For a few weeks I have been trying to come up with a coherent response to the candidacy of Herman Cain. I have shared that struggle with basically every news source I could get my hands on, on the right or the left. Indeed, it seemed like Herman Cain himself hardly had a coherent response to himself. This is a campaign which seemed very unwilling to be a campaign and an equally unwilling or at least woefully unprepared candidate. His campaign staff leadership is made up entirely of ex-Koch brothers employees, his advisors remain either nameless or nobodies, and his debating style can best be described as willfully ignorant.
However, Rachel Maddow's November 4th summed up this candidacy in a bold and undeniable report. Herman Cain is running not as a candidate, but as an anti-candidate. The root of Cain's message, even more than the importance of corporations, is that politics is a farce, that someone with what is clearly becoming a joke-candidicy can rise to power. Herman Cain is leading by example, running to prove that government and the people who can get elected into it are unworthy of the power bestowed onto them.
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but here's one I am beginning to believe. Herman Cain's campaign is, as Maddow labels it, a piece of performance art, albeit with quite a strict script. It is being funded and run almost singularly by the Koch brothers, two men who perhaps best express the greed and depravity of the upper 1%. They are running Cain not, as one generally thinks of puppet candidates, as a means of giving them specific political power, but rather as a means of discrediting the entire political process and government itself and further increase the power of corporations in America.
Rachel Maddow's report can be found here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9Ze-ejTC7c . Watch it, now.
We must seize upon this moment. There is a high probability that the steps taken by the Koch brothers on behalf of Cain may be illegal as well as immoral. A full investigation should be ordered, which will no doubt uncover more problems in the billionaire brother's books. We must use this to add more fuel to the fire to try and regulate, or in many cases re-regulate, the influence that money can have in politics, be it working to get rid of corporate personhood, push for public financing of elections, or limiting the affect of lobbyists groups and PACs. But we must all allow ourselves to spend a moment being ashamed. The fact that the Cain campaign has had and, most likely, will continue to have success suggests that our fragile Democracy may be closer to what Cain's 'brothers from another mother' are after. If we are to remain a true 21st century Democracy, this trend cannot continue.
I'm with you, in that this has a ring of truth. And yes, we should be ashamed. It seems like there's a tendency on the left to be generally embarrassed and unnerved by what happens on the right, but without taking any responsibility for it, because that's 'them', not 'us'. This sense that we hate what politics has become, but it's those wacky, evil conservatives who are moving in this horrible direction, and since they're separate from us, there's nothing we can do. Which, granted, yes, the divisiveness in our country is extreme. But we're all still part of the same country, and simply rolling our eyes and getting depressed is a defeatist reaction that helps no one. (Which I think connects to your previous post, which I'm about to read.)
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