Ten Years On

Last night was the tenth anniversary of the 2008 election. I have been thinking a lot about that night.  I had recently moved to Nacogdoches, a small town in the piney woods of East Texas that was just about as conservative as you would expect. My friends and I went to the one local bar that wasn't student-oriented to have beers and watch the returns. On this historic night none of the many TVs were tuned in, except for a small TV in the corner with the sound turned off.

When Obama crossed the threshold for an electoral voter majority, we cheered. It quickly became obvious that the other people in the space were incredibly unhappy. At that moment we took the hint and left. There was an acrid stench of hateful anger in the air, like the smell of gunpowder after shooting off fireworks.

We watched the returns and Obama's speech at my friends' house. The next day at the university I noticed something odd. Many of my students were very happy about the election, but they carried on with their celebration very quietly. I soon realized why. That same smell of hateful resentment was in the air. I noticed it especially when I went to teach my afternoon upper-level class, and a normally mild-mannered older student was ranting to his peers about how horrible the election of Barack Obama was. He was complaining about the need to purge "Republicans in Name Only." I realized in that moment that Obama was not to get an inch of respect or cooperation from Republicans. Later in April this town of 30,000 would draw 10,000 to the first big Tea Party rally.

The anger I was seeing directly contradicted the dominant media narrative of the time of a "post-racial nation." Ten years on it's obvious that the election or Barack Obama saw the creation of a mainstream and very successful version of white identity politics. Trump in the White House is the logical end point. Nowadays the anger I saw after Obama's election is the driving force in American politics.

Ten years after the Obama win the new president is making fear-mongering about immigrants the centerpiece of his campaign. The old prohibitions against open racism have fallen away. This all feels like a second Redemption, similar to when southern white conservatives terrorized their opponents to bring about the end of Reconstruction. Powerful and deadly forces have been unleashed on our country, I have no clue when it will stop.

Obama, Biden, Trump, Pence, and Masculinity

Watching president Obama's farewell address last week I was struck, after a year of hearing Trump's bloviating, at how he has always performed a very positive version of masculinity. For eight years boys around this country have had a great example of how to be a man. Obama has allowed himself to feel emotion in public, perhaps most famously during his speech after Sandy Hook. He showed similar emotion last week when talking about Michelle, his obvious respect and love were displayed for all to see. This was a man in a relationship of equals, not the usual politician with the smiling, prop wife. While Joe Biden still has a lot of his generation's male bravado and, well, handsy-ness, he has also displayed a similar relationship with Jill. And speaking of Biden, he and Obama have an obviously deep connection to each other. This is part of a positive masculinity where men can be emotionally vulnerable and honest with each other.

President Obama has also modeled how to confront one's enemies without resorting to aggression and anger. He has used humor many times, including in response to Trump's birther allegations. He does not engage in the kind of dick swinging that practically ever other president in my lifetime indulged in. I am thinking here of Reagan's "joke" about ordering the missiles to be fired at the Soviet Union, George HW Bush's TV attack on Bob Dole to counter his "whimpiness," or the innumerable examples of George W Bush swaggering like a two-bit cowboy ("smoke 'em out of their caves," "ride herd," "watch this drive," etc.)  Obama is what you could call a savvy nerd when it comes to his masculinity, the thing I basically aspire to be.

With Trump and Pence taking the White House, we are seeing two very different models of masculinity. Let's start with Pence, since he's the easier one. He represents patriarch masculinity. This kind of masculinity, usually wedded to religion and nostalgic and inaccurate views of the past, sees men as the unchallenged head of the family and leaders of society. They are there to protect women and children, but in a relationship that is hierarchical. This type of masculinity is also tied together with a painfully serious affect, as if nothing is ever to be a laughing matter. I know a lot of men who subscribe to this kind of masculinity back home, and they are almost always insufferable.

This type of masculinity, as limiting and toxic as it can be, is not nearly as poisonous as Trump's masculinity. Almost all the strains of negative masculinity are contained in his personality. As is usually the case, this wretched personality was fed by the manure of paternal neglect. With a loving father Trump may have just become a garden variety asshole, but by craving his father's never present approval, he (with all the money he had as an assist) went into full blown megalomania.

Trump does not have Pence's pretense of protecting women, home, and family. He has an obvious contempt for women, something clear to see even before the Access Hollywood tape came out. As I have written before, his version of masculinity sees women as beings to be conquered, controlled, and displayed, all the while being feared. But his attitude towards other men also betrays his toxic masculinity. He does not appear to have any close male friends. He is incapable of having friendship, since that involves a give and take of emotional support that he simply can't muster. Other men are to be belittled and dominated. The slightest criticism of him leads to angry tweetstorms and unhinged ranting. For him anger and violence are the only tools used when confronted by opponents.

I could never imagine Trump giving the kind of heartfelt dedication to Melania that Obama did to Michelle in a million years. I could not imagine a moment between Trump and Pence like the one we saw between Biden and Obama for a million more. We have enough toxic masculinity in our society as it is, from the soft patriarchal kind to the violent, psychopathic kind as it is. We don't need it modeled (and implicitly validated) by the new occupants of the White House. It's our job to push our boys and young men to something more positive.

I'm Sorry We Let You Down, Mr President

In January of 2009 we thought the war was over, when it had just begun

I am planning on watching president Obama's farewell speech tonight and am feeling very melancholy. It pains me to see such a warm, intelligent, thoughtful person hand over the office of the president to a boorish bigot whose ascension represents the death throes of American democracy. It also feels weird because I have been very connected to this president, since well before he held the office.

