when Hope & Change become We'll Take Anything We Can Get

What good is Barack Obama if he is indeed another inside man for the corporate plutocracy? What good is winning the election if all that Hope and Changey stuff was frankly bullshit? More importantly, what are the deeper implications of Hope and Change transmogrifying into We'll Take Anything We Can Get? 

Despite campaigning in 2008, and now in 2012 it appears, as an "outsider," who tells millions "you can't change Washington from the inside," Obama has governed from the Oval Office as The Consummate Insider. (All of which prompted a very funny segment from The Daily Show.) But what really gets my goat going is when liberals shoot back with the predictable excuse, "he had no choice because of those stupid, evil republicans!," as if they know that Obama, somewhere deep-down in his soul, is really a progressive, and not a soulless neoliberal apparatchik. Yet do they have any EVIDENCE, (besides that secret plot he's got going against Rahm Emanuel & the banksters,) that Obama would govern as a liberal-progressive, you know, if it wasnt for all that realpolitick jazz? Do they have EVIDENCE that Obama is not the blue-dog he says he is? Any EVIDENCE that he plans - or even hopes - to replenish Social Security and Medicare after they're cut, or bring back labor unions after they get decimated, or bring back Habeas Corpus, or Keynesian economics, or undo climate change, or give back to citizens the civil liberties he and the Republicans have taken away, you know, once he has enough power to do so? 

Perhaps the most important accomplishment of Obama's Presidency, (besides extending Bush's Patriot Act; voting for FISA; extending Bush tax-cuts; taking upon himself the sole authority to kidnap or kill any American citizen without due process; appealing a court ruling on NDAA; using drones to kill innocent Muslims without being transparent about it, and approving the use of drones over domestic air-space for commercial and state purposes; failing in Copenhagen; kissing the ass of Wall St. bankers; cracking down on unions and working people; presiding over greater gaps of inequality than his predecessor; undermining attempts to better integrate public schools; invading foreign countries illegally despite being a Constitutional lawyer; buying into the Austerity racket and  sending signals that, like his Republican partners in crime, will actually cut Social Security & Medicare; and moving the party to the right of both Reagan and Nixon) has been to pour cold water on his supporters, aka his "base," while simultaneously convince them that he, really deep-down in his soul, is a pwogwessive... whatever his accomplishments, whatever he says.

LIBERALSARESOSTUPIDLIBERALSARESOSTUPIDLIBERALSARESOSTUPIDLIBERALSARESOSTUPIDLIBERALSARESOSTUPIDLIBERALSARESO STUPIDLIBERALSARESOSTUPIDLIBERALSARESOSTUPIDLIBERALSARESOSTUPIDLIBERALSARESO

What makes all this so alarming is that its not just "the lesser evil" his supporters will be voting for; they'll also be voting for, what Glen Ford calls, "the more effective evil" given  their perfect alibi: those evil, stupid Republicans. As Paul Street writes, "I have been asking Obama-mad campus town liberals to tell me if there was any particular line in the sand Obama could cross where they would withdraw support for him. The question has been consistently met with silence except for one who told me they would cease to back Obama 'if he joined the Republican party.'"  

Obama seems like a great guy. He also has a beautiful family. But judging from his acts and deeds as an elected public official, qua POTUS, his priorities are nothing less than fucked up. He'll fight for Bush policies but not for the CTU - nor even campaign for public sector workers in Wisconsin against a Republican Governor! He'll stay silent when it comes to the gun-laws but not when it comes to ridiculing "the professional left." He'll sit by as poverty grows while find the time to coddle the rich. The real proof is that Obama refuses to go out into the land to rally the people on these issues, (you know, that put-pressure-on-Congress thing,) but he will go out to the swing states during election time when he needs their votes. Such a great speaker, apparently an inspirational figure too, yet such an insider! Thus, to build from what Charles Ferguson, (despite intending to vote for Obama,) wrote a few days ago: the fact of the matter is that the more the two electoral candidates pretend to be (are?) at each others' throats, the more similar they are in reality because being at each others throats requires access to big money, and thus enslaving yourself to the framework of corporate power. It doesn't matter what either of them say or what either of them say otherwise.

