This Is Your Government on Drugs

By Michael Page

This is Your Government on Drugs is a retired history teacher's take on the divisiveness and gridlock that have allowed problems to fester and grow since shortly after the Cold War ended in victory in 1989. The United States has spiraled into deeper debt and lost respect around the world as domestic and foreign problems worsen for lack of serious discussion and the will to do what is best for this country and its people. Safe electoral districts, the influence of big money and the focus on political wins have trumped the welfare of American citizens who fail to show up for elections to effect change by voting for their own interests and those of America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514427972

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Michael Page.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015919277

ISBN:      Hardcover    978-1-5144-2799-6

                 Softcover     978-1-5144-2798-9

                 eBook          978-1-5144-2797-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 11/25/2015

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

727765

Contents

Foreword

Postscripts

Introduction: Outside Looking In

1 Stranger than Fiction

2 Who Sent Theses Lunkheads?

3 Transcending Politics

4 Fix the Government

5 The Business of Government

6 Taxation Policy

7 Does Our Economic System Work?

8 Provide for the National Defense

9 Foreign Policy

10 Social Policy and Programs

11 Health Care

12 Education

13 Financial Policy

14 How Not to Rightsize Government

15 Rules for the Road (to Sanity)

16 The Refereed Society: Oversight and Subsidiarity

17 Conclusions

Sources

About the Author

Synopsis

Foreword

It’s time to pull the string on this book because it is writing itself faster in real time than I can get my ideas down on paper. Six years of research and observation, five months of speedwriting, five revisions, and then several months off to let it settle after each rewrite has only put me further behind as the titular government continues to prove itself crazier and more hapless/dysfunctional every day. The fall elections of 2014 only raised the stakes on gridlock as Republicans took over the US Senate for Barack Obama’s last two years as president of the United States. Spoiler Alert: they’re not getting any more done in 2015 than the Democratic-led Senate did.

This book is the result of the passion in my adult life for studying and teaching history, government, and economics, and then watching, with cynicism, anger, and disbelief, as the madness that is government and politics unfolds daily. This interest was initially stirred by my two grandfathers, who could not have been more different. Though both were born in 1893 and grew up on farms in Michigan, were named Patrick, came to the city of Flint, worked for the Buick Motor Company, and died from heart disease, their lives and views differed greatly.

One worked in bump-and-paint at the Buick, as he called it, and the other (let’s call him Two) worked in the accounting office. One retired and took to newspapers and television to develop a healthy skepticism for politicians and all things political; he could smell the corruption a mile away and loved to talk back to the politicians in the newspaper or on the television from his green Naugahyde easy chair with the cigarette burns on the arms. Thankfully, he didn’t live to see the day his wife’s nephew became governor—that would have killed him for sure.

Two retired as an accountant from Buick and toured the country giving sales talks to car dealers and taking pictures of everything he saw and turning them into slides to show his family. He acted in The Flint Community Players and even ran for sheriff of Genesee County once. In full retirement, he painstakingly turned his lawn into a giant, velvet golf course green of bent grass, read the philosophers of Western civilization, studied a little economics, and parlayed a small initial investment in the stock market into a tidy little nest egg that is still being passed down in the family. As for television, it was all the news he could consume and Big Time Wrestling. Sadly, he lost his voice after a surgery and didn’t get it back until the morning of his fatal heart attack. He would have loved to be around today for all the 24/7 cable punditry and political shenanigans.

I dedicate this book to the two Patricks who helped inspire my interest in, and observation of, politics and economics through their thoughts and conversations. Not too many people I know will appreciate or agree with most of this book, but it needs to be said before we, as a nation, hurtle down the wormhole of chaos into that black hole of political and economic oblivion. At the very least I hope it will start dialogue that will help get the United States back on the road to sanity.

