Author Archives: Julian O. Long

constitutional crisis

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Here’s a graphic that’s been showing up at Facebook and elsewhere. It comes from mediamatters.org. Click the thumbnail to enlarge it, and you can read more from Jonathan Chait. Hat tip to Daily Kos for both items.

Journalists who have pretended objectivity in this matter have actually taken a side by giving credence to the rightist Republican rump. It is a faux objectivity to pretend impartiality when none is possible. Headlines such as “Your fault! No shutdown end; Dems, GOP trade blame” and “In shutdown blame game, Democrats and Republicans united: It’s the other side’s fault” enable journalists to strike a pose that proclaims them superior to the conflict and allow them to report on a situation that has deep political and moral significance for our country as though it were a tennis match.

The old-time sports writers were far more honest. They gave both excellence and foolishness their due. I can’t imagine Haywood Hayle Broun writing any of the drivel that passes for reporting on the government shutdown that I have seen in the last few days’ newspapers. But in the final analysis, no matter how much the Republican rump games the system, our government isn’t a tennis match. Tennis matches achieve closure, and the loser doesn’t get to take the winner hostage and demand that she be given enough points to reverse the outcome of play.

At present we are at the beginning of a hostage crisis in this country, just as real as the crisis of the late 1970s when fifty-two Americans were held captive in the U. S. Embassy in Tehran. For the nation’s major news outlets, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and my own St. Louis Post Dispatch, all of which have been great newspapers in their time, to report on this crisis as though it were the result of normal politics and as though our entire government were to blame, is unconscionable. It renders these media conplicit in the crisis over which they pretend superiority.

There are reasons to compare this present crisis to the secessionist crisis that preceded the American Civil War; but I think a better parallel is to be found in the constitutional crisis that signaled the denouement of the first English Civil War of 1642–1651. In 1649 a minority of the long parliament (the rump) was assembled by Oliver Cromwell to try King Charles I for treason. The parliamentary majority were not in favor of the trial; nor were all members of the rump, nor, apparently, were the English people at large—but the deed was done. And the King was beheaded on January 30, 1649.

The core charge against him was that he had sought “out of a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people of England.” Sound familiar? It should. Today we are witnessing an assertion of right by a parliamentary rump which has cowed the Republican party into refusing to accept the legitimacy of a president who has been twice elected by substantial majorities. This is not business as usual. This is an attempt on the part of a minority of half of the congress to seize power and topple the president.

And the Affordable Care Act is not the cause of the crisis. It is merely the site of it, just as the Monica Lewinsky business was the site of our last Republican impeachment gambit. But it ought to be clear that Republicans do not represent the freedom they so loudly proclaim or the constitution they pretend to defend. The ACA was enacted constitutionally; it has been ratified by a conservative Supreme Court and by the electorate in 2012. It is the Republican parliamentary rump that presently stands outside the constitution, and if polls are to be believed most Americans are wise to that and to who the real tyrants are.

Here’s another graphic, courtesy of Anti-Republican Crusaders. Where will we go from here? The president has invited congressional leaders to a White House conference as the Republican rump continues to foment legislation whose only purpose is to punish him. But things aren’t looking good for the rump. Faced with the anti-democratic consequences of their duplicity, members of the rump now gloat that the government shutdown will teach us all a lesson and contend that the people aren’t always right about what they need. It now looks as though the rump will lose the public relations battle and the support of big business. Not the best resolution, but perhaps it is better than war and bloody decapitation. In the final analysis seventeenth-century England preferred constitutional monarchy to parliamentary tyranny. Monarchy was restored in 1660 and ratified in 1688. Along the way the signers of the king’s death warrant were tried for regicide and followed the king to the scaffold.

a singular failure

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It seems pretty clear now that the Obama presidency has failed.

Don’t get me wrong. I still support Obamacare, and I support the president in his current round of struggles with the Republican rump in the congress, as long as he holds firm. I even think President Obama’s decision to hand off the Syrian affair to the United Nations was correct. It’s what should have happened with the situation in Iraq that was hyped by the Bush administration as cause for war. The only losers are hawks on the left and right for whom the only live issue was whether the United States looked like a superpower.

When I say that I now think the Obama presidency has failed, I mean that the president has failed to govern, even to attempt to govern, as the transformational leader his successful campaigns seemed to promise. This is not entirely the fault of the president or of his advisors. Mr. Obama was able to campaign to be the president of the entire country, to appeal to the broad perception that democracy is being undermined in the land, and to promote a near progressive agenda. That his campaign had broad appeal is borne out by the results of two elections in which he won substantial victories.

But the national electorate is not represented by the United States Congress or the Supreme Court. These institutions, and the bureaucracies that surround them (as well as the bureaucracies that surround the presidency itself), have been skewed so as to give more power to right-wing thinking than it presently deserves, if public opinion is taken into account on countless issues from gay rights to voting rights to firearms regulation. Our country, even in these benighted times, may still be a creation of the liberal establishment brought together by the Roosevelt revolution, but our nation’s capital is now a creature of the Reagan revolution with its neoliberal economics and its bias against social programs and the social role of the state.

