The Presidential Vacuum

The current search for a viable presidential candidate provides yet another demonstration of the moribund nature of the American constitutional system.  With the fall of the Soviet Union and the Financial Panic of 2008 having revealed most of the flaws in our constitution, the campaign for a new president in 2016 serves to highlight the reality that the 18th century document to which all of our leaders (in most cases, happily, if not with near-religious fervor) swear their loyalty is out of date and incapable of serving as a guide for the challenges of the 21st century.  Hammered together to protect the rights of Southern slave holders and Northern property owners against anything resembling a true democracy (rule by "the mob"), the quaint old artifact is uniquely ill-equipped to enhance the prospects for any form of progress.  Outstanding among its flaws is its precluding, due to the absence of the kind of parliamentary system present in most of the world's democracies, the expression of all but the narrowest interests and thus lending itself to the situation we have today of a near total takeover of government by corporate, plutocratic and oligarchic interests.  No Evil Empire to combat; no Evil Empire to serve as a check on our own twin evils of corporate greed and a self-proclaimed divine right to world dominion.  That a nation which spent the first century of its history waging genocidal battles against the land's aboriginal population and showed itself to be barely capable of checking its appetite to spread slavery across its newly acquired territories should deem itself "exceptional" is greeted with irony everywhere except within its own borders.  The concept of States Rights, a cornerstone of the new republic, was essentially written into every attempt at framing a constitution because what was paramount in all these attempts is that there never be a challenge to the right to hold slaves.
      After a brief experiment with actually enfranchising the freed men and women of the South during "Reconstruction," (and even this period was full of ongoing violence and terror against black Americans and their white sympathizers--carpetbaggers and scalawags all), the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution were crassly ignored and a century long reign of terror ruled in the South.  1963, the year of M.L. King's "I have a dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln monument marked exactly one century since emancipation.   A Protestant, apartheid plantation system parallel to the Catholic latifundia to our south only began to unravel 200 years after independence from Great Britain, and that only because of the threat of open insurrection in the 1960s and the embarrassment of presuming to export our way of life to emerging third world nations most of whom were inhabited by people of color.
       In the Democratic Party, we have as a leading candidate a deeply flawed former first lady who, in spite of her ability to articulate progressive ideals and give a good New Deal-style speech, carries more negative baggage than almost any other man or woman in our history with hopes of occupying the Oval Office.  Her most successful rival is an elderly Jewish senator from New England whose success, given his proclaimed socialist ideals, surprised media talking heads.  He is the candidate of the progressive minority in this country, the less than 50 percent of Americans who have watched in disappointment, if not horror, as their erstwhile young black hero proved to be something quite different from the product advertised in his 2008 campaign.  Not since Franklin Roosevelt took on the Great Depression had there been a greater opportunity to turn back the tide of reaction that had taken over the country since the Reagan-Thatcher Counter-Reformation and sent the economy crashing and burning out of almost entirely unfettered greed.  Progressives watched in amazement as their chosen leader, on one issue after another, proved incapable or unwilling to take on the darker forces and instead amazingly stood by and watched the so-called Tea Party faction, consisting of groups of right wing thugs, rewrite the narrative of events leading to the brink of global depression.
      There is no longer a benighted South.  States Rights and Sectionalism have been eclipsed by rust belt realities in the North, globalization, the demise of unions and the absence of a political party that can fashion together a program to deal with the new realities.  The Mason-Dixon line is now the Canadian border.  It is a benighted nation where the Scott Walkers and Chris Christies are indistinguishable from the Marco Rubios, Ted Cruzes and Jeb Bushes.  There is no two party system. In fact, there is no system at all.  There are only corporate lawyers and their rubber stamp courts, technocrats tweaking the dials for as long as they can get away with it, sometimes troubled in their sleep by the nightmare to come of mobs taking to the streets.  What will bring back the soldiers and sailors of the empire posted in a thousand bases around the world in their sleek machines will be the calls of their officers to return to the homeland to restore order.