Obama and His Discontents

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I’ve been reading a piece in Workplace,”The NEA Representative Assembly of 2010: A Longer View of Crisis and Consciousness,” by Rick Gibson, and thinking about the political dynamics that helped to create the social programs put into place by Roosevelt at the height of the Great Depression. Or, rather, I have been thinking about a particular theory about social security, unemployment insurance and the wide range of other programs that make up what came to be known as the welfare, or social welfare, system.

The theory– I have no idea where it originated– is that FDR was a middle of the road liberal, more paternalistic than revolutionary, until leftist forces began to exert pressure. To use contemporary terminology, FDR backed these very left leaning programs becuase he feared that he would loose his base to more radical elements or, perhaps, even to violent insurrection. So it’s not the election, and subsequent re-election, of a liberal democrat that succeeded, it’s the dynamic interaction between a liberal president and the left-leaning subset of his party.

In the first two years of the Obama administration the so-called progressive or left wing of the Democratic party seemed to go into hibernation as Obama, like FDR a middle of the road Democrat, seemed to reproduce if not strengthen the Republican policies of the Bush administration, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to education. Gibson’s piece begins with a long catalog of these failures, in hopes of trying to understand the social context that lies behind or beneath the NEA’s recent Representative Assembly.

Gibson is deeply disappointed in the NEA’s seeming complacence but on other fronts Obama may be finally feeling the pressure that was, arguably, crucial to FDR’s successes. (Gibson is informative but long winded; a concise article might be more effective with an academic audience. I also think, ironically, that he isn’t sufficiently aware of the force of historical dialectic.) We are all galled by the tax cuts for the rich, just as we were insulted by the Race to the Top programs. Let’s hope that the increasingly loud complaints will have some force.

Posted in: Writing

Class Struggle

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It’s a cliche by now to say that Americans don’t discuss or really understand class. It’s more accurate, though, to say that those Americans who profess to have some understanding of American society and economics don’t understand class. It’s a cliche, but it’s still true: class is almost invisible here in the United States, at least in official discourse.

Of course, if you are one of the many getting poorer– or the millions without insurance or unemployed– you know class all too well. Class, as Marx famously said, is always a class struggle for working people, a kind of ongoing, constant battle to keep yourself afloat. Lots of people in the U.S. seemed to believe that by creating a large, affluent middle class we ended this struggle for good.

We haven’t, of course, and we are paying a high price for our complacency. We’ve reached a point, in fact, where the only way we can get the most basic kinds of social support– unemployment insurance, even a temporary raise in our wages– is by paying off the rich. We get a tiny 2% break in taxes and another year of unemployment insurance. The rich get billions.

So the Chronicle of Higher Education’s statistical portrait of the undergraduate population ought to be much less of a surprise. As it turns out, just as wages have declined, and the costs of college have been increasingly shifted to the individual, fewer and fewer students “live on leafy campuses and party hard—many others are commuters, full-time workers, and parents.”

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

White Elephants

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If you spend a little time reading around on the education media, you get a strong sense of impending doom. The private, for-profit universities are facing powerful new regulations that may well shut them down or curtail operations; at least one, Kaplan, is already announcing lay offs. The private, not for profits, long almost completely unregulated, face increasing calls for regulations and accountability. Everything’s up for grabs; the room’s full of white elephants.

The public universities have been in an almost constant state of financial crisis for many years, and even the money-printing athletic conferences are, in fact, often operating in the red. The long festering problems centered around the destruction of tenure and the over reliance on part time faculty are beginning to be reflected in increasingly clear ways in the research into college teaching. Educators love to use the rhetoric of crisis, but it may be justified now.

Posted in: Professional, Union, Writing