Day ONE of the new normal…

by: Jason O'Neal

Many people living in the United States will probably have to think for a moment to recall the last time political violence at the presidential level was seen here at home. This weekend’s events in Pennsylvania may come as a shock to some, but they can’t be much of a surprise for those of us who know that leaders throughout history have, at times, paid their political debt with their own lives. Violence against elected officials is nothing new in the United States, it’s just been at lower levels or nonexistent for a little while. Now that it has awakened from its slumber we must recognize it for what it is–an indication that a social system is in crisis. 

My initial response to the news was one of general disinterest. I had not been near a television or radio for some hours and had only found out when I opened a social media platform. One of my contacts had shared a post made by someone stating disappointment in the marksmanship skills of the shooter. I had no reaction and a couple of hours later I was asked by someone, in person, if I had heard. I was even asked to share my opinion about it and that’s where I find myself now. Contemplating the significance of this one event and its potential impact on the very near future.

As a historian, I have to view the event in isolation and then see how it is connected to current events. I then try to place it in its appropriate context in relation to the events which precede it. Finally, before offering a suitable list of possible outcomes, I must look for instances in the past when a similar event took place. I will not dare to presume that I could know what will happen next and I will not try to make any predictions. What I can state is the following: When any government has lost the trust of the governed it inevitably must be reformed, reinforced, or replaced. Control of the system will then be given to the group best suited to return society back toward a passive state. Rarely, are the power brokers behind the scenes ever replaced unless the masses of the impoverished and exploited classes from below seize control for themselves. That hasn’t really happened in the United States, but other changes to the structures allowed to govern society have taken place.

I also want to take the time now to state openly that I have never voted for either of these candidates, nor their major party opponents in previous presidential elections. I have voted for a third party since 2013. I recently moved and have not registered to vote at my new address and I do not plan on voting in the upcoming election. I see myself as a disinterested party in the outcome of the pageantry of the group spectacle that we all are allowed to participate in. I must also state that I have been a registered voter in both major political parties during my lifetime and was even an elected official at the state level of a minor party. I have come to realize that the interests of the average worker in the United States are not represented by any of the current political options and it is because of this conclusion that I have decided not to vote.

In spite of my best efforts, I still can not avoid the bombardment of news, advertisements, telephone calls, social media posts, and random online personalities trying to tell me how important the next election is going to be. For weeks I’ve heard nothing but vitriol from supporters on both sides of the contests and their infectious propaganda have only cemented the wedge between tens of millions of hard-working folks who can’t see that they’ve been lied to for so long that they are unaware of a reality outside of the status quo. 

Extremists of many factions on both sides have taken the opportunity to control some of the narrative and they will stop at nothing until their opponents are destroyed. People living in the United States have witnessed one election season after another marked by tabloid-style news stories aimed to rally supporters or ridicule detractors. All the while, opinion polls remain unmoved by decisions in court cases or non-stop scripted arguments designed to resemble heated debates by television personalities. Logic and reason have disappeared and they’ve been replaced with mythology and tribalism. People are scared and have begun to turn on each other. Millions of Americans are searching for answers to problems that our society has ignored for decades. The time is ripe for a strongman to step in and promise peace and order while restoring the glory of the years gone by. It is from this perspective that I share my ideas about what may come.

In less than 24 hours, we’ve seen a variety of stories and possible motives. This has led many of the usual conspiracy theorists to begin peddling their version of events that some people will treat as absolute fact. This happens during every newsworthy event and too often these dens of deception are fueled by the desires of a few relatively new players in the entertainment industry as they try to find consumers, entertain current ones, and search for potential funding sources. Even more so in our current climate of ad-driven streaming platforms and the cheap availability of user-friendly technology. These newcomers are bypassing the old guard of news and entertainment organizations which have kept the public docile and unresponsive to social movements since the 1968 Democratic National Convention signaled to the people what the state was capable of doing in response to mass protests.

In a similar fashion, the oldest faction within our society never misses the chance to tie shocking events to some mystical force. They will have you believe that this power has either become very angry at society and seeks to punish it, or it has intervened in some divine way to protect its chosen few, or their selected prophet, from everyone else. Online buzz has already flared up with people from this particular group posting about sharing prayers, or asking for prayer chains, so that society can find favor with a cosmic deity. Ironically, this is the same section of the population that ridicules other groups who have chosen to believe a different set of stories about where humans come from and where we go when we die. Unfortunately, nearly half of all people in the United States identify as belonging to one of any number of various sects of this group. Is it any wonder why fundamental truths about our planet and the universe are consciously ignored by people who in any other setting might actually be considered intelligent folks?

