On Sep 28, 2011, at 1:21 PM, c b wrote:
> Just
> happened again with the Tea Party, elected based in white supremacist
> coded messages, in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohiio with attacks on
> collective bargaining rights, threats of right to work for much less
> laws, welfare cuts.
Therefore, Obama in 2012.
Yves Smith has an excellent hit on Melissa Harris-Perry's idiocy and the Dems' use of "McCarthyite smears" as a way of binding their base to banker-friendly policies:
Conclusion:
> The powerful influence of moneyed interests on the Democratic party has achieved the fondest aims of the right wing extremists of the 1970s: the party of FDR is now lukewarm at best in its support of the New Deal. Most Democrats are embarrassed to be in the same room with union types. They are often afraid to say that government can play a positive role. They were loath to discuss the costs of income inequality until it became so far advanced that it is now well nigh impossible to reverse it. After all, that sort of discussion might sound like class warfare, and God forbid anyone on the mainstream left risk sound like Marx.
>
> The right has no such need to paper over yawning gaps in policy priorities. Its cohesiveness came out of a civil war between the Reagan Right and the old Rockefeller/Javits Republicans. Once the Republican Mensheviks were turfed out, it was possible to present a reasonably unified front and manage tensions. The right pretends to stand for as little government/taxes as possible, save for the military. In reality, it likes a government apparatus just fine so long as it transfers income and wealth to the top and there is not much dissent on the nature of the nominal game v. the real game.
>
> So the Democratic party (and remember, our two party system makes the Democrats the home by default for the left) pretends to be a safe haven for all sorts of out groups: women, gays, Hispanics (on their way to being the dominant group but not there yet), blacks, the poor. But this is stands in stark contradiction to its policies of selling out the middle class to banks and big corporate interests, just on a slower and stealthier basis than the right. So its desperate need to maintain its increasingly phony “be nice to the rainbow coalition” branding places a huge premium on appearances. It thus uses identity politics as a cover for policy betrayals. It can motivate various groups on narrow, specific issues, opening the way for the moneyed faction to get what it wants.
>
> It took most people far too long to get that Obama was a phony because the presumption that a black man would be sympathetic to the fate of the downtrodden is a deeply embedded but never voiced prejudice (and this bias is exploited successfully by the right in depicting Obama as a socialist). Other elements of traditional Democratic associations played into the Obama positioning: his Administration is chock full of technocratic Harvard wonks, and the last time an Administration was so dominated by technocrats was under Kennedy, the last Democratic Administration to have a strongly positive (indeed romanticized) image. (Yes, the Clintons also liked fancy resume types, but they also placed a very high premium on loyalty, and with the result that long-standing supporters often wound up in surprisingly senior roles).
>
> These traditional iconic symbols of liberalism – secular urban elitism, blackness, technocratic skill, micro-issue identity based political organizing groups – have been fully subverted in the service of banking interests. Obama is the ultimate, but not the only, piece of evidence that these symbols are now used simply to con the Democratic base out of their support and money. The task of moving forward will require rebuilding the symbolic vocabulary of the defenders of the middle class. It will probably also require a similar intellectual civil war within the left, against people like Melissa Harris-Perry. Those engaged in that effort need to become skilled in dealing with these liberal McCarthyite identity smears.
Doug