What is the Significance of the Election of Barack Hussein Obama?
Nov 11, 2008 15:39 Filed in: Politics
There is only one thing of which we can be certain: a majority of the voters have become so dissatisfied with the direction of this nation that they are willing to elect a person they perceive to be significantly different from the incumbent, in the hope that he will bring about positive change. The closeness of the popular vote, however, makes it clear that a sizable percentage of the voters who believe that the country is going in the wrong direction still voted for a candidate virtually certain to keep it going in the same direction and to continue unchanged the policies of the Bush administration. This segment of the electorate bears careful watching and study. Some of it can be attributed to racial prejudice, pure and simple. The Moslem-sounding name may have alarmed some voters too lazy to inquire any further, perhaps the same voters that chose to remain ignorant of Bush’s questionable past when they voted for him in 2000 and 2004.
But now that Obama has become the president-elect, we would be wise, in our celebrations of electoral victory, to remain mindful of the powerful forces that make it very difficult for a chief executive to bring about substantial systemic change. Too many institutions have grown fat on the generosity of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, and there is nothing to which they will not stoop to retain what they are now getting. This is particularly true of the beneficiaries of the Iraq invasion and occupation but it is also true of all well-connected businesses and organizations that have been favored over their less Republican competitors. In addition, the promiscuous number of governmental agencies, particularly those related to “national security”—a term that has now become a euphemism for the maintenance and extension of the American Empire—with powerful constituencies in and out of government, have come to regard their fiefdoms, often concealed behind the shield of secrecy, as sacrosanct.
That Obama is not a wild-eyed radical was clearly revealed by the faces lined up behind him the other day when he delivered his short press conference on the economic crisis. Dinosaur Paul Volcker, Carter’s appointment as chair of the Federal Reserve System, appears to be in the forefront of Obama’s economic advisors. Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, Wall Street operatives who played a major role in deregulating the securities and banking industry, and who thus bear considerable responsibility for the present crisis, are said to be on the short list for Treasury secretary. Rahm Emanuel, an Israeli citizen legitimately described as a diehard Likudnik, will be Obama’s chief of staff, so the likelihood of justice and a real homeland for the Palestinian people appears to be off the table.
A friend writes: “I predict that Emanuel and Summers will be the least of what’s objectionable about the new White House crew. Zion siegt! Apparently neither perps nor victims ever learn, only historians.”
By definition, historical perspective is ex post facto. I recently read that President James Garfield could write Latin with one hand while simultaneously writing Greek with the other. He died too quickly from an assassin’s bullet for his performance as president to be assessed.
Obama likewise is an intellectual. He taught constitutional law for years at one of the finest law schools in the nation. He reads; he reflects. The most influential philosophers in his life are Reinhold Niebuhr and Nietzsche, which puts him an unusual category. This guy carries in his head a substantial quantity of apperceptive mass.
It remains, however, to be seen whether he—or anyone, for that matter—can stand upright in the face of the tsunami of late-stage finance capitalism, broken and corrupt as it may be. But if he fails—and failure is likely—his fall will at least have a tragic component.
Tragedy is always preferable to farce, at least when the future is at stake.
Emerson wrote that the great confide themselves childlike to the genius of their age. Augustus became the first Roman emperor because the time and circumstances demanded a monarch. Peracles led Athens because Athens had reached a point in its development (empire) that demanded a person with his talents. Like a surfer catching the right wave, Lincoln rode the tide, the Zeitgeist, into greatness, but at the cost of his own life. Roosevelt swept into power on a wave of suffering and revulsion at the crookedness and predations of Wall Street, and enacted the New Deal.
The question today is not so much Obama, but the direction of the tide. Jimmy Carter was a good and able man, I believe, but from the viewpoint of career-enhancement, he was swimming in the wrong direction. The right wing think-tanks, foundations, and mass media in the service of the corporate and rentier class had changed the mindscape of the nation. The delusions of supply-side economics—an intellectual fraud of the first water—conditioned the voters to accept the systematic dismantling of much of the New Deal that has occurred since January 20, 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president.
