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<H2>The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals</H2><B><EM></EM></B>
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<DIV class=entry-meta-left><B>By <A title="Posts by Adolph Reed Jr."
href="http://zcomm.org/author/areed/" rel=author>Adolph Reed Jr.</A></B>
<BR><B><A
href="http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-long-slow-surrender-of-american-liberals/"
target=_blank></A><A href="http://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/nothing-left-2/"
target=_blank>Source: Harper's </A></B><BR></DIV>
<DIV class=entry-meta-right>February 19, 2014<BR>Change text size: <A
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<DIV class=entry-meta>Posted in: <A title="View all posts in Activism"
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<P></P>
<P><B style="COLOR: blue"></B></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>For nearly all the twentieth century there was a dynamic left in
the United States grounded in the belief that unrestrained capitalism generated
unacceptable social costs. That left crested in influence between 1935 and 1945,
when it anchored a coalition centered in the labor movement, most significantly
within the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). It was a prominent voice
in the Democratic Party of the era, and at the federal level its high point may
have come in 1944, when FDR propounded what he called “a second Bill of Rights.”
Among these rights, Roosevelt proclaimed, were the right to a “useful and
remunerative job,” “adequate medical care,” and “adequate protection from the
economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and
unemployment.”</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>The labor-left alliance remained a meaningful presence in
American politics through the 1960s. What have become known as the social
movements of the Sixties — civil rights activism, protests against the
Vietnam War, and a renewed women’s movement — were vitally linked to that
egalitarian left. Those movements drew institutional resources, including
organizing talents and committed activists, from that older left and built on
both the legislative and the ideological victories it had won. But during the
1980s and early 1990s, fears of a relentless Republican juggernaut pressured
those left of center to take a defensive stance, focusing on the immediate goal
of electing Democrats to stem or slow the rightward tide. At the same time,
business interests, in concert with the Republican right and supported by an
emerging wing of neoliberal Democrats, set out to roll back as many as possible
of the social protections and regulations the left had won. As this
defensiveness overtook leftist interest groups, institutions, and opinion
leaders, it increasingly came to define left-wing journalistic commentary and
criticism. New editorial voices — for example, <I>The American
Prospect</I> — emerged to articulate the views of an intellectual left that
defined itself as liberal rather than radical. To be sure, this shift was not
absolute. Such publications as <I>New Labor Forum, New Politics,
Science & Society, Monthly Review,</I> and others maintained an
oppositional stance, and the Great Recession has encouraged new outlets such as
<I>Jacobin</I> and <I>Endnotes.</I> But the American left moved increasingly
toward the middle.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Today, the labor movement has been largely subdued, and social
activists have made their peace with neoliberalism and adjusted their horizons
accordingly. Within the women’s movement, goals have shifted from practical
objectives such as comparable worth and universal child care in the 1980s to
celebrating appointments of individual women to public office and challenging
the corporate glass ceiling. Dominant figures in the antiwar movement have long
since accepted the framework of American military interventionism. The movement
for racial justice has shifted its focus from inequality to “disparity,” while
neatly evading any critique of the structures that produce
inequality.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>The sources of this narrowing of social vision are complex. But
its most conspicuous expression is subordination to the agenda of a Democratic
Party whose center has moved steadily rightward since Ronald Reagan’s
presidency. Although it is typically defended in a language of political
practicality and sophistication, this shift requires, as the historian Russell
Jacoby notes, giving up “a belief that the future could fundamentally surpass
the present,” which traditionally has been an essential foundation of leftist
thought and practice. “Instead of championing a radical idea of a new society,”
Jacoby observes in <I>The End of Utopia,</I> “the left ineluctably retreats to
smaller ideas, seeking to expand the options within the existing
society.”</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>The atrophy of political imagination shows up in approaches to
strategy as well. In the absence of goals that require long-term
organizing — e.g., single-payer health care, universally free public higher
education and public transportation, federal guarantees of housing and income
security — the election cycle has come to exhaust the time horizon of
political action. Objectives that cannot be met within one or two election
cycles seem fanciful, as do any that do not comport with the Democratic agenda.
