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A watershed election (not)
Robert Zaller
An election that means everything, and nothing
ROBERT ZALLER
Consider two propositions:
(a) The election of 2008 is the most important since that of 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt ran against Herbert Hoover as the country, teetering on the brink of ruin, struggled to cope with the Great Depression.
(b) The election of 2008, for all the hype that usually accompanies a presidential succession, is pretty much business as usual.
These propositions seem mutually exclusive. But, actually, both could be true. How is that? Let us examine each in turn.
No single crisis now facing the country is both as deep and as urgent as the Great Depression, which involved an unprecedented collapse of the world economy and unemployment rates that, in Germany and the U.S., had reached 25%. The U.S., with the more stable and established political system, survived the crisis, although not without the creation of a new order that restructured the relation of government, citizens and the economy in some fundamental ways. The Germans got Hitler.
Our current economic plight, although serious, painful and far from resolved, cannot be compared to that of the Great Depression, in large part because of New Deal instruments that now enable the government to intervene in the market in times of crisis. Had this been 1929, the financial panic set off by the collapse of the subprime loan bubble could well have flattened the world economy again. So far, it has not.
Is the army broken?
What we do face is a series of overlapping crises that threaten our political, constitutional and economic fabric, not to mention the future of the planet itself. We are fighting two midsize wars at once, both of which have now lasted longer than our involvement in World Wars I and II combined, and both of which we are in danger of losing. They have stretched our military and the federal deficit alike to the breaking point (Colin Powell said nearly two years ago that the army was “broken”). Only during World War II did we run larger deficits as a proportion of federal revenue and the national economy, but even then we didn’t attempt to sustain them as long, or to meet them with borrowing from abroad.
Similarly, the economic crisis isn’t cyclical; it’s structural. We’ve built, or rather suffered, the creation of a consumer credit economy that lurches from bubble to bubble and from crisis to crisis because it’s based on asking consumers to spend more and more with ever-shrinking incomes. This situation, too, is not sustainable in the long run, whatever the fancy footwork of the Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve. And it’s compounded by the decline of our educational system (upon which our economic system depends) and the dysfunctionality of our health care system (on which worker productivity depends).
Finally, there is the planetary crisis that looms as a result of global warming and environmental degradation, apparent but ignored for the past eight years. This crisis may not be resolvable at all under the present system of world governance, with its quasi-anarchic nation-states, its bias toward economic expansion regardless of human or ecological consequences, and, per corollary, its increasingly intense and violent competition for dwindling resources.
Oh, and did I mention nuclear arsenals in the hands of unstable states like Pakistan, and rogue ones like North Korea and Iran?
Forty years of conservative government
A single election and a single leader won’t fix all this (indeed, we should be very wary of single leaders in general). But we have reached, in 2008, the end of the forty-year cycle of conservative government that has dominated the American polity since the election of Richard Nixon. Even so-called “movement conservatives” agree that present-day conservatism is at an impasse, not to say bankrupt.
This should be the left’s opportunity, but it does not appear to be. The conventional liberal alternative is timid and palsied. There is general if vague recognition of a crisis, but no popular movement for change. Instead, we have a candidate who runs on the slogan of “Change we can believe in”— as if belief vested in the beneficence of an all-powerful presidency were not a principal cause of our woes— running (poorly, I might add) against a shockingly inept rival who embraces the voodoo economics of a generation ago and whose world view was apparently set in a Vietnam prison camp.
This is how you can have an election that means everything, and nothing at all.
Obama’s disappointing performance
There was never anything to expect from John McCain— a man, to be polite, of limited intellectual horizon. Barack Obama, however, is a remarkably skilful and impressive politician who seemed to offer, for the proverbial brief shining moment, the prospect of authentic leadership. When you spot such a person, you may give him some latitude. It isn’t easy to put together an electoral or governing coalition in this country, even when the tide of opinion seems to be running your way, and it’s unprecedented to do it if you happen to be black. Roosevelt, after all, ran as a centrist moderate in 1932 who gave little indication of what he would do when in office (as, one might add, did George W. Bush, who campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” and a “reformer with results” in 2000).
Still, Obama’s performance is increasingly disappointing, not to say alarming. All politicians move toward the center as they approach an election; the problem is that after 40 years of conservative supremacy, the center has moved so far to the right that the real task of new leadership is to redefine it in progressive terms.
What Obama says, and what he doesn’t say
If politics is the art of the possible, it is also the ability to envision the not-yet possible. Obama may possess such a capacity, but it’s well hidden at present. What we see, instead, is a Democratic candidate who is already willing to cut corners on the constitution (the FISA vote, public funding for “faith-based” charities); surrender to corporate interests (on health care and campaign finance reform, among others); pander to the redneck vote (expansion of the death penalty); and waffle on withdrawal from Iraq.
It’s not just in what the candidate is saying, though, but in what he’s not saying, that the trouble lies: in not promising accountability for the crimes of the Bush administration at home and abroad and a return to the rule of law; in not repudiating the imperial presidency and the militarist adventurism that sustains it; in not demanding the revitalization of our democracy and a rollback of the corporate welfare and corruption that has bled the working classes; in not speaking candidly of the global ecological catastrophe we face and the profound changes that will be necessary if we are to deal with it.
This time, another failure of leadership, and of the political awakening on which it depends, may be one too many.