Add to this fundamental difficulty the continued power in our nation’s capital of corporate wealth with its interests in social control, high unemployment, income inequality, and the suppression of labor. Add the continued power of rightist religion that shares the interest of corporate wealth in social control, particularly in attempts to halt the progress of second-wave feminism. Add to both of these the complexes of phenomena contingent upon President Obama’s status as our first president of African American descent, and you have a mixture of forces that have made against the success of his presidency as we hopefully imagined it five years ago.

Even so—and I’m aware that this may not be entirely fair, President Obama has attempted to govern from a position somewhat to the right of center, backing away from full blown support of economic stimulus to deal with the consequences of the great recession, refusing to hold banks and bankers accountable for their role in the debacle (as the first President Bush did not fail to do during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s), abandoning support for a public option in Obamacare legislation, generally continuing to promote neoliberal economic “reforms” of our nation’s educational institutions, caving to the congress with respect to the sequester in 2011, ratifying and enlarging the surveillance state and concomitant suppression of the press. I could make a much longer list.

While these things have been going on, the President has of course provided progressives a few token victories in the areas of gay rights and environmental concerns. But even these have left the major difficulties faced by LGBT advocacy and environmentalist groups intact. The net result is that the forces of societal sadism and institutionalized greed have seen their fortunes advance during the Obama presidency. The prison industrial complex grows richer every day. The militarization of police continues unabated. State officials now refuse requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act. The resegregation of public schools now seems an accepted fact. The country is now rife with anti-immigrant sentiment, ratified and reinforced by the Obama administration’s program of deportations. Voter suppression legislation is now pending in many states. The American middle class is now all but dead.

Have I overstated the case? Perhaps. But Republican rightists constantly tell us that government is our problem, and that is because the governments of today’s nation states represent the only force capable of standing against the greed and decadence of the corporate oligarchy that now more or less runs the world and owns the Republican party. The same oligarchy also owns much of the Democratic party, and it apparently wields a powerful influence over our young president. It’s too bad. He seemed to have such promise.

in memoriam

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For a long time I refused to believe that the world had changed on September 11, 2001. I now think I was wrong, though I still feel no solidarity with the belief that “they” attacked us because “they” hate “our” freedom. But I’m not going to make a list of the ways I now think the world has changed. I’m rather going to observe that it’s sometimes well to remember what was there before, without embellishment or romantic enhancement. The thumbnail on the left links to a photograph of the World Trade Center towers as they appeared to one photographer in March, 2001. No drama, no klieg lights. I have included it as a rather large file for the sake of clarity (Source: Wikipedia Commons).

The towers’ presence in this memorial bespeaks an absence as profound as that which sent me in search of the poetry of my country twelve years ago, words from Carl Sandburg, William Allen White, Henry Longfellow, Abraham Lincoln, James Agee, Martin Luther King, Walt Whitman, the prince of all our poets. They speak of a once and future republic, of our collective triumphs and our failures, from which they (mostly) do not shrink. They do not speak with one voice. I grew up singing Lowell’s hymn in response to the Mexican-American War right along side “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” each of which has had its jingoistic uses.

But there is poetry in the memory of those great towers. I experienced them for the first time as a disembarked subway passenger, walking a board path through the great hollow darkness underneath them building, here and there lit with fires in big oil drums and the sparks from toiling arc welders. That memory shades their absence for me now. I may one day see the new Center, but it will not replace the former in my mind or do anything to fill the hole in the world that the absence of the towers inscribes upon my mental landscape. For that I can only mourn.

But I reached for poetry for a reason more profound than mourning, and I am thinking as I reach for it now of a sentence of the late Richard Rorty’s: “[I]t is only those who agree with Hölderlin that ‘what abides was founded by poets’ who are still capable of liberal hope.”† For Rorty, our country’s founding poet was Walt Whitman. Perhaps it is not by accident that at the center of my reflections twelve years ago I found these lines from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Whitman believed in democracy. He thought democracy held the key to human flourishing and human happiness. And not mere political democracy, but social democracy shaped and guided by social justice, wherein the goods of this life are available to the least as to the great. Utopian, perhaps; flawed, certainly. But it is the dream that built our cities, our systems of transportation, our schools, colleges, libraries and other cultural institutions, our networks of homes and businesses, and much, much more without which the people perish.

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Rorty reminds us that Emerson distinguished between the party of memory and the party of hope. I think of Whitman returning to Brooklyn at twilight and how his imaging of his beloved New York is parceled into persons, some his human countrymen, some their built works before him and behind him on the water and in time. I am mostly of the party of hope. For me the absent towers of the World Trade Center furnish their parts towards the soul of the republic of my dreams, still to be achieved.

†In Achieving Our Country, (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998) 139-140.