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September 9, 2012 Tomgram: Jeremiah Goulka, Confessions of a Former Republican
Here, to my mind, was one strange aspect of
the political convention season just past: since the great meltdown of
2008, brilliantly engineered by various giant financial institutions
gone wild, we’ve seen a collapse in the wealth of middle-class African Americans and Hispanics, and a significant drop in the wealth of middle-class whites. Only the rich have benefitted.
Though the draining of wealth from the middle and its fortification at
the top have been a long time coming, the near collapse of the economy
four years ago was a disaster whether you look at the rise in
unemployment figures, poverty, the use of food stamps, gauges of upward mobility, or just about any other grim measure you’d care to employ.
All this suggests that the twenty-first century has largely been an American riches-to-rags story. It was this that gave both political conventions an almost fairy-tale-like quality, since the single life trajectory featured prominently at each of them by just about every speaker you’d want to cite was the opposite. Everybody, even Mitt Romney (“My dad never made it through college and apprenticed as a lath and plaster carpenter...”), was obliged to offer a wrenching, heartwarming tale of rags (or relative rags) to riches (no relative about it). The theme, heavily emphasized at the Republican convention and an undercurrent at the Democratic one, wasn’t I feel your pain, but I celebrate my gain. There are, in our world, so many journeys of every sort. It’s strange to see only one of them emphasized and celebrated, the one that, at the moment, is perhaps the least likely to speak to the actual experience of most Americans. With this in mind, TomDispatch today offers quite a different journey -- not economic, but political, and of a sort no one usually thinks to write about. It’s Jeremiah Goulka’s trip out of a particular kind of fantasy world and into what, in 2004, Karl Rove (then an unnamed source for journalist Ron Suskind) pejoratively called “‘the reality-based community’ which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'” Rove added -- that moment being the highpoint of Bush-era imperial self-celebration -- “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'” Goulka’s is a tale of how one man left a party that, in recent years, has had, in Jonathan Schell’s pungent phrase, “a will to fantasy,” and embarked on a hard-won trip into reality. There are so many more such stories in our country. Maybe someday some political convention will have the nerve to celebrate some of them. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Goulka discusses his political journey, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom Joining the Reality-Based Community |
