a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Irony: A state of affairs that appears perversely contrary to what one expects. (OED)

Usually, historical ironies are clearly visible only in retrospect.  Isn’t it ironic, we can say with some decades of distance, that in the late 1960s, a youth revolt propelled so many Americans and so many American institutions in a progressive direction; while, at the same time, America was beginning its most remarkable regression, longer lived than any in its history.  Here is a key symptom.  Even  though the 1971 Comprehensive Child Development Act went   down under  Richard Nixon’s veto,  both Houses of Congress had (narrowly) passed it. There was a good deal of progressive momentum about children’s education among state and federal legislators. Also, a good model survived the Nixonian axe:  funding increased for Head Start, which had already begun to prove itself one of the nation’s most successful programs for developmental  support and education for poor children. But, at the same time,  the  ironically-named “family values” crowd was –with Nixon’s encouragement —assembling for its long war against any programs that supported children,  any attention to their needs and the needs of their families coming from outside of “the family.” It still amazes me that they started winning that war  so quickly—given a push by the 1973 recession and the loss of the Vietnam War.  I don’t think anyone –anywhere on the political  spectrum—predicted  the strength of the regression.  The New York Times this morning (March 11, A13) offers this war dispatch:  The Republican spending bill now being debated in Congress would cut Head Start’s $7.2 billion budget by $2 billion.

The irony that a country being jolted in a Good Society direction was, at the same time, poised to lunge backwards  is perfectly clear now that the country has been torn apart. The rift in attitudes  toward  community responsibility for children is the most telling symptom of the disordered national character.  Yet another generation of poor young children are being attacked. And it is not at all clear where any healing for this disorder will come from. Self-inflicted wounds are very hard to heal.

But, at the moment,  no 20/20 hindsight is need to see the irony in the world historical situation before our eyes. Americans are sitting in their conservative democracy,  from which social democratic  thinking has so disappeared  that last year’s health insurance bill could be hailed as progressive.  They look upon a world  in which  masses of people in predominantly-Muslim Middle Eastern countries,  long derided by Americans  and Europeans as disinclined toward democracy,  are yearning for and fighting for democracy of the social democratic sort. Their model democracy is not America, which has such a poor track record in terms of concern for all its citizens, and which has propped up anti-democratic regimes all over the world.  Their models are decolonializing  states which have used the best of European social democratic  practices  to try to create  new types of social democracies,  tailored to local conditions. Istanbul is more inspiring to them than Washington.

We can read statements coming from Middle Eastern people who want benevolent  elected  state leaders to replace the various kinds of anti-democratic leaders they have been living under since the 1970s. They want  benevolent  states offering help to long-oppressed citizens and ready to redistribute the fabulous wealth  their dictators have stowed  in family bank accounts and in the pockets of  cronies in petro-industries and the military.  That is, they want political freedom and economic  fairness. Or, to put the matter  the other way:  they want an end to political repression and an end to huge discrepancies between  the ruling rich and the poor they trample.

Ironically,  neither  political freedom nor economic fairness are valued at this moment among the leaders of the European social democracies  or America –despite the streams of rhetoric expressing support for the rebellions in the Middle East,  especially in Libya, where the madman dictator is slaughtering his own people.  The European social democracies (and allied countries, like Canada and the other states of the former British Empire) are tearing themselves apart,   repudiating their social democratic principles. We can see everywhere  the emergence of party dictatorships,  more or less dependent on prime ministers  and chancellors and presidents, and completely interwined with corporate dictatorships.   Peoples denigrated  as ‘backward’ are struggling forward; and the  ‘developed’ world is regressing.

