In my last post, I argued that Occupy Wall Street had clear, present and positive goals. I made my argument by focusing on one part of the New York occupation, the Think Tank group. I highlighted its principled commitment to open discussion of the problems of the day, based on a radical commitment to democracy: social, cultural and economic, as well as political. This is serious business. It can be consequential as OWS figures out ways to not only speak in the name of the 99%, but also in a language that the 99% can understand, so that it can respond and act. I promise to analyze directly the challenges involved in a future post. But I’ve been working hard these past weeks, and don’t have the energy to do the hard work required. Today, I feel like something a bit lighter, and will be suggestive and less direct about the big challenges, reviewing the Republican Presidential field, and some other more comic elements of the present political landscape in the United States in the context of the opening that OWS has provided.
Commentators broadly agree: the Republican field for President is weak. The likely nominee, Mitt Romney, appears to be cynical to the core. Making his name as a reasonable moderate Republican Governor of Massachusetts, he is now running as a right-wing ideologue. Once pro-choice, he is now pro-life. Once for government supported universal health insurance, now he is violently opposed to Obamacare. Once in favor of reasonable immigration reform, now he is an anti-amnesty radical. David Brooks, the conservative columnist we of the left like to quote most, supports Romney with the conviction that he doesn’t say what he means.
After Romney, things get even stranger. If these people mean what they say (and I think they do), we are in real trouble, because one of them could be the next President of the United States, insuring its decay as the global power. Perhaps this is a reason for radicals to support Republicans? But then again, this was the reason for the socialist radicals to support Hitler in the thirties.
Bachmann, Perry, Cain and now Newt Gingrich have successively led the national polls over Romney. They are increasingly outrageous as the true-believing candidate. Bachmann seemed to be so uninfluenced by the facts that she burnt out. Perry seemed to forget who he is, or at least who he claims to be, one too many times. Cain not only conveniently forgot about his history of serial sexual harassment. He appeared to not have ever known much about the world beyond his motivational riffs and his slogan for his 999 program. And now the American blowhard-in-chief, Newt Gingrich, is back, appearing as the last man standing. Said to be the intelligent conservative, filled with innovative ideas, thinking that he is always the smartest guy in the room, his willful ignorance is stunning.
About the Arab Spring: “People say, ‘Oh isn’t this great, we’re having an Arab Spring,’” he said. “I think we may in fact be having an anti-Christian spring. I think people should take this [assertion] pretty soberly.”
About the most significant danger facing America:
“I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9,” Gingrich said. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
And in a report today, on the grey non-partisan Congressional Budget Office: “a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.”
These are but a quick sampling, brought to you thanks to the remarkable power of Google. “A Little Red Book of Gingrich” would be pretty funny if he remains an outsider, but that such a pillar of wisdom could become the candidate of a major political party, not to imagine President Gingrich, is truly horrifying.
The poor quality of the Republican field is, I think, not just a consequence of a chance collection of unqualified and undistinguished individuals. It is, rather, a manifestation of a deep crisis in American political culture. The Republican Party has become a bastion of know-nothing ideological true-believers. The Reagan revolution has become radicalized. Christian conservatives, market fundamentalists and nativists (ascendant in response of the election of Barack Hussein Obama) each demand ideological purity. The contradictions among these fundamentalist positions, and the tension between them and factual reality, guarantee that the serious and the responsible need not apply. The only way they can is by hiding their more sober qualities. This is Brooks’s hope for Romney.
Obama and the Democrats are not so constricted, but they have been profoundly and negatively affected by the ideological madness of the right. Given a polarized public, Obama has tried to work with Republicans and the results have been mixed at best, outraging his supporters and critics on the left, perplexing his previous supporters in the center and even on the right (e.g. Brooks and Company). The Democrats have not distinguished themselves in addressing some enduring and profound problems the American public faces. This is where I think the significance of Occupy Wall Street comes in. It helped to put forward some stark facts about the American social condition, concerning the issues of inequality, the structural restrictions on social mobility. It opened public discussion about these and other outstanding issues concerning social justice, providing the opportunity for debate and action. Thus far, it has been very successful.
But I am worried as I look around the blogosphere and as I look at some demonstrations close to home. Some attached to the OWS movement want to push it in a direction that will assure its insignificance and destruction. They would rather play at revolution than work for significant social change. While they dream of and chant slogans about “smashing capitalism,” something that makes no sense to the American public at large, and among serious economists and to most serious social and political scientists as well, they may fail to seize the day.
In the absence of Occupy Wall Street, such sloganeering is quaint and comic, a tragedy of the twentieth century repeating itself as farce in the twenty first. But because there is a real opening right now for significant change, there is the danger that we may face tragedy yet again in the form of a lost opportunity.
