machiavelli the democrat

For a profoundly revisionist take on the Florentine listen to this "Occupy interview" with John P. McCormick, Professor of Political Science from U Chicago, and author of Machiavellian Democracy. You can also read McCormick's brief article, "Defending the People from the Professors," which not only departs from the the Machiavellis of old, ( Straussians, neo-Republicans, and those who McCormick refers to as "self-proclaimed radicals,") but presents a Machiavelli for "democrats" for "theoretical insight, institutional inspiration, and spiritual fortification." 

proceduralists are fake anarchists

If one of the appeals of OWS has been the “99%” mantra, amongst Occupiers there exists a litany of “non-hierarchical” and “leaderless” memes which are also well-known. These buzzwords ostensibly signify radical egalitarianism and hyper-resistance to authority, something more Kropotkinian than either liberal or Marxist. So while an anarchist ethic may be appealing to neo-Nietzschean personalities capable of continually subverting the processes and techniques of power by virtue of their creative agonism, “leaders,” (as many Occupiers never tire of reminding me,) are flawed animals – and thus vulnerable targets for those looking to co-opt or discredit them and their “followers.” According to Malcolm Harris in “Baby, We’re All Anarchists Now,” this leaderless revolution is not just another attempt to not be co-opted but true “autonomous” social action. It is non-representative, post-political, post-systems, post-individualist as well as post-mensch. And it is “premised on the necessity of acting with your body itself, whether through your legs, arms, vocal chords, fingers, whatever.” He adds, “the latter is threatening as hell, especially to the professional left which is thrust into the conservative position of defending its requisitioned authority.”

Sorry to be such a concern troll but if the aversion to hierarchy precludes the coordination of chains of command and their “demands,” many may wonder of this anarchist ethic, cui bono? I’d say that most people these days, the 99%-ers, could give a rat’s ass about anarchist ethics and Foucauldian micro-strategies. Financial security, jobs, better education, a more just and peaceful world… things like that… are probably a lot more in tune with the common folk than some anarcho-situationalist code reversals, let alone The Revolution. The 99% may nod in perfunctory agreement when they hear the slogans, pontifications, and “positivity” of smug college kids but I wonder how deep they actually believe them. Do they even care?

Nevertheless, much of the popular appeal of OWS has been its unruly antagonism to “the system” – not just to concentrations of financial and political power but to the “the culture of capitalism” itself, to its institutional complexes, norms, strategies, and “values.” People are becoming increasingly aware of their exclusion, abandonment, and powerlessness. OWS has called ordinary people of diverse backgrounds and abilities together to talk, debate, perform, and vent anger in ways that show they are trying to think about “paradigms” in new ways, and be creative. So however it turns out, OWS can be said to have successfully reclaimed public space, and even celebrated the anarchical spirit of debate, noise, disorder, and resistance. And despite what some Occupiers may claim, this rowdy spirit – warts and all – is also downright adversarial to the organizational and policy imperatives of “systems” as well as to the managerial stinginess of “consensus” models flaunted at the GA and its working groups. It does not proffer sophisticated models and ideals, nor sets of solutions and procedures, but rather enacts a disruptive and subversive politics which challenges established orders and their mechanisms of control. Interactions are more fluid, and are constantly adapting to people's changing needs. The problem however with this social (or rebellious) vibrancy is that it is difficult to sustain over time. It not only bears the scars of history, and is perhaps more symbiotic to “the system” than we care to admit; it is also impulsive, improvisatory, and vulnerable to rationalization as well as demagoguery. 

The most revealing criticism of the “horizontalist” imperative getting pushed onto people around Zuccotti is that existing hierarchies have already congealed within OWS, and denying this fact may perhaps be an effective rhetorical tactic in opening to a wider following but it also signs-on to secretive networks and potential autocracy. Although OWS’s groups are said to be open for anyone to attend the existence of inner circles is evident. I would not want to exaggerate the power of those who occupy these circles, but they often meet privately, often miles from Zuccotti Park, and traverse OWS networks – not just the GA but its myriad “working groups,” “break-out groups,” and other “sub-groups.” Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with leaders individuals who happen to be more committed than the rest of us in pressing “the system” continually to open avenues for democratic participation and the empowerment of ordinary people provided, I would add, they accept their commitments as a service, or even sacrifice, for the interests of those they ostensibly serve, and, are also prevented from occupying exclusive positions which operate in secret and have some semblance of lasting duration and significance. 

