[Peace-discuss] Populist demagogy in the service of militarism
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at uiuc.edu
Sun Aug 31 18:20:24 CDT 2008
Obama’s Denver speech: Populist demagogy
in the service of militarism
By Patrick Martin
30 August 2008
The speech delivered by Senator Barack Obama Thursday night, accepting the
Democratic presidential nomination at a football stadium in Denver, combined
populist rhetoric with invocations of patriotism and pledges to escalate the war
in Afghanistan and build up the US military “to meet future conflicts.”
The acceptance speeches of the Democratic and Republican nominees are among the
most important ceremonies in American politics and are given massive media
attention. Obama’s speech, according to television reports Friday, attracted an
audience of 38 million people, more than twice the number who watched John Kerry
in 2004.
The candidates use these occasions to speak simultaneously to two quite distinct
audiences: the financial and political elite, who, in the final analysis, play
the critical role in determining the outcome, and the masses of voters who will
cast ballots November 4, but whose interests are given only lip service by the
two big business parties.
Obama devoted the bulk of his remarks to populist-sounding denunciations of the
Bush administration and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, and media
coverage focused largely on this aspect of the speech. But the central purpose
of the speech was to show that he can provide a new and supposedly more
“progressive” rationale to mobilize popular support behind American militarism.
The Democratic candidate made many harsh criticisms of the Republicans, and
spoke with apparent confidence, clearly feeling that powerful sections of the
ruling elite stand behind him and want new management of the affairs of US
imperialism in the wake of the Bush administration’s debacles in Iraq,
Afghanistan and elsewhere.
But his indictment of the Bush, McCain & Co. was notable for what it left out.
There was no mention of Guantánamo, torture, secret CIA prisons, illegal
wiretapping, or all the other violations of democratic rights carried out on the
pretext of conducting a “war on terror.” In a key Senate vote last month, Obama
backed expanded wiretapping and surveillance powers for agencies like the
National Security Agency and the FBI.
Equally significant, Obama criticized the war in Iraq as a strategic blunder,
not an act of aggression that has resulted in the slaughter of over one million
innocent people. He presented the US occupation, which has shattered Iraq as a
functioning society, as though the Bush administration was favoring that country
at American expense. “Iraq has a $79 billion surplus while we’re wallowing in
deficits,” he complained.
Obama began his speech with a brief description of the grim economic
circumstances facing tens of millions of people in the United States, including
declining real wages, foreclosures and falling home values, and skyrocketing gas
prices, credit card debt and college tuition costs. He blamed these conditions
not, of course, on corporate America, but on the Bush administration and the
Republican Party, and declared that McCain was simply ignorant of the
difficulties confronting working people.
The measures which he proposed to counter the effects of the crisis were vague
and hollow, as in his pledge of “affordable, accessible health care” at the end
of a laundry list of other promises, with no explanation of how this was to be
accomplished in the teeth of opposition from the insurance, drug and for-profit
hospital industries.
He embraced many of the nostrums of the Republican right, calling for the
elimination of capital gains taxes on many businesses and modest tax cuts for
most working families, rather than the mobilization of federal resources to
provide jobs, raise living standards and rebuild economically blighted areas.
Most importantly, Obama sought to direct popular anger over deteriorating social
conditions along the lines of economic nationalism, blaming foreign scapegoats
rather than the real source of the crisis, the American capitalist class and the
system of private ownership and private profit.
Thus, in his indictment of the conditions facing working people in the
industrial centers of the Midwest, he referred to a factory worker “who has to
pack up the equipment he’s worked on for twenty years and watch it shipped off
to China.”
He hailed the capitalist market, while claiming that “businesses should live up
to their responsibilities to create American jobs,” and he pledged to “stop
giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas.”
This economic nationalism was the basis of his most important domestic policy
promise: a ten-year program to “finally end our dependence on oil from the
Middle East.” Obama used this pledge to suggest, again, that foreigners, not
American corporate bosses, were responsible for the crisis at home.
There is actually less to this promise than meets the eye, since barely 10
percent of the oil consumed in the United States comes from the Middle East.
Persian Gulf oil mainly flows to Europe and Asia, while the US draws the bulk of
its oil imports from the western hemisphere (particularly Canada, Mexico and
Venezuela), as well as from Africa.
