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It is worth considering why the profoundly conservative Barack Obama ran on the campaign slogan “change you can believe in?” In pretty much every way he maintained the policy oeuvre of the George W. Bush administration from within an historical trajectory that long preceded him— neoconservative foreign policies combined with neoliberal economic policies, against a half-century of conspicuous failures of both. The slogan promised a different path forward, a break from the serial catastrophes engineered by a distant, aloof governing class that always benefits no matter how badly its programs prove for the rest of us. What is most evident seven years later is the distance between what people voted for and what we got.
With the British vote to leave the European Union, ‘Brexit,’ representing a break from the European political leadership whose policies approximate the economic interests of the entrenched industrialists and bankers they represent, a different trajectory with roots in nineteenth and twentieth century European imperial history has begun. In both the American and European cases the inability to affect political ‘change’ toward some semblance of popular representation risks repudiation in proportion to the intransigence, or incapacitation if you will, of ‘official’ politics through state channels. As with the great tragedies of the twentieth century, unfolding dissolution inexorably ties these leadership classes to the realm of political possibility they maintain to keep themselves in power.
As self-proclaimed political pragmatists assert that the racist and xenophobic political right must be stopped they themselves must be called to account for the Western march hard-right under the twin guises of liberalism and pragmatism. It was liberal Democrat Bill Clinton who so effectively used dog-whistle politics to demonize Black children as ‘super-predators,’ who promoted racially disparate drug laws tied to needlessly punitive, race-centric mandatory prison sentences and who slashed the social spending that minimally sustained the dispossessed classes. And it was Bill Clinton who eviscerated the American middle class by throwing it into engineered ‘competition’ with a global peasantry that was ‘freed’ through NAFTAto labor for U.S. based corporations for pennies a day or to flee northward to be ‘illegal’ human beings.
Liberal Democrat Barack Obama entered office in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and immediately restored the institutions that were widely
understood to have created the crisis— Wall Street, the corporate executive class and inherited wealth, while leaving millions of dispossessed to fend for themselves. Mr. Obama created a series of one-sided ‘solutions’ that empowered predatory bankers to set the terms of home foreclosures, that left the inbred, bailout-dependent ‘management’ of the U.S. auto industry to implement ‘tiered’ (poverty) wages and he imprisoned and deported two million human beings who had arrived in the U.S. from economies intentionally destroyed by the ‘free-trade’ agreements that he continues to support against all evidence of their socially destructive consequences.
understood to have created the crisis— Wall Street, the corporate executive class and inherited wealth, while leaving millions of dispossessed to fend for themselves. Mr. Obama created a series of one-sided ‘solutions’ that empowered predatory bankers to set the terms of home foreclosures, that left the inbred, bailout-dependent ‘management’ of the U.S. auto industry to implement ‘tiered’ (poverty) wages and he imprisoned and deported two million human beings who had arrived in the U.S. from economies intentionally destroyed by the ‘free-trade’ agreements that he continues to support against all evidence of their socially destructive consequences.
Please continue this article here: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/01/liberal-pragmatism-and-the-end-of-political-possibility/
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