Postscripts

These postscripts (it is May 30, 2015) to the foreword indicate the time frames for revision-rest-revision mentioned above and illustrate the truth about this book writing itself with continuing and escalating craziness in the world, the country, and the state of Michigan (where the roads will go unfixed another year as spring potholes blossom everywhere, because the all-Republican state government chickened out in late 2014 on road taxes 70 percent of the people want by putting it to a vote six months down the road and then inserting lots of weird and iffy provisions to undermine the measure—the vote failed 78 percent to 22 percent).

It’s November 12, 2013, and I’m really angry and motivated now. Just finished chapter 6 (Crime and Punishment) of Charles H. Ferguson’s Predator Nation. Read it and you’ll see. If you’re not in the 1 percent, you need to stop voting for them and stop hating on the poor people (working or otherwise), minorities, and immigrants—and especially those who were financially injured by the 2008 Wall Street recession—and start working to fix the government!

Now it’s the day after the primary election on August 5, 2014, and not much has changed. I’ve read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (wherein the propertied 10 percent wrote the Constitution to protect their interests and the rest of our 239 years has been about preserving those advantages) and just finished Flash Boys by Michael Lewis (wherein the rich get richer by cheating time in microseconds with faster, straighter fiber optic cable and copying your financial homework without your knowledge before they cut in line ahead of you for gains on the stock market). The madness continues in the United States, and around the world, as seen on CNN (Fareed Zakaria GPS), in TIME, and on Last Week Now with John Oliver as well as on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

The world has taken a turn for the uglier in the last six months with Putin’s Russia attacking the Ukraine, Syria still in conflagration, ISIS in Iraq after we left, and our Congress deadlocked on vacation over the refugee/immigrant Central American children pouring through Mexico over our southern border. It’s time for action to put our nation back on the right track.

Now it’s January of 2015. The fall 2014 elections—conducted amid the protests over police killings of black males in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York—have given control of the Senate to Republicans for the first time under President Obama (even though the Tea Party failed to unseat John Boehner as Speaker of the House). Meanwhile, terrorism heats up around the world (Paris assassinations and ISIS beheadings).

Reading Ralph Nader’s Unstoppable has given me a faint glimmer of hope for liberals and conservatives to come together on issues of importance to move this country forward. Though few will read Nader’s book, his observations that the two political parties work in parallel (if not in tandem—see Representative Boehner and Senator McConnell on the January 25 edition of 60 Minutes: Republicans and Democrats dare not be seen with each other lest their 1 percent-ish donors and party colleagues campaign them out of office for political treason or not being pure-enough conservatives or liberals) to prevent any meaningful progress on pressing issues on which both ends of the political spectrum can agree.

It is summer of 2015, and activity for the 2016 presidential election is already heating up and contains the same old tired politicians spouting the same old gridlockingly ineffectual babble. The first official Republican candidate, Ted Cruz, opposes immigration though his mother was born in Ireland, his father in Cuba, and he in Canada (hypocrisy, anyone?) and led the government shutdown in 2013 that cost taxpayers $24 billion though he says he wants to cut government spending. By August and the first Republican debate, there are 17 GOP candidates led in the polls by that steamroller Trump.

If nothing can be done in President Obama’s last two years (Will Republicans have any ideas that won’t be scuttled by the Tea Party? How many Republican bills will Obama veto?), can we at least get some honest candidates for 2016 who will head us in a different, more productive direction before our domestic and foreign problems implode a once-strong nation? What will it take to become the America we were designed to be?

Just finished Steven Brill’s America’s Bitter Pill, and this well-researched and detailed account of the birth of the Affordable Care Act epitomizes the frustration many Americans have with government: there’s a kernel of good for the country, but it was done in a torturously political way, the political opposition to a Republican idea prevents any improvements, and no one knows what it will cost down the road.

I’ll close on that so you can start reading, thinking, and acting to help get America back on track as the exceptional beacon of light in the world that it was and can be again if we all start to talk, work, and pull together.

