Americans, it is said, are like children when it comes to politics.   We are not really children, we are consumers continually sold snappy, brand-name products, including politicians.  We are marketed to around the clock, from the cradle to the grave, and our political system reflects this.  There are powerful reasons for this sad state of affairs.

I was often critical of President Barack Obama, a genius on the campaign trail, a perfect political product, a man I voted for twice.   I criticized him, in part, because I’ve been personally victimized, many times, by his compromise that left rabid corporate foxes in charge of the healthcare henhouse– not to mention many millions still uncovered by health insurance, and the tens of thousands who continue to die preventable deaths each year in the wealthiest nation on earth.   

Obama, like all presidents, did many bad things, quietly, as he gave inspiring speeches about our values.   Tragically, he lulled much of progressive America to sleep with his beautiful oratory, giving stirring speeches that often directly contradicted his actions; like when he told the correspondents at the annual dinner that they had been his partners in transparency, in keeping American democracy well-informed and robust.   We know, if we look at all, that Obama’s administration was not transparent; it was as opaque as the secretive, aptly named, Dick Cheney’s.   

That said, Obama was one of the better presidents of my lifetime, perhaps the best, sad to say.  A friend with a brilliant talent for argument beat me down thoroughly in a long comparison of the presidents of our lifetime.  He drove the point home.  Sure, Obama did some fucked up, inexcusable things; massive secret “signature strike” drone killing in multiple countries, repeated use of the 1917 Espionage Act to punish “traitors” who revealed shameful government practices, the secrecy about the actual terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but on the whole, may have done less harm, and attempted to do more good, than many of his predecessors.  The scale of presidential atrocity is now being re-calibrated by an insane idiot, as he scrambles to dismantle everything positive that Obama managed to accomplish, in the face of massive, organized obstruction.  All future presidential comparisons will be skewed by this petulant outlier we have in there now.     

The first test for an American presidential contender is one that should disqualify them:  that he or she truly believes they should be the most powerful person in the world.   They must secure massive financial backing and sell that sincere, if grandiose, self-belief to voters on television (and, increasingly, via social media) while at the same time assuring the most powerful entities in America that they will do nothing to affect the bottom line.   This process self-selects a certain egotistical, telegenic, born politician.  Branding and marketing, and skillfully deployed soundbites, will decide the battle.

The successful American presidential candidate must be prepared, and demonstrate a willingness, to do unspeakable things.   I’ve often thought there is a psychopath test for any serious American presidential contender.  Maybe  it’s a kid, strapped to a chair in some secret room, that the candidate has to kill, in front of the most powerful CEOs in the nation, to demonstrate he or she has what it takes, won’t hesitate to do what must be done.  

Presidential candidate Bill Clinton rushed back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a brain-damaged death row inmate.  Candidate Dubya mocked the final plea of the brain-damaged Born Again death row inmate he famously refused to pardon.  They had to, politically.   America needs its president to be tough.  Look how many kudos Trump got, from everyone, when he made himself “presidential” by launching tons of senseless missiles at a Syrian airfield, or when he dropped the Mother of All Bombs in Afghanistan.  How jealous Saddam would have been!   Imagine how presidential Trump will be if he gets to drop nukes on Little Rocket Man’s people.

The world is dangerous, mobs of people are maniacs, murder is rampant all over the place.  As sea levels rise and natural disasters grow dramatically more devastating, the danger from and for humans is getting worse.  Maybe we need a president who can kill, who will not flinch, when the situation demands it.  But let’s look for a moment at the rest of the picture.  

Obama’s winning personality, clear intelligence, gift for the felicitous phrase, encouraged those of us who voted for him to believe he was a decent person, a man of conscience.  He played one on TV, and perhaps he truly is.   He came off as thoughtful and fairly honest, to those of us who didn’t hate him, telling us early on that we have to push him to accomplish the hope and change he promised.  We can’t expect any elected official to do the right thing unless we push him relentlessly, he pointed out.  On the one side some people quietly tried to push, on the other side a few very powerful “persons” representing gigantic market forces generally prevailed.   Good, individually powerless people didn’t band together into a mass movement and push hard enough, Obama chided us when he was criticized from the left, while the people with all the power paid powerful experts who pushed harder to influence public policy.  

