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Insanity Is Deja Vu All Over Again
With the present so radically departing from our past, history has become a damning package of inconvenient truths.
Out of all the famous quotations, few better describe this eerily familiar time than those attributed to George Santayana and Yogi Berra. The former, a philosopher, warned that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The latter, a baseball player, stumbled into prophecy by declaring, “It’s deja vu all over again.”
As movies give us bad remakes of already bad productions (hello, Predators), television resuscitates ancient clowns (howdy, Dee Snider) and music revives pure schlock (I’m looking at you, Devo), we are now surrounded by the obvious mistakes of yesteryear. And it might be funny–it might be downright hilarious–if only this cycle didn’t infect the deadly serious stuff.
Vietnam showed us the perils of occupation, then the Iraq War showed us the same thing–and yet now, we are somehow doing it all over again in Afghanistan. The Great Depression underscored the downsides of laissez-faire economics, the Great Recession highlighted the same danger–and yet the new financial “reform” bill leaves that laissez-faire attitude largely intact. Ronald Reagan proved the failure of trickle-down tax cuts to spread prosperity before George W. Bush proved the same thing–and yet now, in a recession, Congress is considering more tax cuts all over again.
These are but a few examples of mistakes being repeated ad infinitum. In a Yogi Berra country, the jarring lessons of history are remembered as mere flickers of deja vu–if they are remembered at all. Most often, we forget completely, seeing in George Santayana’s refrain not a dark warning, but a cheery celebration. And the logical question is: Why? Why have we become so dismissive of history’s lessons and therefore so willing to repeat history’s mistakes?
Some of it is the modern information miasma. Though the Internet makes eons of history instantly available, the 24-7, moment-to-moment typhoon of cable screamfests, blogs, tweets, e-mail alerts and “breaking news” graphics makes last week’s news feel old, and last month’s news feel positively paleolithic. Add to this reportage that is increasingly presented with zero context, and it’s clear that journalism is sowing mass senility.
Politicians also make significant contributions to the problem. With the age of the permanent campaign intensifying and the era of the long-term electoral majority ending, both parties deliberately focus only on the very recent past–and obscure the larger historical record. From the national debt, to poverty to the downsides of American empire, Republicans tell us it’s all the fault of Democrats’ two-year-old reign, while Democrats blame it on Bush’s eight-year presidency. This, even though these emergencies developed over decades.
And then, of course, there is ideology.
With the present so radically departing from our past, history has become a damning package of inconvenient truths–and those truths are often shunned because they threaten today’s most powerful ideological interests.
This is why in the debates over war, economics and taxes, we aren’t urged to consider past conflicts; we aren’t encouraged to remember that America experienced its most storied growth under the New Deal’s aggressive financial regulation; and we aren’t told that wages and job growth expanded in the mid-20th century with a top income tax bracket above 70 percent. We aren’t reminded of these facts because they threaten the defense industry, Wall Street and high-income taxpayers, respectively–and those forces exert enormous influence over our political discourse, whether through media sponsorship, political campaign contributions or lobbying.
No matter the issue, this axiom is the same: When money has a vested interest in burying history, history is inevitably buried, ultimately leading us from Santayana and Berra’s aphorisms to Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same things over and over again and somehow expecting different results.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
David Sirota, an In These Times senior editor and syndicated columnist, is a bestselling author whose book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything was released in March of 2011. Sirota, whose previous books include The Uprising and Hostile Takeover, hosts the morning show on AM760 in Denver. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.
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Reader Comments
I love reading Sirota’s stuff. He is such a fucking idiot.
“Vietnam showed us the perils of occupation, then the Iraq War showed us the same thing—and yet now, we are somehow doing it all over again in Afghanistan. The Great Depression underscored the downsides of laissez-faire economics, the Great Recession highlighted the same danger—and yet the new financial “reform” bill leaves that laissez-faire attitude largely intact. Ronald Reagan proved the failure of trickle-down tax cuts to spread prosperity before George W. Bush proved the same thing—and yet now, in a recession, Congress is considering more tax cuts all over again.”
“Vietnam showed us the perils of occupation ... “
Utter. Nonsense. Our allies in South Vietnam were attacked by North Vietnamese Marxists. Democratic presidents Kennedy and Johnson undertook a war they did not have the testicular fortitude to see through, and got us hopelessly bogged down. Nixon got us out of an impossible situation, and the Democrats never forgave him. Speaking of “doing it all over again”, the Democrats got us hopelessly bogged down in Korea and Eisenhower got us out. So the Democrats said that Eisenhower was “stupid”. Never give Democrats control of foreign policy, they just muck it up.
“The Great Depression underscored the downsides of laissez-faire economics ... “
That may be the stupidest mis-statement of economic fact in history. After Black Friday, the unemployment rate went to 9% and then dropped to 6%, with recovery well on the way. At that time, Hoover wanted to protect the economy by government action and raised taxes and passed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs.
This government interference in the economy was what then triggered the worst of the Great Depression. Roosevelt did his own interference by raising taxes after the 1936 elections, and we went into a double-dip depression.
It may be counter-intuitive, but restricting trade has the effect of raising prices and killing employment. Clinton and many Democrats signed on to NAFTA and the free-trade legislation, and free trade materially reduced the bad effects when the dot.com Bubba Bubble popped. Free trade and the Bush tax cuts minimized the Bubba Recession, holding unemployment below 6.1% after the third largest economic bubble in history threatened to do devastaing damage.
