What galls the most, what infuriates and confounds, is the brazen clarity of the situation at hand. Mr. Obama has not been losing policy arguments to reasonable people. He has been losing policy arguments to people who are, in many instances, absolutely and unabashedly barking mad. He is losing policy arguments to people who sought elected office in government in order to denude and destroy that very government. Listen to them talk and the matter is plain: they got the job to destroy the job, and are so blinded by the fervor of their political catechism that they cannot be reasoned with under any circumstances. They are destroyers and usurpers, but Mr. Obama has time and again bared his neck to them, and we have all suffered with their sundry victories, and his sundry defeats.They cannot be reasoned with, but can only be defeated, and after two and a half years, it is the President of the United States alone who appears to have not received the memo.
Yes and No. I think this kind of analysis, while I'm sympathetic to it, takes what happens in the public arena that we hear about on TV too seriously--as if all the congressional clowning and posturing and stupidity was the main act. It's not; it's a sideshow. It's kept in place because it's entertaining, the way sports and survivor shows are. And it diverts our attention from the main act, which is happening behind the scenes. Most of us know as little about how real power works in the U.S. government as citizens of the Soviet Union understood the goings on in the Kremlin.
Why would any serious, sane person want to be a congressperson or a president? I think it's best explained by the old Roman cursus honorum in the late Republic. The positions were mostly honorific, and so the game for those who played it wasn't really about governing for most these bloated, petty, infighting, short-sighted senators; it was about ego, personal advancement, and social status. It's about winning and beating the other team. If you understand the cursus honorum and how it played out, you see the basic script for what's going on within the Beltway, and why it makes no sense to anyone outside of it. It's not about getting anything done; it's all about protecting one's turf and prerogatives. Ordinary people outside the Beltway are not in the game the way Beltway lobbyists, media types, pols and their staffers, and the entrenched bureacrats are, and so we cannot understand the game's Byzantine logic. And if you're inside the game, anybody outside the game is irrelevant--at most a bovine herd that must be pushed in one direction or the other as the election cycle dictates.
But back to the question of governing: a president has to have real power to make things happen, and Obama just doesn't. I'm not saying that there isn't enormous power in the executive branch of the American government, but I am saying that power does not reside with the individual personality who plays the role "president".
What he wants or thinks is not all that relevant because he, personally, has no real power. If he had real power, where would it come from? From simply having a desk in the oval office? Clearly not--a president cannot just snap his fingers and stuff just happens. Where else might he get it? From his long-term experience as a bureaucratic in-fighter with a cadre of insider allies? Clearly not--he's an outsider from Chicago. Well, then, from his electoral base? Clearly not--it is disorganized and passive. The base elected him, and probably will again, but it cannot help him to fight the insider battles where it's all about having real power and knowing how to wield it.
The problems are structural, not personal. It's not that I expect it to happen, but if any one individual could make a difference, it would be a long-time insider--as Cheney was, but who defects--as Gorbachev did. Somebody who is an experienced, effective bureaucratic in-fighter with strong credentials in the national security area, somebody who understand how unelected bureaucratic power works. And somebody who sees it as his patriotic duty to dismantle the insider centers of power in order to return that power to . . . ? Well who are the grownups these days to whom real power should be given? What faction within the political sphere is talking sense and sanity? I don't see it.
Clearly there is no relief in the short run. The best we can hope for is to muddle through. We just have to cycle through this, and we will. But for now at least, I can no longer bring myself to pay attention to all the clowning. It's probably time for all of us to start paying more attention to what's going on locally. Wisconsin has shown us that what happens in the state legislatures matters. And for most of us it's an arena where we can have a more significant impact.
Of course the president "has no real power". And of course the "real" problems are structural. This is a straw man argument. It is like saying that Caligula should not be judged too harshly because he existed within the "structural" reality of the late-Roman empire. Ultimately, it's like saying no one is responsible for anything, because we are all embedded in a "structure".
Unfortuately (for all of us), moral responsibility is a hard, hard thing: even in difficult circumstances, we are expected to do what's right to the best of our abilities.
At the very least, candidate Obama participated in a fraud on the American people. And by never articulated any Truths about our current situation*, he is standing by while the lower and middle classes are destroyed and our Republic is dragged into the abyss of neo-feudalism (global, stateless, financial capitalism with a theocratic persona).
A person with integrity, but no power, can fight the good fight and lose. That would have been deserving of respect. But Obama does not fight. Instead, he acquiesces to the forces of darkness on almost every turn. Personally, I think "they" (the financiers) got to him. They said "don't interfere with our heist [the massiver transfer of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the super-rich], or we'll cause a depression like none the world has ever seen."
Now, is he doing this alone? No! The entire national Democratic party is beyond effete--it's merely the rotting carcass of the once-proud party of FDR. But that in no way let's Obama off of the hook. He turns out to have been a glib speaker of progressive-sounding platitudes who did not have the stomach for leadership.
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* Simple example: The Ryan proposal does not balance the budget but only transfers wealth to the top 1% from the bottom 99%. This is very easy to articulate, and is a political winner. Why is it not stated like this? Corruption? Cowardice? WHO CARES?!
