Yes, I’ll be as relieved as anybody if Obama wins. But. . . .
What is the relevance of the presidential election to the crises the country faces?
• The Earth may be close to an irreversible and cataclysmic climatic “tipping point,” and it is already in a convulsion of species extinction, but neither climate disruption nor ecological impoverishment is a priority of the candidates or of the reporters who ask them questions.
• Two days ago the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the world that its financial system is on the “brink of systemic meltdown.” Two weeks earlier, the main solution of both presidential candidates to the financial crisis was to transfer 700 billion dollars from the citizens and our descendants to the very investment bankers who brought about the collapse.
• Health care? The candidates agree that whether it is “a right” or whatever, Canadian and European style single-payer policy for the USA is dead, and the parasitic layers of corporate bureaucracy between us and our doctors will remain in place. Regardless who wins the election, sickness will continue to be as threatening to our personal finances as to our health.
• We scarcely know the candidates’ views regarding the herd of elephants in the room because they never talk about them and no one asks them about them:
• the military-industrial-congressional complex;
• war crimes;
• torture;
• secret prisons in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and a “black hole of lawlessness in Guantanamo“; (Glenn Greenwald)
• a “unitary” executive with unchecked and unconstitutional power, free to violate laws with impunity and not enforce the ones the president doesn’t like;
• a double standard of justice for our so-called leaders and for the rest of us;
• the suspension of the Bill of Rights, and the unchecked powers of the federal police to spy on, and invade the privacy of, citizens who are not even suspected of having committed or planning illegal acts;
• “the bipartisan abandonment and destruction of virtually every political value the U.S. has long claimed to embrace.” (Greenwald again) And oh yeah,
• the nuclear strike force of thousands of intercontinental missiles which remain on hair trigger alert.
The country has been through incredible trauma these eight years, and watching the debates, watching the conventions, following the campaign really closely, you’d never know it.
It may or may not be reassuring to note that the campaigns that resulted in the election of America’s best presidents were no more inspiring.
Franklin Roosevelt ran for president his first time around on a totally innocuous and middle-of-the-road platform. But as soon as he took office he proposed and engineered the passage of a wave of social and public works programs. (Unfortunately he later put the brakes on the New Deal and saved capitalism.)
Abraham Lincoln was no abolitionist. He declared himself in favor of sending people who had escaped slavery back to their “owners” in the South; as president-elect he offered the South a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the continuation of slavery; and he saddled the country with a vice-president who after he assumed power set back the cause of equal rights for generations. But Honest Abe had a heart.
Will Obama, after he is elected, if he is elected, save the “middle class” and the planet? Or should we temper our expectations and merely rejoice that he is neither a sociopath nor a nincompoop?
Not a sociopath. This could make an appealing campaign slogan, hm? but it is probably true of McCain too (and of many or most of the worst presidents and rulers in history). The problem is institutional sociopathy. When sociopathy is institutional, institutions demand that officeholders and office seekers be party to antisocial acts, so as to further their paramount objectives, whether getting elected, or realizing more selfless aims.
The political imperative is precisely the opposite of the absolute moral imperative. “Thou shalt,” the presidency tells the president and the would-be president, “treat at least some people (if not everybody) as means to your ends, and not as ends in themselves.” It’s a measure of a president how far she or he can (if so inclined) avoid yielding to this imperative, and how effectively she or he can mitigate, disarm, and neutralize, the forces of greed and aggressive violence.
Let’s recognize that Barack Obama has redeeming qualities, like Roosevelt, Lincoln, and even Jimmy Carter, who in his latest “term” as ex-president became a voice for peace in the Middle East–and consequently persona non grata in the Democratic Party. But will Obama take up the cause of working class Americans, like (up to a point) FDR? Will he midwife a new birth of freedom and equality, like Lincoln? Or will he revive the Cold War, favor a hard energy path, and precipitate the destruction of Afghanistan and another Middle Eastern country, like Carter?
During the campaign Obama, like his opponent and like so much of the political establishment at all times, has supported positions and policies opposed by a majority of voters (such as the bailout, private health insurance, amnesty for the lawbreaking telecom corporations, etc) but favored by big money and big media and both parties. If elected, will he, like almost every other president in history, remain on the right side of big money, to which he will owe his victory? Or will he set about to:
• mobilize the nation to act with appropriate urgency regarding climate disruption and the destruction and monopolization of global life-support systems;
• get America out from under the military-industrial colossus;
• reverse the flow of wealth from poor and “middle class” to rich;
• make peace in and with the Middle East;
• articulate and pursue a vision of a less aggressive foreign policy;
• undertake to dismantle the worldwide network of military missions, bases, and surrogates;
• stand down, and move toward the elimination of, nuclear weapons;
• abolish torture;
• shut down the gulag;
• restore constitutional democracy and the rule of law to America;
• restore manufacturing to America;
• restore infrastructure to America;
• restore respect for labor to America;
• restore progressive taxation and the public sector to America?
A majority of voters —and god— willing, we will find out. For now, we can but vote and, like Russian peasants when a Czar died, pray. And we can resolve upon more effective means of citizenship—such as activism, aiming at massive noncooperation with, and de-legitimization of, anti-democratic and violent institutions.