The Crisis is Upon Us

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 39 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

A hundred and fifty years ago the fate
of the nation hung in the balance.

History tells us that the results at
Gettysburg and Vicksburg, which came in July, sealed the South's
fate. But that wasn't the way people looked at it at the time.

That's because the South believed so
strongly in their general, Robert E. “Bobby” Lee. They believed
he could keep the North bleeding until it cried uncle, until a new
leader like George McClellan took over and sued for peace. They saw
the draft riots in New York as a sign of things to come.

History shows they were wrong about the
North and it should show they were wrong about Lee. The same Lee who
won at Chancellorsville by dividing his army multiple times in the
face of superior force threw George Pickett's division into the fire
at Gettysburg. That should have ended the war, except Union general
George Meade refused to follow-up, which is why Lincoln eventually
called for U.S. Grant. Grant and his chief lieutenant, William
Tecumseh Sherman, gave Lee the war of attrition he could not answer.

Because Bobby Lee was such a great
general the Civil War lasted longer, and killed many more people,
than it otherwise would have. What began as a romantic, Napoleonic
exercise ended in 20^th century horrors, in Petersburg
trenches and Andersonville death camps, in the blitzkrieg of Georgia
and the abuse of whole populations. (I happen to think that Lee recognized this, as his later life demonstrated.)

I write all this because they're at it
again. Who's Bobby Lee now? Ted Cruz is Bobby Lee now.

The current crisis, which began with
the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, has been unique in
American history for its lack of casualties. Vietnam, the Great
Depression, the Civil War, and even the industrial actions of the
Progressive Era left real casualties, war dead. Our present crisis
hasn't done that. And so the people who cover it and the forces that
are driving it think nothing has really changed, that the present
gridlock is some sort of “business as usual.”

It's not. When the basic functioning of
our system of government breaks down, that's not business as usual.
That's a crisis. And make now mistake – our system is broken. The
judicial system has slowed to a crawl because there aren't enough
judges. Piracy has become a business model because there are no cops
around to stop it. Kids are going hungry for lack of food stamps.

The most remarkable achievement of the
Obama Administration so far is that most of these things have gone
unremarked. The human costs of the present crisis have been buried,
kept out of sight, leading some to believe they don't exist, and
won't exist if the crisis is pressed further.

The biggest mistake of the
Administration was approving a bill earlier this year to exempt air
traffic controllers from the sequester. The loss of air traffic
control inconvenienced Congressmen and Senators, so it was removed in
the spirit of comity, but that only emboldened those on the other
side. Since they weren't noticing the sequester, it didn't exist.

The damage from the sequester has been
hidden, and the assumption is the President will find ways to hide
the impact of the government shut-down, even a refusal to raise the
debt ceiling. Henry Blodget feels Republicans are emboldened by these
actions, thinking that it's only those parts of the government that
serve Democrats that are being shut down. He's right.

The same sort of things have happened
in past crises, only they came sooner. President Lincoln gave Grant
and Sherman their orders to create “all hell” in the Confederacy
by late 1863 – that would have been 2011 by our time scale. William
McKinley let the internationalist progressives within his coalition
get their war on in 1898, 2010 by our time scale, undercutting the
conservative populists for good and all. By this point in Nixon's
term we were deep in Watergate, the crisis of Vietnam having been
effectively dealt with.

What's happening now is, to me, most
analogous with what FDR faced, because the Great Depression wasn't
the real crisis of the 1930s, Hitler was the crisis. In 1937 it was
still considered reasonable for a Republican businessman like Tom
Watson of IBM to sell punch card machines to Germany, or Henry Ford
to accept a medal from Hitler, or Charles Lindbergh to visit Germany
and praise its leaders. Much of this history was buried in the
conflagration that followed, but in 1937 Roosevelt was forced to
retreat before these forces, setting in motion the “little
depression” that made Republicans more powerful in 1938 and slowed
our march to the inevitable conflict, making it more deadly. That, in
fact, is the verdict of Republican historians – it's the verdict of
Ted Cruz.

Appeasement helps no one. Obama's
retreats are making him less popular, even though he's succeeding on
the issue that his opponents claim matters, the deficit.

Every crisis President is important.
Not every crisis President is successful. Their success is measured
by their willingness to eventually confront the real crisis they
face. Regardless of the casualties.

The only way the crisis can be brought
to a head is for the President to change course. Instead of hiding
the impact of sequester and shut-down, as his friends urge and his
enemies expect, the President should be doubling-down on those
impacts, deliberately inconveniencing the programs the right wing
depends on.

Don't sent out farm subsidy checks.
Stop negotiating trade agreements. Close some military hospitals. Put
defense workers on furlough. Stop delivering Wall Street those
numbers it depends on, like unemployment numbers and others involving
economic activity, until the crisis is over.

And when the debt ceiling hits, stop
paying the bills.

State, clearly, that either Congress
does its job or the work of the government stops. It's the only way
to get the message through to the confederacy and its Wall Street
co-conspirators that the work of the government is serious work, work
that has to be done. Stop doing the work and bring the casualties to
their front doors. When the press gang howls, simply point down the
street to Congress. When they claim that it could be done “more
easily,” say that day is past, that “easily” was used and
abused by the right just as every other effort to come to an
accomodation was.

The Tea Party wants war. Give them war.
War, which is all hell, will break them, because they can't handle
war. They can talk war, but they can't handle it. Call their bluff.

Only after this crisis is over can we
start the work that lays before it. We can't address the climate
crisis without a government that's willing to engage. We can't
address inequality without a government that's able to engage. We
can't begin the process of reforming our electoral process, getting
rid of gerrymandering,
until we have a government that's willing and able to engage on a
fundamental level.

All this requires that the present
crisis be brought to a head. It requires the appointment of a U.S.
Grant. It requires getting our political war on. It requires Lend
Lease, and a draft. It requires confrontration, a modern equivalent
of the Southern Strategy.

No crisis President, so far, has failed
this test. No crisis President has failed, when pushed to the war,
failed to respond. This one won't either. It's only a question of
when he decides enough is enough, and that it's time to go to
political war.