Another rambling one

These last few weeks I've been digging into the recent stuff at Open Left on Health Care, and of course it's all infuriating and depressing. And it keeps sending me back to the obvious question: why, why, why, oh why in the hell is it that progressives, who have facts and morality and logic on their side, cannot get a damn thing done even when the Democrats hold all the power? Why do these facts and morality and logic all get laughed out of the building when they come to play with the big boys? Why do so many Americans latch onto the most vile, stupid, untrue, immoral, insane ideas and people?

Is it just that people are really stupid? That all the long history of class conflict dressed up as racial conflict has turned them all into Pavlov's retarded dogs? That the media/celebrity infrastructure is so finely-tuned and all-encompassing that it shuts out all dissent? That the vast majority just don't care, and progressives are just less committed and/or mobilized so they always lose to the crazies?

Surely all these dynamics work together and play a part. But I think there's an overarching issue here that becomes apparent with a more historical view.

The rapid industrialization of the mid and late 19th century caused massive demographic, political, economic, and philosophical change in western Europe and the U.S. The ascendancy of capitalism--in a far more ruthless and heartless time than now--provoked not just the rapid rise in earning and political power of the new bourgeoisie, but also a violent backlash in the form of revolutionary movements that eventually coalesced around the ideas of Marx and Engels. In the years before World War I, business and political elites were constantly terrorized by strong left-wing movements, both in Europe and the U.S. One U.S. president was shot by an anarchist. Eugene Debs won nearly a million votes in 1920, out of 25 million votes for president, a not insignificant number. And, of course, the Russian Revolution happened.

From 1917 until 1990(ish), socialist movements worldwide had a vivid, real-life example of a powerful nation that claimed to be guided by Marx's ideas. Never mind the fact that Marx himself had next to nothing to say about how actual socialism was to come about or how such a society would be run, or that the actual functioning of Soviet society was a tad incongruent with standard socialist ideals. What's important is that from the time Marx and like-minded economists and philosophers began addressing the problem of capitalism in the 1850s and '60s, all the way until the end of the 20th century, there has never been a time when critics of capitalism were without a unifying philosophical framework on which they could base their ideas. Even during the left-wing schisms of the 1930s and '40s that divided party-line communists from those who weren't seduced by Stalin, there was still an argument to be made about what exactly socialism was, and how the excess and unfairness of capitalism could be mitigated. In all that time, through its very existence, the Soviet Union offered a counterpoint that was immensely important to intellectuals, students, and left-wing politicians. There are different ways of organizing societies, it said; and not just in wussy Latin American countries but in a superpower country that might actually put a man on the moon before us!

It's true that in some ways the Soviet threat inhibited progressive goals, and led many liberals to fear the communist label. A new Soviet Union with a new emphasis on Marx wouldn't help left-wing critics push a domestic agenda here in the U.S.--in fact, given the current climate, a million teabagger heads would probably explode if the USSR came back tomorrow. Then again, their heads are already exploding anyway. Reality doesn't much matter to the crazies, of course, and the basis for that that can be found in the darker corners of this same 20th century history.

The Soviet Union gave Americans something to define ourself against--and we did so in an historical echo of an earlier time in which the Indians represented "savage nature" to the paranoid Puritan mind. Just as the Puritans didn't really "see" the Indians, we never really saw the Soviet Union--and the Germans never really saw the Jews. The spectre of communism so haunted Weimar Germany that it ran terrified to Hitler, whose rise was predicated on his alliance with the most powerful business interests in the country. These leaders may not necessarily have been impressed with his antisemitism as they were by his anti-communism--his virulent hatred of "Jewish ideas," ideas that seemed to many Germans to be literally seeping in past the border of their country via Poland and the Soviet Union. This is a vital point that's worth focusing on, because it usually comes across as so crazy when we read about it. The monumental evil of the Holocaust tends to cloud our understanding of how the thing managed to happen; it leaves the impression of some incomprehensible hatred, or mass insanity, but the real grease that moved the gears was people's fear of "the Jews."

The hysteria is easier to understand if we think about it politically, because that's the way Hitler framed the issue. "Look out," he said, "the Jews are coming to take over our country!" What Jews? The communists, of course. Rhetorically speaking, "Jews" had a larger meaning than simply as a marker for the Jewish people. It referred to the enemies of capitalism--or at least the capitalist expansion Hitler foresaw for the German state.