Even those who consider themselves to the Democrats’ left are infected with
electoralitis. Each election now becomes a moment of life-or-death urgency that
precludes dissent or even reflection. For liberals, there is only one option in
an election year, and that is to elect, at whatever cost, whichever Democrat is
running. This modus operandi has tethered what remains of the left to a
Democratic Party that has long since renounced its commitment to any sort of
redistributive vision and imposes a willed amnesia on political debate. True,
the last Democrat was really unsatisfying, but <I>this</I> one is better; true,
the last Republican didn’t bring destruction on the universe, but this one
certainly will. And, of course, each of the “pivotal” Supreme Court justices is
four years older than he or she was the last time.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Why does this tailing behind an increasingly right-of-center
Democratic Party persist in the absence of any apparent payoff? There has nearly
always been a qualifying excuse: Republicans control the White House; they
control Congress; they’re strong enough to block progressive initiatives even if
they don’t control either the executive or the legislative branch. Thus have the
faithful been able to take comfort in the circular self-evidence of their
conviction. Each undesirable act by a Republican administration is <I>eo
ipso</I> evidence that if the Democratic candidate had won, things would have
been much better. When Democrats have been in office, the imagined omnipresent
threat from the Republican bugbear remains a fatal constraint on action and a
pretext for suppressing criticism from the left.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Exaggerating the differences between Democratic and Republican
candidates, moreover, encourages the retrospective sanitizing of previous
Democratic candidates and administrations. If only Al Gore had been inaugurated
after the 2000 election, the story goes, we might well not have had the
September 11 attacks and certainly would not have had the Iraq War —
as if it were unimaginable that the Republican reaction to the attacks could
have goaded him into precisely such an act. And considering his bellicose stand
on Iraq during the 2000 campaign, he well might not have needed
goading.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>The stale proclamations of urgency are piled on top of the
standard jeremiads about the Supreme Court and <I>Roe</I> v. <I>Wade.</I> The
“filibuster-proof Senate majority” was the gimmick that spruced up the 2008
election cycle, conveniently suggesting strategic preparation for large policy
initiatives while deferring discussion of what precisely those initiatives might
be. It was an ideal diversion that gave wonks, would-be wonks, and people who
just watch too much cable-television news something to chatter about and a
rhetorical basis for feeling “informed.” It was, however, built on the bogus
premise that Democrat = liberal.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Most telling, though, is the reinvention of the Clinton
Administration as a halcyon time of progressive success. Bill Clinton’s record
demonstrates, if anything, the extent of Reaganism’s victory in defining the
terms of political debate and the limits of political practice. A recap of some
of his administration’s greatest hits should suffice to break through the social
amnesia. Clinton ran partly on a pledge of “ending welfare as we know it”; in
office he both presided over the termination of the federal government’s
sixty-year commitment to provide income support for the poor and effectively
ended direct federal provision of low-income housing. In both cases his approach
was to transfer federal subsidies — when not simply eliminating them —
from impoverished people to employers of low-wage labor, real estate developers,
and landlords. He signed into law repressive crime bills that increased the
number of federal capital offenses, flooded the prisons, and upheld unjustified
and racially discriminatory sentencing disparities for crack and powder cocaine.
He pushed NAFTA through over strenuous objections from labor and many
congressional Democrats. He temporized on his campaign pledge to pursue
labor-law reform that would tilt the playing field back toward workers, until
the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995 gave him an excuse not to pursue it
at all. He undertook the privatization of Sallie Mae, the Student Loan Marketing
Association, thereby fueling the student-debt crisis.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
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class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Notwithstanding his administration’s Orwellian folderol about
“reinventing government,” his commitment to deficit reduction led to, among
other things, extending privatization of the federal meat-inspection program,
which shifted responsibility to the meat industry — a reinvention that must
have pleased his former Arkansas patron, Tyson Foods, and arguably has left its
legacy in the sporadic outbreaks and recalls that suggest deeper, endemic
problems of food safety in the United States. His approach to health-care
reform, like Barack Obama’s, was built around placating the insurance and
pharmaceutical industries, and its failure only intensified the blitzkrieg of
for-profit medicine.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>In foreign policy, he was no less inclined than Reagan or George
H. W. Bush to engage in military interventionism. Indeed, counting his
portion of the Somali operation, he conducted nearly as many discrete military
interventions as his two predecessors <I>combined,</I> and in four fewer years.