Thus my quest has now become to radically disillusion "the left" and their "centrist" collaborators of elections because elections, at least as they are practiced within the United States these days, not only make the electorate more stupid - they also have the brume of legitimacy about them. I used to think to look forward to elections because at least they got ordinary people, you know, the demos, talking about politics - or at least what passed for politics. I still look forward to these engagements. But I also know that every two years the lowest common denominators get pumped up and paraded, and the historical records conveniently evaporate into the ether, while the race to the bottom stays on course. I also am reminded how important it is to know that the elections are a sham because the difference between an F+ and an F- just ain't gonna cut it. Actually, the difference between the two parties these days, to rephrase it, looks like the difference between someone putting a gun to you & your family's head, saying "Don't worry, I know what I'm doing!," and another person leading you and your family down a long dark alley, saying Don't worry, I know what I'm doing!" I'll leave it up to you to figure out who is who. But be prepared for tedious, exhausting debates because whether or not you live in a red state or a blue state, you'll have to endure inane charts and memes, & do plenty of "fact checking."

On the really important issues that are defining and dictating how people live their lives, and what their futures entail, (the domination of corporate and financial power, increasing police power & militarism, the cracking down on unions; the withering away of social safety nets as well as Social Security and Medicare, growing gaps of inequality, and, of course, climate change,) the difference between these two parties ain't worth squat. That one may be intent on only picking up the pace as we fly of the cliff may be true; but that an opposition is either incapable or unwilling to stop us from hitting the ground seems also true. None of this is all that new. But we are getting closer to making it a whole lot worse.       

go ahead, make my day

Corrente writes,

Maybe it's me, but last night's convention/sideshow convinced me that this whole process of electing a president is nothing but a sham, something for the rubes to chatter about while the real action is going on in an entirely different tent.

Actually its not you - and you're not the only one. But what makes this time different?

People have suspected these things for a long time. The problem is that they know the show is fake but still fool themselves by thinking they've spotted the real distinction, the real importance, between what is real and what is not. Reality is multi-layered. Offstage creeps onstage. One convention is present in another while the same issues are absent from both. And as long as Americans continue their fickle love-affair with reality they'll always have something to seize upon, size up, and dispose of no matter how contrived. Reality requires an effort of the imagination. 

    

Paul Ryan's Ordo Praedicatorum

Libertarian ideology seems to be quite the rage these days. No longer the nomenclature of right-wing economists and nerds that it was in previous decades it has  gained considerable visibility and acceptance - despite its failures, despite Alan Greenspan. Ron Paul's attempts for the Presidency, for instance, though not exactly successful, have increased their following with each consecutive run, while, more tellingly, his libertarian son, Rand Paul, was elected Senator of Kentucky in 2010. Also, a movie based on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was released last year, and, just this last June, the first Ayn Rand Summit was held in DC and attended by John Stossel, Allen West, Grover Norquist, and President candidate, Gary Johnson. The Libertarian Party itself boasts having become the third-largest political party in the US. And considering the more substantial extent to which neo-liberal "free market" policies and talking-points have been adopted across the board, by both Democrats and Republicans, should any of this be much of a surprise?

Another self-proclaimed Randian, Paul Ryan - who in 2009 admitted, "the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, it would be Ayn Rand" - has now been tapped to share the GOP ticket. Ryan has not only reportedly said as far back as 1999 that the books he most often reads are "the Bible, Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged," but also confessed his proselytizing efforts to The Weekly Standard in 2003: "I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well... I try to make my interns read it." Yet some libertarians are complaining. Though some see in Ryan a man of ideological credibility who can balance out the Republican ticket, others are crying he's a phony - a big-government conservative even. Indeed, as lots of the commentary has already pointed out this past weekend, Ryan's record suggests that he is both for economic "austerity" (the gradual privatization of social security, deep cuts to spending, and "a balanced budget") as well as for "big government" (government bailouts, TARP, Ethanol subsidies, unemployment extensions, the Patriot Act and other federal intrusions, Constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage as well to criminalize flag burning, and many proposed measures to restrict the reproductive freedom of women.)      