Shifting to today: why is it that that the teabag nutjobs are going insane about socialists in the White House right now, at this point in time? American business interests, especially multinational corporations in the financial services, weapons, or infrastructure industries, have never had so much money or power or influence (or money). They control more aspects of more people's lives in more countries around the world than ever before. Sure, there are countries here and there resisting our markets--some of them even have materials our companies want. But in all cases, we either fight them militarily , or economically, until they're either neutralized or defeated. There is religious opposition in Muslim countries that is vaguely based on a hatred of western decadence and corruption, but there is no socialist opposition; no coherent thought behind their reactionary violence.

And so this moment exhibits so vividly the unstable and untenable nature of capitalism. Just when its ascendancy is most assured, when its physical and philosophical enemies have been vanquished, this is the very moment when business and political leaders and their blind followers rush headlong into madness, slashing at ghosts both literally (in Iraq) and rhetorically (Obama is a socialist), while the greedy bankers tank the world economy and receive billions of taxpayer dollars for their troubles.

This is quite a moment. Any conscious person knows now beyond any doubt that the capitalist game is not merely rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many-- but that it may, given the existential crisis of global warming brought about by the industrial revolution, actually end up killing everybody on the planet. But where Marxism once offered a way to make sense of this, today we have no real method by which to do so, nor can we really imagine a better future. For awhile Obama looked like he might know a way, or that he at least understood the stakes and was willing to speak directly about them. But now it’s clear that the change we really need is fundamental in nature, and it can't be achieved by just picking the most thoughtful candidate to stand in front while the ship steers itself into the iceberg.

We need to understand our society. And politicians need to explain what's happening to people in a way that makes sense. We need to show people how not to be afraid of ghosts, because the consequences can be very, very bad. But we can't do this by just talking about things like "affordability in health care" and "responsibility on Wall Street." Platitudes like those don't describe reality or attempt to deal with it in any systematic way; they just perpetuate the universal feeling we all share that all politicians are corrupt, and nobody gives a shit.

Yes, a progressive infrastructure needs to be built to fight against the right-wing machine, and it's great that Open Left is all about putting that together. But that infrastructure--the think tanks, policy proposals et al--need to be based on a broader understanding of what the political, economic, and social realities are in the country. That vision doesn't need to be socialist or Marxist or any other -ist, but it needs to be based on an accurate reading of the problem and offer genuine solutions.

Without such a vision, we're really just flailing around in the dark like the teabaggers.

is the President a liberal?

This is going to be a long and meandering one, I'm sorry to say. And it might not be so coherent. Lots of quotations, too. Ok, enough apologizing.

Today in the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne says some innocuous and generally inoffensive things about watching Obama give the Nobel speech with some European buddies:

A French diplomatic veteran ticked off all the good news: Obama's pledge to close Guantanamo, the ban on torture, the continued withdrawal from Iraq, his reaching out to Iran and North Korea, engagement on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the quest for nuclear disarmament, the effort to "reset" relations with Russia. And there is America's new stance on global warming, on display in Copenhagen. This repositioning matters not just to elites but also to a rank-and-file green movement emerging as an alternative on the center-left to social democratic parties, notably in France and Germany.

But these are the days of European second thoughts: Obama is still interesting, he's still not George W. Bush, but what can he show for his efforts? His Israeli-Palestinian initiative has gone nowhere. The fruits of his overtures to Iran, Russia and North Korea are far from obvious. Where is the climate change legislation that was supposed to pass Congress?

Yes. What can he show for his efforts? One would think results would be called for. In fact, lots of people have been complaining that so far Obama seems to be a lot of talk, with no action. Or worse: some have claimed that Obama has betrayed the liberals who first fueled his candidacy by breaking several campaign promises, and that his progressive rhetoric was mere seduction meant to get him elected, whereupon he would govern as a centrist or moderate conservative.

This debate has been picking up steam lately with Obama's Afghanistan surge in particular. That sad, slow, agonizing, utterly predictable move prompted Tom Hayden to write in The Nation that:

Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency.

The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal.

Obama's timeline for the proposed Afghan military surge mirrors exactly the eighteen-month Petraeus timeline for the surge in Iraq.