Moreover, the Clinton Administration initiated the “extraordinary rendition”
policy, under which the United States claims the right to apprehend individuals
without charges or public accounting so that they can be imprisoned anywhere in
the world (and which the Obama Administration has explicitly refused to
repudiate). Clinton also increased American use of “privatized military
services” — that is, mercenaries.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>The nostalgic mist that obscures this record is perfumed by
evocations of the Clinton prosperity. Much of that era’s apparent prosperity,
however, was hollow — the effects of first the tech bubble and then the
housing bubble. His administration was implicated in both, not least by his
signing the repeal of the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act, which had established a
firewall between commercial and investment banking in response to the
speculative excesses that sparked the Great Depression. And, as is the wont of
bubbles, first one and then the other burst, ushering in the worst economic
crisis since the depression that had led to the passage of Glass–Steagall in the
first place. To be sure, the Clinton Administration was not solely or even
principally responsible for those speculative bubbles and their collapse. The
Republican administrations that preceded and succeeded him were equally inclined
to do the bidding of the looters and sneak thieves of the financial sector.
Nevertheless, Clinton and the Wall Street cronies who ran his fiscal and
economic policy — Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Alan Greenspan — are
no less implicated than the Republicans in having brought about the economic
crisis that has lingered since 2008.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
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class=MsoNormal><SPAN
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size=3><STRONG>It is difficult to imagine that a Republican administration could
have been much more successful in advancing Reaganism’s agenda. Indeed, Clinton
made his predilections clear from the outset. “We’re Eisenhower Republicans
here,” he declared, albeit exasperatedly, shortly after his 1992 victory. “We
stand for lower deficits, free trade, and the bond market. Isn’t that
great?”</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
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class=MsoNormal><SPAN
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size=3><STRONG>Taking into account the left’s disappearance into Democratic
neoliberalism helps explain how and why so many self-proclaimed leftists or
progressives — individuals, institutions, organizations, and erstwhile
avatars of leftist opinion such as <I>The Nation</I> — came to be swept up
in the extravagant rhetoric and expectations that have surrounded the campaign,
election, and presidency of Barack Obama.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
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class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Obama and his campaign did not dupe or simply co-opt unsuspecting
radicals. On the contrary, Obama has been clear all along that he is not a
leftist. Throughout his career he has studiously distanced himself from radical
politics. In his books and speeches he has frequently drawn on stereotypical
images of leftist dogmatism or folly. When not engaging in rhetorically
pretentious, jingoist oratory about the superiority of American political and
economic institutions, he has often chided the left in gratuitous asides that
seem intended mainly to reassure conservative sensibilities of his
judiciousness — rather as Booker T. Washington used black
chicken-stealing stereotypes to establish his bona fides with segregationist
audiences. This inclination to toss off casual references to the left’s
“excesses” or socialism’s “failure” has been a defining element of Brand Obama
and suggests that he is a new kind of pragmatic progressive who is likely to
bridge — or rise above — left and right and appeal across ideological
divisions. Assertions that Obama possesses this singular ability contributed to
the view that he was electable and, once elected, capable of forging a new,
visionary, postpartisan consensus.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
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class=MsoNormal><SPAN
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size=3><STRONG>This feature of Brand Obama even suffused the enthusiasm of those
who identify as leftists, many of whom at this point would like to roll up their
past proclamations behind them. Here was a nominal progressive who actually
could win the presidency, clearing the electoral hurdle that Jesse Jackson,
Ralph Nader, and other protest candidates could not. Yet few acknowledged the
extent to which Obama’s broad appeal hinged on his disavowals of left
“excesses.” What kind of “progressive” pursues a political strategy of
distancing himself from the left by rehearsing hackneyed conservative
stereotypes? Even granting the never-quite-demonstrated assertion that Obama is,
in his heart of hearts, committed to a progressive agenda (a trope familiar from
the Clinton Administration, we might recall), how would a coalition built on
