[Peace-discuss] missed opportunity to reach the community around Obama

[C. G. Estabrook]

[In regard to things omitted from AWARE's discussion with
Obama (would that it were possible to include them) -– which,
insofar as I understood it, was the point of the discussion of
the matter at tonight's meeting -- here's a good list dating
from his Democratic convention speech. It's true that there
are more things to object to in Obama's philosophy that his
praise for “absolute faith in our country and its leaders.” --CGE]

    Keynote Reflections
    by Paul Street ; July 29, 2004

        I come from the same Chicago neighborhood (Hyde Park)
as the nation's official new political rock star Barack Obama.
I work in urban policy and civil rights and I've recently been
telling leftists to engage in "tactical" presidential voting -
for Kerry in undecided states and for leftists like Cobb or
Nader in "safe" states. So I must have really liked the
charismatic former civil rights attorney Obama's
much-ballyhooed keynote speech at the Democratic National
Convention on Tuesday, right?

        Not really. Sorry, I might be (rather
unenthusiastically) advising people to vote Kerry in some
jurisdictions next fall but I'm still a leftist - the real
thing, not the mythological sort created by the crackpot
right, which conflates the disparate likes of (say) Bill
Clinton, The New York Times, Tom Daschle, Al Franken, Michael
Moore, Noam Chomsky, and Che Guevara as part of the same
ideological vision.


        Equality Versus Equal Opportunity

        And as a person of the real left, I am opposed to
social inequality in and of itself, whatever its origins. The
massive socioeconomic disparities that scar American and
global life would be offensive to me - and supremely damaging
to democracy and the common good in my world view - even if
all at the top of the pyramid had risen to their positions
from an equal position at the starting line of a "level
playing field." There is no such field in really existing
society, but the creation of such an equal beginning would not
make it any less toxic and authoritarian for 1 percent of the
U.S. population to own more than 40 percent of the nation's
wealth (along with a probably higher percentage of America's
politicians and policymakers). As the great democratic
Socialist Eugene Debs used to say, the point - for radicals,
at least - is not to "rise from the masses, but to "rise with
the masses." Serious left vision is about all-around leveling
before, during, and after the policy process.

        The world view enunciated in Obama's address comes
from a very different, bourgeois-individualist and
national-narcissist moral and ideological space. Obama praised
America as the ultimate "beacon of freedom and opportunity"
for those who exhibit "hard work and perseverance" and laid
claim to personally embodying the great American
Horatio-Algerian promise. "My story," one (he says) of rise
from humble origins to Harvard Law School and (now) national
political prominence, "is part," Obama claimed "of the larger
American story." "In no other country on Earth," he said, "is
my story even possible."

        Obama quoted the famous Thomas Jefferson line about
all "men" being "created equal," but left out Jefferson's
warnings about the terrible impact of unequal outcomes on
democracy and popular government. He advocated a more equal
rat-race, one where "every child in America has a decent shot
at life, and the doors of opportunity [the word "opportunity"
recurred at least five times in his speech] remain open to all."


        Sorry, but those doors aren't even close to being
"open to all." America doesn't score particularly well in
terms of upward mobility measures, compared to other
industrialized states (and Brazil's current chief executive
was born into that country's working-class). Every kid
deserves "a decent life," not just "a shot" at one. And such a
life isn't about living in a world of inequality or (see
below) empire.


        Democracy Versus Polyarchy

        Real leftists are radical "small-d" democrats. They
believe passionately in substantive, many-sided, root and
branch democracy. By democracy they mean one-person, one-vote
and equal policymaking influence for all, regardless of class,
wealth, ethnicity, and other socially constructed differences
of privilege and power. They are deeply sensitive to the core
Jeffersonian contradiction between democracy radically defined
and capitalism's inherent concentrations of wealth and power.
They advocate a political and social life where real, regular,
and multi-dimensional popular governance is structured into
the institutional fabric of daily experience and consciousness.

        They are hardly enthralled by what passes for
political "democracy" in the United States, where highly
ritualized, occasional, and fragmented elections are an
exercise in periodic pseudo-popular selection of
representatives from a "safe" and small circle of privileged
"elites." One term to describe really existing US "democracy"
is "polyarchy," what left sociologist William I. Robinson
calls "a system in which a small group actually rules and mass
participation in decision making is confined to leadership
choices carefully managed by competing [business and
business-sanctioned] elites.

        The polyarchic concept of democracy," notes Robinson,
"is an effective arrangement for legitimating and sustaining
inequalities within and between nations (deepening in a global
economy) far more effectively than authoritarian solutions"
(Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy - Globalization, US
Intervention, and Hegemony, Cambridge University Press, 1996,
p. 385).

        Obama's address advanced a truncated, passive, and
negative concept of democracy, one where we are supposed to be
ecstatic simply because we don't live under the iron heel of
open authoritarianism. It is an American "miracle," he
claimed, "that we can say what we think, write what we think,
without hearing a sudden knock on the door" and that "we can
participate in the political process without fear of
retribution, and that our votes will be counted -- or at
least, most of the time."

        Never mind that what we say and think is generally
drowned out by the giant, concentrated corporate-state media
cartel and that our votes - even when actually counted - are
mere political half-pennies in comparison to the structurally
empowered super-citizenship bestowed upon the great monied
interests and corporations that rule our "dollar democracy,"
the "best that money can buy." Jefferson and Madison tried to
warn us about that power disparity.


