As for me, I think that Reed is making an expansive point, one that travels light years beyond the immediate question of what to think about 'Barry.'
He's asking whether or not a coherent left -- coherently opposed to bloody excesses abroad and solidly embedded inequality at home -- exists in the 21st century US. He answers that question with a decisive no.
Reed brings us full circle, back to the early statements of Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford which began our on-list slap but no tickle fights. Despite all the back and forth yelling we've done for months about who hates who more and who's the worst person, Ford's statements -- which should've served as a pivot point for both pro and con statements -- were never so much about Obama as they were a challenge to the idea that a progressive movement is developing around, and because of the Senator.
Recently, I've found myself less and less interested in debating 'Barry' this and 'Barry' that and much more intrigued by the idea that the left actually has no plan, other than getting elected and pressuring Democrats to distribute a few crumbs to the loudest irritants.
Speaking with Doug in 2003, Zizek said:
[Regarding the failure of European protests to prevent the invasion of Iraq]...when people complain, "But this was a weak resistance, now it's vanishing, now already Chirac is practically withdrawing," and so on, how Europe really showed its weakness. Oh, but I would say, are people aware how precisely by experiencing this as Europe's defeat, you at least set certain standards? You become aware in a negative way of what should have been done. My parallel here is with feminism. The first step of feminism is not, "Women should win." It's that you become aware of how defeated women are. You know, the first step towards liberation is, in a way, the awareness of defeat.
[...]
<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Zizek.html>
It is the left's weakness which fascinates me now. Not in a morbid sense but in almost precisely the way Zizek meant: as a necessary first step towards genuine action.
Reed, Ford, M. Kimberly and others are arguing that the *ideas* about the Obama campaign -- the Netroots and Daily Kos style of simulated empowerment -- have fooled people into thinking that they are not defeated. It's this lack of an appreciation of defeat which is the biggest problem.
About this, Reed writes:
I remember Paul Wellstone saying already in the early '90s that they'd gotten into a horrible situation in Congress, where the Republicans would propose a really, really hideous bill, and the Dems would respond with a slightly less hideous one and mobilize feverishly around it. If it passed, they and all their interest-group allies would hold press conferences to celebrate the victory, when what had passed actually made things worse than they were before. That's also an element of the logic we've been trapped in for 30 years, and it's one reason that things have gotten progressively worse, and that the bar of liberal expectations has been progressively lowered. It's also one of the especially dangerous things about Obama, that he threatens to go beyond any of his Dem predecessors in redefining their all-too-familiar capitulation as the boundary of the politically thinkable, as the substance of "progressivism."
[...]
And so, the FISA bill the Senator supported is declared to be better than the purely Republican version but still, according to the ACLU, "Gives the president broad new powers to spy on innocent Americans' phone calls and emails – even when they have no connection to terrorism."
The rest --
<http://www.aclu.org/safefree/spying/35872res20080701.html>
In the name of a 'compromise' which supposedly reflects progressive or liberal concerns, things actually get a little bit worse.
Regarding this, Zizek writes:
We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation": in a first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the "foreign threat"; in a second negation, the "decent" democratic center, in the very gesture of pathetically rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message in a "civilized" way - in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of background "unwritten rules" has already changed so much that no one even notices it and everyone is just relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And the true danger is that something similar will happen with the "war on terror": "extremists" like John Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy will remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible ethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: they will no longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the mainstream.
[...]
<http://www.lacan.com/iraq.htm>
Here's my new fantasy: we stop talking about Sen. Obama and start thinking and talking about the complete disarray of left politics - a dangerous situation to be sure, because we're needed, at full our strength and highest level of alertness, to deal with problems such as climate change (which, by now, is at least as much a political issue as it is about methods of energy production and consumption).
.d.
-- "The world is a mess and I just...need to rule it."
Dr. Horrible
...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/