Back in 1999-2000 I worked as a library clerk for the University of Chicago's law library. I knew "Professor Obama" as the guy who was in the state legislature and had written a memoir I saw displayed at Powell's. Once or twice I'd seen his face as he came to the desk to check out books (usually we just delivered them to the professors' offices.) I was living in downstate Illinois in 2004, when he ran for the Senate and impressed the crowd at the DNC with his speech. He was the first politician to have their name on the bumper of my car. I had been drawn to him by his forceful opposition to the invasion of Iraq at a time when most Democrats had been cowards.

When he won the presidency in 2008 I was living in rural East Texas. I was out at a bar with some friends, In this reddest of red areas there was one TV with the election returns on mute in the corner, and when we started whooping and hollering, it was obvious from the hard stares that my friends and I were getting that we were going to need to watch Obama's acceptance speech at their house. I should have taken that as a sign of things to come, but didn't see it in the moment.

Sure, I thought all the "post-racial" America hype was a load of horseshit, but seeing the massive crowds on inauguration day made me think that the thirty year conservative wave had been broken on the rocks of a new progressive movement. My naivete became obvious in February of 2009, when Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, and others basically made it known that they were going to go into massive resistance mode.

In the end, they won. President Obama has been very quiet since the election, and I sincerely believe that he has a broken heart. He has to cede to White House to a man whose political career began with a racist conspiracy theory attack on him. I am sure he feels some amount of responsibility for the Democrats' failure in the last election. He thought Clinton was going to win, and so sat on the intelligence revelations that are now coming out so as to avoid having our electoral system being called into question. I can see the heartbreak over this in his eyes.

It hurts even more knowing that we who voted for him let him down. This does not mean that I think the president has been above criticism. He was too generous to Republicans on the stimulus and in general his first year. His use of drones is highly questionable. He should have gone for broke on health care. He did not do enough to use the organization he had built in the 2008 election to keep his voters active etc etc.

But....on that last point, it takes two to tango. We who voted for him can criticize Obama for all manners of things, but we need to acknowledge that we let him down. Did I go out and knock on doors in 2010 or 2014? Was I writing my representatives with the fervor that I am now? Were my friends calling Congress and circulating action plans when the public option was on the board the way they are fighting Trump's appointments now?  Nope.

I know what we did do. We placed unreasonable expectations on him. We watched as he dealt with unprecedented levels of disrespect and opposition and complained about what he didn't get done. We saw those massive crowds on inauguration day and got complacent. As my wife said to me tonight, we thought that being right was enough, and we were wrong. When the Republicans blocked his Supreme Court nomination we should have been in the streets. Instead, we were on Twitter.

Those of us who voted for him learned our lesson too late. I'm sorry we let you down, Mr. President.

Seven Years Of Politics On The Brink

Our modern political insanity dates from Rush Limbaugh's speech seven years ago

We are approaching an ignominious, important, and yet forgotten anniversary in American political life, and one that explains the recent conservative response to the death of Antonin Scalia.  On February 28, 2009, after Republicans had taken a massive electoral beating after their severe mismanagement of the economy led to a fearsome crash, many important conservatives gathered at the CPAC conference.  On that day Rush Limbaugh, clad in an open-necked black suit with slicked down hair like a Bulgarian mafiosi, gave a fiery speech calling for massive resistance to the Obama administration.  The response was boisterous enthusiasm that helped propel the complete and total commitment to destroying the president at all costs.  Even if conservatives had already decided upon that course of action, Limbaugh's speech amounted to a public declaration of that intention by the conservative movement.

It's hard to remember now, but back at the time of Obama's inauguration, it looked as if conservatives were going to have to bend to a tidal wave of support for the new president.  Democrats had large majorities in both houses of Congress, and the massive crowds that showed up to cheer Obama's inauguration seemed to be harbingers of the end of the 30-year-long reign of political conservatism in DC.  After all, an opposition party compromising with a massively popular new president was nothing new.  Democrats controlled the House under Reagan, but still passed his massive tax and social spending cuts in the early 80s.  Perhaps some in the Republican establishment were ready to play (relatively) nice in 2009, but the conservative media wouldn't let it.

Well before Limbaugh's speech on the 28th, Fox News premiered the Glenn Beck Program on January 19th, the day before Obama's nomination.  Beck would soon fulminate against the president with a heaping dose of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking.  He would call progressives "fascists," much like Jonah Goldberg, whose book making the same ridiculous claim was just published in 2008. The conservative media had been paying attention during the election, and saw the response that Sarah Palin received by appealing to the worst instincts of their base.  She would be a prophet of the coming changes.

The conservative political leadership was confronted by its own failure in November of 2008.  It could very well have licked its wounds and stepped aside for a bit, taking some time to think about what to do next.  It didn't do that, of course.  After seeing the response that Limbaugh and Beck were getting from the rank and file by appealing more directly and crudely to it than even Palin did, it decided to treat Barack Obama as if he were an illegitimate president and an enemy of the country.  That has been the modus operandi of the Republican Party for seven long years now, with disastrous consequences for the country.  This is why Marco Rubio, a supposed "moderate" constantly claims that the president is intentionally trying to destroy the country.  This is why an obvious sociopath like Ted Cruz has rallied the Tea Party base despite alienating everyone who actually knows him. And this, ultimately, is why Donald Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican nomination.  The leadership has talked a big game for years, raising the expectations of their base beyond what's realistically possible.  Trump has managed to somehow convince a plurality of that base that he will actually make their wildest desires come true.  After years of lies, hatred, calumny, and disinformation being fed the conservative base by both its politicians and media, such an outcome is hardly surprising.

