The Narrow Spectrum and Identity Politics: Obama’s “Puzzlement,” Invisible Primaries, and the Trivia

[Picaro]

Ran across this old article while looking for something else. It's interesting to compare this leftist writer's views on the 2008 Democratic primaries and his predictions for the Obama administration and what he would really do versus the Party spin doctor hubris.

ZCommunications The Narrow Spectrum and Identity Politics Obama s Puzzlement Invisible Primaries and the Trivialization of U.S. Politics

Both will talk about making certain small adjustments to NAFTA and CAFTA and the WTO and so forth but both will also leave the basic structure and practices of corporate globalization fully intact.


Both will try to tweak the health care system and try to enroll some of the uninsured but both at the end of the day will leave the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations in fundamental control.



Both will make noises about supporting labor and environmental causes and ending special interest domination but will respond most especially to the giant corporations that have the most money and power to influence politicians and policy. Those special interests are not into helping the labor movement and they’re not excited about serious environmental regulation.



Both will talk against racial injustice and about ending poverty on Dr. Martin Luther King’s Holiday but neither will undertake the kind of significant civil rights and social justice initiatives required to meaningfully tackle the deeply entrenched structures and practices of white supremacy and class oppression.



Both will talk to some extent about the cause of reintegrated ex-offenders into society, but neither will really do anything to confront and undo the racially disparate patterns of mass drug arrest and mass drug incarceration that have turned the U.S. into a charnel house of racially disparate mass imprisonment.

Neither will follow the counsel of Dr. King and go after the gigantic and bloated so-called “defense” budget that sustains more than 700 overseas bases located in nearly country in the world and which accounts for half of the world’s military expenditures even while more than a million U.S. children live in what poverty researchers now call “deep poverty” – at less than half the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level.



Both will leave the basic top-heavy wealth structure of the country intact, doing relatively little about the fact that the top 1 percent owns half the nation’s net worth – a fact that makes real and substantive popular democracy essentially unimaginable for reasons that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote about.



Both Hillary and Obama will with line up with Columbia and the international business agenda against Venezuela and independent left nationalism in Latin America.



Both will make aggressive noises and threatening moves toward Iran and its nuclear program real or imagined but neither will say much or anything about the dangerous and provocative nuclear arsenals of Israel and India.



Both could be expected to use real and imaginary dangers abroad to compromise civil liberties at home.


All of this comes with the critical qualifier – unless forced to do otherwise by popular masses at home and/or abroad.


How are voters supposed to make strong policy or ideological distinctions between the two corporate-imperial Democrats Hillary and Obama? As Seib rightly observed on Super Tuesday:


“Democrats and Republicans have reached the biggest primary day in the nation’s history with this much in common: No major candidate on either side has yet offered up ideas or policies that amount to a new ideological course for the country…As voting unfolds on this Super Tuesday, the two hottest candidates at the moment – Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama – are most striking for their ability to appeal to independent voters in the middle of the ideological spectrum, and for their willingness to compromise there" (5).



Seib naturally did not mention that the “invisible primaries” of corporate wealth and media worked powerfully to narrow the spectrum of acceptable political debate in such a business-friendly fashion – an admission that might have undermined his focus on voters as the primary agents of “voters’ focus on character.” He also forgot to mention that importance of racial and gender identity gender as electoral proxies for voters forced to make choices between candidates who don’t seem to diverge much on critical public issues reflecting the persistence of what Dr. King called “triple evils that are interrelated” – economic exploitation (business rule and capitalism), racism (deeply understood), and militarism-imperialism.

Looks like Street nailed it from the Leftist perspective.

 

[william the wie]

just a lurk so I can learn.