Okay, let’s get this over with once and for all: Barack Obama is not a socialist. The Democratic Party is not the Soviet Politburo. Even the most left-leaning member of Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders, is only a little bit socialist, even though he used to call himself socialist back in his days as mayor of Burlington, VT. Mainstream American politics is firmly entrenched in the center-right, and only because the noise from the extreme right has gotten so loud that the whole kit and kaboodle has shifted rightwards does anyone even remotely centrist look like Lenin.
This piece from OpenLeft.com blogger David Sirota tries to further parse out the differences between the more common left-leaning political labels “liberal” and “progressive” in the context of American politics. Because the conservatives were so thoroughly successful in their effort to make the word “liberal” a pejorative (which is what brought them to having to call Obama a “socialist” in the first place), many liberals rebranded themselves as “progressives”, but Sirota argues that there is indeed a fundamental difference between the two, although he finally concludes that you cannot have one without the other.
A similar distinction is at the core of this article at Dissent Magazine by the noted scholar Michael Bérubé, wherein he describes a correspondence with someone over his latest book (via 3QuarksDaily. The person made the distinction between the “liberal” mainstream leftism of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the clearer traditional “leftism” of Noam Chomsky. Bérubé refutes his correspondent’s observation, putting Chomsky more in the camp of contrarianists, citing the social theorist Stuart Hall as perhaps a better example of the left as alternative to the right rather than just a critical mirror (Hall was influential in British Labour Party politics in the Thatcher era), but I think his refutation helps further refine the spectrum.
Three seemingly unrelated articles for anyone interested in seeing the world from a perspective a little bit broader than the pushme-pullyou game of American politics:
British historian and NYU professor Tony Judt recently gave a lecture in his role as director of the Eric Maria Remarque Institute looking at the successes and failures of social democracy in Europe. The New York Review of Books has an edited transcript of the lecture, which also considers why America is ambivalent toward social democracy: he points to the heterogeneity of our society and to the human tendency to discount the dangers of anything sufficiently far away (physically or in time). Given the current fascination in this country with what is or is not “socialist”, it’s worth having the historical overview about the very nature of the ideas of social democracy. Here is link to a video of the lecture (QuickTime), if you’d rather listen to it than read it.
The political humor website Political Irony has this post today with a short excerpt from a recent interview with Noam Chomsky as a commentary on the ironic situation that Big Business finds itself in as it tries to simultaneously convince Americans to both love and hate our government. On their own, these couple of paragraphs are quite illuminating (as is most everything Chomsky has to say about politics), but the whole interview itself is even better. The interview is ostensibly about the past successes of labor political action and how it could/should be renewed in our present times, but the conversation does drift into this bigger context of how corporations and corporatist government has been able to successfully convince most Americans that big business is good for them. Seen in juxtaposition to the Judt lecture, both pieces take on added layers of meaning when considering the long, slow march away from the social reforms of the mid 20th Century.
So, thirdly, there’s this modern take on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” from the New Deal 2.0 blog at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. You may recall that Swift sarcastically suggested that the solution to systemic famine in Ireland was to start eating the Irish children. So, with tongue in cheek and eyes pointed quite firmly at conservative pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the author of the post suggests that the solution to our crumbling economy is to deport the poor until we reach 100% employment. Even though the author, Marshall Auerback, is being as sarcastic as Swift, it is not at all difficult to imagine some right-winger coming up with this idea and running with it sort of the way Lou Dobbs has done with the bugaboo of immigration. I think this post actually goes very nicely with the Chomsky interview as an example, if exaggerated for effect, of exactly how our power brokers work overtime to undermine notions of social justice and economic equality.
If you’ve got 10 minutes or so to spare today, you could do worse than to watch this portion of an interview with Noam Chomsky from a site called The Real News.com:
If you don’t have the time or the inclination to sit through the video (10 minutes seems like an ETERNITY in Internet Time), you can read the transcript instead here on their website (scroll down through all the mostly-inane comments and you’ll find the transcript)
Chomsky and the interviewer use a clip of George Will making what they call a “rather candid” statement:
George Will: Surely in a democracy it’s time for us to stop being sentimental and say the question we settle in an election is not whether elites shall rule but which elites shall rule. (emphasis mine — BK)
This particular observation certainly isn’t new, though it might be the first time a conservative media figure like Will has ever said as much publicly. Indeed, Chomsky has been making this basic point for decades: the American political establishment is not really made up of two differing ideologies, but one single ideology with two warring factions who differ only slightly in their affiliation with external politico-economic powers in American society. Despite the populist rhetoric of today’s Republicans and yesteryear’s Democrats, neither party is particularly interested in the plight of the average citizen except as an electoral strategy. At this stage in our history, I think you’d have to be utterly stupid, deliberately ignorant, or totally disengaged from reality to argue this point, whether it comes from the mouth of Noam Chomsky or George Will.