The conservative politicians know that they have struck a devil's bargain, but so far, it's worked for them.  They may have lost the presidency, but mobilizing their foot soldiers has helped them turn statehouses red in numerous blue states and to control both houses of Congress.  The obstructionist tactics have made it impossible for the president to properly govern the country, and the occasional debt ceiling hostage crisis forces him to give ground.  For that reason this nightmare won't end until the Republican party is kept out of holding the Senate, House, and White House for at least three election cycles.  Until the political strategy articulated by Limbaugh seven years ago starts to no longer pay off, it will be with us.

The Silence on Housing Discrimination

MLK in 1966 in Chicago, where he pushed to end housing discrimination, an action largely forgotten in public memory due to its tendency to raise uncomfortable questions

There has been a great deal of discussion and action recently when it comes to the Confederate battle flag and of the memory of the Civil War generally.  While I am all for taking down the traitor flag and have called for a "memory offensive" on current public ways of viewing the Civil War, I do think that the discussion over the flag can be limiting.  It is easy for whites who live outside of the South to decry it, since they see it as embodying an Other.  Speaking from my time in East Texas, I can tell you that yes, there are a lot of good ole boy goobers in the rural South with violently racist dispositions.

However, there a lot more white people both inside and outside of the South who have benefited and continue to benefit from institutional racism in the form of housing discrimination.  I would even say that residential segregation is the root tool of racism in this country.  Living here in northern New Jersey it couldn't be plainer.  Those suburbs (like, say Summit)  touted for their safety and "good schools" are very, very white, while cities known for their crime and poverty, like Newark and East Orange, are overwhelmingly not white.

The historical past that made this present is well known.  These divisions are not natural, but are the intentional results of decades of policies that subsidized suburbanization, warehoused the poor in urban areas, and that made it easy for whites to get access to cheap home loans, and difficult for people of color.  When African Americans began moving into new neighborhoods and suburbs, white flight and block busting often followed.  The vast majority of white people, both in the postwar period and now, simply refuse to think of sharing a common fate with black people, especially poor black people.

Because of residential segregation, schools are more racially segregated than they were at the time of Brown.  This segregation leads to vastly different outcomes for children in different municipalities and neighborhoods that border each other.  Again, this is all by design, not by accident.  To give a local example, the grandchildren of Newark white flight living in nearby Livingston (where Chris Christie, born in Newark, went to high school after his family left Newark) have access to a renowned public schools system.  Their fate is entirely different than the children of Newark, who are currently being used as guinea pigs in a misguided "reform" scheme because Newarkers aren't allowed to run their own schools.  Those living in the protected municipalities can simply forget about those less fortunate, and never give them a dime of their local taxes.  Unless residential segregation is broken down, there is no hope whatsoever to stop either racism or severe economic inequality.

For that reason, the issues of fair housing and residential segregation ought to be prominent in the public sphere, especially now that the government is taking action on it.  The Obama administration recently announced that it is going to push for stricter enforcement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.  There is a lot at stake in this announcement, which could potentially radically alter residential patterns in large swaths of the USA.  It's interesting, then, that there has hardly been any public discussion of it in the mainstream media.  Perhaps this is down to a busy news cycle, with Greece and Iraq dominating headlines, but I doubt it.

Most Americans (white ones especially) would really, really like to avoid a discussion of fair housing and residential segregation.  In the first place, it is a key example of how racism is systematic and institutional, when most would pretend to see it as a nasty attitude held only by the type of redneck who waves the rebel flag.  The vast majority of white people do not want to see themselves implicated in racism in any way.  Politically, as Thomas Edsall pointed out yesterday, this is a difficult issue for Democrats.  If their party is perceived as bringing poor minorities into affluent white communities, a lot of white voters will react extremely negatively.  That said, Republicans are also hesitant on it, partly because they do not want to admit that systemic racism exists, and also because they would prefer not to make their collusion with it so obvious.

To solve the problems of residential segregation would mean action on a vast and massive scale, action that the majority of Americans would really prefer not to take.  They would also prefer to see the current residential dividing lines as natural, and will just go on pretending the problem doesn't exist, and to wail and gnash their teeth whenever affordable housing is proposed for their community.   That issue will continue to be framed as a local, and not systemic one, and nothing much will change.  For it do so would require and actual acknowledgement of the true realities of economic and racial oppression in this country, which I don't see coming anytime soon.  I only hope that the Obama administration's efforts make things less awful. Until white people and the affluent really and truly see the fates of their children as being intertwined with those of children of color and poor children, the base problem will persist.

Academia's Day Of Reckoning May Be Upon Us

Well, it looks like it might finally be happening.  After decades of rising tuitions, rock climbing walls, and decreasing educational quality, the federal government is stepping in to give our universities a dose of the whuppin' stick.  It will start rating schools based on a variety of factors, including student debt, tuition prices, graduation rates, and student earnings after graduation.  Schools that perform poorly will see their funding cut.  The DOE seems pretty confident in its ranking abilities, with one of its officials saying that it was no different than rating blenders.  Look out, higher ed, you're about to get hit by tidal wave of the kind of standardization already laying waste to K-12 education.

That's because many facets of this proposal are repeating the failed "reform" strategies enacted there.  By depriving money from "low-performing" schools, you effectively make it impossible to improve, since that costs money.  By creating a ratings system based on imperfectly compiled quantitative data, everything important about education that can't be put on a spreadsheet (which is most  of it) will simply be crushed into dust.  If you don't believe me, up in Boston they are essentially eliminating history as the study of the past so as to better boost reading test scores.  I can tell you now that the administrative fat cats who will have to come up with a response to this new policy will not respond by reducing administrative bloat, in fact I am sure they will hire more people to put in compliance regimes.  To boost graduation statistics they will become more selective (i.e. classist) and encourage profs not to give failing grades.  If you create major incentives based around pushing numbers around, people will find the easiest way to make that happen.  The people who run the universities are master bullshit artists, so they will find a way to preserve the status quo as much as possible.

