In quick hits david mizner calls attention to Glenn Greenwald's column,
"Obama's view of liberal criticisms", which began thus:
Last night, Barack Obama spoke at a $30,000 per plate DNC fundraising event at the "home of Richard and Ellen Richman, who live in the exclusive Conyers Farm development in Greenwich [Connecticut]'s famed 'back country' neighborhood," and said the following about liberal critics of his presidency:
Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed -- oh, well, the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial reform bill passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particular derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter.) I thought that was going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are. (Laughter.) We have had the most productive, progressive legislative session in at least a generation.
So, just as Robert Gibbs before him explained (albeit more harshly), if you're one of those people dissatisfied with large parts of the Obama presidency, that's only because you have something wrong with the way you think (you need drug testing/you "congenitally see the glass as half empty"), and because you are saddled with extremely unrealistic, child-like expectations (you're angry that the Pentagon hasn't closed yet/bitter that Obama "hasn't yet brought about world peace: 'I thought that was going to happen quicker' (Laughter.)"). In other words, you're just a petulant, unreasonable, unrealistic, fringe child who doesn't appreciate the greatness and generosity he's given you (h/t Jane Hamsher). Contrary to what many of you thought, it's these flaws within yourself that cause you to be dissatisfied with the administration, not because of any of this:
which he followed with a litany of screen shots and links documenting many of Obama's most eggregious betrayals, after which he wrote:
What's most striking about Obama's comments is that there is no acceptance whatsoever of responsibility (I've failed in some critical areas; we could have/should have done better). There's not even any base-motivating vow to fight to fix these particular failures (we'll keep fighting for a public option/to curb executive power abuses/to reduce lobbyist and corporate control of our political process). Instead, he wants you to know that if you criticize him -- or even question what he's done ("well, I don't know about this particular derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that") -- it's your fault: for being some sort of naive, fringe-leftist idiot who thought he would eliminate the Pentagon and bring about world peace in 18 months, and/or because you simply don't sufficiently appreciate everything he's done for you because you're congenitally dissatisfied.
Perhaps what struck me most about this morally despicable performance is how perfectly Obama embodied the conservative caricature of an out-of-touch liberal elitist at the same time that he was heaping scorn on liberals in a dramatically out-of-touch attack on those responsible for his political success. He was, in short, the conservative's liberal: he embodied everything that conservatives can think of to make liberalism distasteful, if not revolting, and nothing that liberals would recognize to make liberalism attractive.
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The Apotheosis of "Liberal Elitisim"
For some reason, this account of Obama's hollowed-out neo-liberalism made me think of the very different political ethos that I grew up in. It's not at all well-remembered today, but the 1960s student movement was almost entirely made up of students whose parents were working-class, or just one step out of it as GI Bill college graduates themselves. (I was the later). And while most of us were there because our parents had sacrificed to make a better life for us, we were also there because we hungered for knowledge, for understanding, and for the chance to make a difference in the world. We had, in a sense, been waiting all our lives for the adventure we were about to begin, and we had all had some kind of experience that had marked us--or at least served notice--that we had to have something larger in our lives.
For example, a really strange thing happened to me once while I was growing up. I was an intensely curious kid, who did a lot of self-educating by reading books, as well as collecting and examining things, and pestering my college-educated parents (both born working class and the first in their families to go to college). As a result, I tended to ask a lot of questions in school as well. One day, a kid whose identity I can't remember, except that he was a boy in my grade-school class, asked me, "Why do you ask so many questions? What makes you think that you're so smart?" I was dumbfounded. It sounded to me like a non-sequiter. If I wanted to show off being smart, I would answer questions, rather than asking them. What I was was hungry for knowledge, which is pretty much a natural state of being for young humans. It's what we're wired for.
But it's not what our hyper-hierarchical post-nomadic forms of civilization were wired for. Conformity. Obedience. Following instructions. Not asking questions. That's what they were wired for. Unlike your typical nomadic tribe, which needed all the savvy and intelligence it could muster, they didn't need a whole lot of people aking questions. In fact, they didn't really need anyonedoing that. At best, they needed a small elite corps of physical and cultural engineers to keep things running smoothly, and that's probably at least one of the few rational roots of widespread anti-intellectualism--a sort of displaced, or better, mis-articulated form of class resentment. Indeed, if as German Social Democrat August Bebel said, "anti-semitism is the socialism of fools," it could just as well be said that "anti-intellectualism is the class war of fools."
Precisely because conservative elites had done such a good job of demonizing real class war, this foolish ersatz version had a virulent gut-level power to it, making it almost impossible to understand--particularly since understanding was the identified enemey.
A lot of things happened between my childhood experience in the 1950s, and when Barack Obama was in college in the 1980s. But the most salient thing for my purposes here was that answers became far more important than questions. You can see it in Obama's mania for testing kids as a way of supposedly "improving" education. You can see it in his reliance on experts who have "all the answers" even though they totally failed to ask the big questions that could have prevented the catastrophic failures of the Bush Administration.
And so it was that while Obama grew up consciously eschewing the substance of his own mother's liberalism, he came to perfectly embody the hollowed-out conservative caricature of cultural superiority, meritocratic achievement for no other purpose than personal success. This is liberal elitism precisely as conservatives imagine it, devoid of any grounding in community, values or transcendent purposes. It is the enactment of a neo-liberal ethos representing it's own special form of identity politics, framed around the identity of meritocratic achievement. It is a vision that's necessarily blind to the fact that larger questions outside the scope of professional comtepetence even exist, much less that they could be of over-riding importance. And it is equally blind to the fact that turning everyone into a meritocratic success story cannot possibly be a recipe for social and economic progress. Not only do we need a much broader variety of tasks to be done, and not only do the vast majority of them not require professional training, if it were otherwise, then the laws of supply and demand would surely drive down the levels of professional pay, making the meritocratic utopia a self-defeating proposition.
This why the immediate catastrophe of Obama's neo-liberal political failure is not just an historical accident. Rather, it is inherent in his very ideological outlook, difficult as that outlook may be for most of us to grasp. (I freely admit that I am only just now beginning to really make sense of it.) We should not expect to be able to change Obama's outlook in any substantial manner. He is as ideologically rigid and closed to outside ideas as any conservative ideologue--if not moreso, because he is protected by the belief in his own open-mindedness--an open-mindedness that is quickly revealed as a sham when you realize how little interest or patience he has for those questions that defy easy answers, questions that make people angry, questions that make people snap, "How come you think you're so smart?"
For that is part of what Obama was mocking in his Greenwich fundraising speech. It's not that we pesky liberals want to much. It's that we even think to ask about them.
"There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" -- Robert F. Kennedy. |