On the government front, the current representatives of the existing system will speak out to denounce the events and remind folks that the system is supposed to work better than it is and that everyone is supposed to continue to follow the rules. Of course, this isn’t to say that the political mechanism will voluntarily step aside and give up control to ensure the system can work again. It is usually a ploy to remain in charge and it is a message given as a sign that they are still able to rule society and remain loyal to the power brokers who put them in place. They are telegraphing their loyalty and saying that they can be trusted to not upend the balance of power in our society. At times they may be allowed to concede here and there, but only in the face of an organized and militant opposition from below.

One side will win in the struggle for the reigns of control over the people. Which side has yet to be determined, but a few things should be on the horizon. The impoverished and the working poor will either be coddled into remaining passive as their lives become harder, more expensive, and less secure. Or, they will be beaten into submission with crippling debt, a diminishing standard of living, and a fear of financial ruin. Both sides are at risk of eventually becoming motivated to fight back. One much quicker than the other. The trick will be in bringing all sides together as a unified front against the power structure that has been growing fatter by the efforts of them all. This will more than likely coincide with some movement to tighten control over society and prevent an organized resistance from developing. 

As far as things go for us on the bottom, not much will change for the better. We are exactly where we are because we have played into the hands of racism, sexism, nationalism, and selfishness. Every time progress was to be made as a class, we have been separated by one or more of these wedge issues. In less than 70 years, the United States worker has witnessed a downward economic spiral, of a non-unionized, multi-income household with no retirement pension, savings account, or available credit. A husband and wife working today with a college educated child living at home has a lower standard of living than a young man with a high school diploma working in a factory in the 1960s. Both parties are to blame for this decline because they've both had multiple chances to do something about it. Both major political parties have shown that they no longer care about the lives of the working class in this country.

Throughout the course of my life I have witnessed many of these changes firsthand. I was born in 1975, some would say just two short years after the zenith of the quality of life for those living inside the American Empire. This was also three years before the de-industrialization of the modern Rust Belt states. Many of those good-paying unionized jobs went overseas, or were relocated to Sun Belt states with lower wages for employees. I was the only child of a 20 year old retail store worker with a high school diploma–the first in our family up to that point. Her only escape from guaranteed economic serfdom in Houston, Texas was to enter into a common-law marriage of forty years with my stepfather. He was a highschool dropout working at the lower levels of petroleum production in the American Southwest. We moved ten times between five states from the time I was three years old until I turned eight. He was also a violently heavy drinker who held antiquated views about race, women, immigrants, labor unions, and he believed wholeheartedly in the John Wayne version of American history. 

When I hear of the average blue collar white male from the Baby Boomer generation in the United States, I think of my stepdad. Many of them today still cling to the same beliefs he had to explain why he died living his last years in a travel trailer on social security having never accumulated any real wealth or property. In his mind it was because of people of color and immigrants that he wasn’t able to succeed in life. His problems never had anything to do with his compulsion to spend time drinking with friends and choosing to drive company-owned vehicles under the influence. Outside of his anti-union views on labor, I don’t ever recall him having many opinions about politics.

I was just six years old when, in 1981, a newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan was struck by a bullet from a gun in the hands of a would-be assassin. Anyone under the age of 40 won’t know about this unless they’ve actually read about it. My dad was actually a little stunned that a less than stellar Hollywood actor could become the leader of the free world. Before Reagan, there were the Days of Rage of the 1970s. A decade long reaction to the violent suppression of many of the groups who had experienced newfound freedoms of the Civil Rights Era. Participation in the political system, advances made by workers on the job, and access to education, housing, and healthcare were all met with assassinations, a new political regime, militarized police forces, and the reinstitution of business as usual.

The legitimate use of violence by the state, encouraged by the “Silent Majority” (and later the moral majority) was met with small bombings of persons, cars, and buildings. Even Gerald Ford, who had assumed Richard Nixon’s hot seat by the end of 1974, had survived two attempts on his own life. In a way, it was the bullet that nearly killed Reagan that resulted in the complete shift to the beginnings of the current political economy that we are watching implode in real time today. This corporate dominated expansion into the vacated markets of the fallen Soviet Union, at the expense of workers at home, has witnessed the United States conquer the globe as the lone superpower. China and a restructured Russia are a distant second and third, but this supremacy has come with a hefty price tag.

