Let's take two issues. One, was it wrong for leftists to support Obama's election? Even with the 20-20 information we have now about how Obama has handled Afghanistan, the financial and economic mess, health care reform, etc., I fail to see how not supporting Obama's election could have been significantly better than its opposite. Do I need to go over what McCain represented, locally and internationally?
Two, have the leftists who supported Obama's election suffered a political defeat? At most, we can say that leftists who supported Obama's election are suffering from a frustration attack, because their best hopes haven't been realized yet and may not be realized any time soon (or at all under Obama). But that is not a defeat. In my book, defeat means that your forces have been decimated and demoralized, that your ability to fight has been impaired for some time to come. As weak and fragmented as it is, the left remains active and in fighting mode. It's definitely not politically weaker now than it was 5 or 10 years ago.
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Sorry, I wasn't clear.
When I wrote "defeat", I wasn't referring to the 2008 Presidential election, or the specifically dashed hopes of those leftists who passionately supported Obama. Or even the dramatic events and reversals of the Bush years. More generally, I was referring to the long defeat of that set of ideas and ideals we call left politics.
As you know, the post WW2 era has witnessed a sustained assault on these ideas -- starting in earnest with the primitive but effective anti communist hysteria of the mid 20th century and reaching a polished reverse agitprop perfection as the high neoliberalism of the 1980s, 90s and 00's took command.
(Of course, this ideological counter-attack predates the 1950s and can be traced to the first moment socialist and communist ideas were introduced to the world. It's my opinion however, that the post WW2 era is the time when the owning and managerial classes achieved a greater degree of strategic coherency and propaganda sophistication. Neoliberalism's "investor society" 'answer' to the socialist challenge is a great deal more attractive -- at least on paper and during the first years of a capital infusion or boom -- than 19th and early 20th century moralizing admonishing people to flee socialist/communist 'indoctrination' for fear of burning in hell or being somehow "un-American".)
By "defeat" I mean that we live in a society which almost completely rejects the ideas we (broadly defined) cherish. And not just at the totally predictable levels of government and business -- we expect resistance from those quarters. But more critically, at the level of "ordinary people". It's significant that a co-worker tells me his fear of having to pay for "all those uninsured poor people" if the Obama medical plan becomes law. It's significant, because it reveals how successfully capitalist interests are obscured and how deeply neoliberal concepts of "personal responsibility" have taken hold.
My co-worker (and millions more people besides) do not see the funds transfer to the pharma and private insurance sectors built into the plan -- like the devil in that old proverb, capitalism's greatest trick has been making people think it doesn't exist -- or doesn't exist as a destructive force.
When I wrote "learning the real lessons of the campaign" I wasn't referring to the (sorry, but not very interesting) question of whether or not leftists were wrong to vote for Obama. If one was inclined to vote, the presumably lesser evil was the obvious choice.
No, by "real lessons" I mean the lesson that electoral politics cannot deliver the goods so long as it's tethered to capitalist power. We must, to paraphrase Leo Panitch, try to avoid the liberal illusion that capitalism can be durably reformed out of its worst tendencies. (No sooner is some victory won, than the owning class strives to undermine it. In a different but not wholly unrelated context, this reality was the basis for Robespierre's belief that terror was required to solve the push back problem, once and for all. We can see parallels with our investment bank challenge...they're patched up and ready to resume work blowing the next speculative bubble. Apparently, all we can do is watch and kvetch as this rogue elephant gets back to demolishing our collective living room)
*This*, I insist, was the chief error of those leftists who poured so much energy into describing the Obama campaign as not merely a strategic exercise in lesser evil-ism, but as the first salvo of a truly transformative struggle, centered around a "progressive" President.
Bringing it all back full circle to things I wrote months ago, this is also precisely what Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford meant by the Obama situation leading to "incoherency" in serious left circles.
.d.