Electoral Politics

Only two days after the presidential election of 2008 Barack Obama hired as his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, whose father, an Israeli physician, was quoted as saying now that his son is in the White House Israel will certainly have the ear of Obama. Why shouldn’t it? After all, his son is no Arab, scrubbing the floor.

It just descended from there. Obama picked an economic team comprised of the current masterminds of unfettered capitalism who are responsible for our economic meltdown (if Milton Friedman were still alive Obama probably would have assigned him some job). He picked a secretary of agriculture who favors the development of genetically modified organisms, a secretary of defense who’s going to take more troops into Afghanistan, and Hilary Clinton as secretary of state, who is in favor of anything that keeps the Clinton dynasty alive.

Why do progressives fall for these figures like Obama who promise “change” and redemption. I guess because there’s not much of anything else to believe in. The sixties revolution of consciousness, that promised, and to a certain degree delivered, changes in how we view and relate to issues of gender, race, and postcolonial freedoms, had no lasting political effect, really. The same political elites are the ones getting elected to state and national office, with an occasional moderate swing from right to left. They’re still threatening to overturn Roe versus Wade. They’re still sending young men and women (mostly minorities) all over the world to kill and be killed. They’re still complicit in the capitalist system that continues to increase the disparity between rich and poor. And they’re still the only vote in the United Nations defending Israel’s incursions into the West Bank or the blockade of Gaza.

Our children see how our efforts failed to effect any kind of real political change, so what are they supposed to do? There are still young activists out there, like my nephew, who belong to radical anti-war or anti-capitalist organizations that protest and demonstrate and scream bloody murder. I don’t know how much community organizing they’re doing, but after the failure of my feeble efforts in that capacity, I’m not surprised they don’t bother. We marched by the millions against the war in Vietnam. How much did that actually undermine the U.S. role and bring about our withdrawal? I don’t really know. People all over the world marched by the millions against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and look where that got us.

So what motivated them to get out and vote in the 2008 election? Bush’s abysmal record on everything, of course, but what made them think that electing Barack Obama was going to really change anything. By the time you’re in a senate race, yet alone a presidential race, you’re already bought and sold. There’s no way around it. To be one of the elite you have to be able to raise the capital to compete in enormously expensive campaigns that get your face on the TV screen and your voice on the airwaves. You have to make promises to interest groups and you have to pay them back so they don’t abandon you in the next race. Here’s how J. M. Coetzee puts it in Diary of a Bad Year: “We do not choose our rulers by the toss of a coin — tossing coins is associated with the low-status activity of gambling — but who would dare to claim that the world would be in a worse state than it is if rulers had from the beginning of time been chosen by the method of a coin?”

In a recent issue of The New Yorker there was an article on Arthur Fisher Bentley, who wrote a book called The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures back in 1908 that claims all politics and governments are the result of the activities of interest groups (pluralism) that are engaged in a constant struggle for advantage. His argument gained traction after World War II because of people’s fears about the “big ideas of government,” i.e., Hitler and Stalin. Bentley himself was a progressive who advocated using government to curb the power of big business, but maybe he was right: reforming government, as it’s actually constituted, will never be possible.

I sometimes fantasize about what would happen if someone who got elected actually decided they would never run for office again and see what they could actually accomplish without fulfilling promises to anyone except their own conscience. This may be the collective fantasy that got Obama elected. So if Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krugman can write an open letter to Obama detailing what he thinks he should do about the failing economic situation, here’s my open letter about what he should do about everything else. (Unless Obama is in favor of the violent overthrow of the government, which I doubt, he’s not going to change our economic system from capitalism to socialism, but some of the points I make in my letter may make us a bit more like Sweden or even Germany, economically speaking.)

Dear President Obama,

The first thing you have to do is bring all American troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Emergency negotiating sessions, involving every country with any kind of involvement with either county must begin immediately so as to deter reprisals by the warring religious factions in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The second thing you have to do is shut down Guantanamo and provide civilian trials for all those remaining who a case can actually be made against (the Center for Constitutional Rights has to be consulted, along with every other NGO or human rights lawyer who is working on individual cases). Then you have to replace Robert Gates with a Defense Secretary who will look into shutting down other military bases around the world based on the reduction of our military industrial complex, and who will pursue nuclear disarmament. You will get rid of the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program and begin to reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons at all our nuclear facilities in order to comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. You will order a mission change at these labs to develop a renewable energy policy that will develop cars that run on alternative fuels, that develop local renewable energy grids that rely on solar, geothermal, or biomass, and you will redirect highway funds to subsidize mass transportation, in whatever forms are best suited for city, town, or rural area. You will rewrite an economic stimulus package that includes universal health care, whether it’s based on expanding what we currently have, such as using Medicare to cover all the uninsured and letting those with private health insurance keep theirs (which is probably the only way you’ll get it passed) or scrapping the entire system and doing away with private insurers altogether. There’s a ton of other stuff I could tell you to do, but I think I’ll finish by saying you can get rid of the Forest Service and manage our vast western public lands with what Daniel Kemmis describes in his book, This Sovereign Land, watershed-based local coalitions of citizen democracies.

So best of luck, and when you’re done, in 2012, if you last even that long, you can go back to Chicago and Michelle can go back to being a college administrator and you can write some more memoirs. Sounds like the good life to me.