I’ve been away from these pages for a good while. Part of my reason for starting this blog was a desire to write about politics, but it’s been hard for me in recent months to overcome a combination of chagrin and despondency over my guy’s performance in office. He’s still my guy, but I have to change course. I think maybe I’ve understood a way to do so.
From now on and for the foreseeable future I’m clicking the unsubscribe link on the fundraising emails I receive from the Democrats. I’ve made a couple of modest contributions since the President’s jobs speech to the Congress on September 8, and I’m done. The President and the Democrats aren’t doing their job. I’ve watched this president ratify and extend the Bush police state, abandon the real economic interest of middle-class folk like me, and advance the process by which we Americans are destroying our common life, our institutions, our schools and colleges, our urban infrastructures, in the name of economics; and I’m done. The President and the Democrats have my vote only because the alternative is unthinkable.
As the late Tony Judt wrote shortly before his death, “We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers.”1 To be sure the President paid lip service to the social and the ethical in the jobs speech; but I very much fear it was lip service only. Moreover, he will not easily undo his capitulation last August to Republican blackmail; the activities of the congressional Supercommittee will soon dominate cable news, and its deliberations (as well as its deliberate leaks) can only further the evisceration of our public life.
Make no mistake, Republicans, and that includes the Tea Party, don’t really want limited government. And in spite of the retrograde fulminations of Republican pundits like George Will (who, in a recent Washington Post piece, accused Elizabeth Warren of dealing in straw men and then went on to create a straw man of his own), economic individualism is the only sort of individualism Republicans like, and they don’t like even that more than they like what one might term “corporate individualism,” which the Supreme Court has now ratified.
What the modern Republican ideology represents, and what it has always represented, is an attempt to use the coercive power of the state to protect, enhance, and enlarge huge concentrations of wealth in the hands of multinational corporations and a few private individuals; and to ensure that these same persons and entities are never held accountable foir their sins. The idea that Republicans, as Will and others have claimed, believe in individual autonomy and self-government for the generality of humans is simply laughable.
If I were younger and had fewer hostages to fortune I’d join the crowds protesting Wall Street in New York’s Zuccotti Park (and now at Washington Square, as well). The New York Times and other mainstream media, including PBS and NPR, have finally begun to cover the protest. It seems to be gathering force—labor unions have joined in it—but it is still a young grassroots enterprise seeking a program and a vision. Most of the coverage has been light hearted after the fashion of Gail Collins’ column in today’s New York Times. But Paul Krugman takes it seriously, and so do I.
As I write, the Obama administration’s own entanglements in crony capitalism are being underscored by the Solyndra and Keystone XL Pipeline scandals and the President’s own party’s (my party’s) willingness to serve the very monied interests the President is presently attacking Republicans for supporting. Indeed, President Obama may already have given an answer to a challenge Shelby Steele delivered at the end of a little book written in anticipation of the 2008 presidential election: that then candidate Obama needed to let Americans know what things “he would risk his life for.”2
If I were the President, I think I’d find some new economic advisers at the very least. I don’t think Timothy Geithner can be fired in today’s political situation; the Republicans would only vote to confirm somebody worse. But it would be a good idea for the President to listen to somebody with a fresh approach—maybe somebody other than Gene Sperling
—and if I were Barack Obama, the candidate, I think I’d head for Zucotti Park.
Notes
1See Ill Fares the Land, Penguin (New York, 2010), 1.
2See A Bound Man, Free Press (New York, 2008), 134.