Michael Page

October 1, 2015

Introduction: Outside Looking In

The economic collapse of 2008, while not personally financially debilitating, provided the tipping point for me to begin paying attention and reading extensively on national economic and political issues. Initially inspired by Matt Taibbi (beginning with The Great Derangement), The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Andrew Heller of The Flint Journal, and other writers and commentators, I began to organize my thoughts by topic, listing a number of insights and then casting them in incredulous, sarcastic prose (a la Chicago columnist Mike Royko in the old days). My working title, This is Your Government on Drugs, was a reference to that old War on Drugs television commercial showing a whole egg (This is your brain.) and then the egg frying in a pan (This is your brain on drugs.). Scrambled eggs might have been a better metaphor, but you get the idea.

When I had some meat on several of the categories, I visited a few blogs with the idea of joining political conversations and sharing some of my ideas and sources with others who had concerns about the direction the United States of America was taking. I quickly realized that many of these blogs were about shouting the loudest and getting others to react to your rants, whether you had your facts straight or not, rather than working toward consensus on solutions for our most difficult national issues. Yeah, sort of like politics and our national government currently operate. Since then, most of my thinking out loud has been with my friend John, as he is knowledgeable and thoughtful about these issues in ways most people are not.

My thoughts and examples of the lunacy afoot in America come from a variety of media sources in print (newspapers and magazines), television, and books. My main sources of inspiration are listed at the end of this book. The Internet has been a big help in checking dates and simple descriptions like the section on third-party attempts in presidential politics. The ideas for change begin with some of the sources listed but have evolved as I wrote and thought about the problems and possible solutions. The process often made me wonder if anyone in Washington ever read the articles and opinions about the problems they were causing or possible solutions or had an inspiration for really making things better rather than constantly maneuvering for political advantage or to save their political careers.

Admittedly, my knowledge of the detailed inner workings of the federal and state government is limited by my distance from them, but maybe that’s a good thing. The subtitle of this chapter reflects that distance. Yes, it’s a reversal of the song Inside Looking Out, by Eric Burdon and the Animals, which I thought was appropriate because the powerlessness of prison is sometimes too similar to watching America anguish its way to the abyss. The people inside certainly seem well-insulated from real people, their situations, and the stories and thoughts of political commentators about government. The resulting gridlock imprisons millions of Americans daily in unfathomable situations, often not of their own making.

I realized that my work, while I continued to gather material and develop thoughts on national issues, was not going to solve many problems by taking a sarcastic-comical approach to exposing some of the lunacy passing for political thought these days. Someone who wasn’t bought and sold by the political establishment or trained to write by traditional academia had to offer ideas for change, even if they only provided a starting point for a true national conversation before the country implodes on its own power—mad greed, stupidity, and blindness.

I also realized that the lunacy was racing ahead of my ability to capture it in real time, let alone in retrospect. The budget stalemate of 2011 and resulting sequestration—which no one thought would actually come to pass—convinced me of the serious inability of Congress to make reasonable decisions and compromise for the good of the country.

The election of 2012 confirmed that serious issues and ideas were being put into the political mainstream every day (see Simpson-Bowles Commission or the Gang of Eight in Congress) and then being totally ignored as the campaign progressed from the sideshow of the Republican primary debates to the reveal-nothing-of-your-plan strategies of both parties in the general election.

When Barack Obama was reelected I had mixed feelings: the fears of an out-of-touch, clueless Romney presidency were gone, but the fears of a do-nothing second term were front and center as the parties postured their way to the fiscal cliff. While I had supported Obama in 2008, I was less than satisfied with his inability to even get his own administration team together to adequately roll out the Affordable Care Act. Nobody I know understands what the ACA is, what it will do, or how its provisions will really affect individuals and businesses. The falsities (keep your current insurance plan) and ineptitude (ACA website rollout) continue to crop up years after the bill’s passage. I do know, from reading Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone magazine, that we could have saved medical providers $350 billion a year by having a single-payer system and including other provisions in the ACA to really have it serve the American people … but alas, the Republican Party took a totally hands-off, obstructionist approach, even though health care for everyone was originally their idea (See Mitt Romney, governor of Massachusetts and creator of Romneycare, as well as Newt Gingrich of a few years ago). Amazingly, three years after these original words were written, the Affordable Care Act had become the political football the Tea Party chose to stalemate the gutless Republican Party of NO, shut down the government, and take us to the fiscal cliff again over the debt ceiling in October 2013.