We'll see. To be clear: I'll support Obama down the road against Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs or any of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era. But no bumper sticker until the withdrawal strategy is fully carried out.

The response was swift and merciless. Joan Walsh, usually a welcome voice of restrained compassion--two extremely rare qualities in a political writer--ran a post on her blog at Salon.com called "The Poster Boy for Progressive Self-Delusion," in which she remembered Hayden's earlier endorsement of Obama:

Hayden's delusional Obama endorsement in March 2008 made such an impression on me, I can quote whole sentences from memory. Well, one whole sentence, the first: "All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama." Oh, and I remember that he said Obama's "very biography" and his campaign's "very existence" would cure cancer, make my hair silky smooth, and cause pretty, pretty unicorns to dance in my backyard, too.

OK, that last part isn't true.

But I felt like I was in some kind of Maoist reeducation camp, being urged to struggle mightily and cheerfully for Chairman Obama.

So yeah, that old "I told you so" demon drove me back to reread Hayden's Nation piece -- co-signed by Danny Glover, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr. (but redolent of Hayden's manifesto-writing style) -- and boy, it's even worse than I remember. For those of you saying it's not fair to blame progressives for deluding themselves about Obama, please read this, and then try to make the same argument. Some of my favorite lines below:

"All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama. We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country. We believe that the movement today supporting Barack Obama continues this great tradition of grassroots participation, drawing millions of people out of apathy and into participation in the decisions that affect all our lives. We believe that Barack Obama's very biography reflects the positive potential of the globalization process that also contains such grave threats to our democracy when shaped only by the narrow interests of private corporations in an unregulated global marketplace. We should instead be globalizing the values of equality, a living wage and environmental sustainability in the new world order, not hoping our deepest concerns will be protected by trickle-down economics or charitable billionaires. By its very existence, the Obama campaign will stimulate a vision of globalization from below….

"We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama's unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined…. We have the proven online capacity to reach millions of swing voters in the primary and general election. We can and will defend Obama against negative attacks from any quarter….

"We take very seriously the argument that Americans should elect a first woman President, and we abhor the surfacing of sexism in this supposedly post-feminist era. But none of us would vote for Condoleezza Rice as either the first woman or first African-American President. We regret that the choice divides so many progressive friends and allies, but believe that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a Clinton presidency all over again, not a triumph of feminism but a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed. A Clinton victory could only be achieved by the dashing of hope among millions of young people on whom a better future depends. The style of the Clintons' attacks on Obama, which are likely to escalate as her chances of winning decline, already risks losing too many Democratic and independent voters in November. We believe that the Hillary Clinton of 1968 would be an Obama volunteer today, just as she once marched in the snows of New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy against the Democratic establishment."

Oh, and I searched the whole thing: Not one word about Afghanistan. Not even the word "Afghanistan."

[...]

Struggle mightily and cheerfully to forgive yourself for your self-delusion, Tom Hayden and friends...

Clearly, and as Walsh admits, there is some bitterness left over from the 2008 primary here. But leaving that aside for a minute, we can probably all agree that in picking the Afghanistan escalation as his moment to shed his allegiance Hayden is making himself an easy target. Obama certainly spoke at length about Afghanistan being a "just war" both before and after the election; in fact even in his very first speech of note, when he opposed the Iraq war in 2002, he was careful to state "I am not opposed to all wars, just dumb wars," and in this belief he has been quite consistent.

More broadly, Walsh is also correct to note that Obama was never as left-wing on many issues as many liberals seemed to think he was. While there was a widespread belief that Obama was the more progressive candidate, did Obama ever really say he wouldn't staff his White House with ex-Clintonite, New Democrats from the Robert Rubin school of laissez-faire capitalism?

No. But I will say this: he sure as hell let us think so.

Walsh and the "realist" if not "moderate" Democrats that she channels here (she'd dislike that term, but it suits her argument) want us to believe that we're fools to think Obama was somehow different than Clinton or any other frightened, triangulating, centrist Democrat. But in asserting this smug superiority, they want to have it both ways. They want to bask in the president's inspiring rhetoric--in his ability, as Walsh said in a later post on the Afghanistan speech, to be carried away a bit by Obama's trademark rhetorical magic. Yet at the same time, they say that the details--the actual content of that magic--doesn't matter, or should be ignored. Because if we listen to what he actually says in his inspiring speeches, they do not describe a wussy, triangulating New Democrat. They describe a strong, resolute, committed liberal.