ROBERT ZALLER
Consider two propositions:
(a) The election of 2008 is the most important since that of 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt ran against Herbert Hoover as the country, teetering on the brink of ruin, struggled to cope with the Great Depression.
(b) The election of 2008, for all the hype that usually accompanies a presidential succession, is pretty much business as usual.
These propositions seem mutually exclusive. But, actually, both could be true. How is that? Let us examine each in turn.
No single crisis now facing the country is both as deep and as urgent as the Great Depression, which involved an unprecedented collapse of the world economy and unemployment rates that, in Germany and the U.S., had reached 25%. The U.S., with the more stable and established political system, survived the crisis, although not without the creation of a new order that restructured the relation of government, citizens and the economy in some fundamental ways. The Germans got Hitler.
Our current economic plight, although serious, painful and far from resolved, cannot be compared to that of the Great Depression, in large part because of New Deal instruments that now enable the government to intervene in the market in times of crisis. Had this been 1929, the financial panic set off by the collapse of the subprime loan bubble could well have flattened the world economy again. So far, it has not.
Is the army broken?
What we do face is a series of overlapping crises that threaten our political, constitutional and economic fabric, not to mention the future of the planet itself. We are fighting two midsize wars at once, both of which have now lasted longer than our involvement in World Wars I and II combined, and both of which we are in danger of losing. They have stretched our military and the federal deficit alike to the breaking point (Colin Powell said nearly two years ago that the army was “broken”). Only during World War II did we run larger deficits as a proportion of federal revenue and the national economy, but even then we didn’t attempt to sustain them as long, or to meet them with borrowing from abroad.
Similarly, the economic crisis isn’t cyclical; it’s structural. We’ve built, or rather suffered, the creation of a consumer credit economy that lurches from bubble to bubble and from crisis to crisis because it’s based on asking consumers to spend more and more with ever-shrinking incomes. This situation, too, is not sustainable in the long run, whatever the fancy footwork of the Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve. And it’s compounded by the decline of our educational system (upon which our economic system depends) and the dysfunctionality of our health care system (on which worker productivity depends).
Finally, there is the planetary crisis that looms as a result of global warming and environmental degradation, apparent but ignored for the past eight years. This crisis may not be resolvable at all under the present system of world governance, with its quasi-anarchic nation-states, its bias toward economic expansion regardless of human or ecological consequences, and, per corollary, its increasingly intense and violent competition for dwindling resources.
Oh, and did I mention nuclear arsenals in the hands of unstable states like Pakistan, and rogue ones like North Korea and Iran?
Forty years of conservative government
A single election and a single leader won’t fix all this (indeed, we should be very wary of single leaders in general). But we have reached, in 2008, the end of the forty-year cycle of conservative government that has dominated the American polity since the election of Richard Nixon. Even so-called “movement conservatives” agree that present-day conservatism is at an impasse, not to say bankrupt.
This should be the left’s opportunity, but it does not appear to be. The conventional liberal alternative is timid and palsied. There is general if vague recognition of a crisis, but no popular movement for change. Instead, we have a candidate who runs on the slogan of “Change we can believe in”— as if belief vested in the beneficence of an all-powerful presidency were not a principal cause of our woes— running (poorly, I might add) against a shockingly inept rival who embraces the voodoo economics of a generation ago and whose world view was apparently set in a Vietnam prison camp.
This is how you can have an election that means everything, and nothing at all.
Obama’s disappointing performance
There was never anything to expect from John McCain— a man, to be polite, of limited intellectual horizon. Barack Obama, however, is a remarkably skilful and impressive politician who seemed to offer, for the proverbial brief shining moment, the prospect of authentic leadership. When you spot such a person, you may give him some latitude. It isn’t easy to put together an electoral or governing coalition in this country, even when the tide of opinion seems to be running your way, and it’s unprecedented to do it if you happen to be black. Roosevelt, after all, ran as a centrist moderate in 1932 who gave little indication of what he would do when in office (as, one might add, did George W. Bush, who campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” and a “reformer with results” in 2000).
Still, Obama’s performance is increasingly disappointing, not to say alarming. All politicians move toward the center as they approach an election; the problem is that after 40 years of conservative supremacy, the center has moved so far to the right that the real task of new leadership is to redefine it in progressive terms.
What Obama says, and what he doesn’t say
If politics is the art of the possible, it is also the ability to envision the not-yet possible. Obama may possess such a capacity, but it’s well hidden at present. What we see, instead, is a Democratic candidate who is already willing to cut corners on the constitution (the FISA vote, public funding for “faith-based” charities); surrender to corporate interests (on health care and campaign finance reform, among others); pander to the redneck vote (expansion of the death penalty); and waffle on withdrawal from Iraq.
It’s not just in what the candidate is saying, though, but in what he’s not saying, that the trouble lies: in not promising accountability for the crimes of the Bush administration at home and abroad and a return to the rule of law; in not repudiating the imperial presidency and the militarist adventurism that sustains it; in not demanding the revitalization of our democracy and a rollback of the corporate welfare and corruption that has bled the working classes; in not speaking candidly of the global ecological catastrophe we face and the profound changes that will be necessary if we are to deal with it.
This time, another failure of leadership, and of the political awakening on which it depends, may be one too many.
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