By August 2014, House Speaker John Boehner and the Republican Party were talking of suing the president for his attempts to tweak the law and make it work while Congress was out of session (and calling for Obama to use the same executive actions to fix the immigration problem since the Republicans can’t agree among themselves how to do that because they will lose votes with their conservative base if they do anything at all).

While President Obama talks a lot (way too much nowadays, and like he’s still campaigning for president), I have not seen action on issues that clearly need to be addressed. Second-term scandals have plagued his administration. He has failed to show the transparency and honesty he promised in 2008 (NSA domestic spying, Benghazi, IRS targeting of conservative groups, ACA rollout, Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server, etc.). I am still waiting for action on tax reform, which many people seem to agree we need and which could be part of the fiscal cliff solution (increase tax revenues without raising rates by reducing loopholes and deductions, for example). I receive Social Security and am on Medicare, but I accept that these programs need to be revised for modern conditions if they are to survive for my children and grandchildren.

Immigration, education, and many other issues are waiting for solutions that are not forthcoming from our national government—not even on the horizon—because everything has become so politicized and polarized in the last twenty years. The Republicans may be the Party of NO, but the Democrats’ refusal to even mention review and reform of the tax code (too many goodies in there for their voters) or entitlement and assistance programs has maintained the stalemate in Washington. President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union plug for free community college is another example of a dead-on-arrival proposal that would not be free to taxpayers who would foot the bill.

One issue that pushed me over the top, though, was Mitt Romney’s revelation captured in the secret 2012 47 percent speech to rich donors followed by his sour grapes after the election about the people who voted for President Obama because they are addicted to handouts from the government. That was offensive enough to many Americans to get President Obama reelected despite a lackluster first term. The sad part of this is that President Obama is, apparently, still savvy enough to use technology to get elected and reelected (the number one goal of politicians) but woefully unable to use this same technology to take the national temperature and lead this once-great country that has lost its way, and, maybe design a working healthcare.org website. Yes, Obama’s ineptitude is caused, in great part, by the Republican Party’s intransigence and opposition to everything he says and does. His so-called weakness may be due to a wiser worldview that seeks peace because all of our recent wars have only made the world a more dangerous place, yet his opponents ignore reality on the ground in their blind opposition to everything he says and does. That should be all the more reason for him to speak truth to the American people and challenge us all to act on the important issues of the day that lie smoldering month after month.

The best current example of this is the Iran Nuclear Treaty, which has been reflexively opposed by Republicans even before it was completed. I have heard no one give the example of 2003 where George W. Bush, because he didn’t trust Iran, declined to join an international coalition to address the Iran nuclear issue. Talks fell through after two years, and now Iran has 19,000 centrifuges instead of the 360 it had in 2003. Of course we don’t trust Iran, but sanctions alone have not stopped their march to nuclear capabilities. It’s time to try a new approach. Remember, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over even though it hasn’t worked.

Yes, I get Social Security. Is it an entitlement? Does that make me part of Mitt Romney’s 47 percent? I guess so if your definition includes that I worked and paid into the system for over forty years. Do I feel entitled to it? It was part of the agreement under which I worked and received a paycheck from which FICA was deducted from age 16 on. Since we live in a country that recognizes contracts as a basic way of defining the terms of doing business, yes, I expect to receive Social Security income after playing by the rules and working forty-plus years under that agreement. I also paid into Medicare and began to get part of my health care through that system when I turned 65 (paying a small monthly amount for that privilege). While I do pay taxes, don’t forget that some of the 47 percent who do not pay are in Afghanistan defending our country and are not required to pay taxes. Other nontaxpayers are victims (lost jobs, houses, and more) of the 2008 financial debacle for which no one has yet been tried and convicted though less than 100,000 people made big money while most of the rest of us lost significant amounts. I’m sure they aren’t the only ones whose nonpayment makes them a mooching-taker slug in Romney’s view. Do some research on welfare for the rich (sports stadiums, big farm subsidies, oil leases, virtually interest-free money from the Fed for Wall Street, etc.) or huge corporations like General Electric paying no taxes.

