One of Barack Obama’s college professors, one Roberto Unger, has made a smallish splash in the news recently by declaring his conviction that Obama’s defeat in November is essential. His reasoning is nothing like that of the GOP mouthpieces, if the word “reasoning” is applicable in a context like that, indeed it’s quite the reverse. His central point is that Obama has become so much a part of the existing rightist power structure that only a dramatic reversal such as his resounding defeat is now capable of “renewing” the capacity of the democrat party to actually represent the best interests of ordinary people.
Here’s a fairly short piece in it’s entirety, by Russel Mokhiber published in Counterpunch, which I present as a point of departure for discussion. I’ve had these thoughts myself, as have many of us I suspect, but the political realities of turning things over to today’s GOP—the only practical alternative at present— is more than a little spooky. But still, as arguments go this has some compelling features, and let’s face it, another Obama term is not without its spooky elements either.
As a restoration architect I once worked for was fond of saying with regard to some difficult construction choices that had to be made from time to time; “Here we are again—in the position of having to marry one of two desperately ugly women.”
Feel free to substitute “men” in the above, as necessary. Here’s the piece;
Not Ralph Nader. Not Amy Goodman. Not Noam Chomsky. Not Chris Hedges. Not Cornel West. Not Alexander Cockburn. Not one of the great left critics in the United States have dared say what Harvard Law School Professor Roberto Unger said last week. “President Obama must be defeated in the coming election.”
In 1976, at age 29, Roberto Unger became the youngest tenured professor at Harvard Law School. Obama took two classes from Unger – Jurisprudence and Reinventing Democracy. During the 2008 campaign, Unger was reportedly in frequent contact with candidate Barack Obama via email and Blackberry.
But here he is today saying that “President Obama must be defeated in the coming election.”
Why?
“He has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States,” Unger said in a heavily edited video posted on YouTube last month. “He has spent trillions of dollars to rescue the moneyed interests and left workers and homeowners to their own devices. He has subordinated the broadening of economic and educational opportunities to the important but secondary issue of access to health care in the mistaken belief that he would be spared a fight.”
“He has disguised his surrender with an empty appeal to tax justice. He has delivered the politics of democracy to the rule of money. He has reduced justice to charity.”
“His policy is financial confidence and food stamps. He has evoked a politics of hand holding. But no one changes the world without a struggle.”
“Unless he is defeated, there cannot be a contest for the re-orientation of the Democratic Party as the vehicle of a progressive alternative in the country,” Under said. “There will be a cost for his defeat in judicial and administrative appointments.”
“The risk of military adventurism, however, under the rule of his opponents, will be no greater than it would be under him.”
“Only a political reversal can allow the voice of democratic prophesy to speak once again in American life. It’s speech is always dangerous. It’s silence is always fatal.”
Russell Mokhiber edits the Corporate Crime Reporter.
(btw – I’m trying to stack up a little on posts today, and maybe tomorrow, to make a sandbox to play in over the weekend and into next week. My daughter is driving down from Washington state for a visit in a day or two, and neither of us will want to spend our time together on the internet. Thus, absent any shattering new developments, I’ll be pretty scarce around the intertoobs for about a week.)
Well, I agree that since Obama has, to all intents and purposes, abandoned what liberal policies or intentions he may have had, the idea that were he to be defeated in November would in any way impel the Democratic Party in any leftward direction is surely nonsense.
The USA, after all, is not a democracy in which party solidarity (even within a party, let alone between a party and a president of nominally the same affiliation) plays any part, unlike most European parliamentary democracies. The parties appear, in fact to be fragmenting rather than coagulating.
The Democrats have — or had — their ‘Blue Dogs’; they have members who are practically indistinguishable from the centre-right Republicans (I assume there are some, but lying low?) and a single solitary socialist, and the Republicans, for all they are attempting a show of unanimity and united ‘tea-partyness’, is still a party of factions as well, and I cannot see that changing. After all, the far-right dogma is not in any way a party philosophy, let alone a political programme, merely a manifesto adopted temporarily to win a coming election or two.
