Obama and the neutered left

I had coffee at Small World in Princeton with Chris Hedges, who is working on a book about the decay and demise of liberal institutions, something he has written about frequently for Truthdig.com. During our conversation — there were several of us at the table talking about a lot of different things — he made the point that the pillars of liberal America (the press, the Democratic Party, labor, the church and the academy — forgive me if I have these wrong) were all in decay and that a corporate social structure has been growing up in their place.

The problem, he said, is our inability to deal with our state of permanent war and what it means for the American democratic experiment.

His argument — which is spot on, I think — comes at an interesting time, given that Barack Obama is in the White House. Barack Obama, the conventional wisdome asserts, represents a triumph of liberal politics, a black progressive in the White House who will push the nation leftward. But the Obama presidency has had the effect of neutering the reform impulse; the basic contours of the military-corporate state are not being challenged, but we continue to believe that Obama represents change, that we have entered a new era.

We haven’t. It is a mirage, a delusion. Real change has not come, nor is it likely to.

“The idea of Obama is what we want. The actuality is more mainstream.” — an anonymous Obama staffer quoted by Ben Austin in the June edition of Harper’s

The Obama presidency, much more than the presidency of George W. Bush and much like that of Bill Clinton, has badly damaged whatever progressive momentum may have existed during the two to three years before his ascension to the White House.

The reality, however, is far different as the nominal momentum created by the failures of the Bush White House following Hurricane Katrina, the banking failure and cratering economy, collapsing infrastructure (remember that bridge in Minnesota?), various Republican scandals and a general waning of support for war in Iraq and Afghanistan has dissipated in a fog of what can only be described as liberal incrementalism and a general lack of nerve.

The response to this on the left should be vibrant and aggressive protest, a shouting from the ramparts that makes it clear that much more is expected and much deeper change is required. Instead, we have witnessed a dangerous, ineffectual silence.

The questions is what happened. Why has the election of Barack Obama, the first black man to be elected president, not produced the liberal/progressive rebirth that some envisioned? Why is it that we have moved only nominally away from the policies of the Bush years?

There are three basic reasons, I think:

1. Racism. the fear of a black planet (to quote Public Enemy) has combined with the desperate economy and destruction of working class jobs to trigger the right-wing populist backlash. The Tea Party and the folks on the fringe who question the president’s place of birth are consistent with the historical narrative, with the kind of fear and loathing that rises up at times of unsettling change, a racist, xenophobic and hypernationalistic reactionism that can be likened to circling the wagons.

The visceral nature of the movement, which is really quite small, and its enthusiam have captured the media’s attention, captured its narrative, amplifying its message and forcing this right-wing reaction to be viewed as much greater than it really is. The result is a media narrative that portrays the nation as center-right and a pundit class that views everything through this distorted prism.

Given that the decision-makers in Washington — including the people in the administration — are more in tune with the Sunday talk shows and cable news than with what is happening beyond the Beltway, the result has been a natural drift rightward.

(I should add here that Obama’s rightward shift is not a surprise given his approach to issues during the campaign and his cynical dismissal of ideology in The Audacity of Hope.)

2. Obama’s sell outs. The list is endless, including everything from financial reform and health care to Guantanamo, the Kagan nomination and presidential power. Obama has, like Bill Clinton in the 1990s, shown that he views core beliefs as fungible, that passing legislation with cool names that can be sold as reform (and selling it is the goal) is all that matters. Real reform is secondary, if it is of any concern at all.

U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, following his Pennsylvania primary victory on Tuesday over the Obama-supported, Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter, summed up the problem this way (he was not speaking of Obama, but could have been): You make principled compromises in office, but you should never compromise your principles. I leave it to liberals to judge the Obama team on this point.

3. Sycophancy. This is pretty basic — and maybe the most damaging for the left. Too many on the left — and I am not talking about Thomas Friedman or Alan Colmes, folks who are viewed as liberals but are really just purveyors of status-quo ideas — have ceded their independence to a bankrupt Democratic Party establishment. Part of this stems from a messianic streak in our politics that assumes that one fine candidate will save us, that we do not have to do the hard work to defend democracy, that we can leave it to our leaders to fix it all.

That, of course, is absolute nonsense and no one should know that better than the left. Power concedes nothing without a fight and legislative victories can only be won after the people — that would be us — create momentum for change, a moral imperative, if you will.

But that is not what has happened since Obama took office. The messianic streak has only grown stronger even as the president continues to tack right on so many issues, with liberals falling silent. There are exceptions, of course, like Glenn Greenwald on Salon, The Progressive magazine, Chris Hedges and Robert Scheer on Truthdig.com, but they only prove the rule in this case.

Rather than the challenge, we often get the kind of arguments I hear from friends: Barack Obama is only doing what he can given the reality of Republican obstructionism; Barack Obama is a master tactician who is using incremental change to create greater change; Barack Obama is a closet progressive, just you wait and see; and on and on.

Obama, basically, gets no pressure from his left — no one is playing the role that the labor unions did during FDR’s administration (“make me do it,” FDR is purported to have told them, and they did) or that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. played during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, forcing civil rights onto the nation’s agenda. Without that pressure from the left — which should stand against a corporate-dominated politics and culture — the debate gets pulled farther and farther to the right, the incremental improvements become smaller and smaller, withering away to nothing.

And the only winners will be the corporations and their governmental enablers.

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