People who claim that President Obama betrayed the base are, at best, deeply confused. The Democratic Party had primary elections in 2007/2008. In those elections, there was a moderate reformer named Dennis Kucinich who supported things like single-payer medical reform and immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Kucinich was unambiguously repudiated by the actual Democratic primary voters (the base) who divided their loyalties between three centrists. The centrists argued over details of maintaining massive worldwide military presence, tinkering on the margins with the health care system, and minor reforms of the tax system. That is, the base, chose support a platform of rolling back the radical right wing policies of Bush, but signed up for the elite consensus on major economic, social, and geopolitical issues.
Reality: The American Public has populist sentiments, but is not willing to support even Kucinich level reform even with votes, let alone on the streets. The BASE selected centrism.
However, even before the election, the “progressive left” was building the case that Obama was going to break or already had broken his solemn vows to overthrow finance capital and usher in a reign of … well, we don’t know because the “progressive left” has not articulated a vision of what it wants much beyond “fire Rahm Emmanuel” or “lead”. The wacky right wing attack on Obama’s centrist “moderatism” as wild eyed Muslim/Black Liberation Marxist extremism thus found a peculiar echo on the “left”.
In fact, the election of Obama was a huge victory for the actual left: labor unions, environmentalists, civil rights advocates, community organizations. Why? Because it blocked, at least for a while, the establishment of a right wing police state. Anyone who witnessed the operations of the Bush regime and its thuggish mercenaries in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina must realize that normal bounds of civil liberty and rule-of-law were “quaint” in Bush/Cheney’s America. To elect a Democratic majority in the House in 2006 and a Democratic President in 2008 was a win against the odds – and in the teeth of a complicit media and highly organized right wing infrastructure. That reversal crucially depended on the defection from the Republicans of a big chunk of the finance and corporate elite – who, finally, had become nervous about the reckless character of the Bush regime.
Obama came to office, promising sensible centrist policies and in a coalition that extended from the labor movement to the disillusioned heads of large financial concerns. How anyone who claims to be “on the left” could mistake this for anything more than what it was, is hard to imagine. Of course, Obama sold his centrism as something that was hot, delicious, and sizzly, not as putting the brakes on fascism – but he was exceptionally and unusually clear about what policies he would follow. So the victory in 2008 means that the “left” has a chance to organize political groups, field candidates, develop media and message – instead of going to jail or to exile or shutting up.
A chance for now.
One of the most annoying features of the post-election debate about what should be done is the persistent argument that objecting to the “we’re doomed and betrayed” line is tantamount to a demand for subordination. But the real problem with the petulant left is that it doesn’t seem to have anything productive to bring to the table. We’re not getting sit-ins and mass marches, or smart lobbying and incremental reform. calling your centrist allies chickenshit corrupt traitors who need to fire various of their major players seems highly unlikely to produce a positive result. The result seems more likely to be encouragement of the far right and an increasing probability they will be given another chance to make their control of the levers of government permanent.
“In fact, the election of Obama was a huge victory for the actual left: labor unions, environmentalists, civil rights advocates, community organizations. Why? Because it blocked, at least for a while, the establishment of a right wing police state.”
What specifically has been “blocked,” reversed? Please name these things which are now accomplished fact. Thank you.
Instead, a remarkable thing has happened: a predatory imperialist corporatist state which had been run by undisguised thugs (Bush, Cheney and the whole lot of them) is now being run by a guy who’s Black, passes for a liberal, speaks well and makes a show—convincing to many—of having many of the best intentions. And yet, remarkably, what was the most vile practice of realpolitik under Bush and Cheney has been blithely adopted and ratified by a putative “liberal”!!!! In other words, it apparently makes absolutely no difference whether the nation’s government is in the hands of “Republicans” or “Democrats”, the facts on the ground remain dismayingly, shockingly the same in so many fundamental ways:
war and other forms of armed-force coercion remain one of the main-stays of the national and foreign policy of the U.S. A protectionist attitude toward selfish economic advantages, to the deadly detriment of both the world’s natural life-supporting environment and billions of people who live and suffer with the equivalent of about $1 (US) per day.
What’s offered by Obama amount mainly to pious expressions, vain hopes and dreams, and empty promises—often trumped up and offered for sale as genuine progress instead of the sham bullshit which it is.
To assert that the Copenhagen conference “results” were in any sense a positive step is a gross piece of deception which deserves the admiring approval of lesser sham hucksters and liars such as Bush and Cheney, since so much of their work was so flagrantly dishonest as to fail to convince even many ordinarily naïve people.
People used to say about Bill Clinton that his political skills were such that he could and would piss down another person’s leg even as Clinton was shaking hands with that person. In Obama, we have someone who can do the same and who, after shaking hands while pissing on the poor sucker’s leg, that same poor sucker walks away in a daze, marveling that the president of the United States is so charming, so well-spoken and, so importantly, a black man, which, taken together, are supposed to count more than anything he actually does or does not do.
Unlike Madelaine Albright, who was too dull-witted to come up with anything more sophisticated than, “We believe it is worth the price,” when asked directly by a reporter about the long-standing U.S. embargo of Iraq which had by that time directly caused the deaths of many many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, Barack Obama, while doing things no less heinous, would defend those things with a much greater aplomb.
That, it turns out, is what people actually “got” in return for their trust and their votes.
IF the world were actually ruled by an unspeakably cruel and diabolical cabal of evil and ruthless masters, they’d certainly regard Barack Obama as infinitely superior for their needs and uses than Bush and Cheney who gave so many people the actual skin-crawling creeps just to look at and listen to.
What an advantage if the Wicked Witch of the East had looked like Mary Poppins!
Or, what if a sincerely well-meaning fellow who looked, spoke and smelled so very pleasant was in fact morally hollow and lost in dithering over trivial minutiae which easy rendered his vision obscured to a clear view of moral essentials?
As Einstein put it, “Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem — in my opinion — to characterize our age.”
Except that now, we are losing much in the means we once had or might have had and leaving wasted and unused those means which remain—because our moral bewilderment has outstripped anything which Einstein had then imagined. And that is saying a lot.