If you don’t have political parties that are willing to discipline themselves, able to create a universal manifesto for themselves, able to cohere, but must insist on individuality within party membership, it’s going to take an awful lot more than the loss of an expendable president (with a maximum of eight years, half of which is spent electioneering not governing now, any president is expendable) to create an impetus for that sort of change.
(Tomasky’s got something that relates to this I think at the DB, though I just glanced over it.)
Of course, the Red Squirrel Party insists on unanimity of voice and the suppression of revisionists and counter-revolutionaries, as you’d expect. There are dire penalties. (In the old days, before he broke away to form the Red Squirrel Faction, Squirrel, as spokeshuman of the Party was severely disciplined for straying momentarily from the true path. Banned from Cadbury’s hazelnut bars for a month.)
Sounds all very nice, but if Obama has to go, who are they planning on replacing him with? They seem to have conveniently left that bit out. Am i to infer that they are endorsing Mittens?
Sorry, wrong about Tomasky; the starting point’s there, but it’s not developed, alas; and there’s no chance of the commenters on the DB developing it, is there?
I listened to the video, actually. Another third rate mind . . .his ‘remedy’ boils down to Reaganomics, really: America is ‘exceptional’ in its talent; the USA stopped ‘producing’ what other people in the world wanted and could afford; small and medium size businesses can be ‘empowered’ by government to bring that back . . .educate people in what’s needed . . .
Jesus, we’ve heard all this before, and still do, ad nauseam. We’ve heard it in the UK from every damn government from (I think) Wilson on; it’s been a commonplace in the USA probably for longer; and virtually no democratic government has in the last fifty years found a way of actually doing it. And when governments try to educate their populations for ‘what business needs’, any heed taken to that demand is doomed to failure and redundancy.
By the time you’ve educated thousands to be fit for going down the coal mines, some bugger’s come along and invented the petrol engine. And then the geologists who know where to find the oil are in short supply because nobody thought they needed people who pointlessly broke pieces off rocks with small hammers.
These days, to continue the pretence you can return to, recreate, or even create, some kind of capitalist ‘golden age’ like that is simply an ‘abdication’ (he says Obama’s governing has been ‘Less a project than an abdication”) from comprehending, challenging, and altering, the last fifty years or so of the development of western capitalist economics and history.
He accuses Obama and the Democratic Party of “putting a human face on the policies of its adversary”. But that’s what he appears to do himself.
I am so pissed off with old men whose minds are like closed drawers full of the junk of the past and like the musty smell of what people put in there years ago. I was, for a wile, belaboured in meetings with prats who kept going on about ‘thinking out of the box’.
(I got to really loathe that; I can barely remember ever being asked for my ideas so they could find out whether they were ‘outside the box’ already before they told me how to think outside one I might not have been in . . .)
I got so exasperated that I used to tell them as far as I was concerned, there was no box, and if they wanted to think ‘outside it’ they were setting philosophical boundaries by imagining there was one in the first place.
I used to say then (if I hadn’t lost them at that point, which I usually did) that concepts and solutions are infinite; the choice of any one depended only on the will to pursue it. When I usually did finally lose them completely. . .
(I think I’ll start calling this aspect of academia ‘Fergusonitis’.)
Pornstar:
Who knows? Some yet-to-be-born American Trotsky? Or (more likely) some cross-breed of FDR and Jimmy Carter? (Also yet to be born.)
An old friend of mine (who went to the University of Massachusetts — which I had quite mistakenly thought to be pretty ‘liberal’) insists that there is such pressure towards conformity (i.e. to conform to what is perceived as the current norm, whenever it exists) and not to upset applecarts with any kind of effective radicalism, is so great that any alteration from the current trend to feudal capitalism and authoritarianism is impossible.
She said as soon as Obama was elected that even what I thought were very moderate ideas would be too non-conformist and were doomed from the beginning, and she was perfectly right, I think.
Actually, what we all need is someone like Rienzo Piano. Listening to him talk about The Shard* (tallest building in Europe, which I think is amazingly beautiful, saw it from the Thames a couple of weeks ago, and quite surprisingly, like the Gherkin it doesn’t seem to make the London skyline any taller, somehow, despite their height) cheered up a jaded Squirrel no end.
