This blog's primary mission has been to make the attempt to understand the nature of cultural change and its political effects. My basic premise has been that we are in the midst of dizzying changes that we mostly don't understand, that our politics has been several years behind the curve because of its principals' commitment to insider gaming and fighting small-minded, parochial "interest" battles.
Any politics seriously engaged with issues concerning the common good or any reality outside the Beltway bubble will be connected to the ability of sane Americans to organize and demand that the system be responsive to their common interests, but there's little reason to hope that might happen any time soon. As a nation we've most of us become docile observers, like sports fans, of our politics rather than engaged participants. We don't really, on the whole, believe that much is at stake in our politics, and we treat it mostly as an entertainment, and we won't treat it more seriously until we feel the negative consequences of decisions made in the past eight years and even now, but by that time it will have been too late.
We're seeing this play out in the healthcare drama right now. If public opinion mattered there would be a very different discussion going on about it. But it doesn't matter at all compared to insider Beltway interests, and unless Obama can find some way to change the game, we're going to get half-assed healthcare reform, if we get anything at all, that serves the insider interests more than it serves the public interest.
My focus on politics in most of my posts over the years was motivated by my sense of the crisis in the political sphere that Cheney/Bush created. I would characterize this crisis as a radical movement to build a foundation for the future that will insure the continued trend in this country toward an entrenched, authoritarian, crony-capitalist regime. My support for the Obama campaign lay mainly in the fundamental assessment that he was the best of all the candidates to arrest the ongoing project to construct this foundation. While I still think that he was and is our best hope, I've been mostly disappointed by his attitude toward the Cheney/Bush legacy he inherited.
He came into office promising to change the mentality by which the Beltway operates, which everybody understands to be a precondition for getting anything meaningful done, but he appoints Summers, Geithner, Panetta, Holder to key positions for the dismantling of the Cheney/Bush system, and it is clear that they have no desire whatsoever to dismantle it. They have been, in fact, articulate defenders of maintaining and in some areas expanding it.
I don't blame Obama, at least not yet. Whatever we are hearing in the news about the Obama administration is not nearly as important as the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that we won't learn about until his appointees start writing their books. And those books will only be interesting to read if they are written not by disgruntled partisans for substantive change who left out of frustration, but by the skilled infighters who prevailed in support of the broader public interest and in the dismantlement of the Cheney/Bush system. It remains yet to be seen which books will be written. But if it's the first--stories of disillusionment and frustration, I'm not going to read them. They will not tell us anything we don't know already. And in the meantime there are more productive ways to spend my time than to gripe about what a disappointment Obama is.
I still remain hopeful that some important success stories will emerge. I just don't know enough yet about the reality he's dealing with and if there is a strategic rationale behind the choices he's made. I think he's better than the "typical", unprincipled, expediency-centered politician who says one thing and does another as if the discrepancy didn't matter to him. I think the more likely problem lies in that nobody in that position could do more because nobody gets to be president if he is not already hamstrung in so many ways that make it extraordinarily difficult for him to challenge entrenched insider interests. Too many key member of congress are bought by these interests, and that's simply the age-old reality.
So I haven't been writing much lately because everything I have to say about politics I've said in one way or another already. I'm in a weary, nothing's-new-under-the-sun mode when it comes to developments in the political sphere, and quite frankly I'm finding it hard to pay attention or to stay interested insofar as everything that comes to light seems to point to the same old, same old. Watching the news has become a forced exercise in tedium because while the particulars change, the fundamental dynamics remain the same.
There are, of course, extraordinarily important things going on, but until it becomes clear, whether we're talking about health care or Guantanamo or civil liberties or the Middle East, that Obama has the will or the capability to effect the changes he asked us to believe in, it's hard to care very much. So until he shows us he's got something more to bring than the same old same old, there is nothing new or interesting to warrant much comment from blogs like this one. I'll leave it to others who are closer to the action and better informed than I to rant about the continuation of business as usual.
I'm reading two books now--Honor: A History by James Bowman and The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles. The first interests me because of its support of the basic theme of 'from inner to outer' and the movement from disembbed premodern conscious to the modern/postmodern buffered self a la Charles Taylor. The second because it's the story of capitalism and rugged individualism in the 19th century and how it changed us into something the founders never could have imagined. These are themes I plan to focus on and develop during the summer.