Once you really look beyond all the noise and the anger in America right now you see what is behind the chaos- not corporations, or right wingers, or socialists- but fear. Plain and simple fear. Those who are making the most noise and are the most upset are the most terrified not just by health care reform but by what they see happening all around them. They have been whipped into a frenzied lather because those who either lack the skills to mentally unpack ideas and rhetoric, or who do not take the time to do so, are the easiest to frighten and manipulate and they habitually fall for for the easiest and simplest- and self excusing- explanations on offer. Providing those excuses- invariably placing blame on others- is how politics at it’s darkest, and most effective, works. Hope can be fleeting, but fear is forever.

Those who lack the mental gifts for reason or who are simply uneducated tend conservative simply because they fear losing what the have more than they are willing to hope for improvement. Stoking that fear, and providing those excuses and boogeymen, from communists or “Oakies” in the 30’s to blacks in the 60’s and 70’s to immigrants and “socialists” today, has been the fuel for the conservative movement, particularly since the masters, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan perfected the “they’re coming to get you” artform. This is bad enough when the society and economy are basically stable but the problem for the conservative movement in America now is that it simply cannot hold. There is no longer a viable status quo to embrace and we have no choice but to forge a new America together.

The reason for this is that for the last thirty years we got in line behind Reaganism and reduced government, deregulated across the board, and let corporations have their day using the core theory that left unfettered they would rise the tide that would lift all the boats. What happened instead is exactly what transpired eighty years ago and the business community not only gorged itself on behalf of its share and bond holders, but their ravenous snouts broke the trough from which they fed. Our system is now fully broken. The days of “living wages,” easy credit and disposable income that fueled a consumer-driven economy are gone now. Jobs are going for good, wages are sinking for good, energy costs will inevitably rise, and the health care industry- almost twenty percent of our economy- can no longer feed itself on the fat of the populace. The fat is gone.

The great political problem for Barack Obama is that, rather than being a transformative leader who will lead out out of the morass into a new and better America he is far more likely to become the poster boy for its decline. The simple and gruesome reality is that American life is not going to get any better for the average citizen, it’s going to get worse. We are all going to have to learn how to do with less and to live within our diminishing resources. That is not change you can believe in, it’s change you fear and, yell and scream all you want, it’s reality.