Pity there aren’t any polticians/historians/economists/commentators as bright as that.
Dunno whether you can access that outside the UK; if you can, it’s long – nearly an hour, if I remember rightly — but really worth it. Humanism can triumph!
(And he’s Italian. And Squirrel’s a bit disillusioned with Englishness just at the moment. Busily trying to turn more Italianate.)
Red,
I like the shard, too. (And the engineering that went into it gladdens the heart as well.)
As for for Mr. Unger… This is just a re-run of the ‘Gore is indistinguishable from Bush’ argument’ that convinced a few thousand pie-in-the-skyers in Florida to vote for Nader, which delivered unto the world Gulf War 2 and a host of other Bushbaby miseries that will take decades if not several centuries longer to repair.
First idiocism that jumps out of that quote:
The very last thing Obama wants to do is invade… anywhere. The very first thing Mitt Romney will want to do is invade anywhere. Unger is confusing Obama’s approach to assassination with military adventurism, not understanding that -putting aside all the problems, moral and strategic, with drones etc that we have all hashed out- the reason Obama is so fond of drones is that he is so phobic about military adventurism of the kind Cheney et al liked to pour on the shredded wheat every morning.
But what really leaps out of that quote is how sheltered and unworldly Unger is. Yeah, I feel as let down by Obama’s weak-wad performance as the next person who had high hopes for him, but Unger isn’t describing the country that exists, he’s describing the country he wished existed. He wants a candidate, and a party, so pure and well-meaning that it will never get a man or woman elected to high office in any of our lifetimes.
Politics is a game of inches. Obama has signally failed to get down in the dirt and fight for those inches. That is his failing. There are no long bomb hail-Mary passes for the surprise touchdown. Something like 40% of the population would rather live in the dark ages, and vote accordingly. As appalling a situation as that is, it’s their country, too. They have to be kept talking, kept a part of the conversation.
What will really happen if Obama is defeated in November is exactly the opposite of what Unger desires. The next Democratic candidate will be another pluperfect triangulator and shift even further to the right.
Unger should stick to his ivory towers and his worshipful unworldly students and discuss with them his happy utopias.
Elect Mitt Romney to turn America around? Bullshit. That is exactly what people like Unger said when Reagan was elected the first time. I heard them saying it: this is great, this will show the country once and for all how awful their policies are, and then they will all wake up and we will march together lockstep to progressive utopia.
Bullshit. Really annoying bullshit. We have to fight for every inch, and that means, this time, pushing Obama once more into the breach and then kicking his ass to make him try harder. There is no other option and no other way forward. Not in this world. Yeah I’d like to live in the world Mr Unger would like to live in, too, but he sure as fuck isn’t the the man to tell us how to get there.
And as for N. Ferguson, Red, 15 years ago and longer, before he wheedled his way into the pundocracy, he was amusing enough to talk to. I used to see him now and then at a friends place. He wrote a perfectly serviceable, and rather dull, history of a banking family, paid for of course by the banking family. But he was always aiming at celebrity, not rigorous thought. He’s exactly the kind of ‘historian’ Allen Bennet cast as the villain in ‘History Boys’. Kind of third rate number cruncher who finds that if he takes a contrarian position, merely for the sake of being contrary, and shouts loudly enough, and long enough, that someone somewhere is going to put him on TV. and make him very rich. And it all went to his head, and he managed to forget that he never believed any of the crap he was spouting. And then he went to America where the right picked him up and made him a poster boy for the neo-cons and he never looked back and stopped even attempting to think.
he’s made an interesting life for himself out of it, but Christ the number of people who have been fooled by him. I find it very hard now even to stand in the same room with him now. Having to watch otherwise perfectly decent people sucking up.
Squirrel –– I salute you. Some time ago I decided that anyone who without irony uses that execrable expression “think outside the box” not only can’t think outside whatever box they’ve created for themselves but can’t manage even to extract their head from that certain bodily cavity where it obviously resides.