Part of the problem in the USA is that grouping people by generalities is not accurate and creates division rather than agreement, especially when done at the national level. Read Ralph Nader’s book Unstoppable about the many issues on which liberals and libertarians naturally agree; none of these have been addressed or solved because of the obstruction of both parties in the US Congress and the moneyed interests, unfettered to work in anonymity by recent Supreme Court decisions.

Our two political parties allow for less and less disagreement within the parties and almost no agreement or compromise between the parties. If you utter your thoughts aloud on any issue of importance, they will be held against you. As an example, congressional discussions on stabilizing our national financial future were prefaced by attempts to make the discussions secret for fifty years (so parties and voters wouldn’t hold real ideas against their congresspersons). The biggest political divide in November 2013 might have been between the Tea Party wing and the Republican Party as recent elections (2014) kicked off the speculation for the 2016 presidential election.

We get more division when people pick single issues (abortion, right to life, guns, social programs) on which to make their stand. This makes it tough to have a conversation about a range of important issues facing the country unless I first agree with your stand on an issue that is your number one, and often only, priority. This single-issue mania in national elections has added to the divisiveness in politics while narrowing our vision of where we are as a nation and what needs to be done to get back to our founding principles. Single-issue third parties, which is what we’ve seen most of in our history, do not really broaden the conversation about our need to fix our political mess. We need a third party that takes a reasonable, centrist stance on a variety of issues to break the two-party stranglehold on US government. To affect real change, that third party needs to elect people to Congress rather than just aiming at the presidency.

The best current examples of politicians in this vein are Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat who has challenged her party on issues to protect the 99 percent, and Donald Trump, who is raising havoc in the early Republican race for president in 2016 by saying what others will not (and resonating with a surprising number of Americans).

The multiparty system, common in many European countries, makes a better model to fit the diverse beliefs and needs of a country of over 300 million, and it seems to allow people and groups to compromise because sometimes they need to include another party or two in order to have a majority in their legislative or executive branches. Multiple parties may allow people to identify more closely with a party that represents more of their views than our current two-party system does. The logical result of this would be to have a government that better represents the shades of belief present in our citizens. This is especially pertinent after an election between two candidates who agreed during the campaign that American voters had a very clear choice in 2012.

The problem with this clear choice is that it was between a president who had achieved little during his first term (muddled health-care plan, slow recovery, a stimulus that had critics on all sides, last-minute immigration reform by edict, etc.) versus a candidate whose true position on issues could not be known because he changed his position so readily (to get the nomination and then again to try to get elected) and whose vice-presidential candidate was equally unknowable, calling himself both a devout Catholic and a fervid disciple of Ayn Rand, author of about as un-Christian a philosophy as I can imagine.

Sadly, an Internet attempt at selecting a third-party candidate by online voting or consensus somehow failed to materialize despite significant participation from Americans. So Barack Obama was elected again, and the Republicans went right back to opposing everything he says or does, aided and abetted by all of the political scandals hijacking his second term. There was a clear choice and Obama won, but nothing changed.

Too many parties might result in the chaos that preceded the first free elections in Egypt in 2012, where the vote was so splintered in a process new to Egyptian citizens that the runoff vote resulted in a leader who only entered the race when another candidate was declared unable to run because of a prison record. Five months later people that brought down a forty-year dictator were already protesting the actions of their newly elected president. And by 2013, the new president was in jail, courtesy of a military coup, because the army didn’t like the way he was governing. This type of democracy illustrates how fortunate we are in the United States and should be a clear warning to our current government officials to get off their political righteousness and work together before we lose what we have. It should also be a caution to trespassing in other countries’ messes when we don’t really understand the people or the context (because sometimes they don’t either), and we are apparently unable or unwilling to fix our own messes.

