Truthdig
Barack Obama's Neoliberal Legacy: Rightward Drift and Donald Trump
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obamas_neoliberal_legacy_rightward_drift
_and_donald_trump_20170103/
AddThis Sharing Buttons
Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to More4
Posted on Jan 3, 2017
By Paul Street
President Barack Obama. (Wikimedia
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Navy_091026-N-5549O-249_Presiden
t_Barack_Obama_delivers_remarks_to_an_audience_of_Sailors_and_Marines_before
_introducing_President_Barack_Obama_during_a_visit_to_U.S._Naval_Air_Station
_Jacksonville.jpg) )
In a parting shot near the end of his depressing, center-right presidency,
Barack Obama wants the world to know that he would have defeated Donald
Trump if the U.S. Constitution didn't prevent him from running for a third
term. It was a stab at Hillary Clinton as well as the president-elect.
I suspect Obama is right. Like Bill Clinton, Obama is a much better
fake-progressive, populism-manipulating campaigner than Hillary. Also like
Bill, he has more outward charm, wit, charisma, and common touch than Mrs.
Clinton. Plus, he's a male in a still-sexist nation, and he would have had
some very sharp election strategists on his side.
'Inauthentic Hope'
Fine, but so what? The Electoral College has spoken. The Constitution is a
harsh mistress. And Obama richly deserves Donald Trump as his legacy. As I
predicted in my June 2008 book "Barack Obama and the Future of American
Politics
(https://www.amazon.com/Barack-Obama-Future-American-Politics/dp/1594516316)
" (most of which was written in late 2007), Obama's presidency has
epitomized the late left political scientist Sheldon Wolin's early 2008
description of "the Democrats' politics" as "inauthentic opposition." Wolin
predicted (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9175.html) that "should
Democrats somehow be elected," they would do nothing "to alter significantly
the direction of society" and to "substantially revers[e] the drift
rightwards. . The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist
precepts points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the
working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on
their behalf." The corporatist Democrats would work to "marginalize any
possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans."
Wolin called it. Yes, a nominal Democrat was elected president along with
Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2008. What followed
under Obama (as under his Democratic presidential predecessors Jimmy Carter
and Bill Clinton) was the standard "elite" neoliberal manipulation of
campaign populism and identity politics in service to the reigning big money
bankrollers and their global empire. The Wall Street takeover of Washington
and the related imperial agenda of the "Pentagon System" were advanced more
effectively by the nation's first black president than they could have been
by stiff and wealthy white-male Republicans like John McCain or Mitt Romney.
The underlying "rightward drift" sharpened, fed by a widespread and easily
Republican-exploited sense of popular abandonment and betrayal, as the
Democrats depressed and demobilized their own purported popular base.
'To Quell the Mob'
The first year, when Obama's party had Congress, was key. In the book
"Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President
(https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Men-Washington-Education-President/dp/006
1429252) " (2011), Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind told a
remarkable story from March of 2009. Three months into Obama's presidency,
popular rage at Wall Street was intense, and the leading financial
institutions were weak and on the defensive. The nation's financial elite
had driven the nation and world's economy into an epic meltdown-and millions
knew it.
Having ridden into office partly on a wave of popular anger at the economic
power elite's staggering malfeasance, Obama called a meeting of the nation's
top 13 financial executives at the White House. The banking titans came into
the gathering full of dread, only to leave pleased to learn that the new
president was in their camp. Instead of standing up for those who had been
harmed most by the crisis-workers, minorities and the poor-Obama sided
unequivocally with those who had caused the meltdown.
"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks," Obama
said. "You guys have an acute public relations problem that's turning into a
political problem. And I want to help. . I'm not here to go after you. I'm
protecting you . I'm going to shield you from congressional and public
anger."
For the banking elite, who had destroyed untold millions of jobs, there was,
as Suskind put it, "Nothing to worry about. Whereas [President Franklin
Delano] Roosevelt had [during the Great Depression] pushed for tough,
viciously opposed reforms of Wall Street and famously said, 'I welcome their
hate,' Obama was saying, 'How can I help?' "
"The sense of everyone after the meeting," one leading banker told Suskind,
"was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that
point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything, and we would have
rolled over. But he didn't-he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the
mob."