I also understand standard parliamentary procedures and protocol for assemblies known for factions and competing interests. But I do have a problem with “facilitators” who go about selling the Revolution by setting down the procedural rules and histrionic rhythms for the 99%to follow. The process is political – and nowhere else are proceduralists more exacting in their displacement of substantive debate than the facilitation apparatus in OWS.

I attended one “spokes council” one evening, and observed a deceptively informal semi-circle of a couple hundred people who were thoroughly “facilitated” by several individuals whose role it was, (after telling us how to appropriately hand signal during the assembly: “this means… ‘I feel good,’ this means… ‘I don’t like what I’m hearing’”) to keep procedural order, and sort out various agenda items, proposals, questions, concerns from participants. Yet the obvious problem was that – aduh – exacting procedural order is out of synch with the imaginations, concerns, and questions of the assembly which not only seemed to have a life of its own by virtue of its raucous and improvisatory latency but which found itself at times debating procedure itself. Anygoo, I also noticed on a couple occasions whispering into the ears of facilitators by several individuals otherwise peacefully stationed against the wall. No one blocked. No one voiced objection. They “consensed.” 

The criticism that OWS suffers from depoliticization, and is weak on substance, is on the mark. But Its starry-eyed refusal to openly recognize and address hierarchy is also internally debilitating. As Doug Henwood, supporter but resident curmudgeon of OWS, put it, “(w)ith such a freewheeling organization, if that’s the right word, lines of responsibility and accountability are very murky.” Indeed Occupiers will only continually confront the simple politics of how to appropriately allocate the gains of their appeal and accomplishments, like, for instance, how donations should be distributed through the GA.

Occupiers are correct to insist that “what’s your demand?” is a conventional narrative of rationalism, interest group realpolitick, and legitimacy which misunderstands the fundamental challenges posed by OWS. Yet like it or not, the demand for demands is still inevitable. Talk of “cultural revolution,”  “paradigm shifts,” and “we’re all anarchists now,” is theoretically feasible in the loooong-term but OWS still cannot afford to disengage from institutions of power, like the state and the economy. You know, because if you don’t go through politics and the state, politics and the state go through you, no matter how much you say the word “autonomy.” The real difficulty however with “making demands” is that Occupiers simply don’t yet have the numbers willing to go for the mat for them anyway, whatever they are, nor the organization to make them possible.(And things like this make it near hopeless.) Thus OWS has to grow in numbers and appeal to make its presence more efficacious and powerful. Future political and economic crises can only present such opportunities. But if it atrophies into festering blobs of “Occupations” sans “demands” it will become the nomenclature of nose-ringed A-circling suburbia. 

blokes and birds

Of course, for the first three days of the London riots the American media was pretty much Nothing To See Here Folks, Just Move Along. But now that the violence does not show signs of abating, and has actually spread beyond London, even to police stations in Liverpool, Nottingham, and Canning Circus, we may begin hearing discussions on this side of the pond, (like this one seen earlier today on Al-Jazeera,) pertaining to social and political factors, (like police harassment, economic and social inequality, and good ol' injustice,) which  deepen disaffection, resentment, and only increase the likelihood of turmoil and violence when something goes very wrong.

Yet Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns, and Money makes an awfully safe bet:  

Urban riots are usually complex events, in which people participate for many reasons, ranging from simple boredom and criminal opportunism on one end, to conscious political protest on the other.

