Prediction is a doddle. Successful ones usually fall into
two groups: the easy and the lucky. In human affairs, the easy are usually
derived from the two great grifter principles: 1. there’s a sucker born every
minute, and 2. never give a sucker an even break. applying these as your two parameters can make you seem like a
genius when the subject is a society like America, the con man’s paradise. As
for the lucky, they are composed of guesses that are driven forward by some
unguessed social pulsation. Prediction, in this case, gloms onto a phenomenon
without glomming on to its cause, and thus loses its intellectual strength.
I think I can rely on the
grifter principle to predict that Mitt Romney will defeat Obama, and
that Romney will face a strongly Republican house and a majority Republican
senate. The problem here is that the same principles also give us an Obama win.
However, the superstition that lightning never strikes twice in the same place
gives the edge to Mitt.
Obama, however, will proudly pass onto Romney a plutocracy
that is almost completely intact, save for the odd Maddoff casualty. 16
trillion dollars in emergency loans, at 1 percent or below, have saved the
upper 1 percent for us all. We are, well, tearfully grateful, of course.
The bankruptcy of hopeyness cannot of course be laid
completely at the President’s feet. In fact, all liberal-left parties in the
West have rotted from the head. When they work and actually elect a leader, the
leader and the party then engage in such clueless policy making as would puzzle
the angels. Except, of course, those fallen angels who have read Marx.
The latter have notice that, in the course of the state
sponsored well being spread out over the last sixty to seventy years, a certain
political and business class has done extraordinarily well in both conservative
and liberal-left parties. The elite in the latter face a problem that is
intimately connected to their ascent to the rarified 1 percent group, for in
effect, as their personal circumstances change, so do their interests.
Interests are always a hermeneutic product, but hermeneutics is done on a
social level as well as a subjective one. If the tissue of your social level is
constructed from interactions with fellow citizens in the gated community and the
habits that grow around the perks of great wealth, your relationship to a party
base that is composed of much lesser mortals becomes one of a strained
sympathy. The result of this has been a threefold splintering of left politics.
Substantially, the party elite engages in the ‘nudgework’ of slowly unwinding
and destroying the progressive legislation and institutions that were gained
over the past one hundred some years. They aren’t elected to do this, of course
– quite the opposite. But they do it because it is in their interest to do it,
and they simply quietly project their interest upon the population as a whole
and believe, often quite sincerely, that the population as a whole is just
living a little too well and needs discipline. It never occurs to these
denizens of the 1 percent that they are living too well – this is a thought
that simply can’t get through the gate. The gated community is especially
vigilant in suppressing such ideas.
However, in order to distract their constituencies, the
party elite is ever alert to moral panics and sensational trivialities. This is
the sum of their political art. And thus, as congressmen making ‘regulations’
for banks retire to become lobbyists for banks, or tax breaks for the
wealthiest are somehow tantalizingly never closed, or emphasis shifts from
immediate problems – massive and catastrophic levels of unemployment – to
problems involving the tax burden on the 1 percent’s next generation – that
terrible deficit! – massive distraction work is called for. And this involves
the elite’s third political method, identity politics.
Two recent newspaper stories provide a little glimpse into
the content and soul of the Obama era.
One was the recent contribution by his former economics
advisor, Christina D. Romer, to a NYT roundup of economists for Year End
reports was a cri de coeur of Obama-ism. It contained this gem:
We already have a blueprint for a bipartisan solution. The Bowles-Simpson Commission hashed out a sensible plan of spending cuts, entitlement program reforms and revenue increases that would shave $4 trillion off the deficit over the next decade. It shares the pain of needed deficit reduction, while protecting the most vulnerable and maintaining investments in our future productivity. Congress should take up the commission’s recommendation the first day it returns in January."
