Protest for Obama

Frances Fox Piven gets a great big “yes we can” from me:

Naturally, people are making lists of what the new administration should do to begin to reverse the decades-long trends toward rising inequality, unrestrained corporate plunder, ecological disaster, military adventurism and constricted democracy. But if naming our favored policies is the main thing we do, we are headed for a terrible letdown. Let’s face it: Barack Obama is not a visionary or even a movement leader. He became the nominee of the Democratic Party, and then went on to win the general election, because he is a skillful politician. That means he will calculate whom he has to conciliate and whom he can ignore in realms dominated by big-money contributors from Wall Street, powerful business lobbyists and a Congress that includes conservative Blue Dog and Wall Street-oriented Democrats. I don’t say this to disparage Obama. It is simply the way it is, and if Obama was not the centrist and conciliator he is, he would not have come this far this fast, and he would not be the president-elect.

 

Still, the conditions that influence politicians can change. The promises and hopes generated by election campaigns sometimes help to raise hopes and set democratic forces in motion that break the grip of politics as usual. I don’t mean that the Obama campaign operation is likely to be transformed into a continuing movement for reform. A campaign mobilization is almost surely too flimsy and too dependent on the candidate to generate the weighty pressures that can hold politicians accountable. Still, the soaring rhetoric of the campaign; the slogans like “We are the ones we have been waiting for”; the huge, young and enthusiastic crowds–all this generates hope, and hope fuels activism among people who otherwise accept politics as usual.

Sometimes, encouraged by electoral shifts and campaign promises, the ordinary people who are typically given short shrift in political calculation become volatile and unruly, impatient with the same old promises and ruses, and they refuse to cooperate in the institutional routines that depend on their cooperation. When that happens, their issues acquire a white-hot urgency, and politicians have to respond, because they are politicians. In other words, the disorder, stoppages and institutional breakdowns generated by this sort of collective action threaten politicians. These periods of mass defiance are unnerving, and many authoritative voices are even now pointing to the dangers of pushing the Obama administration too hard and too far. Yet these are also the moments when ordinary people enter into the political life of the country and authentic bottom-up reform becomes possible.

The parallels between the election of 2008 and the election of 1932 are often invoked, with good reason. It is not just that Obama’s oratory is reminiscent of FDR’s oratory, or that both men were brought into office as a result of big electoral shifts, or that both took power at a moment of economic catastrophe. All this is true, of course. But I want to make a different point: FDR became a great president because the mass protests among the unemployed, the aged, farmers and workers forced him to make choices he would otherwise have avoided. He did not set out to initiate big new policies. The Democratic platform of 1932 was not much different from that of 1924 or 1928. But the rise of protest movements forced the new president and the Democratic Congress to become bold reformers.

Read the whole thing here

Luck & the Presidency

Was sayin’ to a dear friend tonight, well, Obama could be a good President.  Depending on what happens.  He may have an economic crisis on his hands in the first term of his Presidency that rivals the Great Depression faced by FDR.  In all likelihood, FDR was no more liberal a politician than Obama when he started out.  But faced with that crisis (and later, WW II), and given social pressures as well, Franklin rose to the occasion.  So hell, who knows, maybe Obama will get the same kind of “opportunity” and maybe he’ll be up to it.  We won’t know that for awhile.

What we do know is that the war Obama has on his hands isn’t WW II.  It’s nothing that, sorry to say this, easy.  More like LBJ’s war.  Obama shows no signs at all that he’s going to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan nor stay out of Pakistan.  That should do him in.

Whaddya know, I spent the evening catching up on some blog reading and found someone who said all this much better than I.  Occasionally it gets lonely in my isolated tree house and I think I’ve lost my marbles.  Makes it nice, so nice, to be able to say – what Falstaff said –

Can a crisis mold raw clay into something great? Would Lincoln have come to be regarded as our greatest president without the Civil War? Would Franklin Delano Roosevelt have been great without an eponymous Depression – or, even with it, without the Second World War?

