The Privilege Trailer
All We Are Saying, Is Give Hope a Chance
Roosevelt had called for a “New Deal for the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic heap” in a direct appeal to the working class and the poor that few if any major party candidates had ever made. He already had a record as Governor of New York supporting pro labor and pro social welfare policies, even though those policies had only been enacted in a very limited way. New forces, progressive and largely independent political forces ,were already rallying around him.
I would say the same thing today about Senator Barack Obama. He has a solid record as a progressive in both the Illinois State Legislature and the US Senate. His campaign has mobilized independent non party progressive forces in a way unprecedented excepting the mobilization of non party forces of the religious right behind the Republicans, since the McGovern campaign of 1972 (and his chances of victory today and infinitely stronger than McGovern’s then). Those who are attacking him from the left because of his inconsistencies and lack of specific policies are ignoring both what American politics is and what he is and can become.
Hopefully, McCain and his party will go down to the crushing defeat that the Bush administration and the congressional GOP has richly earned in this coming watershed election. If we are successful in making that happen, an Obama administration will be in a position to address both the present crisis and begin to reverse the disastrous policies of a generation. If we don’t succeed, 1932 on an even grander scale will very likely be the shape of things to come.
Political Affairs Magazine – Bush, Herbert Hoover, and Memories of the Great Depression.Norman Markowitz
Markowitz reminds me that my worries about Obama, particularly his “liberal-as-conservative” centrist rhetoric, has one major ambiguity: events on the ground. It’s not certain, in other words, that the policies of an Obama presidency will be as timid as those of the candidate.
Maybe we are all hoping for some sort of magic, one moment evoking one or more Kennedys, the next F.D.R. Only time will tell, of course. But I think FDR might be the better precedent, particularly if the economy continues to tank. McCain is certainly Hoover like in his love of the powers-that-be.
Even if the economy is just all dull and listless, as it has been recently, but not Depressed, the idea is still sound. If both House and Senate are Democratic, for example, we can fight for a single-payer plan; they could substance to any green building program.
I don’t why Obama would stop laws to make organizing easier; we can keep his feet to the fire about the war on the one hand, and the bases in Iraq, on the other. I certainly would rather have a Democratic administration in the case of another Rita or Katrina. So maybe hope really is an option.
Really Excellent Sheep
When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.
The American Scholar – The Disadvantages of an Elite Education By William Deresiewicz.
This might be one of those articles in which a very privileged person suddenly wakes up to their privileges and starts feeling all bad and stuff. It might be a serious attack on class privileges too. The real problems is that academics tend to see writing and teaching in almost magical terms.
Deresiewicz, in other words, is not going to go so far as to argue in favor of those other forms of power– union organizing, say– that have historically been used by those people he has so much trouble talking to, that is, working people.
Teaching and writing are fine things, of course, but it’s hard to imagine how a shift in curriculum, or even hundreds of articles and dozens of new courses, are going to wrest power away from those Yale Alumni and their ilk. They may be sheep, but they are well-organized sheep.
Fool Me Once, Shame on You, Fool Me Twice…
We have seen, for example, that after nearly thirty years of bipartisan government-bashing, even in the wake of massive catastrophes like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the notion of public obligation to provide for the citizenry’s well-being is steadily being wiped out of public consciousness. (And, by the way, those precocious NGO engineers are energetically instrumental in doing a lot of the wiping.) And it’s crucially important for those who identify with the left to recognize that there is no designated moment at which the crisis becomes intolerable and “the People” either “wake up” or “rise.” That is simply not the way politics works. Absent concerted, organized intervention, it could go on indefinitely, with all kinds of inventive scapegoating available to stigmatize the previous rounds of losers and provide desperate reassurances to the next. And that would be a political situation and social order likely to grow ever uglier and more dangerous.
blackagendareport.com –Where Obamaism Seems to be Going, Adolph Reed, Jr.
Obama has seemed to me, from the very start, as a Liberal’s Liberal. At one level he’s inspiring, if for no other reason than the fact that he’s an African American man seemingly doing the impossible. I’ll vote for he for that reason alone.
On the other hand, he’s gone from vague to right-of-center faster than anyone would have predicted. One reading might suggest that he tried to look progressive to beat Senator Clinton, and is not trying to look like Senator Clinton in order to beat Senator McCain.
That seems logical to me and it makes me angry. I think this is what I hear in Reed’s rant against fake progressive politics. What we don’t know, yet, is just how deep Obamma’s pragmatism runs or in what vein. I just don’t believe he’s an empty opportunist, although he is clearly ambitious.
Phil Ochs saw this sort of opportunism in the Liberals who opposed the war only in so far and it could get them elected. They were certainly responsible for keeping the Vietnam War alive years longer than public sentiment and common sense would dictate.
On the other hand, I won’t believe he has truly progressive intentions until, say, he get’s elected and changes his mind in favor of a single-payer plan. I won’t believe his progressive intentions until he outlines an true green jobs program. The list could go on forever.
The point is that I will vote for Obama, even if I suspect that he’s more liberal than left, because I think it’s less risky than voting for McCain/Bush. McCain is never going to shut down those bases in Iraq, no matter what public sentiment says; he’ll Hoover away as the economy goes down in flames.