Notice the bogus analogy to the house. Notice that the deficit is considered only from the side of government spending, and no notice is taken of the effect on growth if we ‘sensibly’ shave off the ability of the majority to retire in any type of comfort, educate themselves, receive health care, or even receive standard government services, which of course are all determinates of growth and affordability. The Bowles-Simpson commission, of course, never made any suggestions because it couldn’t ultimately agree on its ‘sensible’ cuts, but the country club set hears what it wants to hear, and what it heard was the joyous sound of an ultra-right Republican senator giving cover to an ultra-connected Democratic lawyer for screwing Democratic constituencies up the wazoo. This is Obama’s vaunted ‘socialism’. Alas, it ain’t socialism. It is rat poison, and its effects, so far, are predictable: it has killed the beast. The enthusiasm of the Obama people for Bowles Simpson is not the reason Obama will lose, but it is a symptom of the attitude that will lead to his loss: an astonishing callousness with regard to the biggest slump in employment in two generations, a blindness to the American middleclass’s plucking as its housing asset disappears into a murk of bad mortgages and illegal bank finagling, and a general disconnect from any issue whose explanation would displease the 1 percent, from global warming to the Gulf disaster.
Such, then, is the policy substance that makes President Nudge’s reign a curious mixture of elevated but robotic rhetoric and astonishingly boneheaded reactionary policy, sweetened around the edges with the occasional liberal approved appointment.
But a political regime doesn’t just live – or die - on policy substance (and substance abuse). Politics has a soul. Soul, in America, is the kind of work that has devolved upon celebrities, since nobody else has time for it. Here, one needs an ear to hear. One needs to read for symbols. And a beautiful symbol came down the pike this holiday season: the bio-pic of Thatcher, brought to you by the makers of Mamma Mia.
Meryl Streep, who stars as Maggie Thatcher, is giving interviews that are simply alight with the privileged world view of the 1 percent liberal. This is the end of one she gave the NYT:
““So did Margaret Thatcher. But that’s understandable. She couldn’t show weakness. Imagine what the men would have said.” She added: “In parts of England now it’s a transgression even to consider her as a human being. She’s that monster woman, the she-devil. For me the point of the film was to find the human side.” And though hardly a Tory, she said she vividly recalled the moment when Mrs. Thatcher came to power. “Just as I remember not voting for her, I remember sitting in my room at university when the radio announced that she had been asked to form a government, and I went ‘Yes!’ It felt like one for our team.”
Ms. Streep nodded and said: “I did the same thing. We all thought if it can happen in England, class bound, socially rigid, homophobic — if they can elect a female leader over there, then it’s just seconds away in America.””
Streep is old enough (as am I) to remember the beginning of the feminist movement in the 70s. Back then, the point was to destroy patriarchy. Now, of course, the point is to find women (one from “our team”) who can be leaders – the CEOs of tomorrow! This is a feminism neutered of its original purpose, and remade in the interest of ‘role models’ – that combination of fetishized hierarchy and moralism that is the wholly owned subsidiary of patriarchy. Where once feminists fought corporations on behalf of the millions of women who were victimized in the system that gave corporations outsized power, they now are supposed to fight to make sure those corporations are led by women who, in a triumph of the new, new feminism, have broken the glass ceiling and receiving the stock options and outsized salaries of their male counterparts. The liberal-left party in the U.S. has always had a bad conscious about class, but as class recedes as an issue that the elite takes at all seriously, it becomes what all things become that sink into the unconscious: a ghost. A specter, as Marx might say. Identity politics, haunted by that spector, becomes a compensatory activity, a form of pablum, rather than a revolutionary activity. The center not only holds, it freezes the moment of liberation, stuffs it full of windy truisms, and wheels it out on all occasions in order to keep the party – the political system that has been so good to the elite - going. This is the way formerly liberal-left ideas, bereft of their former revolutionary context, are effortlessly assimilated to the great liberal country club that goes on to worry about the deficit and the bad habits of the lower classes. Thus, Maggie Thatcher, who unleashed a Hobbesian lifestyle on the majority of British women under the withered blessing of Hayek and General Pinochet, becomes a role model of female leadership.
Jesus (and Susan B. Anthony) wept.
And with that: have a happy new year!
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