STARS AND STRIPES AND ... SO WHAT?

By any practical standard it’s irrelevant who wins the US Presidential election this week. It’s easy to forget amidst the hoopla that Americans will also vote for Congress on the same day. Unless there’s a significant change of make-up and politics there, it really won’t matter which candidate takes the White House. The very closeness of the Presidential race indicates no such change is likely.

It’s a two-party system. Each party can count on between forty-two and forty-eight percent of the vote; voting is also non-compulsory. That means elections are decided by as little as four percent of those who bother to turn out and cast their ballot. During the last three years something interesting has happened in this narrow middle sliver.

In 2008 President Obama attracted a record number of first-time voters. Being first-timers they were, by and large, extraordinarily childish in their expectations of the process – they missed the “we” in Yes We Can. Having discovered that casting one vote in one election won’t make the New Jerusalem descend from the heavens, the worry is that this time they’ll stay at home.

Meanwhile the President’s opponents, under cover of the Tea Party and their ilk, have taken over the ideological machinery of the Republican Party. Along the way they’ve dragged part of that vital middle sliver sharply to the right.

Friends who regularly travel Stateside tell me we have a false idea of Americans; that a noisy fringe in the media gives the rest a bad name. Sadly, with the connivance of single-minded lobbyists and demagogic news media, it’s that fringe which increasingly determines the direction of public affairs.

For all their messianic hope for the advent of a new Reagan, it’s their influence on the Congress which will shape the next four years. Should Obama win, they’ll continue to stymie his domestic agenda, leaving him free to act only when it comes to drone-strikes and assassinations. Even if the Democrats win big in a mid-term reaction, he’ll have only two years left – in Washington terms, nothing.

If It’s Romney, he’ll either toe the line or not. If, like his hero Reagan, he decides to raise a tax here and there to offset proposed spending cuts, they’ll turn on him – the way they turned on Republicans who backed the stimulus and healthcare bills. The net result, in any case, is the same.

The joke is that most in the fringe are honest, hard working people who think they’re defending their own interests. They genuinely believe that, thanks to Obama, they’re paying higher taxes. They’re not. Even after enactment of the stimulus package and Obamacare, taxes for the average American have gone down. Not that you’d know it by watching Fox News.

Tea Partyers have been sold a line by a cynical politico-economic elite with an interest in stoking their fears. A distorted view of past and present imperils the future. It seems unlikely that anything short of another financial catastrophe will spur the “change” all parties glibly promise.

When a society begins to be taken in by its own mythology, it’s perilously close to disappearing up itself. When it does, a large chunk of the world will be sucked in its wake.