Where Are We Now? Norman Birnbaum

Published in Europe, well noticed here


Where Are We Now? Norman Birnbaum


16 October 2008

Washington


Voting has begun. By election day on 4 November three of ten voters will have already chosen. Confronted with Obama's excellent organization, the Republicans have recurred to the strategy of the stolen election of 2000 and the ambiguous victory of 2004: systematically blocking electoral access to citizens likely to vote Democratic. The Ohio state government (Democratic) is already in a judicial conflict on the issue. In a contest which may be very close, these matters are as important as the clash of personalities, interest groups and ideas.



If we credit the polls, Senator Obama is ahead by a considerable margin nationally —and is doing well in the formerly Republican states. The difficulty is that the polls cannot be trusted. Each poll employs different methods, we cannot know who will actually vote, and the eight percent of the electorate who report they are "undecided" may indeed have decided (perhaps not to vote for Obama because he is half-black, too educated, or otherwise threatening .) Obama and his advisers are certainly not complacent, and McCain and his staff consider, rightly, that they might still win, despite his unconvincing performance in the final debate. .



The economic crisis has given Obama an advantage, by rendering McCain's (utterly dubious) credentials in foreign and military policy irrelevant. Despite a half-century of continuous Republican counter-attack on the New Deal, accompanied by the Democrats' denial of their social democracy legacy, despite the erasure of public historical memory of the New Deal's achievements---a majority of Americans think of the state as their recourse against impoverishment, as indispensable to their procuring access to education and health care. The unrelenting acceleration of the crisis has reminded many voters not only of the prosperity they are in danger of loosing, but of the decades of slow decline in their living standard that preceded it. Franklin Roosevelt won in 1932 after three years of depression, Obama may win because of a very condensed period of anxiety..



There are, however, three great differences between 1932 and 2008.


The first is that the US, a debtor nation, does not dispose of economic sovereignty. Should the Asians, Arabs and Europeans, together or separately, use their US Treasury bonds as means of economic and political pressure, any US government would comply upon pain of national bankruptcy.


The second is that our recklessly irresponsible imperial elite has burdened the nation with a colossal arms budget. (Congress, shortly before debating the 750 billion dollar bank salvation package sought by President Bush and Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs head Paulson passed without question a Pentagon appropriation of nearly that much.---which did not include the extraordinary expenses of the Iraq catastrophe and the Afghan debacle. Reducing our armed forces to pay for useful social expenditures is not thought of as a plausible or even respectable proposition.).


The third is that the suspicion of many Americans that they have been lied to and cheated by our economic masters is unconnected to a coherent view of alternative economic and social arrangements. Those who depend on Federal old age pensions (Social Security) and medical insurance for seniors (Medicare), or student loans, are intellectually unable to generalize from these programs to the need for a larger welfare state. The Republicans have falsely depicted Senator Obama as a "leftist." He is a highly intelligent and cautious technocrat whose idea of "change" is of an America worthy of Harvard University's efforts on its behalf. That is much much better than McCain's increasingly convoluted befuddlement. It is entirely unclear, however, that it will suffice as the crisis deepens. A President Obama will have to learn as he goes along, and might even do so. As for a President McCain, I am reminded of Dante's words at the gates of Purgatory: lasciate ogni speranze.



It is time for the Europeans to think of themselves as possessing the capacity to act not only independently of the US but to influence it.


France and Germany have made a beginning in refusing to regard Georgia as an innocent victim of Russian rapacity, and in opposing the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO. The termination of the self- defeating western military presence in Afghanistan, European pressure to end the occupation of Iraq, decoupling Europe from the geopolitical dysfunctions and moral liabilities of the American-Israel alliance would constrain a President Obama to listen to those of his advisers who think in these terms.but who do not dare to say so. As for a President McCain, European initiatives of this kind would reduce him to impotent fury---but it would in fact be impotent.


There may be, indeed, a more immediate problem: suppose Bush, Cheney et al despite the obvious divisions in the imperial elite (with Defense Secretary Gates and even Secretary of State Rice seized by occasional attacks of rationality) decide to help McCain by initiating military action somewhere, Iran, for instance ? The Europeans could make their opposition known in ways that might stiffen Obama's spine. That is speculation. What is not speculative is that a revivification of the European social model in the context of the construction of new international economic institutions would have considerable impact upon American domestic debate. Indeed, the fascination with which the Europeans regard our election suggest that they have grasped what many Americans have been slow to learn: the old demarcations between domestic policies and international relations no longer make sense. It remains to be seen if the immediate electoral result and the subsequent course of American politics make a new sort of Transatlantic relationship possible----or terminally deepen the existing divisions.