Despite the fact that I think this initiative by the Obama administration is a terrible idea, our university leaders brought it on themselves.  They have spent the last few decades on a building spree and shoveling money into a metastasizing administrative layer while hiring an army of untenured adjuncts with (justifiably) little to no investment in the institutions where they teach.  This means that students are not getting the optimal education, and scholars are not getting to reach their full potential.  While universities are not to blame for the horrific cutbacks in higher education dollars at the state level, their inability to respond by cutting back on the building boom, big time college sports, and administrative bloat, along with their policy of just jacking up tuition (and presidents' salaries) instead of making the right cuts has led to this situation.

It's high time that the profession cleaned house internally in order to protect the people about to swamped by the quantified regime about to be put in place.  Profs who aren't pulling their weight need a stern talking to from their peers, and to be told to either get their act together, or find another line of work.  With higher ed in a crisis, everyone needs to be doing their job, if not they are letting everyone else down.  It's also high time for students, parents, and faculty to hold the feet of administrators to the fire.  When I was a professor I discovered a lot of student discontent with institutional priorities, discontent that could meaningfully be transformed into action.  Administrators tend to exile faculty voice to powerless faculty senates; if the customers (that's how the university leaders see them) and their parents start to revolt, things will change.  They need to change now, or else the change will soon be coming in the form of a one-size-fits all policy administered from the outside that will make the current troubles faced by the liberal arts look like a walk in the park.

Democrats Are Taking A Knife To A Gun Fight in 2014

This year is an election year, and a crucial one.  The 2014 election will determine the Congress for Barack Obama's last years in office, and gains by Democrats could help break the logjam of Republican obstruction.  Despite this fact, the Democrats don't seem to be doing much collectively to win.  The president's state of the union address this week was a case in point, since he greatly dialed back his vision, pulling away from gun control and income inequality.  It was not a speech that rallied his base.

Contrast that with the Republicans.  While that party is having some internal convulsions (just witness the four separate responses to the state of the union speech) it is working hard to lay the groundwork for  victory.  As conservatives discovered in 2010, low turnout in mid-term elections means having a motivated base is hard to beat.  The GOP rode the Tea Party wave into major gains that year, and since then have put Capitol Hill in a filibustered lock-down.  This year they are playing the same strategy by emphasizing abortion to get conservative Christians to the polls.  The wave of voter suppression laws around the country will also heavily dilute Democratic turnout, absolutely essential when fewer voters in total will be casting ballots.  Add to that the post-Citizens' United money train flowing from the Koch brothers and the like, and the Democrats could very well be roadkill.

Of course, the Dems did better in 2012, but that's because a presidential election brings out a broader spectrum of voters, and with the Republican obsession with ideological purity, swing voters were not as willing to trust them.  Many of those voters will be staying home this year.  The Democrats have also been saved by the Republicans' manifest dysfunction.  They nominated candidates like Todd Akin, forcing them to lose Senate seats that they should have locked up.  Essentially, the Democrats have been lucky, and still seem so passive that they are just hoping the other side tears itself to pieces rather than rallying their own base or making major moves to capture the attention of other voters.

The Democrats have been a truly spineless party of late.  For evidence, just look at L'Affaire Chrisie.  The governor had been engaging in all kinds of well-known shenanigans, but many Democrats were willing to play ball with him for their own power and gain.  (Just look into the whole Belleville senior citizens' center scandal.)  During last year's election I was flabbergasted at the number of Democrats who would so willingly support a man from the opposing party, much less a man who had attacked important Democratic constituencies with his policies.  Now that the reality of Christie's corruption is being uncovered, these folks are suddenly coming out against him.  Had the bridge scandal not erupted, many of those same Democrats would still be kissing Christie's ass right now.

I am glad that the president showed some fire in his speech and is committed to using executive powers to further his policies, but he does not seem to be offering those on the Left much succor.  He has expended the most energy recently defending a health care law that progressives thought was inadequate and defending domestic spying that his base and many of his opponents are incensed about.

If Democrats don't get annihilated this fall, it won't be because of their efforts, but because of the insanity of their opponents.  The Republicans seem to be getting smarter about this, but might have an intraparty civil war on their hands over taming the Tea Party.  If that civil war doesn't break out, expect Democrats to get buried under a landslide come November.

Would a Syrian Intervention Be a "Stupid War"?

I was living in Illinois when the war in Iraq began, and I was so happy that one of the state's politicians, an up and coming state representative from Chicago named Barack Obama, had come out forcefully against it.  The war made me sick to my stomach, from the lies used to promulgate it, the jingoist attacks on the Dixie Chicks and anyone else who dared to oppose it, to the thousands of lives snuffed out.  As Obama took on national aspirations, his vocal opposition to the war was questioned, even after its failure and false pretenses were made manifest.  (People forget just how awful the climate for dissent was back in 2003-2004.)  He famously said that he was not opposed to all wars, only "stupid wars."

I thought that was a great statement at the time, not only because Iraq was a stupid war, but also because blanket pacifism is not a viable basis for this country's foreign policy.  Obama's military actions in power, such as drone strikes, troop increases in Iraq and the bombing campaign in Libya, have surprised those who missed the second meaning of his "stupid wars" statement.  That said, I have been increasingly alarmed by the continuation of these Bush-like policies when it comes to the "war on terror," especially drone strikes and the activities of the NSA.