What Chomsky says that seems a bit less characteristic of his usual rhetoric, though, is that even though our current presidential election is really nothing more than a choice between two very similar and generally disappointing candidates, there is merit in voting for the “lesser of two evils” (meaning, in this case, Barack Obama) because in the long-term the average citizen fares better under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones.
That’s about as close to an endorsement as any presidential candidate is likely to get from a figure like Chomsky. He does undercut his own remark by explaining the all-too-close similarities between McCain’s stated policies and Obama’s stated policies, and at one point he comes right out and says that he thinks that Barack Obama will not live up to his own rhetoric:
Well, I would suggest voting against McCain, which means voting for Obama without illusions, because all the elevated rhetoric about change and hope and so on will dissolve into standard centrist Democratic policies if he takes office.
Personally, I am not comfortable voting for the lesser of two evils. John McCain is simply unacceptable as a potential President of the United States, and his running mate is unacceptable in ANY elected office. But despite the bandwagon parade of newspaper endorsements and the eloquent-but-questionable endorsement from Colin Powell, Barack Obama represents nothing more than the same status quo that brought us to this lowly state of affairs. Choosing between these two candidates is like choosing between being mauled by a man-eating tiger, or being slowly digested by a python; picking the python means it might hurt a little less, but it’s going to last a whole lot longer.
One underlying problem is that our electoral system and our limited view of politics leave most people with the feeling that elections must be an either-or proposition, and create all sorts of rationalizations for voting for a candidate people would really do better to vote against but feel they have no choice if they oppose the other guy even more. It doesn’t really have to work that way. Though Canada uses a parliamentary government, they do, in fact, have FOUR national political parties (well, okay, maybe the Bloc Quebecois isn’t all that national, but they hold a lot of seats in Parliament), and most European nations have proportional voting systems that make for far more diverse political choices than the de facto binary system we have.
So even at this late date, it is my resolve to write in Dennis Kucinich’s name on my presidential ballot. It’s not a “protest vote”, it’s my sincere consideration that he would make a better President than either John McCain or Barack Obama. Kucinich continues to champion the genuine cause of progressive government where Obama and McCain simply pay lip-service to the serious issues facing the American public regarding health care, foreign policy and civil liberties. Kucinich was one of the few members of the House to vote against the $700-billion bailout, was one of the few to propose an alternative to the Paulson plan, and last week called for a probe to be launched into the $70 billion in bonuses being paid out to Wall Street executives even as their companies fail. He continues to fight for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, consistently opposed the PATRIOT Act, and has proposed a universal health care bill that is superior to anything offered by McCain or Obama. As I’ve said here before, the media portrayals of Kucinich as a “loony” are unfair to his record and have cost him serious consideration during the Democratic primaries in two election cycles. Since I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstance and cannot in good conscience vote for Barack Obama at this critical juncture in American history, this is my honest and sincere choice.
The BBC reports that the British department store Selfridge’s will officially roll out its Christmas shopping season this year on AUGUST 2. But American retail chain Toys R Us has them beat with a “Christmas In July” sale that runs this week. (although, as far as I can tell, that’s just a sale and not [...]
On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am [...]
In my copious spare time, usually whilst sitting in the waiting area at Charlotte’s karate studio, I have been making slow but steady progress toward adding tags to all the posts on this site. As of right now, I have completed tagging all the way back to April 1, 2008. The current archive of this [...]
Just the other day I posted about a young man from Nepal who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. He’s only 22 inches tall, compared to the 29-inch tall He Pingping of China, who is the current record holder. Well, WAS the current [...]
boobcheese tickle fights child actor suicides Betty White Zombie Farrah Fawcett Canadian pissing habits that milkaholic Lindsay ChatRoulette whatever half-assed thing Google did this week out-of-control Toyotas
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of all [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with: Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the [...]
Okay, let’s get this over with once and for all: Barack Obama is not a socialist. The Democratic Party is not the Soviet Politburo. Even the most left-leaning member of Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders, is only a little bit socialist, even though he used to call himself socialist back in his days as mayor of Burlington, VT. Mainstream American politics is firmly entrenched in the center-right, and only because the noise from the extreme right has gotten so loud that the whole kit and kaboodle has shifted rightwards does anyone even remotely centrist look like Lenin.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
