Ha!

Thoughts for the Brain - Obamarama

Very well then I contradict myself. My abiding fear that wimpy, liberal America would be too enervated to stave off a Zomney Apocalypse proved unfounded. The turn out was enough and Obama won, which is about the best ‘realistic’ result we could have hoped for. There is still no significant party to the left of the Democrats, save for the Green Party, and I don’t know how they’ve done (or how much to the left of the Dems they actually are). One of these would really change the picture, and that's actual realism.

But what does the result mean? Politically it’s business as usual, albeit mildly more polite, erudite and consensual. Then again it was always going to be. If we’re talking about demographics, look at this, the results of the 2000 election. This was the last hurrah for Nixon’s Southern Strategy. It was a political strategy that sought to undo civil rights movement gains and cement Republican hegemony. Inner cities were left to decay, while suburbs were allowed to flourish. The working class, especially in the northern industrial cities, was subject to socio-economic torture.

Net migration since the 1970s within the United States has been north east to south west (people go where the jobs are, it makes sense - an example, here's a detailed map of 2008 movements based on IRS figures). The Democratic base is on the move while the Republican base is shuffling off the mortal coil. Hence Bill O’Reilly’s anxious observation, that the white establishment is now a minority. Why such anxiety, Bill, do minorities have a hard time of it in the Land of the Free?

We’re not done though. A determined social democratic party that understood its base (leaving aside how many of these things have ever actually existed) would have tailored their tactics to these facts, delivering reforms that strengthen their base, in other words actively overturning the effects Southern Strategy, re-segregation, deindustrialisation and urban decay. The Democrats are not that party and they never will be. From Gary Younge's piece in today's Graun:

The people who delivered him a second term on Tuesday night – the young, black and brown – are those who were least likely to have benefited from his first. His greatest cheer for the night was when he reprised a version of the speech that made him famous when he introduced John Kerry at the Democratic convention in 2004. 

"I believe we can keep the promise of our founders," he said. "The idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try." 

That is what people voted for. The trouble is that while Obama has the eloquence to articulate those aspirations he has, for the most part, not had the courage to fight for them or the strategic ability to deliver them.

This is what the Republicans rely on.

3,000 days of night

Socialists participate in bourgeois elections, even if sometimes only obliquely, through a call to vote for a particular candidate or another party, in order to advance the socialist cause. This is how we weigh anything up: does it get us closer or put us further away from our actual goal.

This is not a debate about principles but tactics. The only principle anyone can break is abandoning the ultimate goal of revolution from below and settling for electing more or less left wing people to existing positions in society.

Will Obama being returned to office result in an uptick in working class confidence and activity? Liberals and left-wingers will certainly feel better if Obama defeats Romney, but we have no right to expect Obama to organise his supporters to build a mass social democratic movement of any kind.

Will the calls of left-wing groups inside America, let alone outside it, make much of a difference to the outcome? It’s doubtful.

What is there then to do? Socialists must look for the vanguard of the working class, try to win it and organise it. The vanguard in America is the group of people, wherever they happen to be, who look beyond the Democrats without looking beyond the Democratic base.

If no left-wing group stands to gain out of a call for an Obama vote (a strictly different thing from an Obama win) then there is no point in doing so. This is all the more the case with socialists outside America. I remember being told in 2008 we had to ‘relate’ to the Obama victory. I thought, why? Who are we supposed to be impressing? 

My predictions for the election tomorrow: 1) there will be a voting controversy and 2) Romney will win, his base is more energised and more likely to vote, also the extent of racism means Obama’s polling is generally over reported (people say they’re going to vote for him but they’re not).

Brace yourself. This is another dimming in the decade of darkness, 3,000 days of night. Obama or Romney, whoever is president, there is a struggle to be had.

Two ringing endorsements

The abyss stares back

The link here is to a short, simple piece on the fundamental deception of American political debate. There is such fundamental agreement between the two mainstream parties, public debate narrows down to secondary, often peripheral issues. Because ‘issues’ like teaching evolution in schools, the veracity of climate change or the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate can be argued relentlessly to no practical conclusion, they serve to mobilise various political bases (although the Republicans are always more interested in motivating their core support than the Democrats) and sustain the illusion of urgent debate.

You know it. I know it. It’s seems hardly worth pointing out, except the same grim parade rolls out every four years and no one does anything about it. America is politically null, excepting the Occupy movement, which, rather like council communism without councils, is a moot point if it’s not able to occupy anything. It would take an event so colossal one almost dares not imagine it to open space for a radical alternative. If America means anything it serves as a warning, this is what happens when the labour movement is permanently sidelined.

Meanwhile Polly Toynbee ponders the Tory options in the run up to their conference. David Cameron needs a national vote of approximately 42% to take an overall majority in parliament, 6% more than he got at the last election, and support is ebbing away. There are plenty of Tories with a mind to blow up Labour ‘client state’, i.e. its basis in the wider working class. This combined with a set of irresistible populist measures may yet work. And these measures need not cost anything. Imagine if Cameron led the country out of the EU just as it collapsed.

Feeble though our efforts may be even something like the October 20th democan start to head off that kind of future.