After the Future

November 7, 2012

Obama’s Acceptance Speech

Most of it seemed kind of canned, flat, laundry listy–what makes America great, etc., etc., etc. But it ended on an impassioned, stronger note: We're not as divided as our…

Most of it seemed kind of canned, flat, laundry listy–what makes America great, etc., etc., etc.

But it ended on an impassioned, stronger note: We're not as divided as our politics suggests. We're the United States of America. Not red and blue. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions.

Yes and no. No empirically; yes aspirationally. But realistically?

And is he signaling that he's going to keep keeping on with his futile attempts to reach across the aisle?

The only way the country becomes less divided is if the extreme right wing in this country is de-legitimated, and I don't think its defeat tonight will do that. The only way it gets de-legitimated is by losing control of legislatures. GOP extremists still hold the House, and we have no reason to believe that GOP extremism in general and its irrational, short-sighted, petty obstructionism will end.

But back to Obama: Andrew Sullivan made the point on Colbert last night: Obama is a moderate Republican. So was Bill Clinton.

Obama, in other words is Eisenhower or Neslon Rockefeller, and that's ok. I'm fine with one party staking out the political territory that a business-friendly, culturally pluralistic Republicanism defines. But that's a right-of-center party, and it's not the party I want to support. It's a party Wall Street and corporate ellites can be comfortable with; it's not a party that represents the interests of "ordinary people," to use Tom Frank's term.

That's where the realignment has to take place. There has to be a party that counterbalances the power of big money.

More on the money issue later, because it is the most important thing we have to deal with now on the national level.

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6 responses

JP

November 7, 2012

See? Obama won. Nothing for you to worry about with respect to the election.

Reply
Jack Whelan

November 7, 2012

I wasn’t questioning the accuracy of your prediction, JP, but the logic of your thinking. The principal way to de-legitimate GOP extremism is to refuse to give it our votes.
Another idea for realignment might be for the sensible business types in the GOP to break off from the GOP extremists and join with the Neoliberal or corporate Dems to form a new party. It would really be the old Republican Party, but it will have to call itself something else. The “Money Party” probably won’t work. It will embrace free market libertarian ideas, and will leave the extreme cultural conservatives to form their own fringe party.
The Democrats would then re-embrace its original tradition of populism — progressive on economic issues, and moderate on social issues. Its nucleus will be traditional labor, ethnic Catholics/Hispanics, African Americans, Main Street progressives, and maybe in time even southern working class whites. And then a fringe party (it’s nucleus the current Greens?) can form further to the left and it can push the populist Democrats to deal with bigger issues that are not exactly “kitchen table”–environment, gay rights, surveillance state, aggressive foreign policy, criminalization of everything, etc. over time.
Just thinking out loud here, but this would bring a better balance to our politics that it currently does not have.

Reply
JP

November 7, 2012

The American system doesn’t support fringe parties.
The libertarian party is pretty much a joke.

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JP

November 7, 2012

It will be interesting to see how Omamacare is implemented.
Warren’s probably the best anti-finance person out there.

Reply
Jonathan

November 7, 2012

Jack, a couple of thoughts. The environment will absolutely be “kitchen table” in a decade or so, maybe much sooner. It might be the only topic on the table. Conversely, “traditional labor” is already gone in the post-industrial world, wouldn’t you say? The rhetoric still sways us, because we’re sentimental and nostalgic creatures, but the reality has lapsed. A few pipe-factories in Youngstown isn’t going to change that. Your description of new party outlines works as a diagram of the political map right now. In a few years, that map will be as fantastical and antique as Mitteleuropa. In any event, at present, your four-part division would create two electable centrist parties, and two shrill, pointless parties on the fringes, as I think JP points out. The future politico-cultural system, as you yourself have pointed out many times, is not going to be made up of easily recognizable parts of the present spectrum. It’s going to be something totally new, will we nill we. I’m still not convinced about the centrality of economic justice. That sounds cruel, or so I’ve been trained to think. When, except in the freakish post-war bubble of history, has there been such justice? Not saying it wouldn’t be nice, but it does seem to be non-essential to whatever we want to call the progress of culture. And who decides, and how, what qualifies as a sufficient level of prosperity for the “average” citizen? This is the problem with utopias. It’s terribly ironic that liberals and conservatives both want to go back to the 50’s — one group for social reasons, the other for economical. But the fact is, things don’t come around again. Just because a certain kind of middle class, a certain kind of income differential was possible at one point in a nation’s development, does not mean it ever will be possible again. I don’t think the country is like what is was in the 1880’s, or 1920’s, or whatever period people want to liken it to (I’m probably thinking of some recent articles I’ve stumbled on in the NYTimes). I think America today is like America in 2012. No comparisons are really valid or useful. And let’s face it, in the present world prosperity equals greater consumerism. We see it at home as well as abroad in very alien cultures. I’m not trying to implement casuistry on behalf of Wall St, but we have to face the fact that general prosperity, under its current form, no longer works as a guiding cultural beacon. It sews the seeds of its own destruction. This is the horrible, tragic sin of the modern western materialist worldview, and we are very very far from even being able to admit it, let alone confront it.

Reply
Jack Whelan

November 7, 2012

Jonathan–
I’m not giving up yet on the power of numbers to counterbalance the power of money. And I would argue that the aspiration toward a republican polity is archetypal, not nostalgic. This aspiration has been realized in many different forms in different times and places. But it’s the form of gov’t a mature people, one that insists on ruling itself rather than being ruled, requires.
It does not require a 1950s level of widespread prosperity, and I agree that there must be significant adjustment to what we Americans consider normal levels of consumption.
But the key point is not about distribution of wealth but about the distribution of power. I don’t particularly care whether there are some people who are extremely wealthy; I do care about the extraordinary power that comes with that wealth. It’s the power distribution that concerns me more than the wealth distribution, but the two come together.
It could be that we Americans are not mature enough to rule ourselves. It could be that reality has become too complex to do it even if we were mature enough. But I’ve not crossed the line yet where I’m resigned to that. And so it’s essential that we do everything we can to resist power becoming more concentrated in the hands of an ever smaller and ever more unaccountable oligarchical minority.

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Obama’s Acceptance Speech

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