On 2010-09-19, at 3:29 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
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> On Sep 19, 2010, at 7:20 AM, Marv Gandall wrote:
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>> They did not expect the administration to capitulate to the Republicans and the bankers, and they were not - from a bourgeois standpoint, and despite the verities of many on the left - ridiculously utopian to expect it to be otherwise.
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> Sure they were. C'mon, Marv, Obama himself showed no tendencies to buck the system that had made him, and he made that very clear by how he campaigned and the people he surrounded himself with. That, plus the absence of any serious popular movement (except the fan club that constituted his former base), made the outcome not at all a surprise.
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I never ever took my cue from Obama's political character or his campaign promises. But I did think, given the crisis in healthcare, the economy, and foreign policy, that it was well within the realm of possibility for US capitalism to move towards a European/Canadian universal health care system; to wind down insolvent banks as it had done earlier in relation to the S & L's; to restructure the financial system as capitalist states have repeatedly done in the aftermath of financial crashes; to re-regulate the industry under pressure, not only from consumers, but from big institutional investors and counterparties who had been badly burned by the collapse of Lehman and AIG; to stem the tide of foreclosures by allowing bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of mortgages, as is common in other jurisdictions; and, under the cover of a revived "multilateral" foreign policy, to to beat a tactical retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan and come to an accomodation with Taliban, Iranians and Palestinians in order to stablilize these regions and advance the US's broader strategic interests.
If there hadn't been the precedent of the Roosevelt administration, I could have been accused of naivete. Prior to the New Deal, it was a canon of faith on the radical left that a doomed capitalism could never save itself from an ultimate crisis, held also by those who entered bourgeois parties as a tactic to hasten its demise. Obama took office when a descent into a similar deflationary depression was widely mooted. I expected a deepening crisis, as it had earlier pushed Roosevelt, would push Obama , whatever his own inclinations and that of his advisors, further than they would otherwise wish to go. I thought that popular discontent and the desire for change would add to this pressure by expressing itself mainly in and around the Democratic base, as it had done in the 30s, rather than through the Republican party. I don't agree with your assessment that the coalition of blacks, hispanics, students, trade unionists, and liberal professionals who elected Obama represented nothing more than a "fan club", but I was clearly too optimistic in believing these constituencies would retain the momentum coming out of the campaign to stay together as an organized force for change, or that the Democratic tops might want to mobilize them for its own electoral interests.
Ah well, I've been mostly wrong rather than right in forecasting the future all my political life. So have we all. But that's as much humble pie as I'm prepared to eat for now. :)