Now is the time when control over corporate excesses may be a real possibility. Now is the time when links among significant social forces, including labor unions, feminist movements, civil rights movements, gay and lesbian rights movements, environmental movements and the like, and indeed, the Democratic Party, could move a broad public. The unions, especially, are social organizations that have the institutionalized power to address the concerns raised by OWS. The unions need the energy and imagination of OWS, as OWS needs the power of the unions. Now is the time that Barack Obama can be pushed to be the president he promised to be. The Democratic Party is the political force that can put an end to the party of the American Tragedy, the GOP in its present configuration, so strikingly revealed by their leaders who would be President of the United States of America.
Or we could denounce liberals, Democrats and play revolution. That would be pretty funny if it weren’t so serious.
Control over corporate excesses?
Most corporations and business just plug along trying to make a profit by making and selling things people want. That’s hardly a threat to society; and in fact, it is how we create wealth that everybody can enjoy in this country.
You ignore the real excess which is the crony capitalism practiced by the permanent political class entrenched in Washington. Nothing is ever going to happen because these “leaders” and their corporate friends all like business the way it is. They’re making very good money feeding at the public trough.
The fault lies in both political parties, not just the Republicans. As to the candidates in the primary, there are some like Newt and Romney that would change little except perhaps re-arranging the deck chairs. The other one you name, Herman Cain, may be weak in your eyes, but if he were elected, things would certainly change. You and I would disagree on whether that change would be good or bad.
Cain doesn’t appear to know much about the world beyond his immediate experience and slogans. I am horrified that he is considered a serious candidate. Yes crony capitalism is a problem. But it is linked with uncontrolled banking, corporations which work against regulations that protect the environment, the consumer and even the average investor. And corporations that work to have tax policies that soak the poor and feed the rich. Yes, we do disagree, but I thank you for your serious response to my piece.
I think we are in basic agreement though that things are running afoul right now, and I don’t see the current bunch in Washington addressing it for the reasons I stated above. They are in bed with big corporations that are gaming the system and using our tax dollars to do it. In the end, that’s what is so appealing about someone like Cain; call it a leap of faith on my part that maybe he can make a difference. When I look at the others, I pretty certain they won’t.
And unfortunately, we are running out of money which, just like with individuals, severly limits choices.
In honor of the comic/tragic nature of this post. I recently saw a debate on Fox News (yes, I switch there, because it is as funny, but less substantial than Comedy Central). The commentators were really debating that now is the time to put the most right and radical candidate forward, because now is the time to go for it all! It is remarkable, how assessments of situations differ. I really hope they put Cain or Gingrich forward (as much as I doubt it), because Obama would win that election with a landslide. The Republicans are caught in the relation conservative center and radical right. I do think though that radical ideas can support the formation of a substantial center, but the radical right is comically tragic.
On the left we see a similar struggle. This is where OWS is important, I agree here with Jeff, but I would read the movement more radical. Push left, as far as we can, without losing the imagination of the public. Jeff thinks that Obama tries to move the center to the left (I agree again), but quite honestly, it seems like a dead-end road. We have to go further, mobilize and educate enough people on the left and for the left, to have a real voice left of centrist Obama (I am not speaking of revolutionary/anarchist action, but a core understanding and commitment of social-democratic politics that is missing). Only then Obama and the democrats will do their job even against Republican opposition, which does not just entail shooting and bombing terrorists overseas.
In this context, I do disagree with the assumption that a presence of the radical left is necessarily only destructive as Jeff fears. The problem is that a movement needs a strong commitment and broad base to actually gain something from the radical critique, because the movement as mass movement also needs to be able to resist at the same time the militant tendencies of its radical elements. I do not think OWS is there yet, it is pretty fragile, so their is a problem, that Jeff rightfully describes. But there is something to be said about the radical element in mass movements. What would the Civil Rights movement have been without its Black Panthers, where would the 68 movements have gone without its radical voices (sorry, I do only now the German example Rudi Dutschke)?
I understand, that I am more hopeful for these substantial tendencies on the left, while I dismiss them on the right. Both are caught in a similar struggle, but come on, Cain? On the other hand, Cain or Gingrich are not the ideological core of the radical right, that is defined by Blomqvist, Cheney and Rove. Maybe I live in la-la-land and Obama could actually lose against Cain and Gingrich, these comical caricatures of the radical right. Then goodbye and goodnight America.
I agree with Tim’s analysis of the left, right and center, although perhaps there is a slight nuance between us, concerning the radical left. Big demands yes. But they have to make sense to the people for whom we claim to speak. Obama surely could use a good hard push from the left, but the push can’t alienate the public. It has to bring them along. I am not sure about the Blank Panthers. I think they were pretty inconsequential. But Malcolm X was important. He was quite radical, but he made sense, as he made people uncomfortable. I have written about this in my book Civility and Subversion. But it’s a judgment call no doubt.
I judge today’s self styled anarchists as people pretending in a academic ghetto almost completely irrelevant if they don’t connect with the wider public. They don’t push or lead Obama, Democrats, human rights activists (gays, lesbians, transgendered, people of color). They turn them off.
I meant Norquist of course (not Blomqvist). That guy is pulling strings so far in the back, so I can’t even get the name right 😉