Newberry’s latest at TPM has me thinking, and although I’m wholly unqualified to match wits with his like on the topic, I’m going to brave a couple of predictions. He writes:

What this represents, however, is a clear decision by the Republican Party to accept that 2008 is going to be the year they lose nominal power. Their hope is that by driving a stake through the liberal state now, they will make it so that the Democratic tenure will be dominated by cleaning up after the massive debt the leave behind, the failed war in Iraq, and the destroyed state of the US dollar. And when that is done, the country will be ripe for the next snake oil salesman to come along and say "what you need is a wild night of tax cuts and war spending!"

A lot of people have been saying this is the plan. Republicans are best at thieving, making messes for others to clean up, and sneaking off into the proverbial night just before they get caught. Unfortunately, Americans have been buying into this cycle since the end of the 60s, and have accepted the diminution the liberal project of increasing the greater good for all, choosing instead to become more and more concerned with the various games of consumerism and head-in-the-sand pseudo-isolationism. Being grossly over-simple, I blame the Boomers. Between retiring from the project of civil involvement and raising a generation of incredibly useless and self-absorbed no talent kids, they’ve allowed their demographic power to become enslaved to the very entities who are going to gut their retirement in the very near future. The bill for this decadence is going to come, and very soon.
Newberry goes on:

It is true that long term commitments on Medicare and Social Security are where the failure of the US economy over the last generation to generate real wages is visible. It is where stagnation shows up in the numbers. We have two choices, we can either continue to burn the house down to toast marshmallows - that is continue to accept stagnation so long as it comes with McMansions and F-150 trucks and the occasional war porn orgy running on Fox News - or we can decide to create real growth again. By this measure we have not been doing well for a long time, and it has been so long that we have even built it into our economic numbers.

To which I have to quip: Ya think?

It’s so easy, and for a hundred really good reasons, to blame Bush Republicans for the mess we’re in today, but I think that misses an important point. It would not have been so hard, in 2000, in 1996, or even in 2004, for the majority of Americans to show a little more enthusiasm for monitoring and holding responsible our (s)elected leadership. The polls showed that people were truly unhappy with the Republican witch hunt of Clinton, they continue to show a deep dissatisfaction with a Congress that can’t seem to bother itself with issues like health care and a stagnant job market, as well as a completely failed war which has expended the resources which could’ve been diverted into the aforementioned areas. And yet...it is only today, and only in the most moderate of senses, that a popular movement buoyed by “anger” can be sensed. I’ve posted before about the coming anti-Republican landslide, but to my eyes, it’s really too little, too late.

If Newberry is right, and the Republicans have accepted that this is the time for them to slink off with their takings, I suspect they are going to do so comforted by the knowledge that the current crop of Democrats won’t be any kind of revolutionary replacement. It’s an estimation I share, sadly. All the recent bloviatings about who loves Israel more help me to understand that the Democrats are not so much out of touch as they are trapped within a bubble world, one in which the kind of bold action to fix the coming economic and social problems is as likely as I am to be elevated to Queen of Tasmania. The imagination, the courage, the willingness to make and implement hard choices just isn’t there. Indeed, why should it be? It’s not like the American public has or will demand “more” from either party. The treadmill continues to speed up, and the bowl of rice gets smaller by the day, but unlike the Mexican or Chilean people, Americans are unwilling to turn off “Idol” and get out in the street to demand their Constitutional rights.

Which leads me to my contribution in this line of prognostication: we’re fucked, hermanas. I beg of you to correct me, to point me to the signs that I may view which suggest a better future than the one I behold. I have a lot of faith in the netroots, its energies and passions, but I also have great respect for time, in all its complexities. And what I perceive is time running out.

I look at my aging parents, their peers, and to people my age. I look at the latest job and investment figures, and to various spots of weakness, in the environment, the global conflict between oilpatch proxies and loopy end timers, I cast my gaze at the extremely precarious economies of oil, and the developing world. What I don’t see: an easy way out of this mess. And this is what scares me most, for it’s clear to me that our leaders, of all stripes, are devoid of the vision and intellect to fight our way out of these problems. Easy is all they know, because it’s all the American people have expected of them. The short version of this point: compare a speech by Kennedy, to any of the idiotic ramblings of Bush. And yet- which would resonate more with a majority of Americans today? Given Fox’s popularity, I think you know the answer.

The more I think on it, the more I think Newberry is wrong. We won’t make it to the point of another “snake oil salesman” offering us a “wild night of tax cuts and war spending.” Because at the point that we’ve cycled through another Democratic clean up administration, the extent of their failures will have created the next devolution of the American experiment with democracy. Imagine with me: half of all Boomers living in conditions of near starvation and third world standards of health care. A slightly smaller group of 35-50 somethings, shuckin and jivin in burger flipping “careers,” morality and compassion stripped from them after 20 years of post-baccalaureate dreams failed. Regular crop failures and droughts and heat waves, conspiring to make an increasingly large segment of the nation exist in conditions now best known in the slums of megacities in South America and Asia. Petrotechnologies that are so expensive as to be the exclusive province of the very wealthy. Regular terrorist/domestic extremist attacks, fueling martial law conditions for urban centers, and the state imposed terror that such measures bring. Let me suggest to you some reading about the growth of theocratic movements. The seeds for medieval theocracy are well planted in this country, and a generation of uneducated children are just coming into adulthood, replete with desires sinister and rapturous. Do you think they will participate in Jefferson’s civil democracy, or instead prefer the “solutions” to their problems as they have in times past, when pigs were burned for eating their young, and cats were blamed for the Plague? Go to a megachurch and find out, if you don’t know.

Believe it or not, this isn’t meant to be a “downer” post. It’s meant to change your mind, your thinking about what you should be prepared for, and prepared to do. We have enjoyed the fruits of over 40 years of indolence and irresponsibility. Certain numbers, certain realities, cannot be ignored or avoided. One consequence of Bush’s destruction of the faith in American righteousness is that the rest of the world will happily let us slide into irrelevance and misery, dancing upon the grave of our greatness. It’s my belief that those of us on the vanguard should begin to consider, with no small seriousness, what it means to face the challenges we do. The thing about rolling downhill: the object doing the rolling gathers speed as the decline progresses. We’re about 1/3rd down that hill, and it’s past the time that anyone can jump off. Fasten your intellectual and dreaming seatbelts, my pretties. And don’t say you weren’t warned.