As all readers know, Obama won the election by a safe margin in both the popular vote and the electoral college (the latter being America's strange system to insure that there isn't too much popular input into who is elected President). This is certainly a happier outcome than the one four years ago. As I remarked before, Obama is educated and he is civilized, and there are reasons to hope that he has a capacity for genuine imaginative empathy with other human beings, unlike the current morally vacant occupant of the White House. That capacity alone might make a meaningful difference.
The Democrats--the generally prudent wing of the Republocrat Party--made gains in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, but not as much as had been hoped--indeed, it looks like, in the Senate, the Democrats will be well short of a filibuster-proof majority of 60, especially when one remembers that one of the "Democrats" is the McCain supporter and all-around reprehensible human being Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. That fact will put significant constraints on the kinds of nominations to the federal courts Obama can pursue, though there is reason to hope that he may still be able to have a decisive influence on the shape of the U.S. Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court matters, however, far less than most lay people believe: vide Gerald Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope and L.A. Powe, Jr., The Warren Court and American Politics: the Court is, in short, mainly a follower, not a leader, when it comes to social and economic policy.)
The NY Times opines that Obama's "triumph was decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens." This, alas, is nonsense: one need only recall that two months ago, Obama/Biden were in a dead heat with the war-monger and the ignorant yahoo. Only the intervention of the quasi-collapse of the financial system tipped the scales decisively to Obama. That the margin of victory was not even more decisive, given the economic catastrophe, is somewhat troubling. Perhaps lingering racism explains it, it is rather hard to know.
Herewith some of my thoughts about the Obama victory, a victory I certainly welcome.
Obviously it is notable that less than two generations after the end of apartheid in the United States, an African-American has been elected President of the country. That is certainly salutary, but not nearly as important as the fact that the African-American who is assuming this position of national and international prominence is neither a bizarre reactionary like Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court nor complicit in world-historic criminality like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice. Instead, the new African-American President is a 'liberal' and 'progressive' in some sense of those terms. The American right has done well at co-opting the increasingly mindless liberal rhetoric of "diversity" on behalf of its reactionary agenda--witness Thomas, Powell, and Rice--but perhaps, with the election of an African-American President who is not a reactionary, we may now observe that the fact that he is an African-American is one of the least important facts about his victory.
The United States, for those who are old enough to remember, went "off the rails" as a civilized country with Reagan's election in 1980 and the triumph of naked plutocracy that it signalled. Reagan gave us unabashed union-busting, massive wealth redistribution to the super rich, the first fake "war on terrorism" (that one never gained much traction), total neglect of the AIDS epidemic (at the cost of millions of lives), a criminal surrogate war of aggression and terrorism against Nicarauga, and, ironically enough, a classically Keynsian economic stimulus package in the form of massive deficit-spending on military hardware. The legacy of that period has now been so thoroughly white-washed in popular American culture that it is almost unrecognizable, but both the whitewash and its legacy are indicative of the additional damage that Reagan did to the nation by debasing the language and shifting the entire spectrum of what could pass as 'sane' opinion to the far right. The consequences of this cultural catastrophe has been with us since: eight years of a Democratic presidency under Clinton predicated on domestic policies that were (except on a few social issues) far to the right of Richard Nixon; the idea that a national media which is almost unrelenting in its apologetics for the plutocracy somehow suffers from "liberal bias" because it doesn't reliably indulge the prejudices of religious-inspired bigots and other ignoramuses; and, most recently, the idea that Reagan represented some inspiring "conservative" ideal that has been betrayed by George W. Bush and his bestiary of madmen, people who are not only Reagan's heirs in terms of policy, but in many cases, in terms of being the very same people carrying out the policies of a plutocracy run amok!
I confess I was hoping for a victory of Obama and the Democrats that had been more decisive--both in the popular vote (and without the intervention of an economic crisis) and in the Senate and House results--such that we might safely conclude that the country in which my children live was finally back "on the rails" of post-Enlightenment civilization. Right now, I'm unsure. The "lunatic right"--in America, this is now mostly a redundant phrase--thinks that Obama is a "Marxist" and a "socialist." One may hope they are right--and, contrary to Professor Myers, with whose general cautionary remarks I am in basic agreement, there is actually some reason to think that though he ran as a mealy-mouthed centrist, he may in fact pursue a far more progressive agenda, certainly one more progressive than Clinton's. But there isn't only the question of whether Obama will be more progressive than his endless forays into public pop-psychotherapy would let on--it's also whether what constitutes the "right" in American politics will change. It is hard not to agree with the sentiments of the economist Brad DeLong (Berkeley) who observed that, "This Republican Party needs to be burned, razed to the ground, and the furrows sown with salt."
Why couldn't the United States have a multi-party system like Canada's in which the "conservative" opposition consists not of some alagamation of moral troglodytes, free-market utopians unhinged from reality, and unabashed apostles of self-enrichment at the expense of the majority, but rather represents those ready to engage in a reasonably rational contest with the social democratic left over the best, realistic means by which to promote human well-being along all its dimensions? Terms like "liberal" and "conservative" function in popular discourse as indexicals: what they refer to depends entirely on the speaker. If an Obama Presidency can change the referents of these terms in the United States, such that "conservative" no longer picks out people whose views would put them on the borderline sociopathic right of most civilized nations, he will have done something quite important. Whether he can do that and cope with the domestic and foreign catastrophes that are the legacy of the last quarter-century is the question now before the world. One can only hope he succeeds.
UPDATE: A propos the themes in the last two paragraphs, this short blog posting by Krugman is apt.
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