The massive taxpayer bailout of the super fat cats would continue, along
with numerous other forms of corporate welfare for the powerful and
parasitic super-rich. This state-capitalist largesse was unaccompanied by
any serious effort to regulate their conduct or by any remotely comparable
bailout for the millions evicted from their homes and jobs by the
not-so-invisible hand of the marketplace. No wonder 95 percent of national
U.S. income gains
(http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/15/news/economy/income-inequality-obama/)
went to the top 1 percent during Obama's first term.
'Plenty of Money to Spend When the Right People Want It'
It was a revealing moment. With (to repeat) Democratic majorities in both
houses of Congress and an angry, "pitchfork"-wielding populace at the gates,
an actually progressive President Obama could have rallied the populace to
push back against the nation's concentrated wealth and power structures by
moving ahead aggressively with a number of policies: a stimulus with major
public works jobs programs, a real (single-payer) health insurance reform,
the serious disciplining and even break-up or nationalization of the leading
financial institutions, massive federal housing assistance and mortgage
relief, and passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have once
again legalized union organizing in the U.S. But no such policy initiatives
issued from the new White House. Obama and his Citigroup- and Goldman
Sachs-appointed team opted instead to pick up the ball from Dubya in giving
the U.S. populace what William Greider memorably called "a blunt lesson
about power, who has it and who doesn't." Americans "watched Washington rush
to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They
learned," Greider wrote,
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/19/AR200903190
2511.html ) "that government has plenty of money to spend when the right
people want it . 'Where's my bailout,' became the rueful punch line at lunch
counters and construction sites nationwide. Then to deepen the insult,
people watched as establishment forces re-launched their campaign for
'entitlement reform' - a euphemism for whacking Social Security benefits,
Medicare and Medicaid."
Americans also watched as Obama passed a health insurance reform
(https://www.amazon.com/Empires-New-Clothes-Barack-Obama/dp/1594518459)
(the so-called Affordable Care Act) that only the big insurance and drug
companies could love, kicking the popular alternative (single-payer
"Medicare for all") to the curb while rushing to pass a program drafted by
the Republican Heritage Foundation and first carried out in Massachusetts by
the arch 1 percenter Mitt Romney.
As the retired and veteran Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren notes in his
indispensable book "The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the
Rise of a Shadow Government
(https://www.amazon.com/Deep-State-Constitution-Shadow-Government/dp/0143109
936) " (2016), "In 2008, Barack Obama the change agent ran against the
legacy of George W. Bush. But when he assumed office his policies in the
areas of national security and financial regulation were strikingly similar.
Even the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans vilify with uncontrollable
rage, is hardly different in outline from Bush's Medicare [legislation]
(both expand medical coverage by subsidizing corporate interests)."
Lofgren is critical of Obama's liberal defenders, who blame all his failures
on Republican obstruction. "They forget" Lofgren rightly notes, "that during
his first two years in office, he had a Democratic majority in Congress."
'To Administer an Entrenched System'
In the summer of 2011, Obama offered the Republicans bigger cuts in Social
Security and Medicare than they asked for as part of his "Grand Bargain" put
forward amidst the elite-manufactured debt-ceiling crisis. It was after this
point that hundreds of thousands of mostly younger Americans had received
enough of Greider's "blunt lesson" to join the Occupy Wall Street Movement,
which sought progressive change through direct action and social
movement-building rather than corporate-captive electoral politics. We will
never know how far Occupy might have gone. It was shut down by a federally
coordinated campaign of repression that joined the Obama administration and
hundreds of mostly Democratic city governments in the infiltration,
surveillance, smearing, takedown and eviction of the short-lived movement
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/14/did-the-white-house-direct-the-polic
e-crackdown-on-occupy/) -this even as the Democrats stole some of Occupy's
rhetoric for use against Romney and the Republicans in 2012.
After his re-election, Obama spoke to some of his rich friends at an event
called The Wall Street Journal CEO Council. "When you go to other countries,
the political divisions are so much more stark and wider. Here in America,
the difference between Democrats and Republicans-we're fighting inside the
40-yard lines. . People call me a socialist sometimes. But no, you've got to
meet real socialists. (Laughter.) I'm talking about lowering the corporate
tax rate. My health care reform is based on the private marketplace." It was
a "touching ruling class moment
(https://socialistworker.org/2013/12/11/meet-the-real-socialists) ," wrote
Danny Katch, author of "America's Got Democracy."
