[Peace-discuss] Inauguration Day, 2009: A Day of Mourning

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...An inaugural celebration? Not for me, thank you. I'm going into inaugural 
mourning: all black to mourn the victims of Obama's wars, and the death of our 
old republic."

	Inauguration Day, 2009: A Day of Mourning
	For the victims of future wars, and for our old republic
	by Justin Raimondo

When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, he sought to dismantle the evolving 
Federalist tradition of pomp and circumstance. In a ceremonial sense, royalism 
seemed to have been restored, or so it seemed to him. As this blogger put it, 
"Dressed in simple attire, Jefferson walked over to the Capitol with a phalanx 
of riflemen, friends, and fellow citizens from his home state of Virginia."

In these last days of the American Empire, such austere republicanism would be 
considered impossibly quaint. Having long ago morphed into Jefferson's worst 
nightmare, the closer we get to the end, the more glamorous our inaugurals 
become. The poorer we are, the more millions we'll throw at a ceremony that is 
really the crowning of a monarch – and not just any old king, but an emperor 
bestriding the globe.

Appearances must be kept up. Like a bankrupt living on a palatial estate – one 
step away from foreclosure – we bask in imperial splendor even as the repo man 
comes knocking at the door.

At a time such as ours, the spectacle of jeweled and gowned courtiers feasting 
on inaugural canapés is beyond tacky. The Bourbons partied, too, right up to the 
eve of the French Revolution. Amid all the sounding of trumpets and the hailing 
of the chief, however, there is something hollow about all this unseemly 
extravagance.

The Obama cult has imbued our new president with superhuman powers: they expect 
and enjoy the spectacle. Yet the relentless lionizing of this messianic figure 
is ironic, because here is an American chief executive who will doubtless become 
aware of his own limitations rather quickly. America is a bankrupt empire 
engaged in two overseas wars, with troops on every continent and bases ringing 
the globe. It's unsustainable, and our ruling elites know it.

The crisis [.pdf] of American state capitalism will consume Obama's presidency 
until his credibility is reduced to a cinder. The only solution is for the 
administration to create a new social compact, one in which the government takes 
not only a major role but the leading role in directing the economic life of the 
nation. In order to do this, however, a broad coalition is necessary, one that 
spans – and in a sense transcends – the traditional categories of "Left" and 
"Right." And this has been a source of Obama's broad appeal: the belief that he 
is above it all.

Of course, libertarians make the same claim for themselves, yet they do so on 
ideological grounds. The Obama-ites, on the other hand, disdain all ideology and 
claim the mantle of pragmatism.

This claim to be non-ideological, and therefore "practical," is a smokescreen 
for what is clearly an ideology of a very definite sort: it is garden-variety 
statism, i.e., a belief in the radical extension of governmental power. As in 
the case of 9/11, when the Bushies launched an invasion of a foreign country in 
the name of a national "emergency," our economic 9/11 has now become the 
occasion for a massive invasion of government into the private sector. The 
nationalization of the banks, the auto industry, and even, it's rumored, the 
newspaper industry, augur ill for the cause of individual autonomy and for the 
social base of the Jeffersonian remnant: small business, the middle classes, 
broadly defined, and the shrinking proportion of the population not entirely 
dependent on Washington's largess.

In the U.S., the private sector – and I mean this in an ecumenical sense, 
including the nonprofit and underground sectors – has always been the dominant 
force in society. The voluntary interactions of consenting adults – the cultural 
bedrock of our old Republic – have charted the course of the American river, but 
now the state is directing the flow.

Obama's economic program can be summed up in one word: reflation. Massive 
government spending, preceded by an orgy of bailouts. Earmarks, which yesterday 
were anathema, are now presented as a panacea. Spending on this scale requires 
some degree of bipartisan complicity, but how will Obama get the Republicans to 
go along? You'll notice he's been courting them rather assiduously, and that's 
given rise to a whole new brand of "conservatives," the so-called Obamacons.

Most of these were won over on the basis of their growing Bush-hatred, but the 
rest will come over because of his foreign and military policy. Obama, after 
all, ran on a platform of increasing an obscenely bloated military budget – 
misnamed the "defense" budget, but in reality a sum devoted to interfering in 
the affairs of other nations and peoples on a scale unprecedented by any 
previous empire. A sum, mind you, more than equal to the military budgets of all 
other nations on earth combined.

This is the grand bargain that will be struck, the one that will give us guns 
and butter. The conservatives will be won over by what John T. Flynn described 
as their "devotion" to "military might." As the economic crisis deepens, 
military Keynesianism will bring the two parties together, as Flynn foresaw, 
because "militarism is the one great glamorous public-works project upon which a 
variety of elements in the community can be brought into agreement." The 
propaganda of fear will become an economic necessity:

"Inevitably, having surrendered to militarism as an economic device, we will do 
what other countries have done: we will keep alive the fears of our people of 
the aggressive ambitions of other countries and we will ourselves embark upon 
imperialistic enterprises of our own."

Flynn was one of the most trenchant and acerbic critics of FDR, a president 
Obama is expected to emulate and may even surpass in the sense that the new 
administration seeks more power than even Roosevelt ever managed to grab. 
Certainly the current economic turmoil mirrors the 1930s in ways we have only 
just begun to experience, yet I agree with Katrina vanden Heuvel, who fears 
Obama may come to resemble a more recent Democratic president: Lyndon Baines 
Johnson. He, too, gave us guns and butter. He also escalated and prosecuted an 
overseas war that was increasingly unpopular with the American people – and 
economically and morally damaging to the United States. It's heartening to hear 
the editor of the Nation, the premier old-line liberal magazine once edited by 
Oswald Garrison Villard, swim against the "progressive" tide by publicly 
worrying Obama will get bogged down in Afghanistan, charge into Pakistan, and 
wind up being brought down by his own hubris, a quality certainly not lacking in 
the new administration.

In the age of Obama, what the late, great libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard 
dubbed the welfare-warfare state will take on gargantuan proportions, just as it 
did under LBJ, both at home and abroad. This is bad news on every front. An 
inaugural celebration? Not for me, thank you. I'm going into inaugural mourning: 
all black to mourn the victims of Obama's wars, and the death of our old 
republic.	~ Justin Raimondo

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=14097