Although its been a while since my last epistemological tweaking I'll contend that  one-to-one causes for individual action is quite beside the point here simply because widespread rioting and looting are not individual events. It would be like citing the endless array of individual reasons given to a questionnaire which asked mobs of people why they end up packing into a stadium for a football match. Such data clearly takes place against a greater field of sociological meaning which attendees also share. This is not to say that all kinds of action rationally make sense or that they even can be justified; but even acts which may seem irrational or contradictory can be understood as a structure of meaning nonetheless insofar they can related to other structures of meaning and institutional patterns. Even if crowds are contestable, disagreeable lots, that doesn't mean they lack a raison d'etre. Actions also often have meaning for actors which is not exhausted by positivist data but which may be crucial to understanding their importance. So, for example, in participating in an event like voting one may also be contributing to the honor or demise of a political party, or vindicating the value of free elections, or defending law and order, justice, whatever. Campos completely misses the significance of the London riots.

Breakdowns of social order (or outbreaks of resistance) obviously reflect disenchantment.  So with widening gaps of economic inequality, a slumping economy, high unemployment, and systemic theft and looting by the rich and powerful – all against the setting of increased budget cuts and enforced “austerity,” (and all of which are secrets to no one,) – can anyone lucidly claim that the UK rioting is surprising? Or, that the cynicism and distrust that many feel toward the powerful these days only denude the good ol’ social contract? Even former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, quipped that a whole “generation” is “growing up completely uncertain about their future,” citing economic and political insecurity specifically. Nina Power, writing in AlterNet, also reminds us that the relationship between the British police and people of color has been contentious as well. Clashes in Bristol between civilians and police already took place earlier this year, and, as reported last December in The Guardian, out of the 333 number of deaths that have occurred in police custody since 1998, only zero have led to any convictions.

The most sensible take on the riots I've seen so far is presented by Camila Batmanghelidjh, “Caring costs – but so do riots,” writing for The Independent. “Our leaders still speak about how protecting the community is vital,” she writes, but (t)he trouble is, the deal has gone sour.” Remarkably, I'd add, these leaders seem only ready and willing to continue taking its chances by continuing to turn their back on inequality, injustice, poverty, and political and economic blight. As Batmanghelidjh writes, “The insidious flourishing of anti-establishment attitudes is paradoxically helped by the establishment.” But Batmanghelidjh provides one particular insight into the enormous depth of the problem, and a problem many may prefer to deny.  

Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best.

But no need to be at street level. Two economists attend to the question of whether budget cuts in particular contribute to social unrest – and they conclude that they do. Via Henry Farrell at The Monkey Cage,   

Expenditure cuts carry a significant risk of increasing the frequency of riots, anti-government demonstrations, general strikes, political assassinations, and attempts at revolutionary overthrow of the established order. While these are low- probability events in normal years, they become much more common as austerity measures are implemented. … We demonstrate that the general pattern of association between unrest and budget cuts holds in Europe for the period 1919-2009. It can be found in almost all sub-periods, and for all types of unrest. Strikingly, where we can trace the cause of each incident (during the period 1980-95), we can show that only austerity-inspired demonstrations respond to budget cuts in the time- series. Also, when we use recently-developed data that allows clean identification of policy-driven changes in the budget balance, our results hold.

Of course, the predictable response from the right is too render sociological realities completely irrelevant. Criminal behavior, like the kind exhibited in England the last few days, we’re told, can’t be explained – and it definitely shouldn’t be rationalized. Since angry youth and the underclass will clamor at the gates, and burst out periodically into what Cameron called, “criminality pure and simple,” the only thing that can be done is squelch it, clean-up the mess, and get back to business. Inequality, injustice, and economic and political crises, play absolutely no role. So as soon as you do refer to everyday facts on the ground, some ignorant whitey will query: “well, surely you don’t mean to condone rioting, do you?” Case in point, I find this exchange bloody outrageous… 

 

what's up with Brand Obama?

Great discussion via Corey Robin on what’s really going on. Is Obama just a “bad negotiator”? Or something worse?

I post a few rounds….and provide my own takeaway at the end.

