As I tried, for about the seventeenth time, to make sense
of the healthcare negotiations, I suddenly realized that
I wasn't watching a political debate at all; rather it
was one of those conflicts you read about in other
countries that are so hard to understand from afar - the
sort in which militant and/or religious sects with hard
to remember names and unpronounceable leaders engage in
struggles usually reduced by the press to simple goals
such as "power" or "strengthening their position."

But instead of Shiek Wahoodie Marzapan or the Terratus
Mozaki faction, we have Max Baucus, Olympia Snow and the
Blue Dogs. And it all makes about as much sense.

That is, until you stop framing it as a political
division and recognize that we are really dealing with
quasi-religious fundamentalists engaged in a simple turf
battle in which the goal is not healthcare or the lack
thereof, but relative standing at the end of the
conflict. In domestic terms, it is much more like a mob
dispute than a traditional political debate. To be sure,
some of the language seems political - talk of a public
option, mandates and so forth - but this is mostly just
part of the Muzak accompanying the mayhem - symbols that
help make the whole thing appear rational.

In fact, politics is pretty much dead in America and has
been for some time.

Of course, politics has never been just about such high
minded things as goals, ideas and reforms. Such causes
have always had to struggle for air against the forces
described by Walt Whitman as including "the meanest kind
of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers,
pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men,
custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels
well-train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels,
disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers,
pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures
of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers,
lobbyers, sponges, ruin'd sports, expell'd gamblers,
policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of
conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside
with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made
from the people's money and harlots' money twisted
together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings
and born freedom-sellers of the earth."

But - whether promoted out convenience or noble purpose -
such causes did at least exist and everyone argued about
them - albeit often futilely.

For example, here is one such statement of goals:

"This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present
strength, under the protection of certain inalienable
political rights -- among them the right of free speech,
free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from
unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights
to life and liberty.

"We have come to a clear realization of the fact,
however, that true individual freedom cannot exist
without economic security and independence. . . People
who are hungry, people who are (and) out of a job are the
stuff of which dictatorships are made.

"In our day these economic truths have become accepted as
self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second
Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and
prosperity can be established for all -- regardless of
station, or race or creed.

"Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative
job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the
nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food
and clothing and recreation; . . . The right of every
business man, large and small , to trade in an atmosphere
of freedom from unfair competition and domination by
monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family
to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and
the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The
right to adequate protection from the economic fears of
old age, and sickness, and accident and unemployment; And
finally, the right to a good education.

"America's own rightful place in the world depends in
large part upon how fully these and similar rights have
been carried into practice for all our citizens."

Now, if you were to clip the foregoing and wander around
the White House and Capitol Hill looking for someone to
advocate such a program, you would be lucky if you came
up with anyone other than, say, Russ Feingold, Bernie
Sanders and perhaps a bare majority of the Black Caucus.
. . .

The others - from the president on down - would regard
such a program as naive claptrap not even worthy of
discussion. And not a single mainstream reporter or TV
show would give it the slightest attention.

Which will give you some sense of what has happened in
the 65 years since these words were broadcast nationally
during a fireside chat by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We like to think of ourselves as so much more
sophisticated than those crazy Muslims with their
innumerable and indecipherable sects, yet that is
precisely what our politics has become as well.

It is not about great issues but about minor factions. It
is not about causes to be advocated but subcultures to be
preserved. It is not about mass politics but about
atomized preferences. And, of course, it is no longer
about votes because they have become almost superfluous -
symbolic reflections of the dollars that really matter.

If we toss out our traditional political paradigm and
start to look at America as if it were one of those
countries we like to occupy, destabilize or develop an
exit strategy for, it all begins to make more sense.

We find ourselves in a country in which at least three
major fundamentalist mujahideens are struggling for
power: the conservative, liberal and establishment. Each
share such characteristics as absolute confidence in
their righteousness, absolute certainty in their beliefs,
absolute contempt for doubt, reduction of their opponents
to the status of devils, and the acceptance of warfare as
a noble exercise as long as they get to pick the target.

In a healthy democracy, two or more parties propose
specific programs to better, in their view, the state of
the nation. But not one of the contemporary American
mujahideens has shown any serious interest in such
matters for the past several decades. It has been left to
minor sects like the Greens and Libertarians to still
worry about issues.

Conservatives, for example, have seemingly forgotten
their erstwhile concern for small government and lower
spending and have chosen to define themselves instead by
what they oppose: primarily abortion and gay marriage.
There are about 1.2 million abortions a year and about
150,000 gay marriages or similar unions. In other words,
conservatives have established as a primary goal changing
the annual behavior of less than one half of one percent
of the American public.

