US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty by Lance Selfa

Author:Lance Selfa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2017-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

The Price of Defending “Hollow Tenets”

Assuming power in 2009 as the economic crisis hit with full ferocity, the Democrats were destined to face a difficult situation. But they also had an opportunity because they were thrust into a position to reorder American politics in the face of obvious crises. As Aziz Rana explained the conjuncture:

At a moment when the country faced convulsive social crises, and more and more of [Obama’s] supporters called for a fundamental reconstruction of American institutions, Obama marshaled his personal story and oratorical gifts to defend hollow tenets: the righteousness of American primacy, the legitimacy of global market liberalism, the need for incremental reform, the danger of large-scale structural overhaul. The consequence—intensified by a virulent right—was that fundamental problems continued to fester and became harder to ignore: mass incarceration and structural racism, dramatic class disparities in power and opportunity, interventionism abroad, and national-security abuses at home.22

The price of Obama’s defense of these, in Rana’s words, “hollow tenets” and the Democrats’ “suspicion of politics formed through mass democratic mobilization” was demoralization and despair that led eventually to the Trump disaster.

An honest assessment of the Obama years would also note the myriad ways—from championing austerity politics, to education privatization, to building a machine that deported more than two million undocumented immigrants—paved the way for Trump’s policies. Obama and the Democratic Party—the so-called party of the people—managed to position themselves as the chief defenders of a status quo that had led millions of Americans to despair. However cynically, the GOP managed to channel public outrage with that status quo into two “wave” midterm elections and an improbable presidential victory in 2016.

In the summer of 2009, when liberal commentators were waxing on about the potential of Obama to become another transformative president in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt, the writer Kevin Baker aired the unorthodox view that Obama was more comparable to Herbert Hoover, the Republican Roosevelt defeated in 1932.

Much like Hoover, “Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past—without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail.” Obama’s penchant to reach for compromise and “bipartisanship” was exactly the opposite of what the dire situation he inherited required—and what the American populace was ready for. Obama’s first term, Baker wrote, offered “one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disas-ter.”23 In the wake of the election of Trump, Baker’s analysis looks more prescient than ever.

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