In my next diary, I'll continue by discussing some factors that Stirling didn't touch on, and how I see his outlook and mine fitting into a larger framework.
But the more I thought about it, the more complicated this began to seem. So I decided to break things down a bit. In this diary, I want to do just two things: first, highlight some ways in which the Democratic establishment--not the DFH McGovernites--destroyed the dominance of the Democratic Party by empowering what Stirling Newberry calls the "Confederate" block of voters. And second, add a reminder about the petroleum-based foundations for the "long war", and how Obama began preparing his transition to where he is now, fully signed on for the duration of that war.
In a followup EarthDay-themed diary, I will discuss the true costs of continuing to cling to the "Petroleum paradigm", which is what Obama has also signed on for.
The Democratic Party's Role In Creating "Confederate" America
The standard narrative of why the New Deal coalition lost power blames the left. The right says it was because the left went crazy, feminists burning bras, gays judges letting criminals out of jails and kicking God out of the classroom, etc. The center says it was more noble, in part-LBJ saying, "There goes the South for a generation" after signing the Civil Rights Act-but also foolish in failing to understand and sympathize with "Joe Sixpack". There is some truth in the second version of this narrative, but there's a lot more truth in a story seldom told about the role of the Democratic Party establishment in sowing the seeds of its own destruction. And much of this story revolves around oil.
(A) Segregated oil-based suburbanization, hollowing out the Democratic Party's urban Northern industrial base. In America's Undeclared War: What's Killing Our Cities and How We Can Stop It , Daniel Lazare explores a centuries-long antipathy to cities which New Deal Democrats uncritically played along with this, effectively undermining their urban working-class base and building the segregated, soon-to-be-Republican suburbs. Even as the New Deal restructuring of the mortgage market made mass homeownership possible, the institutionalization of geographically coded financing-most notably redlining-facilitated not just a suburbanization process, but one that was decidedly conservative in producing both class and race segregation. The Publishers Weekly review of Lazare's book is worth quoting in full to give a sense of the scope of stakes and forces at play over the long sweep of time, to which New Deal Democrats were largely blind:
"I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man," said Thomas Jefferson, voicing a concern of many early Americans about the moralAand, implicitly, democratic and politicalAsuperiority of rural over urban life. If Jefferson's view was predicated on a fear of powerful federal and state governments (dependent upon urban centers), Alexander Hamilton promoted strong, stable states and the idea of cities as necessary to economic and civil health. According to Lazare (The Frozen Republic), the Jeffersonians are winning this ideological fight, much to America's detriment. As a result, he says, the U.S. consistently treats its urban centers with prejudice and neglect. Lazare has marshaled an enormous range of ideas and facts to advance and substantiate his argument, variously suggesting that though cities breed social reform, they are traditionally condemned as hotbeds of immorality; that automobile mass production occasioned urban redesign that endangers the public; that California's draconian 1979 Proposition 13 tax cut further eroded the state's highways and urban schools; and that Jacob Riis's urban reform campaigns were profoundly anti-immigrant and anti-urban. In his last chapter, "Solutions," Lazare calls for implementing our (constitutional) right to amend our "ancient Constitution," and for broader acceptance of emerging technologies like cheaper, faster and lightweight trains. Drawing upon rich historical details, the urban and social theory of John Kenneth Galbraith, Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Jane Jacobs, and economic and environmental studies, Lazare provides an engaging, provocative and alarming portrait of America at the turn of the millennium.
(B) The bargain struck with Southern Democrats, giving plantation owners effective control of their labor force in the short run and subsidizing their (oil-based) mechanization in the long run ensured an eventual long-term civil rights struggle, which in the north would feed into (oil-based) suburbanization in the form of white flight in (A) above, while in the South George Wallace was the midwife of reshaping social conservatism into purported non-racial terms that first Nixon, then conservatives as a whole would embrace, revolving around themes of "dependency" and "personal responsibility". In short, the "pragmatic compromises" of the 1930s planted the seeds of the New Deal Coalition's own destruction.