About the only major policies that establishment
fundamentalists have pursued during this same period has
been to find new ways to transfer wealth from the many to
the few and to periodically change the identity of their
major enemy - i.e. the devil incarnate - and thus
periodically redefine themselves. Over these three
decades the devil has been serially located in El
Salvador, Libya, Lebanon, Grenada, Honduras, Iraq,
Panama, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. And the most deadly
horned beast of all has been the one selling drugs, the
war on which having cost more American lives than any
conflict since Vietnam.

But the only clear victory in all of this was in Grenada
and, as Ted Turner recently noted, the last country to
actually surrender to us was Japan. Yet not one
significant member of the establishment mujahideen has
apologized for the futility and cost of their warrior
fantasies and, as of this morning, not one leader of the
establishment has apologized for their near disastrous
financial policies and misdeeds from which we are now
desperately attempting to recover.

But then, the enemy was never there to be defeated but as
a constant threat enforcing the loyalty of one's
constituency. As Ernest Becker put it, "war is a
sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular
hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to
mutilate or kill foreign enemies." With it you need no
progress, no policies, and no change in the system at
all.

All you need is an enemy, with the greatest threat not
being the enemy itself but that it might disappear.
Constatine Cavafy put it well a century ago:

Night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
And said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.

Few in public office have said it so bluntly, a
remarkable exception being the State Department's
director of policy planning in 1948, George Kennan, who
argued, "We should cease to talk about vague and. . .
unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of
the living standards, and democratization. . . We are
going to have to deal in straight power concepts."

While an establishment or conservative movement obsessed
with power certainly has plenty of precedents in history,
this tendency was mitigated in the United States during
its first two centuries because, for better or worse,
Americans of all stripes believed in things and their
politics reflected this.

But what is rare enough to be deeply disturbing has been
the transformation of the American liberal constituency
into a similar sect - one searching for power without the
necessity of purpose. Certainly since its cynical
acceptance of Bill Clinton, mainstream liberal Democratic
politics has not displayed more than a passing interest
in any major policy - sharing with the right a reliance
on things like gay marriage and abortion while ignoring
massive economic, environmental and civil liberties
issues. To be sure, there are progressives and groups
that have tried to take up the slack, but they have been
uniformly ignored, or even dissed, such as the refusal to
invite single payer advocates to White House discussions
on health care, which mainstream liberals barely noticed.

Further, liberals have increasingly taken to acting like
conservatives. They are defining themselves by their
enemies rather than by their own beliefs and programs.
For example, their obsession with the faults of Fox News
argues that true virtue lies in not being Sean Hannity.
There was a time when liberals had higher standards than
that.

Worse, the liberal paradigm has assigned to much of
America the sins of Rush Limbaugh, condemning the very
people who should be converted, disparaging much of our
land as mere "fly over country," and showing no respect
for the problems of those who live in such places. These
are the characteristics of a snotty private club, not a
political movement.

There are a couple of reasons why all this is deeply
disturbing. The first is that almost without exception,
the best political ideas - from democracy itself to a
minimum wage or ecological preservation - have come from
the left. For liberalism to go into sleep mode or retreat
into a cocoon of smug self identity endangers the whole
nation.

The second is that one of the hidden dangers of politics
without purpose is that it becomes increasingly corrupt
and supportive of aggressively narcissistic and
anti-democratic abuse. This is what happened in Nazi
Germany as the disintegration of liberalism became an
important part of the cultural rubble upon which Hitler
climbed.

There is nothing, however, that prevents the rediscovery
of real politics in America. Admittedly, it would be
difficult given the almost total bias of the media
towards the personality rather than the substance of
power. But there could still be a progressive populist
movement that would promote a real economic reform
movement, defend the weak against the powerful, the local
against the centralized and rediscover the sort of rights
of which Roosevelt spoke 65 years ago.

Since the media is a key part of the establishment
mujahideen, it will not voluntarily admit this to its
viewers and readers, but we are living in a nation of
increasingly angry, restless, confused folk and if they
are not offered decent and realistic answers they will
become increasingly susceptible to the worst kind of
lies.

Yet for it to happen, we must first accept the degree to
which the system we were taught we lived under simply no
longer exists. That our politics have lost honor and
soul, with conscious programs and polices replaced by the
transactions of mobs, exemplified by healthcare
negotiations in which the major winners will inevitably
be the healthcare industry and the biggest losers those
in whose name a final measure will be passed.

And we must also view that part of unempowered America
with which we find disagreement not as irreparable
rightwing junkies but as fellow citizens who have been
deceived, misled and screwed. And then, issue by issue,
turn them into allies as together we rediscover what
politics was meant to be - and still can be - about.