If another political party or two to mediate the discussion is not a plausible idea, let’s take the conservatives at their word and go back to our founders. A constitutional convention, like the one (known as the Continental Congress) that brought us the Declaration of Independence and then our first government, might serve to solve our some of our most pressing current issues and provide a roadmap for the future. Invoking the Constitution but not honoring it in thought and practice is clearly a hypocrisy that isn’t working (not as radical but on the same continuum as Muslims who invoke the Koran to justify their violence). Let’s really do it (unlike President Obama’s mistake of empaneling the Simpson-Bowles Commission and then totally ignoring their bipartisan recommendations) and set the table for sane government for the rest of the twenty-first century. While we do, let’s keep in mind that our revered Constitution was written by the small percentage of colonists with property in order to help preserve what they had (Howard Zinn). It is flawed with such monstrosities as the three-fifths compromise regarding the counting of slaves as citizens and the exclusion of half the population (females) from any legal standing (including the right to vote). Safe political districts and unlimited, anonymous campaign money have become the property advantages of the twenty-first century.

I do believe that a look at the issues that are apparently causing such a wide division in our country will help us find solutions in the twenty-first century that will benefit all citizens. One of the keys to doing this includes a look at the different needs of the generations alive in America at this time and not just the political persuasions that are often based on geography, religious views, economic status or class, and race or ethnicity.

The goal of this book will be to explore the current state of affairs in our national government and politics—and to a lesser extent, state government—and to look at how we got to this point. A look at similarities in our history and our founding principles (especially the United States Constitution) will be used to suggest alternate solutions to some of the key issues of the day in 2015. By no means do I think these ideas will settle all of the issues that weigh on our country, but my hope is that this discussion will open up alternatives that could break up our current angry gridlock and pave the way to solutions for the pressing issues of our time. If enough voters became informed, we might still make a difference through the 2016 elections.

Government gridlock and inactivity have put us at a critical point in our history because of the competing needs for transformation at home amid the increasing challenges in the world. It is difficult for Americans to sustain the attention to domestic issues (government spending versus revenues; infrastructure needs; the battles over financial policy, immigration, health care, and education) because too many people are either too comfortable and focused on the wrong things or too powerless and focused on survival. At the same time conflict and discord are multiplying in the world as others insist on their own rights while the United States is seen as weak and divided.

There is likewise a battle over the optimal level of US involvement in world events and issues, and other countries and groups are taking advantage of our gridlock at home. The uncertainty about the best strategy regarding Syria’s civil war and use of chemical weapons epitomizes this dilemma: the outcome there is unlikely to directly affect many Americans but the fallout (much of it due to our ill-advised invasion of Iraq in 2003) is already affecting our relations in that part of the world (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Israel, the ISIS caliphate). We have many other issues calling for our attention to international affairs: nuclear development in Iran, winding down the war in Afghanistan, the economic challenges of China, the attempts of Putin to reassert the power of Russia in the Ukraine, chaos in Africa, the menace of North Korea, and the anger of our allies over NSA spying.

The bottom line for change, however, is still the American voter and our history of elections and peaceful transition of power from one leader and party to another. Voters need to be better informed on issues and as passionate about voting and the performance of our elected representatives as we are about free speech, taxes, guns, and the other issues that help define us as a country. If we cannot sustain our attention on issues that need our voice and involvement until the next election, the rancor and chaos we have now—not to mention the growing income inequality—will only increase.

As you will hear several times in this book, America will not be taken down from the outside. But the principles and processes set in motion by our Founding Fathers, which have been used to build a unique and powerful nation, will not prevent a lemminglike march to national implosion if we do not address and solve the issues—at home and abroad—that confront us now.

1

Stranger than Fiction

I always wanted to write the great American novel, one that would capture a wide audience while it illuminated and educated readers about important but little-considered aspects of American life by seeing things from a different angle. I’m closing in on a half dozen of those gems. They range in length from still-germinating ideas to full-length manuscripts that just need one more revision or that certain twist to capture the imagination of the right agent or publisher in order to find an audience.