reassuring conservatives not seriously constrain his
administration?</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
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size=3><STRONG>The generalities with which Obama laid out his vision made it
easy to avoid such questions. His books are not substantive articulations of a
social program but performances in which his biographical narrative and identity
stands in for a vaguely transformational politics. Sometimes this projection has
been not so subtle. In an interview with the journalist James Traub a year
before the election, Obama averred: “I think that if you can tell people, ‘We
have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut
on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who’s half Indonesian, married
to a Chinese-Canadian,’ then they’re going to think that he may have a better
sense of what’s going on in our lives and in our country. And they’d be
right.”</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
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class=MsoNormal><SPAN
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size=3><STRONG>Unsurprisingly, therefore, there is little with which to disagree
in those books. They meant to produce precisely that effect. Matt Taibbi
characterized Obama’s political persona in early 2007
as</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.5in; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
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size=3><STRONG>an ingeniously crafted human cipher, a man without race,
ideology, geographic allegiances, or, indeed, sharp edges of any kind. You can’t
run against him on issues because you can’t even find him on the ideological
spectrum. Obama’s “Man for all seasons” act is so perfect in its particulars
that just about <I>anyone</I> can find a bit of himself somewhere in the
candidate’s background, whether in his genes or his
upbringing. . . . [H]is strategy seems to be to appear as a sort
of ideological Universalist, one who spends a great deal of rhetorical energy
showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view, and conversely
emphasizes that when he does take hard positions on issues, he often does so
reluctantly.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
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class=MsoNormal><SPAN
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size=3><STRONG>Taibbi described Obama’s political vision as “an amalgam of
Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and the New Deal; he is aiming for the middle of the
middle of the middle.” Taibbi is by no means alone in this view; others have
been more sharply critical in drawing out its implications, even during the
heady moment of the 2008 campaign.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
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class=MsoNormal><SPAN
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size=3><STRONG>Nearer the liberal mainstream, Paul Krugman repeatedly
demonstrated that many of candidate Obama’s positions and political inclinations
were not only inconsistent with the hyperbolic rhetoric that surrounded the
campaign but were moreover not even especially liberal. When in a June 2008
issue of <I>The Nation</I> Naomi Klein expressed concern about Obama’s
profession of love for the free market and his selection of very conventionally
neoliberal economic advisers, Krugman responded rather waspishly, “Look, Obama
didn’t pose as a <I>Nation</I>-type progressive, then turn on his allies after
the race was won. Throughout the campaign he was slightly less progressive than
Hillary Clinton on domestic issues — and more than slightly on health care.
If people like Ms. Klein are shocked, shocked that he isn’t the candidate
of their fantasies, they have nobody but themselves to blame.” As early as 2006,
Ken Silverstein noted in these pages that the rising star’s extensive corporate
and financial-sector connections suggested that his progressive supporters
should rein in their hopes. Larissa MacFarquhar, in a 2007 <I>New Yorker</I>
profile, also gave reason for restraint to those projecting “transformative”
expectations onto Obama. “In his view of history,” she reports, “in his respect
for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very,
very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. . . . Asked whether he
has changed his mind about anything in the past twenty years, he says ‘I’m
probably more humble now about the speed with which government programs can
solve every problem.’ ”</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
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class=MsoNormal><SPAN
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size=3><STRONG>These and other critics, skeptics, and voices of caution were
largely drowned out in the din of the faithful’s righteous fervor. Some in the
flock who purported to represent the campaign’s left flank, such as the former
SDS stalwart Carl Davidson and the professional white antiracist Tim Wise,
denounced Obama’s critics as out-of-touch, pie-in-the-sky radicals who were
missing the train of history because they preferred instead to wallow in
marginalization. This response is a generic mantra of political opportunists.
