Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/elizaretsky/page/3/)
This was not a defeat for progressives. With a few exceptions such as Russ Feingold, and Nancy Pelosi, there were no progressives on the ballot. This was defeat for the corporate politics that Obama, Geithner, and Schumer represent. No one should mourn for a defeat of this politics. Obama lost because he made the most elementary mistake that a president can make.
There are many indications that large numbers of Americans are depressed about their prospects. Democrats, historically the party of hope, are 20% less likely to vote than Republicans. 15% of the country is unemployed, and no one outside the financial industry feels good about his or her economic prospects. Something close to 70% of Americans tell pollsters that they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Large numbers of Americans, including even immigrants, are afraid that their children will have worse prospects in life than them.
Scientists have discovered a sixth reason why the Democrats are in trouble. Barack Obama is using his pre-frontal cortex while the rest of us are all caught up in the limbic system, the reptilian brain that triggers emotion. As the President explained to a group of Democratic donors in Massachusetts: “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared.” Apparently it never occurred to the hard-wired, no-drama community organizer, that if people were scared it was his job to reassure them, not offer “facts and science and argument,” but what do I know.
1. Democrats thought that when they elected Barack Obama he would just snap his fingers and solve all the problems. Democrats don’t understand that change takes time. 2. Democrats don’t realize that no President in history faced the problems Obama faced. It was like the Civil War, the two world wars, Vietnam and the Great Depression all wrapped up in one.
If there is one thing that characterizes American politics today it is the idea that leftists are idiots. This, of course, is a long-term derivative of the original idea, formulated in the late forties, which was that leftists are traitors. The original charge has been endlessly repeated, worked over, softened, even sublimated so to speak, so that now it seems benign: oh yes, the leftist, still in the playpen, the charming but no longer dangerous idiot of American politics. Given the widespread assumption that the real action in American politics lies in the struggles between “realistic,” “mature,” “problem-solving” “progressives” and Neanderthal Republicans, one has to wonder why it is so important for defenders of Obama to scapegoat leftists. Why, in other words, they have to explain that there are “limits” to what any President can do, that it is “necessary to compromise,” that previous periods of reform also had “fits and starts,” as if they were speaking to children who know nothing of politics, history and human nature.
How are we to understand the malaise, the feelings not only of disappointment but also of disinterest, depoliticization and even hopelessness that the Obama Presidency has brought in its wake? The “liberal” supporters of Obama, such as David Remnick, Hendrick Herzberg or Jonathan Alter give us two contradictory explanations. On the one hand, the campaign raised too-high expectations, there was bound to be a let down. On the other hand, they also tell us that Obama has been a spectacularly successful President, “delivering” health care, financial reform, and saving us from a Great Depression. In either case “we” – the disappointed Obama supporters, in a word, the left – are subtly reproached for our immaturity, our lack of realism; their’s is a sort of: “thank-you-very-much-for-your-help-in-the-campaign-but-lets-leave-things-to-the-grown-ups-until-the-next-campaign” approach.
The greatest division in America today lies between people who have genuine political values, like Shirley Sherrod, and people who live by images and market values, like Fox News and like the Obama administration. Of course, it is true, that people like Sherrod are rare. But as Bob Moses used to say when in 1960 he first ventured into the frozen heart of segregationist Mississippi, if we could find ten people willing to die, we could end segregation in America. Charles Sherrod, Shirley Sherrod – that made two; Bob made three, and the other seven were eventually found. Anyone who listens to Shirley Sherrod’s extraordinary speech will recognize in it the authentic cadence of the civil rights movement.
How embarrassing for America. For eight years their President was a kind of junior bully, a swaggering, bow-legged, sarcastic naïf, who made most of the country ashamed of their nationality. One apologized continuously for being that pariah in global culture — the American, the one with the drones and the barbed wire and the mines and the maimed children and the spy systems and the banks. One watched Europeans treat America as a Walmart nation, showing up for weekends with empty suitcases to buy the cheap goods, but with contempt as well as shame for its tawdry values, its greed, its mercenary and bullying ways, its sneakiness. And then hope appeared.
By dismissing McChrystal, did President Obama reassert civilian authority over the military, pull his “national security” team together, and enhance the power of our democracy? So it would seem. But in fact, the dismissal provides a classic example of what Marxists used to call ideology: it represents reality in an inverted form. The truth is that the dismissal of McCrystal is another giant step in the defense establishment’s control over American policy. Let me explain.
It is not possible to imagine a better symbol of the miserable condition of the United States today than an oil company destroying a huge swath of the American ecosystem, society and economy, while the President sits by helplessly, saying that he is meeting with experts in order to find out “whose ass to kick.” Obviously, Obama should have seized all the equipment that BP had available to plug the leak, deputized their engineers, brought in the US navy and coast guard, and spent as necessary to deal with the problem within days, or even hours of the original spill, when it became clear that BP was in over its head. That is what Lincoln did in 1861 when he took control of the railroads and telegraph lines around Washington DC, what Wilson did in 1916 when he nationalized the defense industries, what Roosevelt did in 1941 when he seized an aviation plant, and again in 1944 when he seized Montgomery Ward, it is what Truman did in 1947 when the government took control of the steel industry, in a sense it is what Reagan did in 1980 when the government fired the air controllers. These acts were all controversial but that is what strong Presidents did when facing threats no less severe than those in the Gulf today. Why hasn’t Obama done anything like that?