Reagan was the final signal the power brokers needed for a return to greatness and a green flag for the move back to the way things were before. Hell, he was even re-elected by one of the widest margins in presidential election history and there were many so-called Reagan Democrats who championed his administration's policies. An agenda which increased spending in the sectors keeping him in power and a decrease in taxes for those very same sectors.

During the tail end of the Cold War, Reagan inherited a national debt of about 3.5 billion dollars short of a full trillion. That is with a “T” and it comes after millionaire and billionaire. A trillion is 1,000 billions and it is represented by a “1” followed by twelve zeroes (1,000,000,000,000). By the time he left office, Reagan’s national debt increased by 186% or about $1.86 trillion. It has never stopped growing with every president since and today it sits at almost $35 trillion. That amount is equal to more money than is needed to give every single person living in the United States a check for one hundred thousand dollars. Where did all this money get spent?

If you have ever tuned into any number of radio stations, television shows, and now podcasts or simulcast via the internet, you may have heard that the money is all going to social welfare programs and undocumented migrants. What is absent from almost all of them is any admission of taxpayer bailouts for large industries and their financial backers. Spending on domestic agriculture, oil and energy production, construction projects, automobile manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and some healthcare has steadily increased. That stated, there is still no industry as heavily subsidized as the weapons manufacturers. The United States spends more money on its military than the next thirteen largest countries combined. With a yearly cost of close to $900 billion, the U.S. spends more than three times as much as China, and nearly ten times as much as Russia, invest in their own militaries. The defense industries which support them are eagerly seeking new markets overseas to sell their surplus stockpiles of weapons to. Ukraine is just the latest casualty from a long list of rather brutal regimes from around the world who agreed to buy guns stamped “Made in America.”

Agriculture has gone overseas as well. U.S. producers trade our staple crops, livestock, and dairy to foreign countries in exchange for the good stuff like fruit, sugar, coffee and tea. Many of the trading partners like guns, too. And oil!

All of this money moving around the globe and a whole bunch of people are feeling left out. Internationally, people are either suppressed by force or violently revolting against the system. In some cases the warfare has bled over into neighboring countries and terrorist warlords have taken control. They are a much more difficult opponent to beat because they are forced to fight a much larger and far superior organized military unit in an unorthodox fashion. And for anyone who may have forgotten, that was the same tactic used by George Washington during the American Revolution against the last world empire. Imagine what Washington could have done if he had to balance the demands of an internal surveillance force of the National Defense Authorization Act, with NATO expansion across Eastern Europe, and a twenty-first century scramble for land and resources in Africa and South America.

Would he be able to buy off enough support from the public with a promise of better jobs, better pay, and better working conditions? Or, would he, being the richest man in Virginia, choose to help himself and his buddies with acquiring more land and money? Just rewinding the expansion of the United States across the continent and following the transfer of wealth and power will allow anyone to see that this path taken by the new nation was all done with a calculated violence and brutality that has often gone unnoticed. A few times the government system in place has faced some turmoil. Sectionalism and civil war, isolationists and imperialists, capitalism and fascism, workers and big business have all escalated to violence before. Some of those conflicts ended with sitting presidents assassinated and others pushed the problems down the road by renegotiating the bargain.

Violence in the history of the United States must be recognized as a major role in events that are taking place around the world and on the streets of our cities and towns. People are migrating to urban centers for a chance to earn money while millions of others are living unhoused in the streets of the very same cities. Addiction to drugs and alcohol are prevalent and other violent crimes will surely follow. There is also the contingent of military veterans suffering from PTSD and other injuries who are accompanied by people suffering from untreated mental illness. Meanwhile, 2 out of every 5 people in the U.S. don’t have an extra $500 in cash available to them. Worse yet, 3 out of 5 couldn’t handle a one thousand dollar emergency. Most Americans are just a couple of paychecks away from joining those living in their cars or tents on the street. The role of poor health and the opioid crisis has many of them in no shape to survive. Police are shooting citizens in cold blood, criminals are killing victims for property or sheer pleasure, and children are shooting each other in schools all over the country. Violence is already here because violence has never left. The fact that it has taken so long to return to the biggest circus show of all time is what really has me puzzled.

What is to be done when the repercussions come?