Anatomy of Defeat: Lessons from the Obama Debacle

Lessons of the Obama Debacle

by Walden Bello

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/12-0

"Obama had a tremendous opportunity to educate and mobilize people against the neoliberal or market fundamentalist approach that deregulated the financial sector and caused the crisis. Although Obama did allude to unregulated financial markets as the key problem during the campaign, he refrained from demonizing neoliberalism after he took office, thus presenting an ideological vacuum that the resurgent neoliberals did not hesitate to fill. No doubt he failed to launch a full-scale ideological offensive because his key lieutenants for economic policy, National Economic Council head Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, had not broken with neoliberal thinking.
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In contrast to Obama, the right wing understood the demands and dynamics of politics at a time of crisis, as opposed to politics in normal times. While Obama persisted in his quest for bipartisanship, the Republicans adopted a posture of hard-line opposition to practically all of his initiatives.

Unlike Obama and the Democrats, the right posed the conflict in stark political and ideological terms: between left and right, between “socialism” and “freedom,” between the oppressive state and the liberating market. The Republican opposition used all the catchwords and mantras they could dredge up from bourgeois U.S. ideology.

Finally, in contrast to Obama’s neglect of the Democratic base, the right eschewed Republican interest-group politics. Fox News, Sarah Palin, and the tea party movement stirred up the right-wing base to challenge the Republican Party elite and drive a no-compromise, take-no-prisoners politics. To understand what has happened to the Republican Party in the last few weeks with the string of tea party successes in the primaries, historian Arno Mayer’s distinction among conservatives, reactionaries, and counterrevolutionaries is useful. In Mayer’s terms, the counterrevolutionaries, with their populist, anti-insider, and grassroots-driven politics are displacing the conservative elites that have long held sway in the Republican Party."

Cultural Studies as Political Quietism?

No, Higher Consciousness Won’t Save Us

by Norman Solomon

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/23-5

"At the time, I scarcely picked up on the fact that "The Greening of America" was purposely nonpolitical. Its crux was personal and cultural liberation -- in a word, "consciousness," which "plays the key role in the shaping of society." And so, "The revolution must be cultural. For culture controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa." In effect, the author maintained, culture would be a silver bullet, able to bring down the otherwise intractable death machine.

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n 1995, the same Charles Reich was out with another book -- "Opposing the System" -- his first in two decades. Gone were the claims that meaningful structural change would come only as a final step after people got their heads and culture together. Instead, the book focused on the melded power of huge corporations and the U.S. government.
Reich's new book was as ignored as "The Greening of America" had been ballyhooed; no high-profile excerpt in The New Yorker or any other magazine, scant publicity, and not even faint controversy. Few media outlets bothered to review "Opposing the System." A notable exception, the New York Times, trashed the book."