| I am, needless to say, underwhelmed by the choice of Joe Biden (D-MNBA). Sure he's better than Evan Bayh and Tim Kaine. But that's an incredibly low bar. Most of what people say he brings does not impress me, and his poor showing in his two presidential outings supports my conclusion.
What he does bring, I would argue, is a soothing reassurance to Versailles that "change we can believe in" will translate into "change you can live with", and it's going to be our job to push back against that, hard, in the years to come, if we are successful in November.
Picking Biden lines up with at least three significant moves by Obama since clinching the nomination: (1) His move to the right with FISA, NAFTA, etc. which pleased Versailles while losing him momentum with voters.
(2) His relative passivity toward McCain's initial wave of attacks, which lost ground with voters, but may have faciliitated the beginnings of serious Versailles re-evaluation of McCain.
(3) His heavy concentration on conventional foreign policy thinking in Wednesday's Security Fest at the convention, rather than, say, stressing the need for rebuilding soft power as a subsidiary point in a night devoted primarily to economic security at home.
In all three cases--four, including the pick of Biden--Obama has made moves that are costly with voters, but play well to Versailles. And that, I would submit, is the core of his general election strategy. This all hinges on a basic misperception on Obama's part--his focus on Reagan 1980 as his model (confused with 1984) of a "transformational" candidate as opposed to understanding the dynamics of a 1932-style realigning election. Of course, that misperception is deeply rooted in who Obama is. But it is a misperception all the same. |
| My argument, in a nutshell, is not new. Indeed, I haven't changed my basic perception of this campaign since I wrote my 4-part series, "Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future back in February--articulating a viewpoint that I'd held for quite some time before that. Here's is the argument of that series in a nutshell:
The 2008 election represents a collision of three historical waves with the wall of rightwing hegemony, which I described as "the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their 'moderate' and 'centrist' enablers, together with the narratives they both depend upon and propagate."
Three waves are: - The roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, described by political theorists such as V.O. Key and Walter Dean Burnham.
- The rise and fall of successive world powers-Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us-described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin
Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich.
- The recent wave of "post-materialist" values surveyed on a worldwide basis over the past several decades by the World Values Survey, and described most fully in the work of social scientist Ronald Inglehart.
Let me run through each of these, briefly.
The first wave--that of party realignments-- has been getting occassional notice of late, but is still largely absent from political narratives outside of the blogosphere. It has been taken up by some prominent DKos diarists, including frontpagers, but on cable TV, not so much. The thirst for realignment could fuel a 30-40 year shift in our political system along the lines of these previous distinct historical eras:
Partisan Balance In US History
Through Six Party Systems
Control of Presidency, House & Senate
| 
Dem-Reps: 12 / Feds: 2 / Split: 1 | 
Dem-Reps: 9 / Whigs: 1 / Split: 7 | 
Dems: 1 / Reps: 9 / Split: 8 | 
Dems 3 / Reps: 12 / Split: 3 |
Dems: 13 / Reps: 1 / Split: 4 | 
Dems: 3 / Reps 2.25 / Split: 13.75 |
Note that the last party system--now coming to a close--is unique in that it is dominated by divided government. Thus, the Versailles converntional wisdom--that our political disease is due to a lack of bipartisan cooperation is based on an inversion of this fundamental reality, which suggests that our problem is actually the lack of a single dominant party. (And we all know what happened the last time that party was the GOP, back in 1929.)
The second wave--that of great power rise and fall-- is one we should be accutely aware of, what with the Beijing Olympics and all. The failure of the Democrats to seriously assess the magnitude of economic decline--which the Republicans have exacerbated enormously, but not caused--has been a serious source of weakness in their campaigning this year, as economic messages have generally lacked consistency and bite. If goes without saying that nothing the Democrats are proposing is remotely adequate to the scale of the problem as seen in terms of great power decline. Furthermore, this failure means that the Democrats face a very real problem should they prevail in November--as I beleive they will: what to do about the profound economic mess we fing ourselves in.
The third wave--of post-materialist values-- describes the characteristic core of Obama's youth-skewed supporters. as well as the danger is holds, since those who assume a post-materialist outlook, free from the constraints of survival struggles do have trouble really connecting with the culture of survival struggle that has defined economic populism and the core of center-left politics during the apogee of the New Deal Era. Part of this trouble--manifest as cultural differences between middle-class and working-class culture--has been a recurrring theme, for example, in educationaction's ongoing series "Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing".
Against all these, we have the wall of hegemony. Let me repeat my formulation of it from above: "the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their 'moderate' and 'centrist' enablers, together with the narratives they both depend upon and propagate."
Glenn Greenwald wrote about a classic example of Thursay, "The decay of serious journalism and Rachel Maddow's new show", which began thus:
As our political culture, economic security, standing in the world and our media institutions have all degraded beyond recognition after eight years of right-wing rule (much of it cheered on by The New Republic), what is The New Republic's Sacha Zimmerman deeply worried about? MSNBC's decision to give liberal Rachel Maddow her own show....
Because it would "polarize" the debate, don'tcha know!
The relegation of "liberalism" to a subordinate position, and its mis-representation in the media by accomodationists, so ably represented by TNR itself, is a quintessential characteristic of the Sixth Party System in its mature form, and is precisely what a fully-realized realignment would do away with.
But this is not what Obama is all about. he is a creature of the Sixth Party System, and all its accomodations, and has shown no signs of fundamentally challenging it.
Indeed, the elevation of Biden as VP, and the shunning of Wes Clark, epitomizes how Obama has dealt with the collision of these three waves and the wall of hegemony. In each of the three examples I cited above--his post-primary move to the right, his relative passivity toward McCain's initial wave of attacks, and his upcoming Wednesday-night focus on conventional national security narratives--Obama has chosen the path of accomodation with the wall of hegemony, and hence, with the existing Sixth Party System.
Biden as VP is one more example of this. It may very well help ensure an Obama victory in November. After all, McCain truly is a dangerous man, and Versailles may finally be waking up to the fact. But the dangers we face go far, far deeper than Versailles dares to imagine. And if we do not fully plumb those depths, and form policies accordingly, those depths will swallow us, as they have so many great powers before us.
Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away. |
