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Notes on Building a Left in the Age of Obama By Paul Street So how and why might I have been willing (somewhat grudgingly) to help Obama get elected (even as I protest-voted for Nader) in the fall of 2008? Beyond the calculation (I cannot lie), I held out two ironic sorts of hope (if I might employ that deeply abused word) for his election. The first such wish was that mass disappointment with a President Obama’s (certain) betrayal of the popular expectations (for democratic transformation) he would ride to the presidency might help move progressively inclined citizens off candidate-focused election spectacles and into Chomsky and Zinn’s “main task” of building grassroots socio-political movements. The second hope held that the corporate Democrats are better able to deceptively pose as a progressive alternative to business class and imperial rule and the Republicans when they are out of office than when they are in nominal power. They are less able to hide their essential identity as the other business and empire party (what former Richard Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips once aptly termed “history’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party”) when they sit atop the political system. I thought it was essential and useful for American citizens, especially younger ones to experience life under a Democratic presidential administration. It seemed to me that most serious middle-aged and senior lefties didn’t require an education from Obama (or alternatively a president Hillary Clinton) on the bipartisan nature of the U.S. profits system and the related American Empire Project. But many in a new and younger generation of real and potential left progressives did need that instruction. They had come of political age in a time mainly of Republican rule, helping make them prone to the illusion that party re-branding atop top government offices might constitutes some sort of dramatic transformation. No amount of lecturing or warning on past Democratic betrayals from older progressives could begin to match the lived experience of Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel, Hillary Clinton, and Harry Reid et al.'s right-center policy and practice when it came to learning that (in Doug Henwood’s words) "everything still pretty much sucks" when Democrats hold the top jobs in the American System. An Obama and Democratic victory in the 2008 elections, would, I hoped, help deliver a vital lesson on the richly bipartisan nature of what I call “American Empire and Inequality, Inc.” Perhaps nobody expressed my sense of the relevant if ironic sort of optimism that a leftist could attach to the prospect of an Obama presidency than the incisive Brooklyn-based Marxist commentator Doug Henwood. As Henwood argued at the end of a March 2008 essay that criticized, among other things, Obama’s subservience to big capital, Obama’s militarism, Obama’s disingenuous claims to be against the Iraq War, Obama’s “empty” slogans, Obama’s “fan club,” and Obama’s denial of the extent of racial inequality in the U.S: “Enough critique; the dialectic demands something constructive to induce some forward motion. There's no doubt that Obamalust does embody some phantasmic longing for a better world -more peaceful, egalitarian, and humane. He'll deliver little of that – but there's evidence of some admirable popular desires behind the crush. And they will inevitably be disappointed.” full: http://www.zcommunications.org/notes-on-building-a-left-in-the-age-of-obama-by-paul-street ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