Corey Robin: What do you guys think of this Greenwald piece? I think it’s excellent, but I’m not convinced. Obama didn’t get the tax cuts he wanted. It’s not clear this will help him electorally (the state of the economy in the fall of 2012 will matter much more than his pose of bipartisanship now; there is zero evidence to suggest this deal will help the economy and lots of reasons to think it will hurt.) Though it’s true that Obama has wanted cuts to entitlement programs for some time, he doesn’t get them in the first phase of the deal, and in the second phase, assuming the trigger mechanism kicks in, Social Security remains off-limits.

What’s your sense of why Obama wants these cuts? We know why the GOP wants them. But what are the ideological underpinnings or economic/political interests of Obama’s position? Even within the framework of neoliberalism, I’m not sure I get the motivation. Have the financial markets really been pushing for these cuts? My anecdotal sense was that people like Summers — I know, now out of the administration, but I took him to be a fairly good representative of that sector — thought this wasn’t the way to go. My assumption is that the reason Obama has taken this route is that he thinks it’s a good way to position himself electorally, and that this is coming less from the money people than the politicos. But I am more than happy to be told otherwise.

So what do you guys think: Weak president? Moderate right president? Shrewd negotiator? What?

Doug Henwood: He’s going to position himself as the “reasonable” alternative to extremists, the man who can compromise where they can’t, etc. His partisan selling point will be his bipartisanship, unlike the other guys, who are just rigid ideologues. He’ll have to do this subtly, so he doesn’t sound too partisan.

Corey: Doug, so is your position that the motivation for this is electoral or do you also see pressure for this coming from the bond markets, the money men, etc?

Rick Perlstein‎: “The people hate partisan gridlock”; “I defeated partisan gridlock”; “The people will hail me as a hero, bearing me aloft on their shoulders.” The fellow’s not quite well.

Doug: He loves it that both “extremes” are complaining.  Wall Street wants budget balance with no tax increases on itself. That means cuts. Their major jones has been for “entitlement” reform, which means anything from a squeeze (CPI gimmickry, etc.) to outright privatization. The squeezers are more the WS establishment, like Goldman; the outright privatizers are the hedge fund guys, who tend to be more libertarian, often rabidly so. A lot of WS doesn’t follow details closely – they just *know* that gov spends too much and needs to be “reined in.” A lot of the time, their “facts” are wrong. But there’s no doubt they want spending cuts, big ones. And the only way to get that is SS & Medicare. BTW, Summers is now a good guy, as these things go.

Jay Driskell: To me, he reads like a classic late 19th century progressive – that there are smart people who know smart things and it is they who should sit down in a room and hammer out the details above the “partisan fray.” The problem, then as now, is that there is no way above that fray – especially when one or both parties are trying to game the non-partisan/bi-partisan negotiations for their own partisan advantage. However, I really do think that Obama really believes that he is making progress. Otherwise, his negotiating strategies make absolutely no sense. I’d like to think he’s in the thrall of capital, but more and more of me think that he is naive and clueless and out of his depth. That is, if he were in the thrall of capital, that would at least be comprehensible (and reprehensible) to me.

Katha Pollitt: IMO, he’s weak. He made a strategic error in letting the debt ceiling, which has a rigid deadline, be connected to deficit reduction, a longterm and complicated issue. this allowed the Republicans to hold the debt ceiling hostage to their ongoing attack on entitlements and discretionary spending on anything good. he also failed to hold the line on raising revenues through taxation. That kind of disappeared.

And so it goes. 

Now for the takeaway. Obama is personally not a fascist, perhaps not a “conservative,” likely not a “right wing Republican.” Actually, it makes little difference at this point what he is, where it is on the political spectrum he identifies, or what it is that he believes in his soul of souls. I know it may be difficult to accept but....“He” has become largely irrelevant. The more important issue is that the political system of the country has moved so far to the right over the decades, including the office of the Presidency, and that Obama, (as Adolph Reed says in the forum linked to above, and as Glenn Greenwald documents, also linked above,) has performed as President like another neo-liberal-opportunist-inside-man for today’s right-wing corporate plutocracy – or, what I would prefer to call, an inverted fascism. The dark truth: the political realm – from the government, the courts, the tax system, the laws, the military, the gamut of public bureaucracies at the federal, state, and local level, our everyday lives – has over the decades been increasingly saturated and taken over by “private” industries, as well as by various shadow institutions and bands of elites. The political culture itself has become one big neoliberal mind-fuck reduced to catering to the whims of spoiled rich kids and their daddies. And the country, only more reckless and belligerent, more destructive, more fearful, more xenophobic, and more heedless. Its tendency for self-destruction is evident; yet some elite few at the top continue to profit enormously from this dysfunction and collapse. It can only get worse. And so it goes.

