The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.
That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing those same improvements: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?
(Tony Judt. Emphasis mine.)
This is excerpt from a thoughtful article in the New York Review of Books that laments, as I have long lamented, the blithe way in which Americans have allowed the hard-won, protections of the New Deal to be dismantled by the economic right in the name of economic Liberty. As Judt points out, we are entering an era of profound economic insecurities at a time when economic inequality has grown dramatically because of Reaganite economic policies.
We Americans, because we live in a Disneyfied understanding of American history, really don't understand the rapacious nature of this predatory monster we've let off the leash. We think of it as benign because we've found ways to restrain it, but there were very good reasons for our ancestors in the first part of the 20th century to restrain it, and many, many Americans will feel its bite if we don't find ways to reverse the dismantlement of these restraints.
Here's the really depressing/frightening thing. At a time of historic political opportunity because of the implosion of
the GOP, Obama and the Dem leadership, rather than taking advantage and
pushing more aggressively for reversing the dismantlement of the New
Deal protections in the name of the public interest, has instead become
a tool of the defense and finance industry Owners.
Obama's timid centrism, if centrism is what we want to call this capitulation, has no real public support. It is completely a creature designed to preserve the the Finance and Defense Industry Owners' status quo. The left and the Beck right are equally disgusted by Obama's capitulation to these Owners, and he is losing the support of the Dem base who wanted him because he was not a Clinton-style triangulator. That's the real source of Obama's dip in approval ratings–it's not coming from his losing the center, but from his losing people like me who are disappointed in his civil liberties, record, his capitulation to Wall Street, and now this decision to prolong the agony in Afghanistan.Maybe he doesn't have a choice; maybe he does. I don't know. But one way or the other, you just want to scream, and it's not "We approve".
And we all know that this show of "weakness" makes it possible for strength-craving Beck Right to make inroads in 2010/12, when instead he and his movement should be pushed to the loony margins where they belong. These right wingers will politically exploit the resentment Americans feel about this capitulation, because the left in the country is toothless, unimaginative, and just plain lame.
Maybe something surprising will happen, but it's getting pretty clear that any hope we (I) might have had for the Obama administration to halt the American regressive drift is all but gone. The tail is wagging the dog, because it's looking more and more that this dog is a smart, eloquent, and gutless.
Leave a Reply