That Ryan even started dialing back his Randian cred a few months ago, evoking Thomas Aquinas, may only cause libertarian voters to harden their convictions, and maybe vote for Gary Johnson. Who knows? But I wonder: what in the world can be more utterly glibertarian than to balance out neo-liberal Austrian economics with an "epistemological" turn *cough* to a 13th century Dominican Catholic priest? (See this take down of neo-liberal Aquinian grandstanding.) And what can be more harmful to the GOP in November than this rift between free-market contractarians who find inspiration in the atheism of Rand's "objectivism," and conservative God fearing Christians? Thus, in Romney's words, "Paul is in public life for all the right reasons — not to advance his personal ambitions but to advance the ideals of freedom and justice; and to increase opportunity and prosperity to people of every class and faith, every age and ethnic background. A faithful Catholic, Paul believes in the worth and dignity of every human life." Well, well...

Ryan's move away from Rand signals the electoral liabilities of associating with her, which Ryan and the rest of today's politerati obviously recognize. Democrats will thus likely try to tag Ryan to her Social Darwinist pretensions - but not so much because she was a free-market libertarian but because she was an ideological hack with as much intellectual depth as a nine-year old. Unfortunately, as Democrats look to exploit that particular angle, the failed economic policies of neoliberalism, and the growing gap between "producers" and "moochers," as Rand put it, will get the obligatory free pass. 

But even by their own "small government" standards libertarian ideas are a failure: they simply don't work. On one level, the I-got-mine-now-fuck-off school of thought creates economic and political counter-movements, to borrow a phrase from Karl Polanyi, which are antithetical to it. But in an even more obvious respect, any "small government" exponent running for office in "big government" by default cannot govern on such principles because big capital will always be there to make sure that the corporate mega-state - and its spending sprees and dysfunctions - will remain in place. Thus, the Paul Ryans and the Rand Pauls of the world who sit in political office will always be compromised, and always fall short of their libertarian spiel. Big capital and its spokesmen will never acknowledge that the effort to "bring back effective and responsible government" actually requires a call to resist this very collusion between big government and big capital.

Big capital will also always be there to remind us time and time again, whether through the mouth of Libertarian, Republican, Democrat, or petty bureaucrat, that the functioning of a successful economy requires transforming political categories and expectations into economic ones. These reminders translate into generating more cost cutting measures and bigger profits. They also make even those who are most well-meaning view the country's problems through the language and schemes of short-term practical payoffs and "market" discourse. The long-term political effects of such incessant zero-sum economizing only preclude the chances that any political alternative to the neo-liberal cul de sac we find ourselves in might ever get off the ground and be worth fighting for. (I mean, who wants to fight a losing impractical battle these days when, to recall Margaret Thatcher's words, "there is no alternative"?) 

Big capital also doesn't need the ideological purity of Ron Paul or Gary Johnson to do its bidding because its already the biggest show in town. By occupying the electoral margins such libertarian figures enable "free market" rationalities to operate as business-as-usual, more informally, more impersonally, and more inevitably. Their mere presence also makes it easier for Paul Ryan to try to back away from his Randian schtick just as he moves into November's spotlight.         

the takeaway 2010: the coming disaster of the Obama Presidency and the triumph of New Feudalism

Expectantly the Democrats lost big last Tuesday. And the purging of the Blue Dogs should demonstrate to even the most fashionably clueless among us of the political failure of Democratic “centrism.” Looking on the bright side, we could be tempted to say that the midterms have at least crystallized the liberal and progressive platform, even if Pelosi gets demoted in the process. As Ari Berman anticipated about a month before Nov. 2, “Democrats would be in better shape, and would accomplish more, with a smaller and more ideologically cohesive caucus.” True, less blue-dogs in Congress would be a benefit insofar Democrats are able to shape and control their narrative without party bickering. And though I would love for this to be the takeaway of the 2010 midterms, I also detect some stupid here not getting the scrutiny it deserves. First of all, the remaining 24 Blue Dogs in the House, true to form, are already calling for Pelosi to quit. More obviously, if less numbers overall ostracize the Democrats as an ineffectual incumbency it will only require from Brand Obama and members of the party brass more leadership, more heavy-lifting. And given the statements already being made by Obama it is clear the White House intends to remain at odds with the party’s liberal base, and do its best by clinging to the diminishing “center.” 