In the wake of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the increasing third-worldization of our nation, together with the burst of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial meltdown, this nation might be ready to listen to someone who can articulate alternative paths, who doesn’t mouth uncritical hymns to the virtues of laissez faire capitalism while filling the coffers of the wealthy out of the public purse, who doesn’t believe that social Darwinism is the answer to all the problems of the world, and, perhaps most important of all, doesn’t believe that the only path to national prosperity lies in plundering the rest of the world, especially the poorer nations who cannot resist.
Maybe.
It is, however, already beginning to look as though the financial elite may succeed in keeping the genie of real change in the bottle this time around. Clearly, they saw the crisis coming, and probably were intending for the collapse to happen after the presidential election, when an increasingly senile Republican president-elect and his raptorial vice president-elect would offer no resistance to whatever plans that had already been made to complete the transfer of vast public wealth into private hands. It will not be as smooth as originally planned, but when Obama takes office on January 20, 2009, he will still be presented with a fait accompli that will require years to undo, that is, if it is even possible to undo all the damage. In this quest, he will be bitterly opposed by all those powers that profited from the previous regime.
So, dear reader, the question we must ask is not whether Obama is ready to be president, but whether the time is right for the changes that must be made to preserve our republic, and ultimately human life on the Earth. Is it we who are ready, in other words? Absent this precondition, the most able and prepared president hasn’t a chance.
Remember Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? Brutus participated in the killing of Caesar, but when he afterwards explained to the mob that he killed his friend and benefactor Caesar to save the republic, there were immediate calls from the mob to make him king. Brutus was resisting a current that ultimately swept him away on the plains of Phillipi. The Roman republic had already ceased to exist in the hearts of the people; there was no republic to save.
So far, I have not seen the kind of willingness that makes for positive revolutionary change, but I live in Mississippi, which is hardly a representative sample of the U.S. Nevertheless, I still suspect it will require something far more serious than the current public discomfiture to render the collective psyche capable of accepting what every sensible and knowledgeable individual knows should have been done twenty years ago. It would have been easy then. Too bad.
My expectations today are not high, but I would like to be pleasantly surprised.
Update: If you think Obama is a socialist, read what the socialists are saying about him.
But now that Obama has become the president-elect, we would be wise, in our celebrations of electoral victory, to remain mindful of the powerful forces that make it very difficult for a chief executive to bring about substantial systemic change. Too many institutions have grown fat on the generosity of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, and there is nothing to which they will not stoop to retain what they are now getting. This is particularly true of the beneficiaries of the Iraq invasion and occupation but it is also true of all well-connected businesses and organizations that have been favored over their less Republican competitors. In addition, the promiscuous number of governmental agencies, particularly those related to “national security”—a term that has now become a euphemism for the maintenance and extension of the American Empire—with powerful constituencies in and out of government, have come to regard their fiefdoms, often concealed behind the shield of secrecy, as sacrosanct.
That Obama is not a wild-eyed radical was clearly revealed by the faces lined up behind him the other day when he delivered his short press conference on the economic crisis. Dinosaur Paul Volcker, Carter’s appointment as chair of the Federal Reserve System, appears to be in the forefront of Obama’s economic advisors. Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, Wall Street operatives who played a major role in deregulating the securities and banking industry, and who thus bear considerable responsibility for the present crisis, are said to be on the short list for Treasury secretary. Rahm Emanuel, an Israeli citizen legitimately described as a diehard Likudnik, will be Obama’s chief of staff, so the likelihood of justice and a real homeland for the Palestinian people appears to be off the table.
A friend writes: “I predict that Emanuel and Summers will be the least of what’s objectionable about the new White House crew. Zion siegt! Apparently neither perps nor victims ever learn, only historians.”
