeway on Saturday morning “just to say hi.”

Are these the sort of people we mean when we sit in front of our computers and, often anonymously, label every politician “hopelessly corrupt,” or lament that the only recourse for Washington may be to “blow up the place”? Yes, the dysfunction in D.C. is frustrating, even maddening; and yes, the system of electing our representatives is broken and encourages both corruption and rabid polarization. But to tar every public servant with the same broad brush, and to assume our problems are intractable because of inherent corruption and ill intentions, is to deny the possibility of people like Giffords and Roll – and, most certainly, to discourage other potential leaders from following in their footsteps. And in the wake of Saturday’s tragedy, which happened to take the life of a 9-year-old student council president, we don’t need to offer any more discouragement to the next generation of potential leaders.

In addition to some moderation of the indiscriminate scorn being heaped upon government officials, there are a couple other things I’d like to see come out of the current soul-searching. For one, I’d like to see House Republicans give up their plan to vote on a repeal of the health-care reform law. If they want to re-litigate healthcare during the coming term, fine! They can debate specific elements of the law that should be improved or jettisoned, and they can force negotiations with the Democratic-controlled Senate in their hopes of slowing down funding for the law’s implementation. But the repeal vote that was scheduled for next week is nothing but divisive, hyper-partisan showboating, with no hope whatsoever of advancing the debate – but plenty of potential to inspire another round of vandalism and, quite obviously now, worse crimes among the unhinged elements of the populace.

And one more thing: I’d like – but hardly expect – conservative leaders and followers to examine why they find violent rhetoric and imagery so appealing. Why do crosshairs on a poster or phrases like “Don’t retreat – RELOAD!” stir the conservative spirit? Why did protesters last spring have to exhort Congress not simply to defeat healthcare legislation, but to “kill the bill”? Tea Partiers have been tripping over one another this weekend to insist that such stuff is a bipartisan problem, but the equivalency simply isn’t there – not when we can all still remember those red-faced shouters disrespecting their legislators at the 2009 town halls, or the signs at Tea Party rallies that read, “We left our guns at home – this time.”

Because guess what? I don’t care whether he was one of your guys or not: This time, somebody brought a gun.

For an unreconstructed liberal (now redefined as “socialist”) like myself, it’s been difficult watching the Republican bullshit machine steamroll once again into Washington, firing pistols into the ground like Yosemite Sam and making all kinds of noise about “listening to the American people” as they give away the store to millionaires and billionaires. It’s been even more difficult watching President Obama begin his makeover from “transformative figure” into Bill Clinton, capitulating quickly to GOP demands that those millionaires keep their tax cuts before they’ll even consider any other legislation during this lame-duck session – legislation they’re sure to filibuster in the Senate anyway.

At least Obama got in one nice shot as he bent over earlier this week. “I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers, unless the hostage gets harmed; then people will question the wisdom of that strategy,” Obama said on Monday. “In this case, the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed.”

Rough language – for a Democrat. It’s a nice metaphor, though, and it perfectly suits an opposition party that has the audacity to say, “Because we’re so concerned about the nation’s debts, we have no choice but to deny America’s millions of long-term unemployed their last scrap of subsistence-level aid … unless, of course, we’re allowed to bust the budget and keep the Bush tax cuts for people making over $1 million a year.”

Obama was right to make this shitty deal, as a matter of politics if not policy. I hate the fact that his cave-in might lend new credence to the already-discredited fallacy that trickle-down economics are a viable salve for tough times. But I believe in the art of compromise. And even though Republicans have spent two years pissing all over that art, if I can demand (pointlessly) that they do it, then I mustn’t complain (too much) when Obama does it as well. Moreover, Obama calculated, correctly, that the lackluster economy has robbed Democrats of the ability to compete intelligently with the streams of bluster and trickeration emanating from the GOP.

In the current climate, there’s no way Dems would win the argument that letting all the tax cuts expire, rather than continuing them for millionaires, would be better for the economy – even though they’d be correct. And there’s no way they’d convince Americans that Republicans, through their intransigence, were hurting the middle class by holding their tax cuts and unemployment insurance hostage to the conservative obsession with helping the wealthy. After all, if last month’s election proved anything, it’s that voters haven’t noticed the Teafoxlican knives in their backs; they’ve only noticed that they’re in pain, and that the Democrats haven’t done enough to make them feel better.

Of course, it’s not just right-wing politicians and talk-radio/TV blowhards who have been pushing the nation’s head under the water the past two years – though they’ve been doing an excellent job of it, whether it’s trashing the (insufficient) stimulus, fighting tooth and nail against health-care proposals that were once their own, dunderheadedly denying the expertise of economists and climate scientists, or portraying the pragmatic-to-a-fault Obama as a fascist/socialist/Kenyan/Muslim monster. These morality-free efforts have undermined public confidence and done much to keep the economy down – all in the name of achieving precisely the electoral outcome we got last month.

What concerns me, in the wake of the tax-cut compromise, is that other group of connivers who have swallowed the key to America’s economic handcuffs: the Chamber of Commerce set, and the corporate elites (both executives and shareholders). Over not just the last two years, but the last 10, they have dispensed with the indispensable bond that makes capitalism work – the balance between the people’s financial fortunes and their own. Throughout the 20th century, the status of workers (in terms of wages and standard of living) climbed and plunged in relative concert with the financial health of those for whom they worked. But that link has now been severed: Corporate profits and shareholder earnings have soared since the end of the 2000-01 recession, while workers’ wages have remained flat and barely more than a million jobs have been created (even as the working-age, products-and-services-consuming population has risen many times that number).