***

In his most widely celebrated speech, Obama recited a passage from Dreams From My Father that said:

"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."

He's talking about the universality of the African-American experience, but not only that. He's also explaining his political beliefs. The movement from slavery to freedom and the constant striving for rights, representation, and one's fair share is something that represents, in a very profound way, the aims and beliefs of American liberalism. In other words, there is a deeper meaning here, particularly given the larger context of the speech as intended to move past the Revered Wright uproar. He was trying to explain the important things about himself, and his beliefs, and why, in a country that had been scarred for so long by right-wing hateful rhetoric, people had nothing to fear from confronting the mistakes of the past--whether inflicted by Bush or by even worse legacies. He was trying to legitimize liberalism.

Think I'm reading too much into it? How about this?

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

Expanded education, health care, unions, expanded services for veterans, an end to the war in Iraq. (Not Afghanistan, no. But a stirring, emotional antiwar note nonetheless. Was it wrong to think he believed it?) These are all LIBERAL policy proposals. It's a speech aimed at defining Barack Obama as someone who does more than believe certain things. They animate his being. He is a crusader. He believes with all his heart.

***

Or at least he seemed to. And that "seemed," of course, contains all of Hayden's bitter disillusionment. Obama was a man who presented himself as an unrepentant liberal, specifics be damned. Whatever else you might say about Tom Hayden, he's a man who's spent his life believing passionately in certain things. Can you blame him for feeling inspired by that speech, for believing that it meant Obama was different? And can you really mock him now for feeling so betrayed?

In Obama's Afghanistan speech, Walsh found herself disappointed. The Obama magic wasn't there that night. Well, why not? Surely it couldn't have had anything to do with the content of the speech he was trying to make? With the fact that he was trying to justify escalating a war for bullshit reasons?

Obama was never about simple beliefs and magical unicorns. It was about liberalism. He won people over because he articulated liberalism. And now it turns out it was all bullshit. This is going to be a very difficult thing to handle.

Dionne finishes his piece by praising Obama's speech to the Nobel committee as mixing realism with idealism in some sort of ideal package. "It turns out that there is an Obama doctrine based on a quest for moral balance. Its central insistence is that it's possible to be tough-minded and idealistic, to adhere to a realism rooted in values." Unfortunately, right now that "moral balance" seems to consist mainly in appeasing as many Joe Lieberman Democrats as possible, until the liberal goals he claimed to have in the first place are extinguished altogether. I guess Dionne's point that, well, he hasn't really done what he said he'd do, but he still says it really nicely!

I guess we should have known better than to care about what his pretty words actually meant.

p. s. Obviously I don't buy the theory that Hillary voters knew all this ahead of time. They never truly heard him in the first place.

D'oh!

Crap, I just realized that the best line of all, that really does explain everything I meant to say (and which thereby refutes the whole point I was trying to make; oh well), actually comes later in the same song:

I wish I could write you a melody so plain

That could hold you, dear lady, from going insane

That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain

Of your useless and pointless knowledge.

This Machine Kills Fascists, Too

At the risk of drifting even further away from my stated goals for this blog...

The Monthly Review article from my last post reminded me of another article I first read a long time ago, but many times since.

Sometime in high school I was digging around in my parents' attic (I hung out up there a lot) when I stumbled upon a ratty old book (now out-of-print) called The Age of Paranoia: How the Sixties Ended. It was a collection of articles from the first few years of Rolling Stone magazine, organized into various sections, e.g.

--"Dope, Hair, and the Gentle Oppressors"

--"Other Alternatives in Action"

--"Keeping Up with the Mansons"

et cetera.

Some stuff was better than others; a long-winded investigative piece on the struggles of the underground press, for example, kinda gave the impression that every 17 year old in America started a newspaper in 1968 in order to explore the various psychosocial consequences of printing the word "motherfucker." On the other hand, a piece called "The Trial of the New Culture," by Gene Marine, told the heartbreaking farce of the Chicago 7 and was impossible to put down.

The very last piece in the book was a column by Ralph J. Gleason that first appeared in Rolling Stone in May, 1970. (It's naturally impossible to find this or any of the old RS stuff online, since why would anyone want to read articles from back in the day when Rolling Stone was a good magazine? I mean, that would be crazy.)