By definition, historical perspective is ex post facto. I recently read that President James Garfield could write Latin with one hand while simultaneously writing Greek with the other. He died too quickly from an assassin’s bullet for his performance as president to be assessed.
Obama likewise is an intellectual. He taught constitutional law for years at one of the finest law schools in the nation. He reads; he reflects. The most influential philosophers in his life are Reinhold Niebuhr and Nietzsche, which puts him an unusual category. This guy carries in his head a substantial quantity of apperceptive mass.
It remains, however, to be seen whether he—or anyone, for that matter—can stand upright in the face of the tsunami of late-stage finance capitalism, broken and corrupt as it may be. But if he fails—and failure is likely—his fall will at least have a tragic component.
Tragedy is always preferable to farce, at least when the future is at stake.
Emerson wrote that the great confide themselves childlike to the genius of their age. Augustus became the first Roman emperor because the time and circumstances demanded a monarch. Peracles led Athens because Athens had reached a point in its development (empire) that demanded a person with his talents. Like a surfer catching the right wave, Lincoln rode the tide, the Zeitgeist, into greatness, but at the cost of his own life. Roosevelt swept into power on a wave of suffering and revulsion at the crookedness and predations of Wall Street, and enacted the New Deal.
The question today is not so much Obama, but the direction of the tide. Jimmy Carter was a good and able man, I believe, but from the viewpoint of career-enhancement, he was swimming in the wrong direction. The right wing think-tanks, foundations, and mass media in the service of the corporate and rentier class had changed the mindscape of the nation. The delusions of supply-side economics—an intellectual fraud of the first water—conditioned the voters to accept the systematic dismantling of much of the New Deal that has occurred since January 20, 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president.
In the wake of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the increasing third-worldization of our nation, together with the burst of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial meltdown, this nation might be ready to listen to someone who can articulate alternative paths, who doesn’t mouth uncritical hymns to the virtues of laissez faire capitalism while filling the coffers of the wealthy out of the public purse, who doesn’t believe that social Darwinism is the answer to all the problems of the world, and, perhaps most important of all, doesn’t believe that the only path to national prosperity lies in plundering the rest of the world, especially the poorer nations who cannot resist.
Maybe.
It is, however, already beginning to look as though the financial elite may succeed in keeping the genie of real change in the bottle this time around. Clearly, they saw the crisis coming, and probably were intending for the collapse to happen after the presidential election, when an increasingly senile Republican president-elect and his raptorial vice president-elect would offer no resistance to whatever plans that had already been made to complete the transfer of vast public wealth into private hands. It will not be as smooth as originally planned, but when Obama takes office on January 20, 2009, he will still be presented with a fait accompli that will require years to undo, that is, if it is even possible to undo all the damage. In this quest, he will be bitterly opposed by all those powers that profited from the previous regime.
So, dear reader, the question we must ask is not whether Obama is ready to be president, but whether the time is right for the changes that must be made to preserve our republic, and ultimately human life on the Earth. Is it we who are ready, in other words? Absent this precondition, the most able and prepared president hasn’t a chance.
Remember Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? Brutus participated in the killing of Caesar, but when he afterwards explained to the mob that he killed his friend and benefactor Caesar to save the republic, there were immediate calls from the mob to make him king. Brutus was resisting a current that ultimately swept him away on the plains of Phillipi. The Roman republic had already ceased to exist in the hearts of the people; there was no republic to save.
So far, I have not seen the kind of willingness that makes for positive revolutionary change, but I live in Mississippi, which is hardly a representative sample of the U.S. Nevertheless, I still suspect it will require something far more serious than the current public discomfiture to render the collective psyche capable of accepting what every sensible and knowledgeable individual knows should have been done twenty years ago. It would have been easy then. Too bad.
My expectations today are not high, but I would like to be pleasantly surprised.
Update: If you think Obama is a socialist, read what the socialists are saying about him.
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