So why would Obama once again reaffirm his willingness to “compromise” rather than try to fire up his own troops in his own party – especially when the signals sent by the GOP tell us that it has no intentions of compromising whatsoever? You know, there was a time not all that long ago when Obama was considered not just a great orator but some new kind of inspirational leader. You know, he had charisma in a good er, "progressive" way. He was even a "community organizer" guys!!! So how can the President continue to foolishly reach across the aisle only to be taken for another ride? Can it be he is just another inside-man for the corporate plutonomy? (Hey everybody! look at Mika!)

One sure lesson to be learned from 2010 it is that even without enough votes to get its policies enacted the gains made by the GOP enables it to simply watch “gridlock” take its toll and dismantle what’s left of the age of Obama.  

Energized by the Theo-Cons of the religious right, as well as Tea Party antics and rhetoric, the GOP has been able to rise from the dead in just two years to effectively denounce and repudiate Obama and the Democrats. How did they do it? Sensing weakness in the Dems, they fought and fought continuously. Republicans knew nothing could be gained for their party if they simply went along with the policies of a majority party: Obama and the Dems would get the credit if their policies succeeded and were popular, just as they would surely get blamed if their policies stalled, needed cover, or downright failed. Thus the Republicans became known on MSNBC as The Party of No. 

In reinventing themselves the Republicans were also able to distance themselves from the Democrats in a very clear way. What they did was take a feudal turn to the right, and got a huge push from "outsiders" otherwise known as The Tea Party. This New Feudalism is evident not only in the House of Representatives but also in the Senate where old white men parody 1950s middle-class America by evoking the spirit of Balance-the-Budget hardhead Calvin Coolidge and the coming specter of A Socialist Takeover. These New Feudalists speak everyday of America’s ennobled place in history as it  soldiers on against infidels, libertines, and the shiftless. They plunder the serfs back home. They make others fight their wars. They spread the gospel of wealth while speaking in tongues. They steal from the poor to give to the rich. Some of their additional accomplishments? Presiding over economic and financial collapse through financial deregulation and disregard; dilapidated and starved social institutions; unprecedented expansions of executive power and surveillance; two losing wars; a bloated military budget which – when paired with rising health care expenses – is bankrupting the country; xenophobia; a plutocratic “austerity” agenda which professes to cut state spending “across the board” by privatizing social security, Medicaid, and Medicare, while making the Bush tax-cuts permanent; and, of course, extolling of private wealth growing disparities in income and wealth inequality. Republicans have also gotten older. But perhaps the most telling sign of the coming of a New Feudalist establishment is the redistricting of congressional seats it is about to redraw. 

Surely it isn't new to say that the GOP is radically at odds with the demos. For no matter how much talk there is today of a “populist” Tea Party take over of government don’t expect the Marco Rubios of the world to rock the boat of the Republican establishment. We'll see how much of that Defense budget Rand Paul wants to cut. We'll see how much executive power Dick Armey or that guy in Wisconsin who beat Feingold wants to cut back. Can't wait for Sarah Palin to fight for the unemployed and uninsured. Yeah, both parties are

joined at the hip in profound ways which make meaningful distinctions between them utterly specious: thoroughly corporatist, militaristic, neo-liberal, anti-democratic, and dispassionately fascist just poised at the edge waiting to wage a jingoistic boot stomping of all opposition into oblivion perchance the opportunity ever presented itself. How totally awesome is that? Yet unlike the Democrats who are plagued by caution and "thoughtfulness," (as any good latte drinking feminist sympathizer is,) Republicans can dress themselves up in callous, go it alone, cowboy regalia and rhetoric to give them the semblance and reputation of inherent autonomy, of a Going Rogue toughness and independence, which many, many Americans find appealing. And so by STAYING ON MESSAGE they can position themselves to pull this whole fucking mess of a country continually to the right. You see, Rush and Hannity know stuff. They and their propogandist blowhards know how to create reality so liberals can report it. 

Louis Hartz and McCain-Palin Rallies

-->

-->

-->

In 1955 Louis Hartz argued in his very influential The Liberal Tradition in America that since Americans have never experienced a feudal past to tie them down to hardened class conflicts, they have been able to successfully adhere to Lockean liberalism, i.e., "the liberal faith," and, in effect, neutralize more ideologically extreme movements from both the left and the right, including the possibility for a genuinely revolutionary politics. Even Southern slaveholders were guided by the Liberty, Reason, and Truth of the Enlightenment. For the governing principle in the United States, or, as Hartz put it, "the triumph of the liberal idea," has been that "interests" and individual enterprise would not be possible without a settled order based in the principles of fairness and equality. It was an argument played especially well by bow-tied liberals who sat to the left of William F. Buckley during the cold-war.

