The most historically important--and heartening--election of my lifetime was 2008. But the most important election for the future is this one, 2012.
Never has the threat to the future been so clear. Over the course of the campaign, Romney and Ryan have flat out said what they want to do, even if they've been trying to obscure those statements in the last weeks.
They want to undo the hard-won progress of the past four years. And the past fifty years. And the past 70 years.
They are contemptuous of providing universal health care, something which every advanced democracy provides, and which leaders have been trying to institute since Harry Truman. Even in the hybrid form that is going to make billions for the same private insurance companies that have been soaking vulnerable citizens and denying them care for a generation or more. In doing so, Romneyryan will stop the falling prices of health care that have begun as a result of Obamacare, which will cost individuals, families and businesses--including and especially the small businesses they profess to champion--billions of dollars, and in the case of some businesses and some people, their very lives.
They want to bring back Don't Ask Don't Tell or something similar. They want to reverse the very measured economic incentives that have helped to bring the U.S. economy back and set it on the road to a better future, as well as further enriching Wall Street. They want to destroy the beginnings of real protections for consumers against predatory capitalists.
They want to erase the gains America has made in the world. They want to return to armed swagger, costly wars, torture. They want to erase gains made in immigration fairness.
But erasing the gains of four years is not enough. They want to erase the gains that women have made towards full equality in the workplace, in the courts, and in managing their health and their families. They want to defund the largest network of healthcare providers for women, especially poor women. They want to criminalize abortion and possibly even certain forms of contraception.
They want to destroy the most successful programs in helping seniors avoid poverty, starting with Medicare and Medicaid, and moving on to Social Security. They want to reverse hard-won principles that work in practice: to help students of all ages get an education, to rebuild our infrastructure, and even to help rescue and rebuild in times of disaster, like hurricane Sandy. And they aren't too sure about public services like firefighters, EMTs, teachers and public schools. Oh, and public television has got to go, too.
They justify all this with narrow theology and lies. They wail about the national deficit, which soared from a surplus under Clinton to huge debt under Bush, but which has been declining under Obama. But their announced plans add up to creating massive deficit, without doing anything for the country but transferring more to the wealthy.
And that's the basic reversal, the most dangerous one. For years now--since the 1980s perhaps, certainly since 2000--the middle class has been declining while the wealthy have taken a bigger and bigger share of the country's wealth. The most important threat to the future represented by plutocrat Mitt Romney is making that imbalance greater--so much greater that economically and politically, it will become very very difficult to reverse.
As Jonathan Chiat concludes: "Both his fealty to his party and his belief in his own abilities point in the same direction: the entitlement of the superrich to govern the country."
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