It was called "Fighting Fire with Fire: An End to Logic."

If you zip around the TV channels...you are bound to encounter Rev. Oral Roberts and Dr. Fred Schwartz. It is startling (not to say frightening) how much these men resemble Nixon and Agnew. Because Oral Roberts is a faith healer, it has been impossible for liberals, as an example, to look at him with objectivity and to analyze him. Because Fred Schwartz surfaced at the end of the McCarthy era (and spoke in an Australian accent as he tied his kangaroo down, Jack) it was possible for them also to regard him with objectivity. Both are instantly seen as religious extremists hallucinating a Communist devil against which to conduct their holy crusade and without which their babblings would have no reference point at all.

But Nixon and Agnew came from what is ordinarily considered respectable America (as opposed to faith healing, holy rollers or snake cults), and it has simply been impossible to get even the brightest of the TV commentators, no matter how opposed he may be to the deadly duo, to see either of them in that light.

But Nixon and Agnew, like Welch and the rest of the right-wingers, make what they say sound rational and they say it in a rational tone of voice (i.e. in ostensible calm and quiet) simply because they do not in any real way deal with American society in a rational manner. They do it by hallucination, with a kind of surrealism and with a religious commitment to angels and devils.

...

Goebbels' Big Lie caper was as cool as a freight train and as subtle as a crutch compared to the Catch-22 functioning of the American society. We are not invading Cambodia, Nixon/Agnew said as the troops marched in. We are not going to occupy Cambodia. In fact, we aren't even there! It's like Jimmy Durante in Jumbo, leading the elephant off the lot; when the cop yells "Where are you going with that elephant?" Durante asks, "What elephant?"

The pure purveyors of the new religion--Nixon, Agnew, Reagan, the Sacred Trinity of their hagiography--simply turn it all inside out, twist logic around, deny everything and go straight ahead doing what they say they are not doing. So-called decent people are in general too decent to make the challenge to them more than a formality.

What has been as irritating as the TV news people with Daley and Agnew and Reagan? No one even gave Ronnie Baby a bad time when he said of his own remark (that it made no difference where the bullet came from which killed the Santa Barbara student) that it was a "figure of speech."

Reagan was asked mildly didn't he think it contradictory for him to dismiss his own statement about the possible necessity of a bloodbath to quell student disturbances as a "figure of speech" while condemning [Black Panther spokesman] David Hilliard's dismissal of HIS statement about offing Nixon as a figure of speech?

No, Reagan didn't see the contradiction. And nobody pursued the point.

They never do. Because if you pursue the point, you get to be a nut like Lenny [Bruce] or [Eldridge] Cleaver or a conspirator or whatever it is that they want to label you as.

Now what all of this has meant to me for some time is the true bankruptcy of radical movements and politics, their utter inability to accomplish anything positive at all; because every time they are dealing with an insane situation and trying to deal with it logically. I do not think it can be dealt with by logic. History proves that, I believe. I do think that it can be dealt with--to what extent I don't know but to the extent it can be dealt with at all--by intuitive kinds of things. By poetry. By music. By art.

There is no effective way logically to react to the Presidential horror show of Cambodia any more than there was to the horror show of Vietnam. We send the telegrams and sign the petitions because we don't know what else to do. But the logical steps are useless and we know it.

...

If there is no way to change this world (always supposing we can live on it long enough to enjoy the change) without killing half of us, then fuck it. I'll do my best to have a ball and go out swinging. No violent revolution is worth it, no matter how you have to break eggs to make omelets and no matter where power comes out of. It also comes out of the mouths of poets and musicians and babes. ...

When I first read this, I thought here's a guy who's describing my mind. I felt that shock of recognition you get from accidentally walking past a mirror. It hit me.

Today, though, I'm not so sure. I mean, there is a real mood, a kind of hopeless hilarity here that is undeniably real for anyone who spends any time reading newspapers or watching television or otherwise attempting to become an informed citizen. But I also think Gleason might have been too caught up in his moment to realize that there really were amazing changes happening around him. I mean, I don't want to tick off a laundry list of differences between 1969 and 2009, but a black guy just got elected President. Important changes have happened in peoples lives in the last 40 years even if they weren't structural or fundamental in nature.

