http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/11/election-post-m.html
Brian Leiter on Obama:
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.
--ravi
--
Support something better than yourself ;-)
PeTA => http://peta.org/
Greenpeace => http://greenpeace.org/
If you have nothing better to read: http://platosbeard.org/
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