The president clearly does not see these interventions, Syria included, as "stupid wars." The covert activities and drone strikes are meant to carry on the same old war against Al-Qaeda, but through different, less costly and risky means than invasion and regime change.  He is pushing for action in Syria on wholly different grounds, namely to dissuade the Assad regime and other nations from using chemical weapons.  Essentially, he is trying to enforce international norms through Bush-like methods of unilateralism.

The goal of these strikes is rather admirable, and reflects a kind of liberal interventionism now prominent in Obama's cabinet.  In so many ways, it would be a far less stupid war than the war in Iraq.  The United States would not be aiming for regime change, it would only be involved short term, and it is responded to a case of mass murder perpetuated by a horrible cruel regime.  The war in Iraq was a naked imperialist adventure by the Bsuh administration to remake the Middle East to conform to a neo-con vision.  The talk of weapons of mass destruction was never anything more than a pretense, rather than the real motivation in the case of Syria.  Obama is not aiming to put a new regime in power, or to subject Syria to occupation.

A potentially open-ended intervention to unilaterally enforce an international norm isn't exactly inspiring the American people to action now, even though they got in lockstep behind the Iraq disaster.  Of course, the fatigue from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan perpetuated by Obama's predecessor has a lot to do with that.  I also think that the horse sense of the public is actually right for a change, but perhaps not for the reasons I usually hear.  The same conservatives who hurled abuse at me while I protested the war in Iraq ten years ago are now against intervention in the Middle East in large part due to their antipathy to the president.  Most other people know little about the war in Syria, and the suffering that Syrian people have endured at the hands of the Assad regime.  Unlike in 2003, they aren't scared of the boogeyman.  

From where I stand, war in Syria would be stupid (namely), namely because it would, no matter how advanced our smart bombs are these days, lead to the deaths of innocent people.  Their deaths would be all for the cause of the United States saving face after its president set a "red line" of behavior that the Assad regime broke.  It will result in more, not less suffering by regular Syrians.  It will not bring an end to that horrible war, and the rebels fighting Assad could end up being even worse (and Taliban-like) when they get into power, anyway.  It would be stupid because it would be unilateral, and harm all the efforts Obama has made to patch up America's relationship with the rest of the world.  It would continue to arouse the hostility of the people of the Middle East, who are tired of American political and military intervention.  That hostility gives Al-Qaeda its foot soldiers.  Any blowback will be worse than anything that might possibly be accomplished.

Perhaps the successful raid on bin Laden's compound and the bombing campaign in Libya have made the president over-confident about the capabilities of American force.  I just hope he thinks about where he was and how he was thinking back in 2003, and somehow changes his mind about this stupid war.

America's Empire is Bigger than President Obama

Today we received the news that the government has been using the Patriot Act to examine the phone records of Verizon customers.  This was upsetting, but hardly surprising.  Secret surveillance and the increasing reach of the national security state have been hallmarks of the so-called War on Terror for a dozen years now.  Although president Obama has stepped back from some of the most egregious policies of the Bush administration, such as extraordinary rendition and torture, he sends drones around the world to rain death from the sky and lets the NSA do all kinds of secret spying on American citizens.

It was not supposed to be this way.  Back in 2008 it looked to me like this former Constitutional law professor would get Guantanamo closed and pivot America away from the paranoia and destruction of civil liberties embodied by the Bush-Cheney years.  I was much too naive, and should have known better.

The one basic fact of our nation's politics during the last century has been America's status as an imperial power.  Every single president since McKinley has fought to maintain that empire, regardless of their political philosophy.  From the gunboat diplomacy of Teddy Roosevelt to the CIA's Cold War assassinations to the more recent taxis to the dark side, upholding this empire has meant abuses of power and the open flouting of the law of nations.  It has meant building up a national security state removed from political oversight and transparency, and no president, liberal or conservative, has managed to tame it, or ever will.

Imperialism is an American political fact of life.  America's empire will only cease once it collapses or is forced into retreat.  No one man, including the president of the United States, will ever have the ability to dismantle it or deny its relentless demands.

America is an Empire, No Matter Who is President

This week it's deja vu all over again, as that sage Yogi Berra once said.  During the Bush administration it seemed like not a week went by without some hair-raising revelation about the laws defied and rules broken in The War on Terror.  Back then, that war was much more in the public eye, with our cowboy-in-chief promising to "smoke 'em out of their caves" and to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."  We heard about "extraordinary rendition," secret prisons, mysterious flights, and illegal wiretapping.  The current president has taken a much less macho stance, and has avoided invading other countries, but it is becoming more and more clear that he too prefers to operate in a legal gray area.

Our nation has been sending drones around the world to commit targeted assassinations, including against American citizens.  This week we are now learning of the Obama team's rather fuzzy definition of what an "imminent threat" means, and what justifies these deadly strikes to begin with.

This is not how it was supposed to happen.  When campaigning for the presidency, Obama promised transparency, an end to Guantanamo, and for America to behave like a responsible world citizen.  He does deserve credit for putting an end to the Bush torture policies, but by and large, he has continued to prosecute the War on Terror with methods reminiscent of the Bush years.  Our government has been ruthlessly violent with members of terror groups, engaging in a direct strategy of killing off anyone who might potentially be a threat.  This approach has the advantage of flying under the radar (unlike the invasion of Iraq), which means that most people in this country don't seem to know or care much about it.  The hit on bin Laden, one of the few operations to get some attention, might be the most popular decision of Obama's presidency.

It should not surprise us that this former constitutional law professor who won a Nobel peace prize soon after being elected president would be using drones to rain death and destruction around the globe.  There are forces in the world that control all of us, including the president.  Even the most conscientious president must grapple with the unavoidable fact that America is an empire.  Empires, by their nature, seek to maintain their power, influence and reach, and will do all kinds of nasty things to make sure that happens, often in secret.  (This scene from The Spy Who Came in From the Cold pretty much sums up that hard reality.)

