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Sunday, July 17, 2011

Where We Are One Quarter Past the Mid-Term Disaster

In the aftermath of the disastrous 2010 mid-terms I rightly didn't expect much of anything good to happen these days, and hoped the White House and Senate would manage as much as possible simply to let the crazies howl at the moon in the hope that this might alienate enough people to shift the balance of power during the 2012 Presidential and Congressional campaigns, and otherwise constrain the anti-governmental impulses of the Movement Republican Majority to symbolic gestures and Do-Nothing malaise (else they express these impulses in more damaging ways). So far, so good on all that, by the way.

Of course, Obama has sought lately to exploit the idiocy of the Debt Ceiling hostage crisis -- which given the fundamentals had eventually to break our way if only we were patient enough to wait for Wall Street finally to crack its whip at the bought-and-paid-for GOP as it could not help but do given what default would do to their profits -- to broker a "Grand Bargain" that would have the primary impact of breaking the back of Republican anti-tax orthodoxy. Such an accomplishment would have been epochal, although the left armchair disgruntlement blogipelago misread Obama's framing of the trap as the usual evidence of his seeecret Dr. Evil proneness to betray all the principles he and we stand for contrary to all sense. I still don't know exactly what the arithmetic for a Deal would or will look like, and so suspect lowest common denominator results -- possibly a clean(-ish) vote after all despite months of histrionics or else an abdication of Congressional powers coupled with ritual whining rights for the GOP exposing just what level of self-marginalizing disarray stratifies Movement Conservatism's anti-modern anti-governmental moment in the sun.

I think it is likely much too much to hope for anything really good to come between now and 2012, and suspect stasis is the best case we can shoot for given just how dangerous and deranged and destructive the GOP is at the moment and how they are positioned in the House and Senate and Governor's mansions and courthouses. The still metastasizing scandal of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp provides hope that something big may happen for good in spite of the GOP's straightjacketing of federal governance, however. It really isn't too crazy to hope the scandal will wrest primary control of the richly endowed and globally reaching News Corpse from Murdoch and that a post-Murdoch Fox and Wall Street Journal might not be in bed with Movement Republicanism quite so catastrophically. And as the arrests and investigations proliferate in Britain it also looks like it isn't too outlandish to hope this might eventually bring down Britain's awful austerity-peddling rather precarious Cameron government. Such a result wouldn't be a bad thing to show for these two otherwise dim and depressing years.

Again, it's far better than I hoped to see, I must say. I still expect Obama handily to win the Presidency in 2012. And, yes, that is a good thing in my view. (Tell me the President who was better than Obama or propose some non-symbolic alternative to his specific conduct in comparable circumstances -- as occasionally I do myself on the Unitary Executive, HAMP, his War policies, his bland (but largely vindicated) lgbtq advocacy, his too-modest and I still think more modest than was possible initial stimulus, often to be proven less informed and less wise than the administration for my pains -- be specific about real-world alternatives when you level your most devastating criticisms, else I think too much radical left anti-Obama critique simply exposes at best a disdain for the Executive as a vector of political agency and reformist possibility altogether, a perspective that is at least argumentatively defensible but still quite foolish in the real world in my view, or exposes at worst an ugly left form of the paranoid anti-Obama derangements exposed on the right during the Summer of Tea.)

I still hope Obama could win by a sufficient margin to provide coattails to facilitate the difficult re-taking of the House by Pelosi and the far more difficult holding of the Senate (and one more shot at reform of the filibuster, tho' that is obviously too much to hope from spindly Reid's boxer shorts). I honestly don't know if the economy can wait that long for another shot of real stimulus, but that does indeed look like the best case and it also looks like an incredibly difficult feat to achieve (that should be all the democratic left needs to hear to know what to do, but I'm not holding my breath that they will).

More can happen at the state level over the coming months, with populist revolts against Shock Doctrinaire GOP Governors (imagine if that Wisconsin and Ohio and Michigan -- and, soon enough, Florida and New Jersey -- organizational energy had kept these utterly predictably bad Governors from winning in the first place, but, no, Americans were disgruntled and having their little fit of suicidally stupid pique) radicalizing the discursive waters in which the Presidential campaign might be framed, as well as ongoing efforts at the State level to move a couple of states toward single payer (cheers, Vermont! march on, California!), to keep up the momentum of glbtq rights decisions, to keep up the momentum against the death penalty, to push for more common sense gun control (there could be movement here at the federal level on ammunition clips if we pushed for it), and to stem the tide of anti-woman anti-abortion GOP big-government authoritarianism (one of the most devastating forces afoot at the moment, and not yet mobilizing the left effectively, so, you know, do something about it!).