Yet the office of the Presidency is still a powerful institution. And insofar the Presidency still matters, and I suspect it would still matter if we believe Presidential elections still matter, Obama's performance as President, as Greenwald shows, has been a failure. Instead of a promising leader of a progressive political movement Obama looks like a figure-head doing public relations for various elite powers who tug, push, extort, and coddle him in all sorts of ways. All the “negotiations” and “fights” he and his staff ostensibly enter into with the GOP, as well as with the tugging, pushing, extorting, and coddling elite class, (which he is part of anyway,) amounts to backroom deals and incremental number-crunching – not structural reform nor the Change We Can Believe In that the country needs and voted for.    

Obama does not have the powerful political personality to make the Presidency a “progressive” lever of power, much less take on the GOP and his detractors. But the continued focus of Him,and what He is really up to, reflects the inability or unwillingness  to see our systematic crisis accurately. And yet it is still in these respects that the real significance of “his” political performance, at least as an individual for objective assessment, will be difficult to ascertain in an epistemologically pure light. We’ll keep coming back to these kinds of questions: WTF Obama? Or less crudely, to what degree can it be said that “he,” or any other individual statesman of late modern post-industrial globalized nation-states, are indeed political actors capable of creating and taking responsibility for the policies enacted in their name? To what extent does Obama and his staff operate from a position of power? What kind of power does the President have? Or is it rather in terms of “weakness,” or some other characterization, we should be thinking? In what ways can it be said that these political actors, including the President, the Congress, and political parties, are autonomous agents – and not, say, merely a concentrated consortium of players very cognizant of their interests and of the discontented masses but which only play the Punch and Judy show for the cameras? Are the actors in the ring really battling it out? Or are they throwing phantom punches, taking dives? And does it even matter given the power structures in place which make their “battle” possible? When is a fight not a fight? A debate, not a debate? A negotiation, not a negotiation?  

By continuing to offer various rhetorical palliatives and rationalizations Obama and the Democrats create the illusion that the interests and welfare of Americans are truly "their" priority. These campaign strategies are advertisements and slogans, and they define the compromised style that political opposition within a rigged system takes. Although I certainly disagree with Mattt Taibbi’s statement that the White House is “the most awesome repository of political power on the planet,” he is definitely onto something when he says,

We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening. Also, this: if the Democrats suck so bad at political combat, then how come they continue to be rewarded with such massive quantities of campaign contributions? Is it possible that by ‘surrendering’ at the 11th hour and signing off on a deal that presages deep cuts in spending for the middle class, but avoids tax increases for the rich, Obama is doing exactly what was expected of him?

One last thing. The system is not static. Things still happen. Shit happens. And Obama and the rest of them still have to sell and spin whatever comes down the pike, at least for the public relations “battle” between them – even shit they accept, like, and push for. And the tact for re-election will likely remain, as Glenn Greenwald writes, “as a compromise-brokering, trans-partisan deficit cutter willing to ‘take considerable heat from his own party.’” Thus, “the ‘reasonable’ alternative to extremists,” in Doug Henwood’s portrayal, “the man who can compromise where they can’t, etc. His partisan selling point will be his bipartisanship, unlike the other guys, who are just rigid ideologues. He’ll have to do this subtly, so he doesn’t sound too partisan.” It may be the case after all, as Adolph Reed says, that “Obama’s one trick was good for getting him elected to successively higher offices, but now he’s where the buck stops where that trick — the equivalent of a short con — doesn’t work so well. And he doesn’t have a long con to operate. So all he has is a knack for getting himself out of the room he’s in at the moment.”