Alas, time and circumstances have caught up with me. I now feel compelled to lay out my own amateur look at what is happening in our country in the early twenty-first century. The course we are on now is so bizarre and twisted that many people have given up on solutions to the difficult problems that are more desperately needed than ever. Too many people support ideas or positions based solely on party loyalties that are rarely objectively examined (listen to middle-school students who know or care little about politics parrot their parents’ ideas at election time or notice the middle-class voters who cling to the ideas of the top 1 percent, as if those people would ever let them ascend to their level of financial excess or political influence). And, even more scary, many more people frantically pursue material dreams while chasing the popular culture (news note: Katy Perry just eclipsed Justin Bieber for most Twitter followers), completely helpless or oblivious in the face of the overhaul needed in the United States if we are to survive the twenty-first century.

What is happening now in the United States of America proves that truth is often stranger than fiction, even the horror fiction of Stephen King or whomever of that genre you think best writes about real or imagined horrors in modern society.

Matt Taibbi, in his 2009 book The Great Derangement: The Terrifying True Story of Politics, War, and Religion, describes the origins of the current political stalemate in Congress during the administration of President Bill Clinton. Even after a government shutdown in 1995 spurred by the Republicans’ Contract with America (see Newt Gingrich, now a pundit for CNN after a failed 2012 presidential bid), Clinton was able to create several years of budget surpluses by reaching across the political aisle on issues like the budget and welfare reform even while Republicans were trying to impeach him for lying about his questionable personal behavior. We reached a point where those in the majority froze out the other party, denying reasonable access to hearings, committee work, political input, and other congressional activities. Taibbi describes sessions of Congress under Clinton and George W. Bush that conducted cosmetic (for show) business during the day and engineered their real agendas behind closed doors after dinner (after the media had left for the day when their deadline for submitting articles passed).

Dysfunction grew as Clinton lost his majority in Congress to Republicans in 1998. George W. Bush came into office with a Republican majority in Congress despite having to be declared the winner over Vice President Al Gore by the US Supreme Court in 2000 after mass electoral confusion in the state of Florida (hanging chads, anyone?). After wreaking economic havoc on the country (Imagine the effect on Social Security in 2008 if W’s plan to let people invest their own Social Security funds had passed!), W lost that majority in 2006, and we were back to the behind-the-scenes political fighting as our deficits grew and the deregulation of the financial industry, begun under Alan Greenspan during the Clinton administration, opened the door to the financial crash of 2008.

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 has only worsened this split, despite his clear-cut victory and promise to transcend politics and get Washington working together again. The feeling that we transcended our racial past in the 2008 election is long gone in 2015. Disrespect for the office of president seems to override disagreements about politics and how the country should be run. And ironically, there are not many visible signs that blacks and other minorities have benefitted from Obama’s presidency (see Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland). In fact, the brief public life of Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent was about the class war that the rich are winning because of their grip on Congress and Wall Street while blaming Obama for the failure of the economy to rebound for many middle-class Americans.

While trying to deal with the huge economic problems he inherited from George W. Bush, Obama has been hamstrung by his inability to unite his own party even when they enjoyed a congressional majority in 2008-2010. His inexperience in national government—he was a first-term US senator with no experience in the House when he ran for president—seemed to play a large role in his inability to work with his own party or the opposition. The president seemingly makes more speeches than he has conversations with members of Congress, and that seems to be a significant part of his leadership and communication problems. Yet he fails in comparison to Ronald Reagan in his ability to go over the disagreeing heads of Congress to appeal to the American people because he seems so aloof.

Meanwhile, opposition actions like those of Republican senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, who used Senate rules to individually hold up hundreds of appointments during Obama’s first term, further blocked Obama’s ability to effectively lead the country by denying him key workers and advisors. (This tactic continued as Obama’s 2015 nomination of Loretta Lynch as attorney general was held up for months in the Senate—even though Republicans disliked the current attorney general—because she supports the president’s immigration policy and Democrats blocked passage of a related bill in the Senate.) Many of these appointments Shelby held up were midlevel positions, not