The goal of American military intervention in the Persian Gulf is not to
guarantee current shipments of oil to the US market, but to put the United
States in control of the oil lifelines of its main economic competitors and
strategic rivals, particularly Western Europe and China.
Even Obama’s pledges of improved social conditions were linked to the growth of
American militarism. Thus he called for a guarantee of an affordable college
education to every young American “if you commit to serving your community or
your country.”
While this language might appeal to young people facing skyrocketing tuition
costs, it has a very definite, and very reactionary, subtext: Obama is planting
the seeds for a new Democratic administration to reestablish the draft. Such an
effort would certainly be accompanied not only by manufactured panic over some
new foreign policy crisis or terrorist attack, but by claims that compulsory
military service is needed in the name of “fairness” and “shared sacrifice.”
When he finally turned explicitly to foreign policy, Obama came out aggressively
against the Bush administration’s mismanagement of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and declared himself more than willing to match up his credentials
to serve as “commander-in-chief.” This theme was underscored in the run-up to
his speech by the appearance on the platform of a parade of retired generals who
vouched for the Democratic candidate’s militarist credentials.
Obama won the Democratic nomination, at least in part, by claiming to be more
antiwar than Hillary Clinton. But in his acceptance speech, he made it clear
that he was running not as a principled opponent of the Iraq war, but as an
advocate of a different war.
“While Senator McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I
stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real
threats we face,” he said. “When John McCain said we could just ‘muddle through’
in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight
against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11.”
Obama argued that Bush’s bellicose posturing over Iraq had served as a
substitute for a more coherent global strategy. “You don’t protect Israel and
deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington,” he said. “You can’t truly stand
up for Georgia when you’ve strained our oldest alliances.”
Even more ominously, he declared, “We need a president who can face the threats
of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past.” In other words,
instead of continuing the stalemate in Iraq, Obama wants to extract US troops
from that quagmire so they can be used in Afghanistan, against Iran, or in the
struggle against more powerful antagonists like China and Russia.
The candidate invoked Roosevelt and Kennedy as Democratic predecessors, not for
their association with liberal social reforms, but in their capacity as leaders
during World War II and the Cold War. “As commander in chief, I will never
hesitate to defend this nation,” he said, adding, “I will rebuild our military
to meet future conflicts.”
Obama ended his speech with a brief citation from the speech delivered by Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington 45 years before to the day.
Remarkably, he did not speak of King by name, referring to him only as “the
preacher.”
He avoided the core of the 1963 speech, which is not the oft-quoted “I have a
dream,” but rather King’s indictment of the injustice and oppression of blacks
in the American South, and his declaration that American society as a whole had
failed to fulfill the democratic promise of the American Revolution.
King told his audience, “Nineteen sixty three is not an end, but a beginning.
And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be
content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.
And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is
granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake
the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”
There is not the slightest hint of revolt by the oppressed in the Obama
campaign, despite efforts by some Democrats, sections of the media and “left”
apologists like the Nation magazine to present him as the leader of a mass
insurgent movement against the political establishment.
Media reaction following the speech fell along predictable lines, with MSNBC,
ABC, CNN and much of the press hailing Obama’s nomination as the culmination of
the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, while Fox television and the Wall
Street Journal howled that, despite his conservative tone and paeans to the
military, he was seeking to revive New Deal or Great Society liberalism.
One liberal commentator who gushed over the speech, columnist Harold Meyerson,
noted Obama’s invocation of Kennedy and Roosevelt, and wrote that in his
combination of military muscle-flexing and economic appeals to working people,
Obama was reminiscent of another Democratic president: “Add this rhetoric of
toughness to his hard-times populism, and Obama comes off as the leader not just
of Roosevelt’s and Kennedy’s party, but of Truman’s as well.”
It is both true and damning to note that Obama’s rhetoric and approach are
reminiscent of the Democratic president responsible for the single greatest
atrocity in the history of American imperialism, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
Obama seeks the presidency under conditions where the protracted economic
decline of American capitalism makes impossible any return to the liberal reform
policies of a Truman. An Obama administration would involve the use of liberal
demagogy—without any actual economic concessions to working people—to support an
aggressive program of American militarism in the Middle East, Central Asia and
throughout the world.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/obam-a30.shtml
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