(C) The Interstate Freeway System. Although Eisenhower was a big proponent of Interstate system, dating back to his early experience in a cross-country military expedition, Democrats had long planned such a development, and provided the bulk of Congressional support for it. While clearly necessary and inevitable in some form, Democrats never thought through a whole host of consequences, including not thinking through how money could be recouped (by retaining property rights to off-ramp-adjacent property, for example) that could then be used to ameliorate disamenities. In any event, one of the major demographic results of the system was tremendous sprawl, both to suburbs and exurbs, and across the nation, particularly away from the industrial Northeast and outward to the Sunbelt.
(D) The Military-Industrial Complex. In addition to everything else, there was a profound geographical dimension to the military-industrial complex, captured in the title of the definitive book about it, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America. By subsidizing an entirely new industrial zone away from the tradtional industrial heartland, primarily across the Sunbelt and along the coasts, the Democrats further eroded their highly-unionized industrial base, while empowering a diversified collection of regional elites who were traditionally hostile to both unions and to the Northeast-centered national elites.
Oil, Empire & The Long War: Obama's Self-Recruitment
In December, 2006, I wrote a diary, "Obama vs. ISG: Yes Blood For Oil!" the bulk of which read thus:
On Dec 04, Chris Bowers wrote a post, "The Two Obamas and Me, Part One" which contrasted the principle-driven Obama who first inspired tremendous netroots support with the compromise-driven Obama who now seems intent on demonizing the very people who helped get him his start. One example Chris cited of the second Obama was this:
In town-hall meetings, when those who opposed the war get shrill, Obama makes a point of noting that while he, too, opposed the war, he's "not one of those people who cynically believes Bush went in only for the oil."
Chis followed up:
Did anyone with any power every say that? Did any leading Democrats ever say that? Did any progressive or liberal of any public stature ever say that? If they did, I'd love to see the quote.
Well, now it appears that someone has come quite close to saying that: The Baker/Hamilton Iraq Study Group (ISG). Privatizing Iraq's oil is one of their fundamental recommendations--regardless of what the Iraqis want. Democracy--well, that was always an afterthought.
The ISG is a center-right outfit, composed entirely of people who were wrong about Iraq. Anyone who opposed the war from the gitgo was simply not considered ISG material. As Glen Greenwald points out today ("The principal sin of the Baker-Hamilton Report"), their overall proposal is clearly to prolong US involvement, a position that the American people now soundly reject. Greenwald points to an AP poll:
Seventy-one percent said they would favor a two-year timeline from now until sometime in 2008, but when people are asked instead about a six-month timeline for withdrawal that number drops to 60 percent.
In defiance of these numbers, the ISG is attempting to once again redefine a "center" that's an extreme minority position, so that the mainstream of American opinion can in turn be defined as "extremist,""defeatist" and "off the table." One part of that center, pointed out by author Antonia Juhasz (The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time) in an LA Times Op-Ed today, is the ISG's "advocacy for securing foreign companies' long-term access to Iraqi oil fields." (More on this below.)
Barack Obama, of course, has helped make this happen. Every enabler of bipartisan rhetoric has helped make this happen. But Obama has a special role, since his early backers, those who helped him early when he needed it most, had every reason to suppose that he would be a powerful, eloquent, moral voice of leadership opposing the war. Instead, we've gotten a weathervane routine from him, as David Sirota wrote last June for The Nation:
Then there is the Iraq War. Obama says that during his 2004 election campaign he "loudly and vigorously" opposed the war. As The New Yorker noted, "many had been drawn initially by Obama's early opposition to the invasion." But "when his speech at the antiwar rally in 2002 was quietly removed from his campaign Web site," the magazine reported, "activists found that to be an ominous sign"--one that foreshadowed Obama's first months in the Senate. Indeed, through much of 2005, Obama said little about Iraq, displaying a noticeable deference to Washington's bipartisan foreign policy elite, which had pushed the war. One of Obama's first votes as a senator was to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State despite her integral role in pushing the now-debunked propaganda about Iraq's WMD.
