What Just Happened?

How did things go so wrong so fast? Despite the gloomy election forecasts it didn’t seem possible that ignorance would overwhelm sound judgment and mendacity become an art form, practiced by corporatists and power-hungry politicians. And yet here we are on the brink of a hard-right swing, with voters, blinded by artful propaganda hoodwinked into making ill-advised choices in the name of freedom and liberty.

Redefining concepts and fielding candidates willing to hang a teabag from their hat or claim a party affiliation with any letter other than a D was enough to turn the election tide in many districts. In the aftermath of a voting frenzy that claimed the purest of motives it still isn’t clear what the majority of supporters see as their mandate. After all “smaller government” and “business friendly” are pretty open-ended descriptions for a new political order. And how does a goal to repeal health-care legislation in the early stages of implementation signal a real ballot-box revolution?

How we laughed at our silly friends across the ocean for the instability of their governmental structures. However, the machinations of political extremists here and stalling tactics that guarantee an inertial legislative process are signs we have lost a sense of serious purpose. People around the world must be snickering behind our backs, and no matter how we insist ours is a nation founded on principles of freedom and justice for all, every functioning organ from the Supreme Court to the Congress is ravaged by special interests as the moral high ground crumbles beyond our grasp. Worst of all we risk being seen as silly and irrelevant.

Who will support our interests abroad when disruptive elements in this country are allowed to make excuses for inexcusable behavior? Stomping a young woman to the ground or arresting a reporter for asking the wrong kind of question is the sort of thing that happens regularly in countries we tend to disparage for heavy-handed assaults on human rights. Rough stuff at a Rand Paul event occurred at a local rally, but here’s the rub. Rand Paul is Kentucky’s senator elect, a member of a federal legislative body who will join others of his kind in setting policy for our country.

If the Tea Party didn’t see its every wish fulfilled this election cycle it made significant gains and that strange amalgam of bright-eyed pols doing victory laps around Washington is an unnerving sign of things to come. By the time the Tea Party faithful figure out they’ve been had by the likes of Dick Armey and the Koch brothers the grass roots that drove their agenda will have withered and died, and what some like to call the “new” ideas of congressional hucksters like Paul Ryan and Rand Paul will have succeeded in ravaging New Deal initiatives.

“Free markets” will be the standard by which we define ourselves - - freedom and justice for all not so much. The smiley face Mitch McConnell sports these days is a turn on the dour expression he usually wears as he contemplates a Senate of Republican resistance to the president’s agenda and the goal of making him a one-term president.

As for the president himself, if he caves in to the phony rhetoric about keeping all the Bush tax cuts in place he will have given ground where he need not. Let conservatives explain their willingness to provide tax breaks for investors and companies that choose to offshore while their ‘best and brightest’ devise ways to cut spending on the backs of average American workers. The president will lose his best chance to stand tall in the face of Wall Street pressure during the lame-duck session. If he loses the fight at least he will have taken a principled stand. If he wins he’ll have something to celebrate in a bleak electoral season.

As scary as many election results are the good news is that some of the more extreme elements were rejected at the polls. The bad news is that by supporting a series of obviously unprepared radicals Tea Partiers enabled Democrats to hold a slim majority in the Senate - - a less than gratifying outcome and a warning to left-of-center voters that they need to get on message and refuse to elevate disappointment about unrealized liberal goals into crushing defeat at every level of the progressive agenda.

Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell says the GOP should have supported her more vigorously. Her loss, however, was one hopeful sign that propaganda is insufficient to the task of hiding the inadequacy of ignorant, uninformed candidates like her. That she claimed to be “like you” the average voter in one of her campaign ads provided one depressing explanation for how well some under-achievers have been able to perform in our tortured political environment.