On Wednesday, Matt wrote a diary, "Obama's Consolidation of the Party", that got quite a bit of notice, not just here, but elsewhere across the blogosphere. Mike and Chris both weighed in to compliment Matt and add a few thoughts of their own.
But I called it "A Rather Strange Post", and the time has come to elaborate further on why I said that--not so much focused on what Matt said, but on what he's describing, and the challenge of making sense of it.
Matt set up his post by saying:
Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship.
He went on to talk about "Voter Registration," "Obama Organizing Fellows," "Money: MyBarackObama.com," "Field: MyBarackObama.com," and "Message and Politics: MyBarackObama.com." A recurrent them throughout the post was how Obama had managed to centralize power, while largely ignoring and/or marginalizing (other?) progressive groups and constituencies.
I only took on part of my concerns in my comment, the heart of which was questioning Obama's non-partisan schtick:
Like it or not, the aspiration to create a non-partisan politics is at odds with the very structure of our political institutions, from the winner-take-all single-member districts that define most of the legislative bodies in the country, to the electoral college. Also, like it or not, where one party systems do exist, the result is invariably tyranny.
There are, of course, powerful yearnings to be free of partisan strife. There are also powerful yearnings to eat so much ice cream that your [sic] burst.
I got deeper into historical specifics in responding to Chris's post when I wrote:
A Return to the Failed Policies of the Early 1900s
As I wrote several months ago--Obama is an early-20th Centrury progressive, not a post-Vietnam one. The former focused a great deal on process, and trusted that substantive equity would naturally follow. The downside of this is that these policies have already been shown to fail.
I'm not saying that they didn't do anything good. But I am saying that they were inadequate to the scope of the problems they faced, which meant that they failed in the long run--if not sooner.
Time to flesh this all out, in hopes of encouraging a more enlightened debate.
This final installment to this series was delayed because of a domino effect set in motion when I had to cover a 6-hour Long Beach Harbor Commission meeting on Tuesday. For a refresher on the earlier installments, just click the links below
In this diary set, I've worked with the notion of historical cycles, or waves-specifically, three differently scaled waves all of which converge on this November's election, and in doing so, confront a wall--the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers, together with the narratives they both depend upon and propagate.
The first part dealt with the roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, The second part dealt with 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 third part dealt with 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.
Now, I look at the wall those waves are crashing up against...
The notion that history moves in cycles, or waves is an ancient one. In this diary set, I'm looking at the coinciding impact of two waves that are part of longterm cycles, as well as a third one indicative of global transformation that's been under way for several decades now These three waves all converge on this November's election, and in doing so, they confront a wall--the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers.
The first part dealt with the roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, the next part will deal with the recent wave of "post-materialist" values. The second part dealt with 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. This part deals with 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.
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