One would like to hope that lefties would rally and organize available forces in support of such campaigns and to spotlight the unprecedented danger of Movement Republicanism to help Democrats retake power across the federal layer, but it is too much to expect sense from people who would prefer to complain from their armchairs about the endlessly many ways in which their elective mommies and daddies fail to measure up to their highest hopes and to indulge in energetic "exposures" of those who do not share their demoralizing disgruntlement as sell-outs to those hopes even when we share them and strive to work with what we have to bring those hopes closer to realization in the real world.

5 comments:

RadicalCoolDude said...

Carrico: Tell me the President who was better than Obama or propose some non-symbolic alternative to his specific conduct in comparable circumstances

Have you never wondered if we would be better off if John McCain were president?

Fred Branfman has almost convinced me that we might have been in his recent AlterNet piece, in which he writes:

«if McCain had won, not only would Democrats be looking at a Democratic landslide in the 2012 presidential race, but the newly elected Democratic president in 2013 might enjoy both a 60 percent or higher majority in both houses and a clear public understanding that it was Republican policies that had sunk the economy. He or she might thus be far better positioned to enact substantive reforms than was Obama in 2008, or will Obama even if he is re-elected in 2012.»

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/151665

Dale Carrico said...

Yeah, things would be so much better if McCain was President and Palin Vice-President. Your special brand of "radicalism" is as cool as ever, dude. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

RadicalCoolDude said...

Carrico: Yeah, things would be so much better if McCain was President and Palin Vice-President.

Branfman makes a good case that both the Democratic Party and the country would be.

Carrico:Your special brand of "radicalism" is as cool as ever, dude.

My brand of radicalism is "disaster radicalism" in the sense that only when moneyed elites have terminally fucked up can radically democratic policies find widespread support and possibly be enacted.

That being said, I think that a disastrous McCain presidency would have mobilized progressives and racidals into fighting instead of many of them being neutered into becoming cognitive-dissonance-impaired apologists for the disastrous "Republican lite" presidency of Obama, which is now willing to butcher Medicare and Social Security.

So I don't know what is more heart-breaking: Obama in action or the people who can't stop defending his acts of cowardice and betrayal as "realism" and "pragmatism"? :/

Dale Carrico said...

You're an idiot. A McCain Presidency would have just killed even more people with even worse variations of the policies you decry as "Republican Lite" -- even though the actual progressive accomplishments of the Obama administration are many and hard fought and frankly epochal (which is not to deny the ongoing damage of the wars and unitary executive among other things so don't even start with me motherfucker). There is simply no point at which the lies and crimes of the Right will provoke your fantasy of a spontaneous crystallization of sufficiently radical fervor to measure up to your personal standards and bring about your ideal outcomes with no muss no fuss. Social struggle in the necessary direction of sustainable equity-in-diversity with the tools at hand articulated by actually existing institutional constraints amidst the diverse stakeholders who really contest the shared world is hard, but of course whining about how those who are fighting fail to measure up to optimal ideals is cheap and easy and always highly enjoyable. You are a sorry excuse for a person of the left.

jimf said...

> . . .don't even start with me motherfucker. . .

From your RSS feed:

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/07/19/272794/allen-west-obama-supporters-gene-pool/
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Rep. Allen West (R-FL) is no stranger to controversy and seems to relish in making outrageous statements. . .

"I believe we are headed towards the ultimate ideological clash in America. There is a widening chasm which has developed between those who believe in principled fiscal policies and those desiring the socialist bureaucratic nanny-state. . .

I must confess, when I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool."

In the same post, West equated the Libyan rebels fighting against dictator Muammar Qaddafi to the Taliban, and falsely claimed that “47 percent of wage earning households in America do not pay federal income taxes.” He also accused Obama of threatening “our nation’s senior citizens and Military Veterans/Retirees,” when it is in fact proposals and demands by members of his own party that are doing that.

West’s disdain and harsh rhetoric for those who don’t agree with him is nothing new. He frequently disparages political opponents – often personally. He once said anti-war congressmen should “get shot a few times,” and claimed “if you support Medicare…you can kiss the United States of America goodbye.”

West, who was discharged from the Army for abusing an Iraqi, has also said he can’t possibly be Islamophobic because he brought “the light of freedom into the Islamic world.”
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Well, all I can say is that this summer's heat-wave isn't the result of all that sissy climate-change nonsense, it's the good lord workin' up a head of steam over all those fags fixin' to get married in New York.