Some who called for climbing on the bandwagon insisted that Obama was a secret
progressive who would reveal his true politics once elected. Others relied on
the familiar claim that actively supporting the campaign — as distinct from
choosing to vote for him as yet another lesser evil — would put
progressives in a position to exert leftward pressure on his
administration.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Again and again, perfectly sentient adults cited the clinching
arguments made on the candidate’s behalf by their children. We were urged to
marvel at and take our cues from the already indulged upper-middle-class
Children of the Corn and their faddish, utterly uninformed exuberance. And it
was easy to understand why so many of them found Obama to be absolutely new
under the sun. To them he was. A twenty-five-year-old on November 4, 2008,
was a nine-year-old when Bill Clinton was first elected, ten when he pushed
NAFTA through Congress, thirteen when he signed welfare “reform,” and sixteen
when he signed the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which repealed
Glass–Steagall.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Obama’s miraculous ability to inspire and engage the young
replaced specific content in his patter of Hope and Change. In the same way that
he and his supporters presented his life story as the embodiment of a politics
otherwise not clearly defined, the projection of inspired youth substituted a
narrative of identity — and a vague and ephemeral one at that — for
argument. Those in Obama’s thrall viewed his politics as qualitatively different
from Bill Clinton’s, even though the political niche Obama had crafted for
himself only deepened Clintonism. Of course, perception of Obama’s difference
from the Clintons and other Democratic contenders past and present was bound up
in his becoming the first black president, the symbolic significance of which
far outweighed the candidate’s actual politics. Thus, for instance, the
philosopher Slavoj Žižek, usually not a faddish enthusiast, proclaimed just
after the 2008 presidential election that</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.5in; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Obama’s victory is not just another shift in the eternal
parliamentary struggle for a majority, with all the pragmatic calculations and
manipulations that involves. It is a sign of something
more. . . . Whatever our doubts, for that moment [of his
election] each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of
humanity. . . . Obama’s victory is a sign of history in the
triple Kantian sense of <I>signum rememorativum, demonstrativum,
prognosticum.</I> A sign in which the memory of the long past of slavery and the
struggle for its abolition reverberates; an event which now demonstrates a
change; a hope for future achievements.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Nevertheless, Obama could not have sold his signature
“bipartisan” transcendence so successfully to those who identify as leftists if
Clinton had not already moved the boundaries of liberalism far enough rightward.
Obama’s posture of judiciousness depends partly on the ritual validation of
bromides about “big government,” which he typically evokes through resonant
phrases rather than through affirmative argument that might ring too dissonantly
with his leftist constituents. He can finesse the tension with allusions because
Clinton, in his supposed “New Covenant” from a “New Democrat,” had already
severed the link between Democratic liberalism and vigorous, principled
commitment to the public sector.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Obama also relies on nasty, victim-blaming stereotypes about
black poor people to convey tough-minded honesty about race and poverty.