Where on earth did it come from in the first place? A television ad?
I cringe.
Madame,
I think that dire expression came from that line-drawing puzzle that’s been around for decades if not longer, the one where you have to connect a certain number of dots with a limited number of straight lines, and without lifting the pencil, and it stumps everyone at first because there is no way to do it unless you either draw one more line than you are allotted or unless you draw one of the lines outside the box, ie not from one dot to the next but long enough to then turn a corner and come back and finish. And only those clever puzzlers who realize there is no rule about extending a line outside the box (of dots) solve the puzzle.
That is certainly where I remember it being applied first.
‘paradigm shift’ is a related horror. Which I know I have resorted to once or twice, to my shame.
Bluth,
…an Executive Branch coup d’etat that will continue until some far future Supreme Court decides to make its mark.
I have to tell you that I’m simply unable to take Unger or the 2000 Naderites at anything like face value. I think they just don’t have the balls for a fight, they went looking for a position that would make surrender the right thing to do, and by golly they found it: well, anybody who couldn’t find one would be such a lightweight that he’d be living in the ionosphere. I’ll go further. I think the kick they get from being Too Pure for Politics is just a cheap, childish thrill.
But don’t tell me I’m being to hard on them. Being hard on them would be taking them at their word and accepting that they really believe that the best way to confront the far right is to hand them everything they want.
In totally unrelated news a state representative named Lisa Brown has been banned from speaking in the Michigan House, though the reason seems a little unclear.
One of those voting for the ban (a certain Mike somebody) said it was for using foul language: “What she said was offensive…It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.” He wouldn’t but I will: she said “vagina.”
But another backer of the ban (one Wayne so-and-so) demurred. “It wasn’t about body parts…It was the ‘No means no’ comment. A step too far…It’s like giving a kid a time out for a day.”
See, that’s what’s so great about democracy. We don’t have to agree on everything, just the important shit.
Nat,
Sixteen months or so ago the same thing happened in Florida, except the legislator who got censured said ‘uterus’.
Imagine if schoolchildren had been in attendance!
I’m pretty sure if someone said ‘clitoris’ there would be an instant 2nd amendment solution. (Or else all their heads would explode like in Mars Attacks.)
“Outside the box” is now Management Speak, and like all Management Speak, it is perfectly (and deliberately) content-free. I’ve heard it attributed to the immortal Deepak Chopra, but I refuse to trust anybody who could possibly have heard him say it.
I believe that “paradigm shift” has an honorable pedigree. I think it comes from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, whether as something he said verbatim (I don’t recall) or as a summary of a theme of his, which it would have been — once. One doesn’t have to agree with everything Kuhn says to allow that he’s a genuine and honest thinker, which means that 99.4% of the people who use the term today can’t possibly know what he was talking about.
Paradigm shift is not Management Speak. It’s Marketing Speak, which is something else entirely.
Bluth,
Well, I’ve heard it said (I mean, how would I know?) that it is a word that more than a few men have never heard of. Or at least, learned to use in context, as it were.
Nat, indeed, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a brilliant book (there is even, just out, a 50th anniversary edition!) and Kuhn is a certified deep thinker, but lesser mortals appropriated his term and sullied it beyond redemption.
Oooh, it’s only because Gunny’s away that you guys dare to use such foul language here. Why, I was once put on the naughty step for writing “n*pples” (without the fig leaf of course). Gunny has Standards. And I have a fucking load of respect for him for those Standards.
Oh, Natasha, do you know how to use it in context?
Fuckin’-ay-boy-howdy he does, but you were never on the naughty step here for saying “nepples”, of that I’m perfectly certain.
Nepples is a wonderful word.
Madame,
Contextual accuracy is never to be taken for granted. There are reasons why prudent linguists acquire Editors.
Natasha –– And there are reasons why Editors deeply appreciate cunning linguists, prudent or otherwise.
tmi?
Never fear, Amy, it’s naught but a little word play.
I regret that I have
only oneno recommends to give to this excellent conversation. Great thoughts – esp Red. And I bloody love Thomas Kuhn. Knocks spots of Popper.