The rightward policy drift got worse until Obama was a full-on lame duck and
could make some more progressive-sounding noises with knowledge that nothing
he claimed to be for (like an increase in the federal minimum wage) was in
danger of being passed. By Lofgren's insider account in "The Deep State":
For six years running, Obama sought bipartisan compromise with the deluded
persistence of Captain Ahab, despite abundant evidence that the GOP was in
no mood for it. . After frittering away those six years when he had at least
one house of Congress in Democratic hands, Obama emerged from the 2014
midterm debacle with an epiphany: now was the time to display the populist
president that his supporters thought they had elected in 2008. . There was
only one problem: how was a lame duck president going to get this agenda
through the most numerically dominant Republican Congress since 1929? That
absurd dilemma sums up the reality of his presidency. . Obama.may be, like
Napoleon III, a sphinx without a riddle: merely an ambitious politician who
tested well with focus groups, and who arrived at just the right moment,
promising hope and change as a pretext to administer an entrenched system
without any conviction.
The only part of Lofgren's passage I might take some issue with is the
phrase "without any conviction." Obama brought a fair amount of capitalist,
imperialist, neoliberal and even subtly white-supremacist conviction to his
privilege-serving role. Read his deeply conservative and American
exceptionalist, Ronald Reagan-praising 2006 campaign book, "The Audacity of
Hope," or any of the speeches Obama gave to elite business and foreign
policy groups during his years as a U.S. senator and presidential candidate
(I covered all that material at length in "Barack Obama and the Future of
American Politics"). Candidate Obama bent over backward to distance himself
from "angry" black calls for racial justice and equality, preening as a
"post-racial" leader ready and willing to blame poor blacks for their
position at the bottom of American society (this too is covered at length in
my 2008 book. See the third chapter, titled "How Black is Obama? Color,
Class, Generation and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights
Era").
And recall that Obama spent no small part of his last years in office trying
to pass the secretive, undemocratic and global-corporatist Trans-Pacific
Partnership
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/19/progressive-obama-hes-melting-hes-me
lting/) .
'We're Worse Off Than Before'
How strange after all this to hear the liberal black author Ta-Nehisi Coates
recently proclaim
(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/obamas-unique-background-shaped-outlook-race
/) that Donald Trump is the radical backlash "price we have to pay" for
Obama's "revolutionary" presidency. "Revolutionary," that is, simply because
Obama was half-black.
I wonder if Coates caught The New York Times' memorable report
(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/many-in-milwaukee-neighborhood-didnt-v
ote-and-dont-regret-it.html?_r=0) on widespread black non-voting in
Milwaukee (the most populous state in the contested state of Wisconsin)
during the 2016 election. By the account of Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise
after a visit to the heavily segregated city of Milwaukee's black North
Side:
At Upper Cutz, a bustling barbershop in a green-trimmed wooden house, talk
of politics inevitably comes back to one man: Barack Obama. Mr. Obama's
elections infused many here with a feeling of connection to national
politics they had never before experienced. But their lives have not gotten
appreciably better, and sourness has set in.
"We went to the beach," said Maanaan Sabir, 38, owner of the Juice Kitchen,
a brightly painted shop a few blocks down West North Avenue, using a
metaphor to describe the emotion after Mr. Obama's election. "And then eight
years happened."
All four barbers had voted for Mr. Obama. But only two could muster the
enthusiasm to vote this time. And even then, it was a sort of protest. One
wrote in Mrs. Clinton's Democratic opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of
Vermont. The other wrote in himself.
"I'm so numb," said Jahn Toney, 45, who had written in Mr. Sanders. He said
no president in his lifetime had done anything to improve the lives of black
people, including Mr. Obama, whom he voted for twice. "It's like I should
have known this would happen. We're worse off than before."
"Mr. Fleming, 47, who has been trimming hair, beards and mustaches for 30
years, had hoped his small business would get easier to run. But it hasn't.
"Give us loans, or a 401(k),' he said. . His biggest issue was health
insurance. Mr. Fleming lost his coverage after his divorce three years ago
and has struggled to find a policy he could afford. He finally found one,
which starts Monday but costs too much at $300 a month.
"Ain't none of this been working," he said. He did not vote.
There's a real and nationwide material-economic basis for such complaints.