Clinton’s division of the poor into those who “play by the rules” and those who
presumably do not, his recasting of the destruction of publicly provided
low-income housing and the forced displacement of poor people as “Moving to
Opportunity” and “HOPE,” and most of all his debacle of “welfare reform” already
had helped liberal Democrats to view behavior modification of a defective
population as the fundamental objective of antipoverty policy. Indeed, even
ersatz leftists such as Glenn Greenwald, then of Salon.com, and <I>The
Nation</I>’s Katrina vanden Heuvel defended and rationalized Obama’s
willingness to disparage black poor people. Greenwald applauded the candidate
for making what he somehow imagined to be the “unorthodox” and “not politically
safe” move of showing himself courageous enough to beat up on this politically
powerless group. For her part, vanden Heuvel rationalized such moves as his
odious “Popeyes chicken” speech as reflective of a “generational division” among
black Americans, with Obama representing a younger generation that values
“personal responsibility.”<SUP>*</SUP> Perhaps, but it’s noteworthy that Obama
didn’t give the Popeyes speech to groups of investment
bankers.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 30pt; tab-stops: 45.8pt 91.6pt 137.4pt 183.2pt 229.0pt 274.8pt 320.6pt 366.4pt 412.2pt 458.0pt 503.8pt 549.6pt 595.4pt 641.2pt 687.0pt 732.8pt"
class=MsoNormal><I><SUP><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier New'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>*</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></SUP></I><I><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier New'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG> In a 2008 speech to a mostly African-American audience in the
city of Beaumont, Texas, Obama scolded <BR
style="mso-special-character: line-break"><BR
style="mso-special-character: line-break"></STRONG></FONT></SPAN></I></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 30pt; tab-stops: 45.8pt 91.6pt 137.4pt 183.2pt 229.0pt 274.8pt 320.6pt 366.4pt 412.2pt 458.0pt 503.8pt 549.6pt 595.4pt 641.2pt 687.0pt 732.8pt"
class=MsoNormal><I><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier New'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG></STRONG></FONT></SPAN></I> </P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 30pt; tab-stops: 45.8pt 91.6pt 137.4pt 183.2pt 229.0pt 274.8pt 320.6pt 366.4pt 412.2pt 458.0pt 503.8pt 549.6pt 595.4pt 641.2pt 687.0pt 732.8pt"
class=MsoNormal><I><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier New'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>his listeners about feeding junk food to children: “Y’all have
Popeyes out in Beaumont? I know some of<BR>y’all you got that cold Popeyes out
for breakfast. I know. That’s why y’all laughing. . . . You can’t
<BR style="mso-special-character: line-break"><BR
style="mso-special-character: line-break"></STRONG></FONT></SPAN></I></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 30pt; tab-stops: 45.8pt 91.6pt 137.4pt 183.2pt 229.0pt 274.8pt 320.6pt 366.4pt 412.2pt 458.0pt 503.8pt 549.6pt 595.4pt 641.2pt 687.0pt 732.8pt"
class=MsoNormal><I><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier New'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>do that. Children have to have proper nutrition. That affects
also how they study, how they learn in <BR
style="mso-special-character: line-break"><BR
style="mso-special-character: line-break"></STRONG></FONT></SPAN></I></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt 30pt; tab-stops: 45.8pt 91.6pt 137.4pt 183.2pt 229.0pt 274.8pt 320.6pt 366.4pt 412.2pt 458.0pt 503.8pt 549.6pt 595.4pt 641.2pt 687.0pt 732.8pt"
class=MsoNormal><I><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier New'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>school.”</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></I></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Obama’s reflexive disposition to cater first to his right
generally has been taken in stride as political necessity or even applauded as
sagacious pragmatism. Defenses of Obama’s endorsements of the likes of John
Barrow, a conservative Democrat from Georgia, and the Republican turncoat
senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania over more liberal Democrats rest on the
assumption that Democrats can win only by operating within a framework of
political debate set by the right and attempting to produce electoral majorities
by triangulating constituencies. At least since Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign,
“serious” Democratic candidates have insisted that, because appealing to the
right’s agenda is necessary to win, the responsible left must forgo demands for
specific policies or programs as quid pro quo for their support. As its reaction
to left criticism of his approach to health-care reform illustrated, the Obama
Administration defines as “responsible” those who support it without criticism;
those who do not are by definition the “far left” and therefore dismissible. To
complete the dizzying ideological orbit, this limitation has been sold as
evidence of the importance of subordinating all other concrete political
objectives to the project of electing <I>more</I> Democrats, on the premise that
the more of them we elect, the greater the likelihood that a majority will be
amenable to embracing a leftist program.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Anticipation of jobs and “access” — the crack cocaine (or,
more realistically, powder cocaine) of the interest-group world — helps to
make this scam more alluring, especially among those who have nurtured their
aspirations in elite universities or the policy-wonk left or both. Such
aspirants can be among the most adamant in denouncing leftist criticism of the
Democrat of the moment as irresponsible and politically
immature.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>But if the left is tied to a Democratic strategy that, at least
since the Clinton Administration, tries to win elections by absorbing much of
the right’s social vision and agenda, before long the notion of a political left
will have no meaning. For all intents and purposes, that is what has occurred.