Now I won't dare argue that electing Obama--even in the abstract, much less his actual performance thus far as president--represented some kind of fundamental change. Obviously the kind of real change Gleason was talking about is an end to capitalism. And even in his moment, with all the revolutionary talk going on around him in 1970, it was painfully obvious that that was not going to happen.

I don't think it's going to happen today either--but this isn't a cause for despair.

The history of progressive change in this country is a series of moments when businessmen realized (or were made to realize) that they could still make money without necessarily doing things that happened to be morally repugnant. The end of slavery, women's emancipation, the Civil Rights movement, the child labor movement etc. were all battles where entrenched interests fought and often killed people in order to keep the status quo--and when they lost, they went back to making just as much money as they did before. Or maybe a little less. Even so, the extension of rights and votes and political protection to formerly disenfranchised groups often provided business with more opportunities to extend their reach than they had before. Again and again throughout history, the vested interests do everything in their power to protect their profits--even though they were never seriously threatened by the battle in the first place.

(Of course, this is what makes the astroturfers like Dick Armey so insane--they're whipping up mobs of hysteria and hate...in order to protect the astronomical profits of health insurance companies which are not at all threatened by the health care bills under consideration. If the bill (whatever bill, some bill) gets passed, it won't do anything to harm their profits. And if it does, by some incredible luck or chance, then the insurance companies will always find new ways to make money. They always do. So what are we going to do about it?)

I guess my point is that it's silly to get all bent out of shape by the fact that American capitalism wasn't defeated in 1970, when it was never even remotely threatened. Of course it's insane, and rapacious, and we're fucking Iraq and Afghanistan just like we fucked Vietnam; Catch-22 is no less applicable today than it was then. Milo Minderbinder is still buying eggs for 7 cents and selling for 5 and still making a profit. But understanding all this, difficult and disillusioning as it is, is not the end. It's the beginning.

***

On the other hand, Gleason's riff on the importance and function of art is wonderful. I suppose everything I'm trying to say can be expressed more clearly and forcefully in a Bob Dylan lyric. I'm thinking either:

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.

Or else maybe,

Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief

Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief

Saying, "Tell me great hero, but please make it brief

Is there a hole for me to get sick in?"

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly

Saying, "Death to all those who would whimper and cry!"

And dropping a bar bell he points to the sky

Saying, "The sun's not yellow it's chicken!"

Yeah, that one hits the spot.

Self-examination

Sorry for the delay in posting. I went home to see Mama and Papa T for Thanksgiving, and then I took the GREs this weekend, which I totally recommend to anyone who thinks they might enjoy sitting in a white room for 4 hours while being surveyed by 8 cameras on the ceiling to make sure nobody smokes drugs or dreams about opening the unauthorized candy bar they somehow smuggled past the 5 layers of security outside. I'm SO glad I only spent $150 for the privilege.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about an article by John Bellamy Foster from the Monthly Review a friend passed along a few weeks ago, tracing the evolution of American foreign policy, alongside the explosive growth of the military-industrial complex since WWII. It's long, but worth reading in full, particularly for the contrast it paints with the political debates I've been highlighting here.

In it, he says:

The immediate response of the Bush administration to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was to declare a universal and protracted global war on terrorism that was to double as a justification for the expansion of U.S. imperial power.

[..]

The unpopularity of geopolitical analysis after 1943 is usually attributed to its association with the Nazi strategy of world conquest. Yet the popular rejection of geopolitics in that period may have also arisen from the deeper recognition that classical geopolitics in all of its forms was an inherently imperialist and war-related doctrine. As the critical geopolitical analyst Robert Strausz-Hupé argued in 1942, “In Geopolitik there is no distinction between war and peace. All states have the urge to expand, and the process of expansion is viewed as a perpetual warfare—no matter whether military power is actually applied or is used to implement ‘peaceful’ diplomacy as a suspended threat.”

U.S. imperial geopolitics is ultimately aimed at creating a global space for capitalist development. It is about forming a world dedicated to capital accumulation on behalf of the U.S. ruling class—and to a lesser extent the interlinked ruling classes of the triad powers as a whole (North America, Europe, and Japan). Despite “the end of colonialism” and the rise of “anti-capitalist new countries,” Business Week pronounced in April 1975, there has always been “the umbrella of American power to contain it....[T]he U.S. was able to fashion increasing prosperity among Western countries, using the tools of more liberal trade, investment, and political power. The rise of the multinational corporation was the economic expression of this political framework.”