“Ronald Reagan proved the failure of trickle-down tax cuts to spread prosperity ... “
Marxist malarkey. LBJ’s War on Poverty cost $6.6 trillion over a thirty-year period, an average of $220 billion per year. We have absolutely nothing to show for the waste of $6.6 trillion dollars except broken poor families, fraud, and corruption. After the WoP was passed in 1965, the markets went flat for seventeen years with three major recessions, culminating in the Carter Catastrophe when unemployment, interest rates, and inflation all went to double-digit figures. Reagan’s tax cuts and economic reforms went to the benefit of everyone, and jobs, growth, and the economy all took off like a rocket.
Sirota’s consistent lying cannot be attributed to ignorance, because no one could be that ignorant. But if Democrats can keep raising taxes, they can use the tax money to buy votes and political power.
Many Republicans voted for the War on Poverty out of concern for the poor, but the poor were not helped and the country was worse off. Fewer Republicans voted for the Democrats Unaffordable Housing Project that has done so much damage to the economy, and almost no Republicans have voted for any of Obama’s programs, knowing that Democratic Party programs always end in waste, fraud, and corruption.
Posted by scorp on Aug 21, 2010 at 6:16 PM
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
T.S. Eliot, ‘Choruses from “The Rock”.
Posted by whattheheck on Aug 22, 2010 at 5:23 AM
Here are some generalities we may draw from the article:
• Tax cuts are never useful and always benefit only the rich.
• All military adventures are useless and self-serving.
• Capitalism is the worst form of economics and a total scam against the populace.
Like most generalities they should be ignored. While I’m in a quoting mode, here’s one to keep in mind…
“A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove, either.” — Mark Twain
Posted by whattheheck on Aug 22, 2010 at 5:37 AM
From the first eleven words of the initial comment on this article, I correctly guessed the author.
I think that the frustration we all feel when looking at the last sixty years of our history, can be due to the lack of progress. I’m not talking about technology or knowledge. I’m referring to the merry-go-round we call America’s guiding principle.
Whenever there is a change in the political leadership in our country, the party now in charge resorts back to the same basic policy we had the last time they were in power. It becomes a one step forward, two steps back sort of thing.
George H. W. Bush led us into the first Gulf war on false pretenses. The ‘Citizens for a Free Kuwait’ debacle, coupled with the downright lie by ‘Nurse Nayirah’( in a testimony before Congress, no less) manipulated a patriotic America into approving this contrived war. I guess it never occurred to us that the Bush family was an oil family and that the Persian Gulf was rich in oil.
Bill Clinton inherited a huge budget deficit and left with a budget surplus. We were at peace during his presidency. Americans were, for the most part, content. His efforts to find and eliminate Osama Bin Laden were covert, but still overshadowed, in many opinions, those efforts by George W. Bush.
Among Clinton’s accomplishments was the conversion of a massive budget shortage into a budget surplus. Oh!, I mentioned that already.
Enter George W. Bush and again we’re at war under false pretenses. The WMD concoction even surpasses his father’s fables. And it never dawned on him or his military advisors that maybe an all out war in Afghanistan was not necessary. If our main objective was to bring Bin Laden and Al Qeida to justice, perhaps the greatest intelligence network in the history of mankind could have pinpointed the location of a terrorist group, with no national alliance. And perhaps the best trained and disciplined special ops personnel in the world could take them out.
Meanwhile, our country was rapidly self-destructing, with problems ranging from the economy, to unemployment, to illegal immigration. But our president was still occupied with the wars, convinced that he was doing God’s work.
And now, after Americans finally realize that they were again fooled, it is again time for a change. We look to an intelligent young Senator to help bail us out of this new mess. When campaigning, this candidate tells Americans that it will be a long, tough road to recovery. But two years into his presidency, and after many accomplishments, some of the fickle, impatient citizens of our fine country are still not satisfied!
As long as we Americans allow ourselves to be swayed by the richest and loudest voices of unreason, we’ll never escape this cycle
Posted by Eugene Connolly on Aug 24, 2010 at 5:32 PM
Eugene Connolly,
We’re on the same page with the repetitive 2-party cycle farce. We repeatedly elect them and they party at our expense.
“Bill Clinton inherited a huge budget deficit and left with a budget surplus. We were at peace during his presidency. Americans were, for the most part, content. His efforts to find and eliminate Osama Bin Laden were covert, but still overshadowed, in many opinions, those efforts by George W. Bush.”
I think of Clinton as “Mr. Lucky” — He took office near the beginning of the tech decade and rode it to the peak. Few remember it popped just before he left 1600 Penn. Ave. If any credit must be given for a “balanced budget” it should go to the period of triple digit PEs and anticipation that it would go on forever. The “budget surpluses” were largely Fed income taxes on short term, massive stock gains.
A longer view fits your paragraph on political leadership. Not the figureheads like the Bushes, Clinton or even back to Reagan — our real Leadership is behind the scenes at Wall Street and those who slip in and out of the agencies and bureaucratic seats of power.
Many are Harvard and/or Goldman Sachs alums:
Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Barack Obama
Think of the influence and changes they have engendered:
Interest rates, bank margins, TARP and accounting rules suspensions, Repeal of Glass-Steagal Act — these are the ones making changes I can’t believe in.
This kind of connection has a long history.
Posted by whattheheck on Aug 25, 2010 at 4:57 AM
extended discussion >>>Continued...
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