I do not think that even a president is able to change that basic fact of political life, and that shift would only occur if the public definitively decided that they were tired of the complications arising from America's imperial obligations.  I don't see that happening.  Like other former hegemons, America won't cease being an empire until after some kind of calamity forces the issue.  As much as I hate the crimes that America's imperial status demands, I fear the cataclysm that would end that status even more.  My only hope is that this nation can find some way to hang up its imperial crown in a new and more peaceful fashion, but I doubt that's possible.

Is a Second Term Slump Avoidable for President Obama?

The inauguration is coming tomorrow, after perhaps the most eventful and contentious lame-duck session of Congress in our time.  We seem to have collectively erased our memories of the 2012 election, despite the fact that it dominated public discourse for well over a year.  Perhaps the double-whammy of Sandy and Sandy Hook are to blame for the amnesia, but I think the Right has done a pretty successful job of so thoroughly ignoring the results that their defeat is no longer discussed.

Well, whether they like it or not, Barack Obama is starting four more years in the White House tomorrow.  Back in 2009 I would have been ecstatic by this prospect, but now I'm pretty much just exhausted, as happy as I am.  The intransigence and extremism of the opposition party doesn't really give one much hope over the president's prospects for bringing new initiatives forth and getting them turned into law.  I also have the sinking feeling that he will experience the second-term slump that even his most illustrious predecessors suffered from.

After winning a landslide in 1936, FDR went on to get involved in the aborted court-packing scheme and made cuts to his New Deal programs that brought on a recession.  When his second term ended, his political standing was much weakened.  Nixon didn't make it through his second term due to Watergate, and Reagan's second was also bedeviled by scandal, along with his increasing senility.  The economy boomed in Clinton's second term, but he was impeached and almost didn't make it out intact.  Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, crashed and burned with the deterioration of Iraq, Katrina, and judicial scandals.  Sometimes I feel that the pressures of the American presidency are such that it's impossible to sustain a high standard of performance for more than four years.

One reason Obama might be different is that unlike other presidents, he did not have a honeymoon period in his first term.  From the beginning, his political opponents have obstructed and blockaded him at every turn.  This experience has hopefully kept him sharp and his team from getting complacent.  Obama also does not suffer from the deficiencies of other past presidents.  He is younger than Eisenhower and Reagan, and not scandal-prone like Nixon and Clinton.  He is not a cowboy buffoon like W, whose idiocy was not fully exposed to the American public until it was too late.  My main fear is that his intellectual detachment will be more manifest once his fatigue with the job sets in.  It just might get too tiring to force himself to do the work of retail politics that he today seems to approach with disdain.

I think the gun control issue will very quickly define the nature of his second term.  For the first time since the early 1990s, there appears to be a groundswell of support for gun control, an issue Obama seemed happy to completely avoid to this point.  That of course never stopped the gun nuts from spinning paranoid fantasies about Obama's true intentions.  They went out and bought guns and ammo by the barrel-full when he was elected in anticipation of new gun control laws that never came.  For his first four years, Obama seemed to think that even raising the gun issue was out of the question.

Current events certainly now make the gun nuts feel as if their fever dreams were right all along.  By taking on the NRA and the hordes of wingnut "patriots," Obama is doing political combat with the faction of the Right that seems to hate and fear him the most.  If he can get his legislation passed, this would be a political de-pantsing of epic proportions, and would clearly send a signal that the president will be in the driver's seat for his second term.  Defeating one of Washington's most powerful and fearsome special interests, a lobby that has scared Democrats from even talking about guns, would give Obama the kind of political mojo he needs to get through his term without a slump.  I could even see the Republicans giving way on the debt ceiling issue in this case, since they would finally have to acknowledge his position of power.

If the president is unable to get much done on gun control, it will greatly embolden those who despise him the most.  He will have spent much political capital on a losing issue, and will most likely spend the rest of his term playing defense.  A similar thing happened to W, who floated the idea of Social Security privatization at the start of his second term, only to have it smacked down faster than my 18-year old self was when trying to talk to members of the opposite sex.  By tackling a brand new issue and a powerful lobby in the bargain, Obama is taking a huge risk, even despite the public's horrified reaction to Sandy Hook.

Mark my words, as goes the gun issue, so goes Obama's second term.

Why I am Voting for Barack Obama

When I cast my vote for president on Tuesday, my vote will be, once again, for Barack Obama.  Having lived in Illinois back in 2004 during his Senate campaign, this will be the third time I will have the pleasure to do so.  The first set of reasons I am voting for him are positive in nature: bin Laden is dead, General  Motors is alive, gay men and women can serve openly in the military, the economic stimulus brought the nation back from the brink of economic collapse, young immigrants have a clear path to citizenship, America is once again respected not hated by its allies, we have two new strong liberals on the Supreme Court, there are more avenues for women to sue for their rightful wages, America is out of Iraq and on the way out of Afghanistan, and we are finally on our way to having universal health coverage after a century-long battle.  All of these things were accomplished against unprecedented levels of obstruction by the opposition party, unrelentingly mendacious propaganda spewed by Fox News and the mobilization of a corporate backed church and king mob (aka the Tea Party).  While I wish the health care law had been stronger and stimulus focused on New Deal-style jobs programs among other disappointments, I am amazed at what the president has done in the face of levels of hatred, obstruction, and disrespect I have never before seen directed at a sitting American president.

