The gang on Morning Joe this morning was gassing on about how neither of the presidential candidates — but especially not the incumbent, as was repeatedly pointed out by Mark Halperin, successful pundit and talk-show sycophant — have been "specific enough" about their plans to pull the country out of the ditch in which 32 years of crackpot conservative economics and a decade of deregulated thievery have left it. (Okay, that last part was me.) There was, as you might expect, very little talk about income inequality, or about stagnating wages, or about how so many largely unaccountable centers of power have decided that the country doesn't need a middle class and, to that end, have worked on their own to make the one purportedly accountable center of power — the government, and the electoral politics that power and staff it — as unaccountable as they are, folding them into that impregnable iron bubble in which the other centers of power carve things up for their own benefit.

No, there was not any talking about that.

Joe Scarborough talked about how the people will willingly follow a politician who proudly "slays sacred cows." Willie Geist said something about a Grand Bargain, and that the biggest problem with the election is that the politicians can't tell the people what "we" really need. Steve Rattner lumped in Social Security with The Deficit. Halperin mentioned that some people picked on him for not giving the president's performance the other night a better grade. Mika Brzezinski meeped something that sounded recognizably humane and Scarborough accused her of hijacking the show.

It is easy to mock the sheer entitled audacity of these people's talking about the "sacrifices" that "we" all have to make. It is easy to mock the notion of a Grand Bargain which, even in its most benign form, will involve changing the very natures of Social Security and Medicare while closing "loopholes" that will sock the middle class and cost the richest people in the country a little of their pin money, at least until their lawyers and lobbyists close in on Washington and devise new loopholes to replace those old ones. (We've had an endless discussion of the mortgage-interest deduction, which is pretty plainly on life support, but almost none on the preposterous carried-interest deduction. Coincidence? I think not, and neither does my banker in the Caymans.) But the discussion failed to include what I think is the most important factor driving the current drift of support in the general direction of Willard Romney.

Resignation.

There was a moment right there at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 when the nation could have radically reassessed the power of corporations and the power of their money in our politics. The way that American corporations did business was laid bare in all its magnificent avarice and mendacity for all the world to see. The damage that an unaccountable and deregulated corporate elite could do to the rest of the country was just standing there in the open with a huge spotlight on it. It became possible for the country to see how the game had been rigged and for whose benefit, and for the country to see the complicity of the political elites in building the crooked casino that was our national economy.

And then the moment passed.

We need not cast blame again as to why the moment passed. Suffice it to say, it passed because those same forces that brought on the crisis — and, therefore, that brief, glimmering opportunity — were able to make it pass. We need not go into all the reasons they were able to do that. Suffice it to say that there has settled upon our politics, as we perceive them among ourselves, a notion that the rigged game is the only game in town.

We have allowed ourselves to become mired in the habits of oligarchy, as though no other politics are possible, even in a putatively self-governing republic, and resignation is one of the most obvious of those habits. We acclimate ourselves to the habit of having our politics acted upon us, rather than insisting that they are ours to command. TV stars tell us that political stars are going to cut their Grand Bargain and that "we" will then applaud them for making the "tough choices" on our behalf. That is how you inculcate the habits of oligarchy in a political commonwealth. First, you disabuse people of the notion that government is the ultimate expression of that commonwealth, and then you eliminate or emasculate any centers of power that might exist independent of your smothering influence — like, say, organized labor — and then you make it quite clear who's in charge. I'm the boss. Get used to it.

And, hell, we're already entertaining ourselves by watching bosses act like jackasses all over television. Donald Trump is sui generis in this regard, of course, but the cable lineup is full of shows about angry misanthropes who come in and treat the employees of hair salons, restaurants, and saloons like dirt, all in the name of "improving" the businesses in question. The Economist last week published an astonishing sentence in one of its allegedly "centrist" editorials calling for the Grand Bargain: "No Wall Street financier has done as much damage to American social mobility as the teachers' unions have." Do not look up at your betters with anger. Look around at your neighbors who teach in the public schools. Inculcate the habits of oligarchy in people — especially the habit of resignation — and you can turn them on each other and go on your merry way. Look at the now weekly stories of corporate chieftains "encouraging" their employees to vote a certain way, lest the chieftain — regretfully, I am sure — be forced to destroy any economic independence the employees have.

So, as we groan on towards the election, it's becoming clear that a lot of people have decided to vote for Willard Romney because he is The Boss, and because we all know that everything in our lives, including the exercise of our freedom, is at the whim of the boss. Those are the habits of oligarchy. The Morning Joe crew speaks their language.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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