Posted by: mondo dentro | Monday, April 11, 2011 at 05:43 AM
By the way, I just stumbled upon this from our old friend Adolf (http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv2ch15.html):
"A shrewd victor will, if possible, always present his demands to the vanquished in installments. And then, with a nation that has lost its character-and this is the case of every one which voluntarily submits-he can be sure that it will not regard one more of these individual oppressions as an adequate reason for taking up arms again. 'The more extortions are willingly accepted in this way, the more unjustified it strikes people finally to take up the defensive against a new, apparently isolated, though constantly recurring, oppression, especially when, all in all, so much more and greater misfortune has already been borne in patient silence."
Posted by: mondo dentro | Monday, April 11, 2011 at 06:02 AM
Mondo--
I guess my point is that it's too late for anything except symbolic gestures. The only way real change comes is from the bottom-up pressure of a well organized, well-funded, popular movement, or from the an experienced Gorbachev insider, but probably nothing happens until there's a confluence of the two. Until something like that happens, we're stuck with a system that doesn't work, except for the interests of insider power.
So I don't disagree with a thing you've said in your basic analysis of the situation, but does that make Obama a fraud? Only insofar as anyone who works within the system is a fraud. The system has been fraudulent for some time now, but it's not completely obvious to everyone who participates in it because they want to believe it's merely flawed. It's more far gone than flawed, for sure. So I think Obama is an average politician playing the game the way it's set up, and he probably sincerely believes he's doing the best he can. I'm not defending him so much as I'm simply pointing out that there's no real point in getting particularly angry at him for not being a transformative hero. His presidency, for me at least because I'm a little slow on the uptake, makes it clear that there is nothing of the old republic left. Everybody's just going through the motions. Some stuff gets done, but nothing that impinges upon the interests of insider power. This ridiculous factional conflict between Republicans and Democrats is a game that matters to those who are playing it, but doesn't affect the core power centers.
So Obama is just a guy in a position where it's very cool for him personally, but where he can't do much except perform ceremonially. Is it possible for him to do more or fight more vigorously? Maybe, and that would be more satisfying, but I don't think it would change anything.
Posted by: Jack Whelan | Monday, April 11, 2011 at 07:24 AM
I hope it's clear that we are in agreement on most of this, and that the discussion is mostly about nuance. But...
Why diminish the importance of the symbolic? The failure of our leadership class is, to me, precisely in the realm of the symbolic. They may not have the power to do much, but they do have the power to speak out, to inspire the troops, to create a vision about which the grass roots can organize. They choose not to.
The way I see it is this: Obama led his troops onto the battlefield against a powerful enemy, with flags waving and trumpets blairing. Then when they engaged, he decided to turn his back and consult with his staff about "strategy", letting the slaughter proceed. It is a betrayal pure and simple, at the most primal level.
If you don't want to lead, don't take on the mantle. Is that really too much to expect from our elected officials? Apparently it is.
Posted by: mondo dentro | Monday, April 11, 2011 at 08:11 AM
I think it's clear now that many of us were hoping against hope that Obama would be for the left what Reagan was for the right--the transformative figure who wouldn't just play by the rules, but who would change the rules. It turns out, though, that Obama is Eisenhower, not Reagan; he's simply not somebody who ever really intended to change the rules; he just wanted to play the game, and thought maybe he could get a few things done.
I think it's clear that despite his rhetoric, he's an empty suit the way most pols are, and not even remotely a guy on a mission except to pad his resume. He's very happy to hang with elites and think of himself as a historic figure for being the first black president. He's a game player, not a game changer. And I just don't care about him one way or the other. He's not the answer, and we were wrong ever to think he was.
So what's the take away here? Nothing changes until a bottom up social/political movement mobilizes to demand it. It has to get organized, and it has to fight on all levels of the system, from dogcatcher on up, the way the right has done. And it needs allies from within the ranks of insider power, because nobody from outside the system will be savvy enough to deal effectively with these entrenched power centers.
The other point I'm making about Obama, I guess, is that even if he were the Reagan of the Left, I don't think he'd get much support from the Left because it isn't organized or really motivated. All it's good at is complaining and blaming.
I agree with Chris Hedges--Liberalism is dead; it's a spent force. The Left in this country hasn't the will to accomplish anything. The source of any progressive popular movement has to arise from something other than the hodgepodge of sixties-type cultural lefties. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x566443
Progressivism, if it's to have any real bite, has be reborn. And it's not likely to happen from within the Democratic Party, and for that reason it's likely to happen any time soon.
Posted by: Jack Whelan | Monday, April 11, 2011 at 03:19 PM
The rebirth will be helped by anger at Obama, not hindered.
Explaining, and even insisting, that there's no point in being angry serves only to blunt the gathering force of any nacent social movement. Indeed, this tendency to intellectualize and to make abstract the concreteness of the building anger directed at Obama--and the vital importance of expressing it--is one of the reasons liberalism/progressivism is "spent". The right doesn't make this error. They are not only adept at sensing and gathering the social energies of resentment, they cultivate it. The rebirth you say is necessary is not going to be a neat, thoughtful academic exercise. It will involve name calling, complaining, and blaming--at the very least. Anger is the Energizer bunny of polical movements.
By the way, it is a rather large interpretive error to not understand that "Obama" is being used as a stand-in for "the organized leadership of the Democratic party". It is to be understood in a metonymic sense, just as one speaks of "the Crown" to mean the King and his government. I certainly am not talking about Obama-as-savior, and I know of very few serious Obama critics who do, either.
Posted by: mondo dentro | Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 06:30 AM