by Seth Ferris, New Eastern Outlook:
When Nicolae Ceasencu decided, on December 21st 1989, to make what turned out to be his last speech it is generally agreed he didn’t know what was coming next. The revolution which would depose him hours later was already in full swing, and he knew why – the people didn’t believe in him anymore, were no longer prepared to live in enforced poverty, and his security apparatus could no longer contain them.
But still the old man went out on the balcony and repeated the same old catchphrases everyone was so tired of – claiming that everyone was better off under him, and everyone who was against him was part of a foreign plot to destroy socialism and bring Romania under foreign domination. Despite the party packing the square with acolytes, the dictator heard boos for the first time ever, the crowd turned on him and he had to be rescued by helicopter before the revolutionary spirit he was appealing to take the opposite turn to the one he wanted.
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Apparently Ceausescu was advised not to make this speech. So why did he do it?
He was trying to appeal to the middle – assuming that whatever people had put up with for the previous forty years was what the man in the street actually wanted, and he could cast his opponents as extremists who wanted to take all that away. Seeing his support ebb away within his own inner circle, he tried to cast them too as extreme by appealing to the silent majority, not understanding it was silent because it was no longer there.
There was considerable irony in the fact that this is what the leaders of democracies always try and do, not dictators who had destroyed all opposition. In fact this has been rejoiced over by democracy advocates – it is held that Ceausescu read the public so wrongly because he was a dictator, who never had to listen to the people, and no democratic leader would be able to do the same.
But the trouble is, they all do. Even in countries perpetually run by coalitions, in which finding the political middle is the only way to get anything done and then relating that to the public middle is the only way to stay in power, politicians get very out of touch.
They carry on assuming that what was true yesterday must be true for as long as it suits them, because that is the nature of the beast: believing they are always right and always good and always popular, even in the face of every indication to the contrary. You don’t get to be a political leader unless you can lie to yourself and not care, and be more adept at arguing the ridiculous than analysing what is going on in the real world.
So in any political system we have an inherent contradiction: the one thing every leader needs to do, identify and satisfy the middle, has to be done by the people least capable of doing it. Eventually those who fail in the attempt are hoist on their own petard, but their attempts can have long term consequences which threaten the lives of every citizen of everywhere, because the rest of us aren’t allowed to run away and hide behind ideology and big mouths.
Stuck In The Middle Without You
The US Republican Party is finding this out the hard way before our very eyes. Whatever your politics, it is sad to see this happening, because if the US gets its own public wrong, it can’t be equipped to do any good for anyone else’s.
The United States was built on the dream that everyone could make it big and be whatever they wanted in the new land of opportunity and freedom, where no king or Congress could tell anyone what to do. That dream has proved very pervasive, so it can’t be said to be without foundation, as the number of people still desperate to enter US to live and work testifies.
American Dream
Ultimately, that dream is represented by the concept of Middle America. Due to the mass media and US cultural influence, we all know what this looks like: suburban house, husband with a good job, wife who doesn’t need one, obedient children who play sports and attend a Protestant church and everyone going to the mall and supporting whatever can be perceived as the American Way of Life.
In many countries, such a picture, even if accurate, is held to depict only one part of the population. It is understood that other social cultures exist, which don’t necessarily share the views, standards and aspirations of the middle class.
But in the US, Middle America is where every normal person is supposed to belong. If you don’t, you are presumed to want to. If you do, you have to pretend deviations from that do not exist, or are alright really, which is why narcotics are prevalent in all aspects of US society.
For a generation, Middle America has been Republican. This was not always so. There have been periods when the party of Lincoln was just for the wealthy or the loud, and the Democrats were where most people presumed themselves to be, the unwashed masses.
Conservatism was for the exclusive, the outsider and the showy, everything the man in the street, though more conservative by nature by having more need to conserve the less they had, was not comfortable with.
Eventually the Republicans became the home of everyone who had traditional values, who thought they were ordinary and thought that was better than being different. US politics, which for 100 years still effectively mirrored its Civil War divisions, fell into the pattern found in most democracies: the south and prairies which had once been solidly Democratic became Republican because they were fundamentally protectionist and localist in nature, whilst the Democrats became the brass necks and intellectuals in the cities and amongst the dispossessed and those on the sexual fringes of society in terms of gender ID.