People who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 typically did so because they believed that there was no substantive difference between the major parties. When Bush subsequently stole the election and wrecked the country, many Democrats reserved a particular animus for Nader voters, shrieking that they and their foolish "idealism" were at least somewhat responsible for what happened. Al Gore wouldn't have launched an unprovoked war based on lies, they said; Al Gore wouldn't have built legal black holes and tortured prisoners and all the rest.

But as Foster's article indicates, the most egregious crimes of the Bush Administration should be seen not as aberrations but instead as the entirely natural outgrowths of our foreign policy consensus.

Sure, there are Democrats in Congress who challenge some of these basic geopolitical assumptions. But they don't hold any power. The purse strings are always given to the right people, and those are the people, Democrat or Republican, who never question the central tenets of our foreign policy.

***

I live in DC, and I have a few friends who work on the Hill--most as Democratic Congressional or Senatorial aides of some sort. Whenever we get together and talk politics, it quickly becomes clear that, while we generally agree on domestic policy issues, we might as well be from different planets when it comes to foreign policy. To put it plainly, they think my understanding of the issues is shallow and naive. The conversation usually hinges on the various options available to the president regarding troops in Afghanistan. My friends talk about the political infighting, the difficulty of getting the Karzai government to stop being corrupt, the various carrots and sticks available (always vague, nobody knows any hard data; nobody says anything not already in the public record, of course). I nod, and say, "yeah, but what the fuck are we doing there in the first place?"

At that point, my friends smile and make a quick calculation. Am I serious? There's a lot of mind games going on on the Hill; access and information are key, and so being able to joke and take a joke is of vital importance. But it's also vitally important to look down upon those views that are not part of the debate. Once my friend realizes that I'm serious, his smile gets bigger. "Well, sure," he says, his voice patting me on the head, "but we're there now." And if I want to learn what the options are, if I want to hear about the politics that surround the most horrible and weighted decisions a country can make, I need to forget about asking those irrelevant questions. Those kinds of questions, to the Hill people, are quite literally of zero importance. We're there now. What are we going to do about it? We can't leave. We have a commitment (in money and bases and outsourced warmaking et al). I can either man up and play the geopolitical game--literally the only game in this town--or I can sit here in my fantasy world and imagine how I'd like the world to be. Everyone gets another round, and the conversation moves on.

***

Here's the thing, though: the Monthly Review is a socialist journal. Its first published article, called "Why Socialism?" was written by Albert Einstein in 1949. Its critique of American empire comes from the same place as the question I asked my friends: a fundamental reevaluation of basic tenets underlying our foreign policy. So does this mean that the very act of examining those fundamental assumptions is a socialist act? Was my question a socialist question? Is what I do in this blog an act of socialist media criticism? And if so, does that mean that I'm not a liberal? And does that mean that there is no hope for the Democratic party? That I should peddle my story to somebody who cares? That the Democrats are just the benign face of American imperialism, the "mommy imperialist" to contrast with the dumb, angry, alcoholic, wife-and-child-abusing Republican daddy imperialist?

Well yeah, maybe. But whatever my personal political beliefs, I seem to always vote Democratic when the time comes. Of course, given the choice, I'd prefer a Democrat who understands and fears the way American imperialism works. (This was part of Obama's allure--he seemed like a politician who might actually read things like the Monthly Review.) But just because the party leaders are eager beneficiaries of the geopolitical outlook, that doesn't mean they'll always be in charge. Sure, that sounds a little crazy. But imagine if we had more people like Grayson or Bernie Sanders in office and taking on leadership roles? It's a long road, but changing the rhetoric has to be the start.

Am I living in a fantasy world? Maybe. But if so, it's a lot more hopeful than the world in which liberals sit around, drink beer and argue whether 30,000 or 50,000 is the number of troops necessary to kill all the terrorists. Those people aren't liberals. It can't hurt to try and reclaim the term for people who are.

And if that means we need to learn a thing or two from a Socialist magazine, well, who cares? The crazies think anyone to the left of Sarah Palin is a socialist anyway. They won't know the real thing from a smack in the face.