In November Obama's reticence on the war ended. Five days after hawkish Democratic Representative Jack Murtha famously called for a withdrawal, Obama gave a speech calling for a drawdown of troops in 2006. "Those of us in Washington have fallen behind the debate that is taking place across America on Iraq," he said. But then he retreated. On Meet the Press in January Obama regurgitated catchphrases often employed by neoconservatives to caricature those demanding a timetable for withdrawal. "It would not be responsible for us to unilaterally and precipitously draw troops down," he said. Then, as polls showed support for the war further eroding, Obama tacked again, giving a speech in May attacking the war and mocking the "idea that somehow if you say the words 'plan for victory' and 'stay the course' over and over and over and over again...that somehow people are not going to notice the 2,400 flag-draped coffins that have arrived at the Dover Air Force Base."
This is larger context for Obama's remark dismissing "those people who cynically believes Bush went in only for the oil." As Chris said, who are those people? I've gone to anti-war demonstrations, I've attended weekly peace vigils. I've talked with people carrying "No Blood For Oil" signs. Even I haven't met anyone who "believes Bush went in only for the oil." The point of those signs is not to claim that this was Bush's only reason--that would be absurd. The signs are meant to point out a reason that the official discussion routinely ignores, and refuses to discuss, except to ridicule--just the way Obama did.
Of course, at a basic level, everyone knows that Iraq is about oil. There are only two reasons we originally got involved in that part of the world: Oil and to deny the Soviets a warm-water port. Israel only became important as a result of those first two reasons. Our oil obsession caused us to overthrow the Mossadegh regime in Iran in 1953--a promising democracy that we would give our eye teeth to have back today, at least, if we had any sense. Which, of course, we don't. In Afghanistan, our anti-Soviet obsession caused us to team up with the most extremist elements of the Mujahadeen, and partner with bin Laden. The problems we face today are almost entirely of our own making--the result of narrow, short-sighted, knee-jerk responses to situations that were far less threatening to us than the situations we face today, situations our reactive policies have created.
But if oil is half the reason we're in the Middle East to begin with, oil also plays a very specific role in this very specific war. We had both the President and Vice-President from the oil industry. We had all manner of other oil company connections, we had a huge imbalance in financial support for the GOP from the oil industry vs. alternative energy, we had the super-secret Cheney energy taskforce with maps of Iraq's oil fields, we had promises that Iraq's oil revenue would pay for Iraq's reconstruction--the connections go on and on and on and on. To not talk about any of them is of necessity to not talk about the real reasons, true context, and political alignments that lead us into this war. And this, in turn, leads us to embrace a series of fairy tales, instead. First WMDs and Iraq's mythical involvement in 9/11, then the absurd notion that Bush not only cares about democracy, but that that's the reason we invaded Iraq in the first place--a reason that Bush himself strenuously opposed, until it was forced on him by the Iraqi people.
By ridiculing and misrepresenting those who refuse to ignore the link between oil and war--and war and death--Obama has paid his dues to join the Washington insider's club. And from that perch, he now parades--much like John McCain--as a maverick outsider. (You know, like Frank Sinatra in the heyday of the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground and the Mothers of Invention. Or Peter Frampton at the time of the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the Slits.) The "maverick outsider" status absolutely depends on absolutely banishing real outsiders from even a moment's notice, especially if they represent a majority of the American people.
At the time I wrote that, I had no idea how bad it would get. I only knew that Obama quite clearly was not one of us. I did not dream that he would actually normalize virtually everything that Bush had done in the conduct of his long war, and freeze us into decades of a foreign policy based on preserving a dying--and Earth-killing--industrial policy.
What this two-fold diary is meant to underscore is the degree to which the Democratic Party establishment is utterly committed to a politically self-destructive foreign and domestic policy that revolves around oil and empire. It is the contradictions of this commitment that is their perpetual undoing. Scapegoating the left is merely one of the ways they choose to manage the perpetual chaos that results.
