On 2010-11-22, at 2:49 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> Heck, read the comments on Krugman's op-ed today... you don't have to have
> thought that Obama was going to "do the socialist revolution" to think that
> he and his administration have made the mess they were handed worse…
This is what is lost on many on the left, including on this list, who think the preponderance of criticism has been coming from radicals and liberals who had naive expectations that Obama would act against the capitalist system. In fact, I know of no serious commentator who expected Obama and the Democrats to be anti-capitalist. None. On the contrary, liberal capitalists like George Soros as well as many liberal and libertarian bloggers, many of them with Wall Street experience (Yves Smith, Ed Harrison, Barry Ritholtz, Simon Johnson, Marshall Auerbach, Mike Konzal, etc.) all hoped and expected the new administration to take steps to restructure a banking system in crisis and, in the process, to clear the markets for toxic securities and underwater mortgages - all in the interests of capitalism. There were also suggestions that economic necessity would dovetail with the Democrats' political interest to act boldly in order to secure their electoral victory against the Republicans.
These were not unreasonable expectations in the circumstances, even though they turned out to be misplaced, any more than it was unreasonable for Marxists at the end of the nineteenth century to have had misplaced expectations about the imminent demise of capitalism.
We now know the Obama administration did not act to clean up the financial and housing mess, and it consequently frittered away its advantage over the Republicans. In light of this experience, we can speculate on whether the economic and political system has become so dysfunctional that it is no longer possible for American capitalism to reform itself. That would be a discussion worth having, because this conclusion already seems to me to be implicit in the arguments of those on the list who defend the administration from its critics. But this was not clear (except perhaps to dogmatists wearing stopped watches) in in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 election, and those liberals and radicals who at the time suggested that it was both necessary and possible for the Obama administration to craft a policy response reminiscent of the New Deal rather than the preceding Bush administration have nothing to answer for, IMO.