It is so depressingly inevitable. Obama, like Clinton, Blair and Brown before him, like in Rudd in Australia, like the Swedish social democrats, like every example of centre-left government the world over – we seem incapable of building a progressive and sustainable movement for change.
Sure Obama can recover from the mid-term disaster. He can find his feet, stabilize and win in 2012 against a Tea Party infused Republican candidate. But he can never waste such promise and momentum again because he will never have such momentum again. His second term if it happens may well do good things but it won’t be coherent, systematic and its unlikely to lead to another Democratic President, House and Senate that will continue the process of building a more progressive world.
OK I know I’m personalizing it around Obama. One person cannot take the blame but a leader can decide to build a movement and be a leader or be a lone operator working from their own cabal. Obama and his amazing election supporter base could have built something enduring and deep, the kind of countervailing cultural and political forces the right is so good at mobilizing.
But as I understand it there was a conscious decision to turn off the life support system on the Movement for Change to kick the ladder away and focus on governing from the centre. Just like all the other centre-left ‘leaders’ it became an elite and technocratic project. As such it was doomed to disappoint.
Instead Obama should have made an intellectual construct out of his hope mantra. He should have fixed on a frame like the Good Society and made it real. With a vision you can inspire a movement. The movement then becomes the vision. Opportunities then open up rather than get closed down. People will break down walls for hope, security and the kind of freedom that a deep version of democracy can give them because it gives them back control over their anxious and exhausting lives.
Once we have a more seductive vision of the Good Society than Consumer Society then there is the impetus to build the alternative political economy and the new social state that will support it.
The definition of an idiot is someone who does the same thing again and again but expects a different outcome. When will the centre-left learn and stop being idiots?
No related posts.
All Content
The only way to build a sustainable leftist movement is by violence and opression. The Left is bound to be idiots as long as leftism is idiotic. There is no way around it.