 

Clearly, LBJ, who self-consciously sought greatness, believed that victory over some large challenge was part of the entrance exam. He wanted to be the second coming of his political idol, FDR, and did a fair job of tracing that picture on the domestic front – including his embrace of racial justice in a way that ran counter to everything for which his life had previously stood. But to be FDR II, he had to win a just war — and not over an abstraction (poverty), but over a physical enemy (the march of communism). And the war that history provided for him was neither just nor winnable. As a result, nobody will ever place Lyndon Johnson in the top rung of the American Pantheon.

 

And the same, in all likelihood, applies to our next president, Barack Obama, despite his central-casting role as the emblem of America’s journey toward healing of its original sin. I suppose it’s hypothetically possible that radical jihadism will present an opportunity for an actually winnable war on his watch – but I doubt it.

 

On the economy, though, perhaps an LBJ-level opportunity is in the cards – but probably taking a very different form. Not that Obama has evidenced much thoughtfulness or originality on the subject of economics – nor the kind of strength and toughness needed to drive something controversial to completion, as Johnson did with the Civil Rights Act. Obama simply isn’t a leader.

 

But perhaps, on both policy grounds and leadership grounds, not much will actually be needed? Perhaps this looming Depression II is so significant, and our self-consciousness of it is so vivid (in large part because we went through the first one), that there’s a politically meaningful consensus that something serious has to be done. And perhaps — and this is the big “perhaps” — a concomitant consensus will emerge about what that something must be.

 

He’s definitely got one thing going for him: The world will be pulling for him. His tabula rasa-dom, his ability to serve as a universal-recipient-cum-focus-object for people’s fantasies, will stand him in good stead during a universally perceived emergency – in a way it wouldn’t have in palmier times. Even a lot of us who resent this person benefiting from the misogyny and fraud he rode to the nomination want the next President of the United States to succeed. The crapper we’ve fallen into is too dire to wish for anything else. The soul-repair of the Democratic Party will just have to wait on this. The tsunami has deferred that dream, too.

 

So I’m now hoping Obama serves as the stone soup for the collective, wisdom-of-crowds birthing of a new era. I don’t think he has the capacity to imagine it or deliver it himself. I don’t believe he has greatness in him, just waiting to be catalyzed by this crisis. In fact, I think he’s got certain aspects of narcissistic personality disorder, and that that cripples him as a decision-maker and even, long-term, as an inspirer.

But he might be a Luck Child, dropped by fate into our midst at the moment we need one… the moment when we most require a catalyst (or pretext) for a very different kind of greatness to emerge in us and among us.

 

And as the saying goes, it’s often better to be lucky than good.

Hope springs eternal because we look for it, and good for us.

Gilded America

Steve Fraser with Bill Moyers

From Bill Moyers’ Journal at PBS:

The BBC reported startling economic equality figures in a recent documentary: the top 200 wealthiest people in the world control more wealth than the bottom 4 billion. But what is more striking to many is a close look at the economic inequality in the homeland of the “American Dream.” The United States is the most economically stratified society in the western world. As THE WALL STREET JOURNAL reported, a recent study found that the top .01% or 14,000 American families hold 22.2% of wealth – the bottom 90%, or over 133 million families, just 4% of the nation’s wealth.

Additional studies narrow the focus: This from the Pew Foundation and THE NEW YORK TIMES: “The chance that children of the poor or middle class will climb up the income ladder, has not changed significantly over the last three decades. “This from THE ECONOMIST’S special report, “Inequality in America:” “The fruits of productivity gains have been skewed towards the highest earners, and towards companies, whose profits have reached record levels as a share of GDP.”

This trend, among others, has some historians and cultural commentators comparing our era to that of the late 19th century Gilded Age. Bill Moyers guest Steve Fraser notes its hallmarks: crony capitalism, extreme inequalities in wealth and income, ostentatious spending and wage depression. Mark Twain is responsible for naming the period between Reconstruction and Roosevelt, ‘The Gilded Age.’ As THE OXFORD COMPANION TO UNITED STATES HISTORY notes, it is the only period to be commonly known by a pejorative name.

Transcript

Related Material from PBS

Tomgram: Steve Fraser

Women in a Difficult Economy, Heidi Harmann