“Lock and Load!”

The economic crisis has given the United States a new experience: irreconcilable political camps and militant protests on both sides. Is the country even governable?

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange have a new way of greeting one another these days: They call each other “comrade,” like the bearded radicals of the 1970s or people in today’s Cuba.

Of course, these arch-capitalists on the trading floor are being ironic. They feel they’ll soon be living in a socialist or even a communist country. Obama and his Democrats finally forced their health care reform plan through Congress, a plan that will make having health insurance mandatory; that’s going way too far for many Americans, and in many places there’s a great deal of resentment about it.

A wave of threats and even violence has spilled over from Arizona to Kansas and on to New York. One anonymous citizen told his congressman he hoped he would “bleed, get cancer and die.” That was one of the comparatively milder variations of what was said to politicians. Someone threw a brick through the front window of another representative’s office. An unknown perpetrator tried to sabotage another representative’s home but succeeded only in cutting the fuel line to the gas grill on his brother’s patio.

Opposition politicians did little to defuse the situation. Republican minority leader John Boehner called Obama’s new law “Armageddon” and Sarah Palin, ex-Governor of Alaska and current figurehead of the new protest movement, told her followers, “Don’t retreat — reload!” — a call tastefully illustrated with her political opponents pictured in the cross-hairs of a rifle scope. It was extraordinary even for the hysterical argumentative style of the United States. The New York Times even compared the developments with Germany’s Kristallnacht.*

What on earth is wrong with the Americans? The extreme reaction to Obama’s proposed legislation begs the question of just how possible it is to reform this country that is plagued by so many social and economic problems. Obama came into the White House a year ago with an ambitious agenda and has since retreated in the face of public opposition. Obama is stuck in a backlog of reforms. He really wanted to have accomplished more by this point in time. He wanted to have a new energy policy in place, Wall Street reined in and a new immigration policy enacted. Instead, he just barely got a new health care law passed. Even that came at the cost of many compromises.

Obama took office with the high point of the financial crisis just a few weeks old; the “Great Recession” was yet to come. Riding a euphoric wave of electoral victory, the new administration believed it was the opportune time for reform and thought it could reform everything all at once. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, remarked in an interview that it would be a shame to waste this crisis.

But they underestimated how insecure the country was. Unemployment at record levels, people’s life savings wiped out, thousands of homes repossessed and auctioned off. Americans hadn’t felt so vulnerable or seen their very existences threatened like this since the early 1980s.

*Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, refers to the night of November 9-10, 1938, when Nazi gangs rampaged across Germany and Austria smashing windows in Jewish shops and homes.