The Obama administration certainly inherited a mess, whose origins are not only in the Bush White House (the wars), but also in the Clinton White House (the economy). Enthusiastic financial globalisation and cowboy war-mongering are the two horns upon which the Obama presidency rests. But it seems unwilling or unable to remove itself from its perch, offering salves here and there but little more. Part of the problem is that there is no longer any opposition to the Democratic agenda, which is to prosecute Bush’s wars and to protect the neoliberal dispensation.
In the 1930s, when crisis struck, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democrats faced immense pressure from the unions and the Left, whose push made the administration conduct a few fundamental reforms of the economic institutions. Roosevelt recognised this and warned his peers in the power elite: “The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever.” Roosevelt spent some of his own muscle to absorb the independent parties to his left, such as the Progressive Party of Wisconsin and the Farmer Labour Party of Minnesota. When they were absorbed into the Democratic establishment, Roosevelt crowed, “We have on the positive side eliminated [Progressive Party leader] Phil Lafollette and the Farmer Labour people in the Northwest as a standing Third Party threat.” Obama has no such worries. The Third Party threat is no longer a realistic irritant.
More dangerous might have been the committed progressives within the Democratic Party, whose caucus is the largest in Congress. But the progressives have been mute, overwhelmed either by the immense charisma of Obama or by their own lack of any alternative strategy. In March, the progressive caucus’ leaders, Raul Grijalva (Representative from Arizona) and Lynn Woolsey (Representative from California), complained that the President had not yet met them face to face to discuss the legislative agenda. Instead, the President had already met the Black Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus, and the two conservative Democratic groups, the Blue Dog Coalition and the New Democrat Coalition.
Claiming to be “choked blue” by the extreme Left of the Democratic Party, the “blue dogs” gathered together in 1995 to hold fast to their mishmash of conservative and liberal views. Obama has also met several times with congressional Republicans. Woolsey told the press that the progressive Democrats are “good soldiers, but we’re not just a go-along-to-get-along people, otherwise we would not be progressives. We’re a big caucus, and we will be heard.” But so far, little has been heard from them.
The Republicans, meanwhile, have imploded. They seem to have followed the script of the 1930s Republican Party when confronted by the enormous New Deal project of the Democrats. Then, the Republicans rolled up their sleeves and held fast to the thoroughly unpopular laissez faire individualism of the Hoover 1920s. In 1935, Republican leader Henry Fletcher said, “All we need to do is to apply to present-day problems and conditions the same devotion to economic freedom and social progress which has characterised the Republican Party through these years.” President Herbert Hoover (who was “more unpopular than Judas Iscariot”, in the phrase of Senator Hiram Johnson) published a turgid book entitled The Challenge of Liberty (1934), in which he argued, “We might as well talk of abolishing the sun’s rays if we would secure our food, as to talk of abolishing individualism as a basis of successful society.”
The Club of Growth’s Chris Chocola channelled this 1930s response recently when he said, “We strayed from our principles of limited government, individual responsibility and economic freedom. We have to adhere to those principles to rebuild the party.” But the principles themselves make no sense to the jobless and the hopeless. Obama’s hope is essential, because without hope reality would be unbearable. The Republicans are churlish, too masculine in their derision of social welfare. It is what has prevented them from being a party of the moment. Their leaders resemble frogs, sitting on their own lily-pads, flicking their tongues at the occasional fly, but unable to say anything as the water level drops in the pond.
Prashad continues:Adultery, bribery and whatnot have impaired the chances of anyone leading the Republicans. It might fall to the haughty and tin-eared Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to carry the tattered standard. More than a third of registered Republicans view their own party unfavourably. Things are in a sorry state. Without a party able to offer a rational critique of war and waste, sections of the population will move towards anti-social ideologies of racism and xenophobia. Indications of such a direction are already there, as hate crime numbers rise with the unemployment rate.FDR faced political forces that--while outside the two-party big tent--had big influence in mass social movements of the day. The movements grew out of concrete social realities. The political directions they took were fostered by conscious efforts at "agitation, education and organization"--the ancient labor movement formula--by partisans of the left and the right.
The coalitions of the hungry and the hardened pushed Roosevelt not only to create a social insurance system but also to create the means for them to better organise in the workplace (the National Labour Relations Act). They created the basis for a better life and for collective bargaining. The benefits of their success have now run out; Ronald Reagan’s policies of the 1980s did them in.
The tattered labour movement is now trying to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which Obama supports. But it is unlikely to move past Congress, where it currently sits, prone before the Blue Dogs and their Republican allies. The one good piece of legislation that would empower workers and help revive a mass-based Left in the U.S. will not be the one necessary concession made by the power elite. They take their cue from the Chambers of Commerce, who feel no threat from a conciliatory President and an absent labour movement. There is none of the heat and light that Roosevelt felt, only a continued faith in Obama’s hope. Would that were enough.
We can laugh at Sarah Palin, but her bid to bring together the gun fondlers, the bible wallopers, the anti-human rights haters, and the other pockets of marginal ultra-rightists, is no joke. If she can't do it, many others will try--and somebody is likely to succeed, with hatred of Obama as a rallying point.
We need a coherent, political left to help protect the small-'d' democratic inch won in the last election, and fight for the miles of democratic power needed to protect the planet and humanity. It's a defensive battle at this stage. But the spread of the single payer movement, the efforts of unions on the ground to fight for EFCA, and other 'secret storms' show that the battle can be met. Leftists of the movements, ignite!
Read Prashad's whole essay here. ey
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