Next year's presidential election is going to be a debacle. What our country actually needs is a New Deal-style massive, Keynesian spending spree to get the millions of unemployed Americans working, get our demand-driven economy surging again (keep in mind: 70% of our economy is driven by consumer spending). This is what it needs. Those folks need jobs. Tax rates on the top 1% must go up. This is what will get our economy rolling again.
However, this is not going to happen. Instead, both parties will offer non-solutions to real problems. The Democrats will ape Republican economic thinking, leashed to supposed deficit hawks (which really translates into folks who don't like social spending -- since deficit hawks never balk at Pentagon spending and bank bailouts). And the Republicans will continue their "more of the same" stuff -- lowering taxes on the top 1%, eliminating regulation of industry, and outright subversion and suppression of non-Republican voters through intimidation and actual disenfranchisement.
Anyway, neither party actually will offer a way out of this mess. Our country absolutely needs new thinking. You know we're in trouble when actual moderate/centrist thinking qualifies as "left-wing radicalism" in DC. That's how skewed our country's become. Here's a little graphic:
[Left]=======================[Center]=====["Left"]=====["Center"]=====[Right]
Our system has an ideological ratchet in place -- we are allowed to hew ever rightward, but when anybody tries to tack left, the ratchet locks. It's impermissible. Anyway, the false centrists are really conservatives, the false leftists are really right-moderates. And everybody to the left of those right-moderates (Obama's one of those, btw -- and he gets called a "socialist"), anybody to the left of Obama (and that's a lot of people) is completely left out of the political system.
That's a reality not lost on those Occupy Wall Street (OWS) folks. They get it. They understand that they've been left behind. It's not like the astroturf, reactionary billionaire-financed false populism of the Tea Party (who are really just the shock troops for the GOP). Rather, OWS is something very different. It is a movement that actually doesn't have a place within the "Beltway Consensus" diagrammed above.
Sure, the Democrats will pay lip service to them. Hell, they have to, in order to feign some kind of credibility with these folks. But today's Democratic Party is completely captive to Wall Street and the banking industry; they will have exactly nothing to offer OWS except empty words of support.
And the Republicans can't even pretend to have anything to say to them, because it's so clear that they are hostile to actual, practicing democracy. They are marching along with "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength." as their political maxims, not even understanding just how Orwellian they are. Maybe some of their elite opinion leaders get it, but they have their own rank-and-file completely snowed.
So, going into 2012, we have a country on cruise control while driving toward a cliff. Barring a sweeping voting out of the Republicans and a massive change of heart on the part of the Democrats, neither party will offer a thing to improve things for the majority of Americans. And that is going to create armies of pissed-off, desolate, desperate people. Each election after 2012 is going to get messier and messier, until there is a proper political sea change and new thinking is brought in (or old thinking that has been disregarded because it challenges economic wrongthink).