By the fifth year of Obama's presidency, U.S. black households' net worth
had fallen to 1/13th of the wealth of U.S. white households
(https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/how-barack-obama-faile
d-black-americans/511358/) at the median. This helped generate a sense of
futility about voting among black citizens-a sense that contributed
significantly to Mrs. Clinton's failure to recreate the electoral coalition
that elected Obama in 2008 and 2012. Talk about vote suppression.
(The smart reparations advocate Coates knows all this, of course. He
persists, nonetheless, in seeing Obama's presidency as racially
"revolutionary" because of its symbolic significance. But even the symbolic
victory was a double-edged sword. "For many white Americans," the black
economist William Darity Jr. has noted, Obama's "elections confirmed their
belief that American racism is a thing of the past.")
'Three Tours in Iraq and No Bailout for People Like Us'
Yes, it's true that Obama won a second term with a convincing victory over
Mitt Romney in 2012. But Romney was a perfect foil for the fake populism the
Democrats were brandishing in the wake of the Occupy Movement they helped
crush the previous year. Romney was like something out of central casting
when it came to helping the Democrats pose as a party of the people. He was
a rigidly aristocratic and super-wealthy Wall Street Republican who was
dumbly caught on a smart phone calling "47 percent" of the U.S. population
lazy moochers and welfare cheats. Throw in the Mormon thing and the Obama
two-peat was an easy slam dunk. Who knows how a more charismatic and
"authentic" Republican opponent might have done in 2012?
The misery and betrayal of the working class (both white and nonwhite)
continued apace without serious presidential opposition during Obama's
second term. So did the savage upward concentration of wealth and income;
the deadly expansion of the permanent U.S. imperial war machine; the
systematic deportation of millions of "illegal" Latinos; the
hyper-segregation, shakedown and militarized policing of black ghettoes; the
neglect and suffering of Native America; the relentless federal
subsidization of parasitic finance; the creation of millions of precarious
low-paid, no-benefit, part-time and contract jobs
(http://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/nearly-95-of-all-job-growth-duri
ng-obama-era-part-time,-contract-work-449057) ; mass debt servitude;
ridiculously high health care costs and college tuition; the "geocidal"
cooking of the planet by Big Carbon.
In the excellent 2016 movie "Hell or High Water
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/08/12/hell-or-high-wat
er-may-be-the-first-great-film-about-the-failed-economic-recovery/?utm_term=
.55278a9f9f47 ) ," the following complaint is written on the side of a
building in a depressed eastern Texas farm town: "Three tours in Iraq but no
bailout for people like us." That sums up the neoliberal-imperial era as
experienced by the nation's "heartland" working class and epitomized by the
age of Obama. American government has billions, nay, trillions of dollars to
spend on rescuing and recapitalizing giant parasitic financial institutions,
restoring outrageous Wall Street "compensation" levels, overturning the
Libyan government, destabilizing Syria, militarizing Africa, undermining
Venezuela, occupying Afghanistan and overthrowing governments in Honduras
and Ukraine, and on keeping "more people in prison than any other country,
including China, which has four times our population," writes Lofgren. It
has nothing really for the nation's hard-working and increasingly surplus
everyday people, a remarkable number of whom are thrown into jail and prison
for victimless crimes like drug possession. The financial executives who
criminally crashed the economy and threw millions out of their homes and out
of jobs continue to escape prosecution. They live in style above the law.
One does not deny the catastrophe that is the incoming Trump administration
by saying good riddance to the Obama administration. The two presidencies
are joined at the capitalist, imperialist and white-supremacist Deep State
hip along with all the other dismal presidencies of the long neoliberal era,
starting with Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, tea partyers and
now the noxious, geocidal atrocity that is the forthcoming Donald Trump
presidency. Trump is what America gets after "the inauthentic opposition"
party makes it into the White House.
The resistance we need to form against Trump and Trumpism must not repeat
the mistakes of the past. It must not allow itself to be hijacked by the
dismal dollar Dems and their timid centrist and electoral nothingness, which
only pushes the country further in the same direction as the arrow on
Hillary's 2016 campaign poster-to the right.
Chris Hedges: The War in Vietnam, Like the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, 'Is
One Long Atrocity' (Video)
The Chinese Solar Juggernaut That Donald Trump Can't Stop (Video)
Rick Perry Doled Out Billions in Grants and Tax Incentives for Corporations
While Governor of Texas
NBC Hires Megyn Kelly, Racist Attitudes and All
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
C 2017 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
Signup for Truthdig's newsletter
