The right is fractured, unwilling or unable to reconcile its many disparate and untamable parts. The left, mostly marginalized in a media landscape controlled by the 1 percent, is in the same boat.
Just as it did during the Clinton years, it has fractured upon the shoals of a centrist Democratic presidency enthrall to the money men of Wall Street.
Here is what we are looking at:
- The Democratic president, Barack Obama, has played nice with Wall Street — see Glenn Greenwald’s column today — when it should have taken the financial industry out behind the woodshed.
- A Republican frontrunner, Mitt Romney, who picks his position based on the position of the sun and is even closer to Wall Street than Obama.
- The anybody-but-romney contingent of the GOP — Gingrich, Santorum, Perry — that plays the populism card but has no critique of American capitalism, nor has any interest in pushing one.
- And Ron Paul. Paul is the only candidate of either party who opposes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has from the beginning. He offers a critique of crony capitalism and has been as powerful an opponent of the Bush/Obama assaults on civil liberties.
Paul, as I wrote earlier, is no progressive. His history on race and comments on the Johnson civil rights legislation, hardline position on border security, antiabortion views and his opposition to unions, regulations and the social safety net cannot be overlooked.
In a year, however, when there are no Democrats on the ballot other than the centrist president and in a media culture that freezes out third-party challengers, Paul is being used as a stand-in for the missing critique of the system — a needed and legitimate critique. And his presence — and the lack of any kind of similar personality on the Democratic side — has raised the cracks in the left-liberal contingent.
Paul’s presence keeps elements of the left critique on the table, but he is an awful salesman for what so desperately needs to be sold. A Paul presidency would not achieve progressive goals — far from it — but it likely would prevent us from traveling a path we have too often traveled.
What the Paul phenomenon shows — as Obama-mania did in 2008 — is the desperate hunger on the left for someone to talk about the break down of the American system. And what it proves is that a single candidate offers little. What is needed is a movement, one focused on the corruption of our government and the corporate order, the dangers of the imperial project and the environmental cataclysm we face.
This need will remain in place 11 months from now, no matter who wins the election, regardless of who ends up winning the White House.
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- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Hank Kalet 