If the right sets the terms of debate for the Democrats, and the Democrats set
the terms of debate for the left, then what can it mean to be on the political
left? The terms “left” and “progressive” — and in practical usage the
latter is only a milquetoast version of the former — now signify a cultural
sensibility rather than a reasoned critique of the existing social order.
Because only the right proceeds from a clear, practical utopian vision, “left”
has come to mean little more than “not right.”</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>The left has no particular place it wants to go. And, to rehash
an old quip, if you have no destination, any direction can seem as good as any
other. The left careens from this oppressed group or crisis moment to that one,
from one magical or morally pristine constituency or source of political agency
(youth/students; undocumented immigrants; the Iraqi labor movement; the
Zapatistas; the urban “precariat”; green whatever; the black/Latino/LGBT
“community”; the grassroots, the netroots, and the blogosphere; this season’s
worthless Democrat; Occupy; a “Trotskyist” software engineer elected to the
Seattle City Council) to another. It lacks focus and stability; its métier is
bearing witness, demonstrating solidarity, and the event or the gesture. Its
reflex is to “send messages” to those in power, to make statements, and to stand
with or for the oppressed.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>This dilettantish politics is partly the heritage of a generation
of defeat and marginalization, of decades without any possibility of challenging
power or influencing policy. So the left operates with no learning curve and is
therefore always vulnerable to the new enthusiasm. It long ago lost the ability
to move forward under its own steam. Far from being avant-garde, the self-styled
left in the United States seems content to draw its inspiration, hopefulness,
and confidence from outside its own ranks, and lives only on the outer fringes
of American politics, as congeries of individuals in the interstices of more
mainstream institutions.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>With the two parties converging in policy, the areas of
fundamental disagreement that separate them become too arcane and too remote
from most people’s experience to inspire any commitment, much less popular
action. Strategies and allegiances become mercurial and opportunistic, and
politics becomes ever more candidate-centered and driven by worshipful
exuberance about individuals or, more accurately, the idealized and evanescent
personae — the political holograms — their packagers
project.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>As the “human cipher” Taibbi described, Obama is the pure product
of this hollowed-out politics. He is a triumph of image and identity over
content; indeed, he is the triumph of identity <I>as</I> content. Taibbi
misreads how race figures into Brand Obama. Obama is not “without” race; he
embodies it as an abstraction, a feel-good evocation severed from history and
social relations. Race is what Obama projects in place of an ideology. His
racial classification combines with a narrative of self-presentation, including
his past as a “community organizer,” to convey a <I>sensation</I> of a politics,
much as advertising presents a product as the material expression of inchoate
desire. This became the basis for a faith in his virtue that largely insulated
him from sharp criticism from the left through the first five years of his
presidency. Proclamation that Obama’s election was, in Žižek’s terms, a “sign in
which the memory of the long past of slavery and the struggle for its abolition
reverberates” was also a call to suspend critical judgment, to ascribe to the
event a significance above whatever Obama stood for or would
do.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>In fact, Obama was able to win the presidency only because the
changes his election supposedly signified had already taken place. His election,
after all, did not depend on disqualifying large chunks of the white electorate.