        "Pleding Allegiance to the Stars and Stripes"
         
        Real leftists are suspicious of those who downplay
internal national divisions, "patriotically" privileging
"homeland" unity over class differences and over international
solidarity between people inclined towards peace, justice, and
democracy. We are deeply critical, of course, of war and
empire, which advance inequality and misery at home and
abroad. Global humanity - the species - and not "fatherland"
or nation-state, is the "reference group" that matters to us.
         
        That's why many leftists cringed when they heard the
newly anointed Great Progressive Hope Obama refer to Americans
as "one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and
stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."
Its part of why I was uncomfortable when Obama praised "a
young man" named Shamus who "told me he'd joined the Marines
and was heading to Iraq the following week." One of Shamus'
endearing qualities, Obama thinks, is "absolute faith in our
country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service." "I
thought," Obama said, "this young man was all that any of us
might hope for in a child." Not me. I hope for children who
regularly and richly question authority and subject the nation
and its leaders/mis-leaders to constant critical scrutiny.

        Many of us on the left should have been disturbed when
Obama discussed the terrible blood costs of the Iraq invasion
and occupation purely in terms of the U.S. troops "who will
not be returning to their hometowns," their loved ones, and
other American soldiers dealing with terrible war injuries.

        What about the considerably larger quantity (into the
tens of thousands) of Iraqis who have been killed and maimed
as a result of U.S. imperialism and whose numbers are
officially irrelevant to U.S. authorities? One of the problems
with the American exceptionalism that Obama espouses is that
it feeds indifference towards "unworthy victims" among peoples
and nations less supposedly favored by "God" and/or History
than "beacon" America. This racially tinged coldness goes back
to the nation's founders, who thought their "City on a Hill"
had been granted the Creator-ordained right to eliminate North
America's original, Godless and unworthy inhabitants.

        In the part of his speech that came closest to a
direct criticism of the Iraq invasion, Obama suggested that
the Bush administrated has "shad[ed] the truth" about why
"U.S. troops were sent into "harm's way." He added that the
U.S. must never "go to war without enough troops to win the
war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world."

        It's hardly a "war," however, when the most powerful
imperial state in history attacks and occupies a weak nation
that it has already devastated over years of deadly bombing
and (deadlier) "economic sanctions." "Securing the peace" is a
morally impoverished and nationally arrogant, self-serving
description of the real White House objective in Iraq: to
pacify, by force when (quite) necessary, the outraged populace
of a nation that understandably resents an imperial takeover
it rightly sees as driven by the superpower's desire to deepen
its control of their strategically super-significant oil
resources.

        And "shade the truth" doesn't come close to doing
justice to the high-state deception - the savage, sinister,
and sophisticated lying - that the Bush administration used
and is still using to cover their real agenda, understood with
no small accuracy by the people of Iraq.

        The low point in Obama's speech came, I think, when he
said the following about his repeatedly invoked concept of "hope:"

        "I'm not talking about blind optimism here - the
almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away
if we just don't talk about it, or the health care crisis will
solve itself if we just ignore it. I'm talking about something
more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a
fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out
for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant
bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill
worker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny
kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place
for him, too...In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us,
the bedrock of this nation; a belief in things not seen; a
belief that there are better days ahead."

        Sorry, but this leftist takes exception to this
horrific lumping of antebellum African-American slaves'
struggles and sprituality with the racist U.S. crucifixion of
Southeast Asia - "the young naval lieutenant line" is a
reference to John Kerry's "heroic" participation in a previous
and much bloodier imperialist invasion, one that cost millions
of Vietnamese lives - under the image of noble Americans
wishing together for a better future. I suppose "God" (Obama's
keynote made repeated references to "God" and "the Creator")
gave Nazi executioners and Nazi victims the shared gift of
hoping for better days ahead.

        What told Kerry and his superiors that the Mekong
Delta was theirs to "patrol"? The same arrogant sensibilities,
perhaps, that gave 19th century white Americans permission to
own chattel slaves and allowed the Bush administration to
seize Iraq as a neocolonial possession.


        Popular Struggle, Not "Elite" Saviors

        Need I bother to add in conclusion that leftists
believe in organizing and fighting alongside ordinary people
for justice and democracy at home and abroad, not in holding
up as saviors great leaders from (whatever their alleged
humble origins ala Obama or John Edwards) within the
privileged "elite"? It was probably inherent in the nature of
Obama's keynote assignment that he would finish by saying that
the swearing in of Kerry and John Edwards as president and
vice president will allow America to "reclaim its promise" and
bring the nation "out of this long political darkness." It's
inherent in my leftist sense of what democracy and justice are
about and how they are attained to say that a desirable future
will be achieved only through devoted, radically democratic
rank and file struggle for justice and freedom and not by
hoping - or voting - for benevolent "elite" actors working on
behalf of any political party and/or its corporate sponsors.

        Paul Street (pstreet99 at sbcglobal.net) is an urban
social policy researcher in Chicago, Illinois. His book Empire
and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11
(www.paradigmpublishers.com) will be published in September, 2004.

<http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=5951&sectionID=1>