I also have one very big negative reason for voting for Barack Obama, namely that he is all that prevents the radical conservative movement from gaining control of the levers of national power.  As I have been saying time and again, the Republican party is not a traditional center-right institution, but the vehicle for a radical band of ideologues set on putting their Ayn Randian crossed with Christian dominionist vision of America into practice.  A Romney presidency will see oil and coal barons free to pollute, banks set loose to exploit customers and wreck the economy, women's reproductive rights threatened, the conservative ideologues on the Supreme Court with a clear majority, a return to the old disastrous neo-conservative foreign policy, the social safety net shredded, and our horrendous social inequality worsen.  That alone would be reason enough to vote for Obama, but I feel that he has not just prevented the Right from doing their worst, he has managed to do a lot of good against long odds.

In recent days I've heard from friends via social media and read in blogs and other online forums the disappointment of the Left in Barack Obama.  They often point to things that I myself am greatly concerned about: his continuance of immoral and un-constitutional practices from the Bush era used in the war on terror (drone strikes, Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, targeted assassinations), a tendency to compromise as a starting point in negotiations (his renewal of the Bush tax cuts is an obvious example), the weakness of the health care reform law, cowardice on the gun control issue, and the fact that his administration has done little to better conditions for the poor and working classes.  I share these concerns, and even though the online quizzes tell me that my political views more closely align with those of Jill Stein, I'm still voting for Obama.

I used to vote for third party candidates; I didn't vote for a Democrat for president until 2004.  Why the change?  Because the Bush II administration showed me that as milquetoast and compromised as the Democratic party can be, the Republicans are extremists hell-bent on putting their dangerous ideology into practice.  As much as I am horrified by targeted assassinations and drone strikes, the reality is that America is an empire, and that fact is much bigger than any one person who will be its president.  In regards to domestic policy, I would love it if the president had stuck harder to his principles, but politics is the art of the possible.  I am no longer enamored of the Left's obsession with the doomed noble cause or the beautiful loser.  It's all well and good to romanticize Ted Kennedy's run for president in 1980 as a last stand for liberalism, but his actions and the liberals who voted for third party candidate John Anderson helped get Ronald Reagan elected.  Power is what matters in politics, and putting that power in the hands of right-wing extremists must not be allowed to happen.  In any case, the American political system is so beholden to corporate interests that Barack Obama is by far the most progressive president in my lifetime, despite his compromises and shortcomings. In fact, I will hazard to guess that it will be a very long time, perhaps never, before we have another president as progressive as him.

But let me not end on such an negative note.  I will not be voting for president Obama out of the fear I have of his opponents or as a "necessary evil," but because he has managed to accomplish a great deal of positive things; I would even say he has done more for this country in his four years than any other president in my lifetime, including Bill Clinton.  If that's not worthy of my vote, I don't know what is.

White Like Me: Romney's Not-So-Secret Weapon

Some news sources have been discussing the narrowing of the "gender gap" in presidential polling this year, which is awfully surprising given that one candidate signed an equal pay for equal work measure into law on his first day in office, and the other represents a party full of Bible bangers obsessed with controlling women's bodies.

One thing we're not hearing much, however, is that the erosion of the "gender gap" might be greatly explained by the growth of the "race gap."  In Florida, for example, Romney leads by 30 percentage points among white without college degrees, despite Romney's support for policies totally antithetical to the economic interests of the working classes.  This matches the numbers across the South, where in 2008 Barack Obama won 98% of the black vote and 11% of the white vote in Mississippi.  The gap is getting bigger, and as Chauncey DeVega at WARN has pointed out, Romney is gaining among white voters even after losing two debates!  There seems to be an implicit, lizard-brain notion among many white people that Romney is inherently more worthy of being president because he is white like them.  Charles Blow's recent blog backs up that interpretation with poll numbers that show a significant chunk of (white) voters who think Obama is more trustworthy than Romney, but will be voting for Romney anyway.  That, my friends, is white privilege at its most fearsome.

Occasionally some public figures just come right out and say what they're really thinking in regards to the fact that Romney is white like them.  Take for instance Thomas Friedman, that oracle for suburban businessmen who are too busy to actually formulate real thoughts about the global economy.  He recently commented that many (white) voters decided for Obama in 2008 out of the novelty of having a black president, and are now willing to try "something new," as if Romney is in any way "new." The subtext was clear: "it was an interesting novelty to have a black president, but now let's give the White House back to the type of person who really belongs there."  Sarah Palin's "shuck and jive" nonsense came out of a more overt dehumanization of the president via his race.

I'd long known that voting for Obama put me in a minority as far as white males were concerned.  Obama won only 41% of white male votes, and this was considered a "strong" performance.  It now looks like Romney is leading among white women as well, and, as I have mentioned, is getting a lot of support from the white working class.  When you think about the numbers, it's a little crazy that only 41% of white men voted for a candidate who won a decisive election, and that in the the last month Obama has polled as little as 32% of white men.

I'm proud to be a part of that 32%, but I am saddened by the implications of the numbers, since they confirm my pessimistic gut instincts.  White men are fiercely guarding their privilege, and despite his outright lies, constant flip-flopping, and lack of any specific policy plan, Romney is still one of their own, and Obama is not.  I can only hope that that enough of what Harvey Milk called "the us people" show up to the polls to counteract the aggressive defense of whiteness.