Certainly, the regressions going on in the European social democracies are recession-driven regressions. The world economic upheaval    that was brewing for a long time but irrupted in 2008 is the proximate cause of the present embrace of “austerity” measures and efforts to stimulate growth by tearing away at social programs, unions, environmental protection  budgets,  and any institutions requiring support over time , generation to generation –like healthcare systems and schools and universities.  The idea that corporations and banking institutions that made millions during the crisis should pay higher taxes  –or, at the least, pay the taxes they owe–is an idea with much popular support behind it but little or no support within legislatures where it is feared as a growth-inhibiting idea.  The European ruling parties behave like their national and EU banks, who seem unable to focus on anything except  the possibility of inflation. The deterioration of their social democracies  will, they hope, be stemmed if they get their deficits under control and the spectre of inflation banished.  Intellectual  short-sightedness is epidemic in Europe’s mainstream parties,  as intellectual  blindness is in America’s.

The great unraveling that is going on in Europe began to become intense in the 1980s, when anti-immigrant fever  struck.  People pouring into Europe from the very states which are now the battlegrounds of democracy –from northern Africa, from the Middle East – began living in the European social democracies as second class citizens. In some states, they were needed as guestworkers;  in some they were needed to keep up the birthrate, supplying new workers in aging societies. But everywhere they  were  attacked  by people who viewed them as a threat to national identities –white Protestant or Catholic European identities– and as an economic threat because they would get a free ride in the welfare systems.  Neo-fascist, rightist parties with anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, anti-Roma, platforms mushroomed. Each moment of economic uncertainty since the 1980s has boosted the rightist parties. And the rightist parties have had enough clout to pull the left to the center and the center to the right. Now, the European leaders who voice their support for the Middle Eastern democracy movement do so while trembling at the thought of oil-shortage inflation and at the sight of refugee waves landing on the southern Mediterranean rim and flowing northward.

America is much more advanced along the road of regression than any European state, certainly than the European states that still have fairly strong oppositions or even nascent protest movements, like the one in Britain called UK Uncut that has so thoroughly embarrassed the Cameron “Big Society” officials. While the cutters are busy cutting social and educational and housing support programs, the Uncuters are busy demonstrating how the government lets corporate tax evaders go untouched.  But even in America there is a rising tide of protest, led by union members in the states now engaged in union busting or legislation to outlaw collective bargaining.  Many ordinary citizens can see clearly that all the cries for “austerity” and slashing of budgets are designed to perpetuate the dominance of the rich.  Some are even able to see that the Middle Easterners who are rebelling against their plutocratic governments are  –ironically enough—the ones who are the teachers in this consciousness-raising.

All the sprouts of protest in the regressed democratic countries are recognizing the same basic problem. On the one hand, political institutions –particularly parties—have become detached from the people they represent and exercise decision-making without citizen debate or participation, guided only by ideology, very detached from realities. On the other hand, corporations operate only for themselves, manipulating governments at every chance.  They have no regard for their workers or the people who are their customers and who are also, more fundamentally, the collective owners of the national resources the corporations exploit. In short, small groups of interlocked leaders become dictators, and democracy is eroded, really betrayed.  And those interlocked leaders are in no position to condemn the dictators who control non-democratic states –for they have been interlocked with them, too.

This is a general situation in which only those who are living on the outside of their societies, marginalized, limited from or excluded from political participation, can get a realistic view on what is happening –and has been happening.  A huge consolidation of authoritarianism by the current generation of authoritarians in the Middle East; and a step-by-step dismantling of the Euro-American  democracies by the current generation of pseudo-democrats.  Many of those who have protested over the last decade, since 9/11, have been paranoid, terroristic outliers, madmen imitating the worst violence perpetrated by those they attacked  –men who literally got their weapons from those they attacked.  Now, there is something different happening –genuine popular up-risings, not wild populist frenzy or terroristic revenge.  And the irony is that in America it would be this very week when the United States Congress, led by a clearly unhinged, self-aggrandizing man, Representative Peter King, himself a former booster of the IRA, would be accusing the American Muslim communities –communities so filled with people who came to America to escape lawless authoritarian regimes—of harboring terrorists and failing to co-operate with law enforcement.

Irony, when it grows thick, is not like smoke, blinding. Rather, it induces an “I cannot believe  it,” stranger than fiction feeling. And that can lead to a “This has got to stop, it is making us crazy.”  Along with their freedom and their need to be treated fairly, most people treasure their sanity.