Consider this passage as well,

“This then is the mood of America's absolutism: the somber faith that its norms are self-evident. It is one of the most powerful absolutisms in the world....It was so sure of itself that it hardly needed to become articulate, so secure that it could actually support a pragmatism which seemed on the face to belie it. American pragmatism has always been deceptive because, glacier like, it has rested on miles of submerged conviction, and the conformitarian ethos which that conviction generates has always been infuriating because it has refused to pay its critics the compliment of an argument."

Hartz's "glacier" metaphor is an apt portrayal of the somnambulism of Americans the last few decades. "Look where 'business-as-usual' is getting us!," Hartz's neo-Tocquevillian voice seems to declaim, as the American Dream drifts further away. Indeed Hartz also issued the warning which alloyed American middle-class enthusiasms to the dangerous "conformitarian ethos" generated by the promise of social mobility, the principle of equality, and, material well-being.

People at McCain-Palin rallies calling for Barack Obama's head, and referencing him to "well, you know....an arab," should remind us that populism - which both political parties have been conveniently been able to leave to various surrogates and media spokespersons to abuse and exploit every day, (a la "culture wars,") - is alive and kicking. There is lots of anger out there. And yet we should wonder whether today's good ol' red-state resentment also calls into question Hartz’s notion that American democracy has indeed been able to successfully sever itself from a feudal past. What was it that George W. Bush was able to tap into? What was Hillary Clinton going for that one week in Pennsylvania? Or, more historically, was not the populist appeal of, say, William Jennings Bryan back in the late nineteenth century – or even Andrew Jackson earlier – the vestiges of a feudal inheritance which at brief moments has been able to push back against the forces of Lockean liberalism and American Whiggishness? What of the early agrarian movements of the nineteenth century, or the populist movements that later appeared after the Civil War, which sought to preserve small-scale production through cooperative trade and enlist the hopes of ordinary people about ordinary human things, such as families, Churches, small businesses, and, above all, in the capacity of small landed collectivities to make decisions for themselves responsibly?

Rest assured I am NOT at all advocating some romantic turn to the good ‘ol days of hoedowns, Jim Crow, and vigilante justice but instead reconsidering how the diverse efforts of plainsfolk, meek as they may be – warts and all – have contested the notion that the state and the metro poles of financial capital are the only sites of political activity. The issue is therefore less political restoration than political renewal. So, yes, anachronism abounds – rest assured – especially in today’s world of blogs and “networking,” and especially in light of the recent collapse of the “ownership society.”

Hartz claimed that the American democrat, the genuine "progressive," is at bottom a middle-class concoction, part Horatio Alger, part John Calhoun, but always and ultimately a “‘petit-bourgeois’ giant… a pushover for its democratic capitalism, its pot of gold.” It all reflected the “self-made” individual and the promise of procuring wealth presented by the American founding. No wonder Americans would become known for chasing treasure with a single mindedness that struck most foreigners as daring and adventurous yet utterly uncouth - and all while simultaneously looking at themselves as morally upright, God-fearing people. Thinking of a remark made by Tocqueville the aristocrat in the second volume to Democracy in America makes it difficult not think of the rabid fawning of those attending political rallies these days. “Their vanity, “he wrote, “is not only greedy but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing while it demands everything, but is ready to beg and quarrel at the same time….It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it.”

Nonetheless if the Founding Fathers were revolutionary with respect to gaining independence from the British crown they were also completely smitten with the propertied class, quite appreciative of the alignments between plutocrats and the federal government, and deeply fearful, suppressive, and even loathsome, of the demos. Not even Jefferson had the stomach to question King George, much less other Southern slaveholders or wealthy merchants, for keeping rich above poor. Indeed democracy implied the breakdown or loss of power – a takeover of institutions and resources, as well as the radical reinterpretation of priorities and agendas which were to otherwise belong to persons of wealth, an elite class. Democracy signified the political not so much in terms of “leadership” and acquiescence as with equalizing the context within which ordinary people would attempt to effectively coordinate.