Much of that discrepancy, of course, is due to globalization and the advent of cheap, accessible foreign labor. But there’s no denying that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of jobs have been eliminated to serve no higher purpose than the demands of executives and shareholders for ever-higher salaries, stock prices and dividends. One can argue that this is just another step in capitalism’s maturation – that as American companies learn how to maximize profits and maintain production with less manpower … manpower that is increasingly overworked and underpaid, or else outsourced … workers will just have to find another way to keep themselves afloat. One can also argue that there’s nothing government can or should do to intervene in that process.

But those are ugly arguments to make, as far as I’m concerned – particularly when, even as the business elite are handing out pink slips and toasting their profits, they’re also pushing for tax breaks and spending cuts (like those pesky unemployment benefits) and fighting against universal health coverage that might make losing one’s job less catastrophic. I don’t know exactly what government might do to reverse the trend – perhaps lessening the general tax burden on businesses, but making it more costly to reap large profits or dividends without sufficiently re-investing in people and equipment.

Wherever you come down on these arguments, one fact is well-documented: Corporate America and some small businesses currently are sitting on (or distributing to those shareholders) billions of dollars in uninvested profits – and for months now, corporate leaders have been deflecting criticism of their stagnant ways by whining, “We just can’t purchase new equipment or hire new employees, because we don’t know what our tax rate is going to be next year.”

Well, now they know. And now maybe we’ll find out whether their whining was just a dodge, a smokescreen to hide the possibility that they never plan to restore that essential link between the fortunes of the ownership and working classes under capitalism. Unfortunately, because Obama and the Republicans decided to kick the tax can a couple years down the road, rather than deal with it conclusively, it would be no surprise at all to hear a Chamber of Commerce mouthpiece whine during the coming weeks – after it’s too late to undo the compromise, of course — “How can you expect us to spend the next two years adding payroll when we don’t know what our tax situation will be in 2013?”

Should that happen, you can bet that a GOP-led House of Representatives will refuse to lift a finger to force the hand of business leaders who funneled $800 million into last month’s Republican victory. And you can bet that Teafoxlicans, instead of helping to find ways to circumvent business’s obduracy and improve the economy, will spend the next two years insisting that the continued poor employment numbers are all Obama’s fault … in an effort to force a 2012 election result that builds on 2010’s.

“America Held Hostage.” Where’s Ted Koppel when we need him?

A year ago in this space, I spent a couple months fulminating my way through a reading of Ayn Rand’s steaming heap of Objectivist sludge, Atlas Shrugged. In her far-right fantasyland, the federal government’s efforts to regulate commerce creep inexorably (and ridiculously) toward Communism, leading the nation’s manufacturing giants – fed up with the notion that they should care about anyone or anything besides their own achievements and profits – to go on strike in protest. While the industrialists fiddle in their Shangri-la of selfishness, the nation burns, building to a denouement in which an airplane load of magnates look down as the lights go out all across Baghdad New York City. And they celebrate.

Astonishingly, that’s pretty much the situation in which we find ourselves now (minus the Communism — or a respectable John Galt type, for that matter). “See all this cash?” the corporate titans (and their Teafoxlican allies) tease. “Keep our taxes low, and give us everything else we could possibly want – deficits and debt be damned — or we’ll never spend a dime of this money to put Americans back to work.” Obama has already caved to the first demand, and the new Congress won’t even be sworn in for another month.

Watch carefully as the Teafoxlicans now begin pressuring Obama with demands that he act more like that great compromiser Clinton – the same guy they rewarded for his moderation by accusing him of rape and murder, then impeaching him for receiving blow jobs. It’ll be quite the spectacle. Meanwhile, We the Hostages will stay in the corner, angry and fearful, wondering whether we’ll ever find a way out of this predicament. Or at least get a bathroom break.

Quite the election season, wasn’t it? The outcome certainly didn’t resolve, or even bring much clarity to, the policy disputes that divide us; despite the Republicans’ harping about “clear messages” and “listening to the people,” the overriding theme of this election seems less ideological than that. Indeed, the true message imparted by the disappointingly small segment of the electorate that actually voted seems to be, “We’re gonna keep re-shuffling the deck until we get a hand that we like.”

I have to say, I’m in no mood to espouse my own theories about this election off the top of my head. There’s so infernally much punditry bouncing around right now, and I don’t want to wind up parroting some idiotic thing that Lawrence O’Donnell said recently. (How has this guy become the new MSNBC star? He can’t even read off a teleprompter, a task which is supposed to come naturally to every good Democrat!) Besides, Jon Stewart has told me I’m part of the “conflictinator” apparatus, and since I’m prone to believe every single thing the man says, I’m feeling rather chastened right now — much more so from him than from the election results.

Therefore, I’m leaving it to you, Popdose’s current-affairs constituency. What are your thoughts on the election? Where do we go from here? Will (and should) the watchword of the next two years be “compromise,” or “obstruction,” now that the GOP bears some actual responsibility for the state of the nation? Let’s have it out in the comments section, and if we arrive at anything intelligent maybe we’ll get some free passes to John Boehner’s tanning salon.