As I’ve said before, the Republican political strategy of playing to the backlash to shift wealth to the super-rich was going to run out eventually. Is this it?

This must be a real shock to the other side, but they really have only themselves to blame. They have been running around saying that the survival of the capitalist system is at stake, and now they find people talking about whether that system really ought to survive. For a generation, politics has been about the social issues and the “culture war” — all the while the super-rich have been grabbing everything they can — but now the issues are the role of the capitalists (a.k.a. “job-creators”) and just how much they ought to get and keep.

Now they actually have to defend their system — not just promise to stop abortion and gay marriage, promises which were somehow never actually kept. Their arguments range from the relatively sophisticated (faith in individual opportunity is what keeps the system running) through the fallacious (the Supply-Side Lie) to the downright demented (protestors smell bad). The point is that people are finally talking about this.

There are quite a few steps between here and making serious change — and it will take longer than we can really expect people to be camping out in the cold. In the next few months, everything will start to coalesce into an election campaign. (Obama has disappointed all of us, but we can’t just let him go down — but that’s another, much longer post.) A start has been made.

Maybe the Mayans were right after all, and 2012 will be the year the world changes.

A few thoughts:

1. The phenomenon which some are calling “white nationalism” is more about culture than about crude skin-color prejudice. (There is still a bunch of the latter about, of course.) Large numbers of (white) Americans have their identity tightly bound up with a vision of America as the only advanced country with the moral fortitude to reject national health care. What we most condemn about modern America is precisely what they are most proud of — and the possible loss of which most outrages them. There are assumptions about the proper relation between the individual and the community, and the proper role of the state, which have to change if we are to have a decent future. And I submit that our main task is not so much to persuade the other side, as to mobilize as many people as we can against them — and to cow as many half-hearted opponents as possible into silence.

2. It also would help for everyone to take the proverbial deep breath. Given the force of the other side’s resistance, it would be easy to lose sight of how deep in enemy territory we are playing. The political mainstream is arguing over the role of the rich in society and how much they should be expected to pay in taxes. Even if it looks like the other side is winning at the moment, it is significant that we are talking about it. Bob King, president of the United Auto Workers, had an column in one of the Detroit papers recently, in which he argued that America should try to be a country where we have a broad middle class; someone wrote a long letter in response that America should instead strive to be a country where deserving people get rich. I’m ecstatic that people are having those sorts of arguments in the mainstream media.

3. People should also cool it with assumptions that the Republicans WILL hold the House, WILL take the Senate, and WILL elect a President. Maybe yes, maybe no — but it doesn’t help to lose heart nearly a year and a half before the elections. The GOP is in disarray at this point, and there may be (metaphorical) blood on the floor at their next convention; the teabaggers hate the establishment, and vice versa. (1964, anyone?) For the moment, I still expect Obama to be re-elected, and if it’s not quite the exciting prospect it was in 2008, it will be psychologically devastating to the Right. They’ve convinced themselves that “the American people” reject Obama and all his “socialist” works, and a clear demonstration that this is no so will positively break their hearts.

I can hardly wait.

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not existed first; that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence … labor is the superior — greatly the superior — of capital.”

–Abraham Lincoln, Milwaukee, Wis., Sept. 30, 1859