There is a sickening truth to this lack of American political will, except among extreme right-wing zealots, it seems.  We, who don’t share their values, have been reduced to a nation of handwringing spectators, waiting for our leaders to do the right thing.  Historically, this hopeful passivity has not been a good bet.  There were literally thousands of labor strikes during FDR’s first and second terms, when an uncommonly bold president seized the momentum for change to create a social safety net to save the country from Communism.   

Frederick Douglass hit the nail on the head in 1857:   

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. 

A century and a half later our first “post-racial” president presided over a nation as divided as on the eve of the Civil War, surrounded by in your-face racists intent on rendering him powerless, while membership in white supremacist hate groups rose dramatically and, mobilized, carried the president we have now into office.  With all of the threats we currently face, as a nation and a planet, are we still really watching wealthy talking heads argue over whether racism is bad and whether men and women are really equal?  While a global climate catastrophe gathers steam, no less.

Americans are trained from our earliest days to be consumers, to consume politics and culture as well as everything else.  We are trained to want, to feel a stimulated need, to buy, to binge.  Imagination and creativity is the realm of a small group of professionals who make huge sums to create the content we are all the audience for.   We are numbed now when it comes to our own powers, and overwhelmed with monetized distractions.  We leave the heavy lifting to the professionals, that’s why they get paid the monster bucks.

There is a deep sense of futility in America.  We have an opioid crisis that kills tens of thousands a year, Americans overwhelmed by hopelessness.  One person with a powerful argument, a hundred people, a thousand, a million, are often outmatched by a single billionaire who can spend whatever it takes to have their free speech heard everywhere.  We watch the results time after time and it beats us down.   Not only can’t you fight City Hall, you can’t fight one very rich asshole with a giant twenty or fifty million dollar megaphone and a skillful top-shelf media team.  Free speech, baby, take all you can afford to buy.

Yet we have Bernie Sanders, energizing millions with a real critique of the  indefensible status quo here in a wealthy nation that leads the world in death by gun violence, incarceration,  military spending, health care spending and annual preventable deaths by citizens too poor to afford the world’s most expensive health care.   With his average campaign contribution of, chant it with me, crowd, “$27”, Sanders reached millions and made himself a legitimate presidential contender.  

He did this based largely on his vision of a better, more fair America, as opposed to promising incremental change as the best we can hope for, or idiotically vowing to turn the clock back to the days when America was great, when you could openly wish everyone a Merry Christmas, when women were not so disgusting, when you could call an assertive black person a “nigger” without fear of losing your job for not being politically correct, where traumatic brain injuries to football players was not an issue, they knew what they signed up for and should be allowed to hit and be hit as hard as possible, where military widows respectfully shut the fuck up, etc. 

I don’t really fault this piece of shit we have in the Oval Office now, in a way.  I fault myself.   I fault everyone else who is addicted to the opiate of American celebrity.  What is this spoiled man-child in the White House celebrated for?  Being a born-rich, vulgar, relentlessly self-promoting jackass who made 185 million dollars producing a long-running “reality TV” show where he fired people every week.   That show was his only purely successful business venture, in a long, public career of mostly fuck ups, but it was more than enough to create his brand. 

He became a celebrity mega-brand as he decanted gallons of toxic kool-aid during the presidency of Obama, insisting, to the end, with no evidence whatsoever, that Obama was an illegitimate president, born in Kenya, a secret Muslim and a liar.  Today we’ve got the 1% president our system deserves, America’s racist, self-regarding, entitled chickens coming home to roost.  

The percentage that put him into power, and continues support him in spite of his performance in a job he is completely overmatched by, seems to be around 39%.   Like their president, they know only how to “double down”.  In my recollection 39% was also the high-water mark for German voter support of the energetic, no-holds-barred Nazi party.  Of course, once they had that 39% in Germany, the rest, as they say, is history.  It was 100% soon after that, no matter how many Germans may have opposed it.  

We need to get off our couches now and back into the streets.   We must be vigilant and take nothing for granted in the Age of Trump.  American political arguments are not won with logic, they are won by masses of people doing the hard work.