This is a political blog, and this is a political post, I promise. I will be talking about the here and now, but I need to start in the late 1970s, talking about punk rock. Bear with me.
So, as I said, we begin in the late 1970s. Popular music had burst at the seams with creativity in the previous decade, and the range of ideas that popular music could express similarly exploded. But, in the 1970s, the record companies began to realize that this music could make serious money, and they turned major label music into a product. There were still artists and groups who wanted to say something real, but it became harder for such artists to get signed. Albums became more and more crafted: where the Beatles had made 19 albums in 6 years, now 6 albums in 19 years would be closer to the mark for someone like Michael Jackson. The music sounded like it was three years in the making as well. Pop music became dominated by artifice, by emotional poses rather than the emotion itself. An awful lot of bad music came out of this, as well as some extraordinary art that I personally needed many years to learn to appreciate on its own terms. But the immediate sincerity of the music of the 1960s got lost along the way. Punk rock emerged into this setting as the antidote to all this. It was deliberately uncrafted. It was a badge of honor amongst groups like the Sex Pistols that they could barely sing or play their instruments. The Circle Jerks rammed the point home with a cover of The Gilligan’s Island Theme that was more of a deconstruction. Punk rock was supposed to be a revolution, the overthrow of corporate rock. The problem was that the revolution was doomed to fail. Any group that stayed together too long began to learn to play and sing; they then had the choice to either pretend they still had no talent, or to keep their honesty by revealing what they had learned. Both the Clash and XTC were groups that started as punks, but no longer were by the release of their third albums. Neither group ever lost the fire that initially fueled them, but now they had become artists.
Politically, our situation now reminds me of the early days of punk rock. The current wave of the politicization of fear began when the 9/11 terrorists provided George W Bush with the opportunity to become a national hero by showing his toughness in a war with Iraq. But Bush was still a product of corporate politics, representing a Republican establishment that wanted to govern their way, but wanted to govern. The Republican brand of punk rock started with two related developments during the Obama presidency: the decision by Mitch McConnell to refuse to pass anything Obama proposed; and the rise of the Tea Party movement. These developments had in common a determination to overthrow the current order. Tax cuts, which had been a Bush triumph for his wealthy backers, became instead a means of destroying the government and its “bloated” programs. A right wing media environment grew up to support these ideas. It gave a voice to the fears and hatreds of supporters who had grown weary of the coded messaging of establishment Republicans. The genius of Donald Trump was to recognize that blatant racism and xenophobia would be a badge of authenticity to this audience. The outrageous and ugly things he said during the 2016 campaign were proof to this crowd of his genuineness. He was punk.
Just as the punks had to prove their authenticity with their lack of musical ability, Trump began to build his cabinet with a group of people whose complete lack of knowledge of how to govern was a badge of honor. But now there is a problem. A Republican Party and a Tea Party movement built on overthrowing the government now controls it. The forces arrayed to destroy our government must now govern, and we see that there was never a plan for what to do if this day ever arrived. They know what they were against, but they have no idea what they are for. The time has come for the punks to learn to play their instruments.
Not all of the punk rockers ever did become musicians. Many lived in a haze of drugs that prevented their talents from emerging, and also killed many of them. Similarly, we have started to see scandals claiming the political lives of some of the political punks. Andrew Puzder and Michael Flynn are gone, and their replacements are establishment Republicans. While I am sure that some hardline Republicans will never be cured of the ideological psychosis promoted by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart, there will be others who will actually learn to govern. To quote another pop culture reference, they will learn that with great power comes great responsibility.
The Republicans have already begun to sort themselves into factions, one that truly wants to figure out what to do with this prize they have won, and another that wants to retain their punk authenticity at all costs. Which faction comes to dominate the next four years, if either one does dominate, will be determined by how closely the rest of us continue to watch them. The scandals are our best hope of weeding out the bad apples, which means we must continue to protest, and we must also continue to support honest media sources. Most important of all, we must build a team that knows how to govern for when our turn to do so comes around again. That means winning local elections, and building from there. When our turn to govern at the national level comes again, we must be ready to show the American people the benefits of knowing how to do it. We must learn to play our own instruments.
There has to be a song to close this one, and this seemed like a good choice:
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