Underclass ideology -- where left and right come together to embed a common sense around victim-blaming and punitive moralism, racialized of course but at a respectable remove from the familiar phenotypically based racial taxonomy -- will most likely be the vehicle for effecting the purge. Obama's success will embody how far we have come in realizing racial democracy, and the inequality that remains is most immediately a function of cultural -- i.e., attitudinal, and behavioral -- and moral deficits that undercut acquisition of `human' (and/or `social,' these interchangeable mystifications shift according to rhetorical need) capital, a message his incessant castigation of black behavior legitimizes. In this context, the `activism' appropriate for attacking inequality: 1) rationalizes privatization and demonization of the public sector through accepting the premise that government is inefficient and stifles `creativity;' 2) values individual voluntarism and `entrepreneurship' over collective action (e.g., four of the five winners of the Nation's `Brave Young Activist' award started their own designer NGOs and/or websites; the fifth carries a bullhorn around and organizes solidarity demos); 3) provides enrichment experiences, useful extracurrics, and/or career paths for precocious Swarthmore and Brown students and grads (the Wendy Kopp/Samantha Power model trajectory), and 4) reduces the scope of direct action politics to the `all tactics, no strategy,' fundamentally Alinskyite, ACORN-style politics that Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone have described as `activistism' and whose potential for reactionary opportunism Andy Stern of SEIU has amply demonstrated. Obama goes a step further in deviating from Alinskyism to the right, by rejecting its `confrontationalism,' which severs its rhetoric of `empowerment' from political action and contestation entirely and merges the notion into the pop-psychological, big box Protestant, Oprah Winfrey, Reaganite discourse of self-improvement/personal responsibility.
All of the above salves the consciences of our professional-managerial class peers and coworkers who want to think of themselves as more tolerant and enlightened than their Republican relatives and neighbors, even as they insulate themselves and their families as much as possible from undesired contact with the dangerous classes and define the latter in quotidian practice through precisely the same racialized and victim-blaming stereotypes as the conservatives to whom they imagine themselves superior. This hypocrisy, of course, is understood within the stratum as unavoidable accommodation to social realities, and likely to be acknowledged as an unfortunate and lamentable necessity. Yet those lamenting at the same time reject out of hand as impractical any politics that would challenge the conditions that reproduce the inequalities underlying those putative realities. Obama, in the many ways that Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley and others have catalogued here, is an ideal avatar for this stratum. He has condensed, in what political dilettantes of all stripes rush to call a `movement,' the reactionary quintessence that Walter Benn Michaels in The Trouble With Diversity identifies in a politics of identity or multiculturalism that substitutes difference for inequality as the crucial metric of political criticism...''
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I posted this from Adolph Reed's essay because it seems to be the kernel of his long essay. Maybe people are more likely to read it than follow the link and wonder through a lot of other points Reed has made before. Thanks to Michael Yates and Joanna.
Here's a little more because it bares on foriegn policy:
``This is where I don't give two shits for the liberals' criticism of Bush's foreign policy: they don't mind imperialism; they just want a more efficiently and rationally managed one. As Paul Street argues in BAR, as well as in his forthcoming book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, an Obama presidency would further legitimize the imperialist orientation of US foreign policy by inscribing it as liberalism or the `new kind' of progressivism. You know, the black is white, night is day kind. And, as he has shown most recently in his June 30 speech he will similarly sanitize the galloping militarization of the society that proceeds under the guise of `supporting the troops.' (How many of you have noticed being called on by flight attendants to give a round of applause to the military personnel on board a flight - it may be only a matter of time before pretending to be absorbed in reading will no longer work, and those who don't cheer them on will be handcuffed - or the scores of other little, and not so little, everyday gestures that give soldiers priority over the rest of us, in the mode of returners from the Eastern Front? Actually, befitting neoliberalism, these gestures are for the image of soldiers, what they get instead of medical care and income support for the maimed.) All in all, I'd rather have an inefficient imperialism, one that imposes some cost on the US for its interventions. Clinton, like Bush père and Reagan, was able to pull it off with `surgical' (i.e., broadly devastating and terroristic to the objects, relatively painless for the subjects) actions and had the good sense both to select targets that couldn't really fight back and to avoid the hubris of occupation. To that extent, no one complained; this was the new Pax Americana that in principle could have gone on indefinitely, with successive US governments creating and lighting up demon regimes abroad as needed...''
Going back to Vietnam days (because so much of my internal feeling of this period reminds me of that one), the way to combat the militarization of civilian society, including putting the lie to the war on terror is to provide the forums in anti-war organizations and media outlets for returning vets who have become anti-war and anti-military through their experiences. That's how it was done back in the day.
Which reminds me this whole support our troops mantra is the very distant echo of that other period, which implies back then we spit on the vets. Not so.
The Nixon administration and the military command propaganda machine put out the general lie of an anti-military ethic on the domestic front, first of course to discredit the anti-war actions, and second because many soldiers were getting back and joining the protest movements or creating their own. And many were discovering the way to get over Vietnam was to join and volunteer in such places. The alienation of returning vets took place when they got back to their homes and families. The thriving anti-establishment (hippydom) places or spaces (including of course the drug cultures) became the places of welcome from both escaping the war and a middle america in denial. Activism in almost any form was therapy. The realization among vets that the military was a giant screw job was common. Serving your country became a bitterness. In other words the military and its image of citizen heroism of service carefully constructed during the 50s was disintegrating. Internally the military called it a morale problem but what that really meant was the inability to command and maintain discipline. So the line between civilian and military worlds had become a kind of foggy place, not much of a line at all. That was especially true around here because there were so many bases here and SF-Bay area was one of central locations for the Pacific theater of command for the war.
There was the whole legal dimension too as lawyers previously involved in the anti-war, CO business, began to take on cases with active duty personnel who wanted out. I've mentioned this before, but there was an ad hoc underground of people who could get you out of the Oakland Army Intrasite Personnel Center and escape to Canada. I got an insight into how far the military had lost control when I worked as a carpenter apprentice at the Oakland Army base (1969) and realized the armed MPs were armed to keep soldiers inside---and not necessarily to keep the protesters out. Well, because there were no protests at the gates. There was nothing there but a sprawling warehouse district, a nomansland.
(continued on next post)