As things stand, his commitments to an imperialist foreign policy and Wall
Street have only more tightly sealed the American left’s coffin by nailing it
shut from the inside. Katrina vanden Heuvel pleads for the president to
accept criticism from a “principled left” that has demonstrated its loyalty
through unprincipled acquiescence to his administration’s initiatives; in a 2010
letter, the president of the AFL-CIO railed against the Deficit Commission as a
front for attacking Social Security while tactfully not mentioning that Obama
appointed the commission or ever linking him to any of the economic policies
that labor continues to protest; and there is even less of an antiwar movement
than there was under Bush, as Obama has expanded American aggression and
slaughter into Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and who knows where
else.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Barack Obama has always been no more than an unexceptional
neoliberal Democrat with an exceptional knack for self-presentation persuasive
to those who want to believe, and with solid connections and considerable good
will from the corporate and financial sectors. From his successful wooing of
University of Chicago and Hyde Park liberals at the beginning of his political
career, his appeal has always been about the persona he projects — the
extent to which he encourages people to feel good about their politics, the
political future, and themselves through feeling good about him — than
about any concrete vision or political program he has advanced. And that persona
has always been bound up in and continues to play off complex and contradictory
representations of race in American politics.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Particularly among those who stress the primary force of racism
in American life, Obama’s election called forth in the same breath competing
impulses — exultation in the triumphal moment and a caveat that the triumph
is not as definitive as it seems. Proponents of an antiracist politics almost
ritualistically express anxiety that Obama’s presidency threatens to issue in
premature proclamation of the transcendence of racial inequality, injustice, or
conflict. It is and will be possible to find as many expressions of that view as
one might wish, just as lunatic and more or less openly racist “birther” and Tea
Party tendencies have become part of the political landscape. An equal
longer-term danger, however, is the likelihood that we will find ourselves with
no critical politics other than a desiccated leftism capable only of counting,
parsing, hand-wringing, administering, and making up “Just So” stories about
dispossession and exploitation recast in the evocative but politically sterile
language of disparity and diversity. This is neoliberalism’s version of a left.
Radicalism now means only a very strong commitment to antidiscrimination, a
point from which Democratic liberalism has not retreated. Rather, it’s the path
Democrats have taken in retreating from a commitment to economic
justice.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto"
class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>Confusion and critical paralysis prompted by the racial imagery
of Obama’s election prevented even sophisticated intellectuals like Žižek from
concluding that Obama was only another Clintonite Democrat — no more, no
less. It is how Obama could be sold, even within the left, as a hybrid of Martin
Luther King Jr. and Neo from <I>The Matrix.</I> The triumph of identity
politics, condensed around the banal image of the civil rights insurgency and
its legacy as a unitary “black liberation movement,” is what has enabled Obama
successfully to present himself as the literal embodiment of an otherwise
vaporous progressive politics. In this sense his election is most fundamentally
an expression of the limits of the left in the United States — its decline,
demoralization, and collapse.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%" class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 150%; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><FONT
size=3><STRONG>The crucial tasks for a committed left in the United States now
are to admit that no politically effective force exists and to begin trying to
create one. This is a long-term effort, and one that requires grounding in a
vibrant labor movement. Labor may be weak or in decline, but that means aiding
in its rebuilding is the most serious task for the American left. Pretending
some other option exists is worse than useless. There are no magical
interventions, shortcuts, or technical fixes. We need to reject the fantasy that
some spark will ignite the People to move as a mass. We must create a
constituency for a left program — and that cannot occur via MSNBC or blog
posts or the <I>New York Times.</I> It requires painstaking organization and
building relationships with people outside the Beltway and comfortable leftist
groves. Finally, admitting our absolute impotence can be politically liberating;
acknowledging that as a left we have no influence on who gets nominated or
elected, or what they do in office, should reduce the frenzied self-delusion
that rivets attention to the quadrennial, biennial, and now seemingly permanent
horse races. It is long past time for us to begin again to approach leftist
critique and strategy by determining what our social and governmental priorities
should be and focusing our attention on building the kind of popular movement
capable of realizing that vision. Obama and his top aides punctuated that fact
by making brutally apparent during the 2008 campaign that no criticism from the
left would have a place in this regime of Hope and Change. The message could not
be clearer.</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></P></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>