Beyond the Bailout State
Roosevelt's Brain Trust vs Obama's Brainiacs
By Steve Fraser
On a December day in 1932, with the country prostrate under the weight
of the Great Depression, ex-president Calvin Coolidge -- who had
presided over the reckless stock market boom of the Jazz Age Twenties
(and famously declaimed that "the business of America is business") --
confided to a friend: "We are in a new era to which I do not belong." He
punctuated those words, a few weeks later, by dying.
A similar premonition grips the popular imagination today. A new era
beckons. No person has been more responsible for arousing that
expectation than President-elect Barack Obama. From beginning to end,
his presidential campaign was born aloft by invocations of the "fierce
urgency of now," by "change we can believe in," by "yes, we can!" and by
the obvious significance of his race and generation. Not surprisingly
then, as the gravity of the national economic calamity has become
terrifyingly clearer, yearnings for salvation have attached themselves
ever more firmly to the incoming administration.
This is as it should be -- and as it once was. When in March 1933, a few
months after Coolidge gave up the ghost, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was
inaugurated president, people looked forward to audacious changes, even
if they had little or no idea just what, in concrete terms, that might
mean. If Coolidge, an iconic representative of the old order, knew that
the ancien régime was dead, millions of ordinary Americans had drawn the
same conclusion years earlier. Full of fear, depressed and
disillusioned, they nonetheless had an appetite for the untried. Like
Obama, FDR had, during his campaign, encouraged feverish hopes with no
less vaporous references to a "new deal" for Americans.
Brain Trust vs Brainiacs
Yet today, something is amiss. Even if everyone is now using the Great
Depression and the New Deal as benchmarks for what we're living through,
Act I of the new script has already veered away from the original.
A suffocating political and intellectual provincialism has captured the
new administration in embryo. Instead of embracing a sense of
adventurousness, a readiness to break with the past so enthusiastically
promoted during the campaign, Obama seems overcome with inhibitions and
fears.
full:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175008/steve_fraser_empire_of_depression
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