Things We've Learned in the Last Month of the Election

The past month has been one of the craziest periods in an election that I can remember.  It started with Mitt Romney looking sunk, only to be followed by his campaign's improbable resurgence.  All of the craziness has revealed quite a bit.  Here's what I've seen revealed, in bullet point form:

• With the blatant politicization of the attack on the Libyan embassy by Republicans, we now have an inkling of what it would have been like had Al Gore, and not George W. Bush, been president on 9/11.  
• Despite the fact that Romney's willingness to use the events in Benghazi to go after the president before the dust had even settled made him look completely opportunistic and unfit to be a leader, only a month later, he is making this issue the centerpiece of his campaign, as if he previous, damning actions had never taken place.  The fact that the media is letting him get away with it is just more proof that our public discourse is built on amnesia.
• The fact that the post-debate coverage has centered on facial expressions rather than substance, or on the lies being told repeatedly by Romney and Ryan, is just more proof that our political process is a media circus taking place in a post-factual world.
•  The fact that conservatives were calling the vice-presidential debate a "draw" (rather than a Ryan win) and are already desperately trying to change the subject to Libya is proof that Ryan clearly lost the debate.
• The re-release of then Senator Obama's 2007 comments at Hampton University are part of a blatant attempt to stir up white racial resentment by the right-wing press.  Such resentment is now clearly and openly a part of the conservative political mainstream.
• Romney has not and will not be punished for his strategy of lying his ass off at every turn.
• The fact that Romney and Ryan still have a chance at winning the White House despite their taped comments showing a complete contempt for half the country's population is just another example of how in a democracy, the people get the government that they deserve, and they get it with a vengeance.

What If...Barack Obama Acted Like Mitt Romney on a Foreign Trip?

Introduction: Mitt Romney is currently traveling abroad, and has so far managed to offend his British hosts with his comments on the London Olympics, and soon after arriving in Israel, insulted Palestinians for good measure, too.  Three other aspects of his trip are getting less press but are notable: he has been engaging in major fund raisers while traveling abroad, he has essentially said that if he were president he would subsume American foreign policy to Israeli wishes, and he has praised Israel's health care system as superior to that of the United States.  I think that the lack of broad comment on these things puzzling, since the president is being accused of being "anti-American" by his opponents, but here you have his adversary dissing the United States while in a foreign location, and openly begging for money from people who do not live in the United States.  I get the feeling that there would be a quite a firestorm if Barack Obama did these same things.  Since counterfactuals are always fun, I've envisioned here what the reaction would be like.

*WHOOSHING OVERDRAMATIC MUSIC*

Hannity: Welcome back to Hannity, ladies and gentlemen.  As you may have heard, Barack Obama's hatred for America reared its head yet again this week during his foreign trip.  While visiting Europe, he held multiple fundraisers with people who are technically American citizens, but who have not been living in this country for years.  As if that's not enough, while he was in France, Obama praised its socialized healthcare system during one of these fundraisers.  To talk about this, we have Jerome Corsi, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilly here with us tonight.  Hello gentlemen.

Corsi, Limbaugh, and O'Reilly: Hello Sean

Hannity: What do you make of these actions by the president?

Limbaugh: For years the liberals have been whining, as they always do, that when we call Obama "anti-American" that's racism, since you know to liberals you can never criticize a black person without being a racist.  Well now it's obvious that this man hates America, something he learned from his Kenyan father.  We have the best healthcare system in the world, and yet he goes to France and tells them they're better than us.  This just goes to show that we are a nation under occupation by a foreign power.  He's also taking money from foreign sources.  I don't care if the contributors are American, I'm sure that's just a front so all of his socialist buddies in Europe can funnel money to him.

Hannity: Yes, I wonder where the FEC is in all of this.

O'Reilly: The Romney campaign has been sounding the alarm on Obama's anti-Americanism, I think they've been vindicated.  By going to a foreign nation and running down the United States, Obama is giving aid and comfort to our terrorist enemies.  Congress should draft articles of impeachment, and anyone who doesn't think so is willing to let a man who loves his foreign friends more than his own people.  I will apologize for being an idiot if he is not impeached.

Hannity: I can't think of another American political figure who has betrayed the nation like this, yet his allies on the left will just sit by and watch it happen.

Corsi: If I may cut in, I think Obama's actions reflect a foreign attitude and the inability to understand what it means to be an America.  It's high time we took another look at his birth certificate, since this seems to be the work of a foreign agent, not the president of the United States.  He is trying so hard to cover up his secret identity, but I think in his comments in France, which he thought would be private, Obama has let the mask drop a little bit.

Limbaugh: And if you can believe it, Obama's biggest contributor is a man who made his money from casinos in China.  I think we could be seeing a backdoor way for Red China to control the United States and turn it into something else.

Hannity: Well it looks like the president will be in a lot of hot water for so flagrantly disrespecting the country he is supposed to lead.  Next up on Hannity, we'll take a look at the president's gambling kingpin moneyman, and talk to Mike Huckabee about the connection between Obama's lack of values and support by those who profit from immoral activity like gambling.

Mitt Romney's Desperate Appeal to White Identity Politics

I've always hated the term "identity politics," since it's usually employed by conservatives to deride the efforts of any group of people who are not white or straight in their quest for rights and respect.  There are some true instances of identity politics, however, and we are seeing one right now in the case of Willard Mitt Romney, and it comes from desperation.

His now infamous warbling of songs like "America, the Beautiful" during the campaign are part of a noxious attempt to paint himself as "American" and the president as "un-American."  The worst of the insinuations have come from mouthpieces like John Sununu, who had the audacity to say "I wish this president would learn how to be an American."  Romney himself has claimed fealty to "Americanism" and has implied that his opponent does not.  Romney's campaign has recently tried to step this up a notch with claims that the president does not understand the "Anglo-Saxon" ties between the United States and Great Britain because of his heritage.  At base, this tactic is trying to president Obama into the Other, in large part due to his race and background.  The implicit message in these statements is not to say that Romney would be a better president, but that he is white (and therefore "American"), and Barack Obama is not.

Romney is doing this less to appeal to undecided voters, but to get Republicans to the polls.  Mitt is disliked by his own base, who tried out the loony likes of Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann before they realized that Mitt was the only Republican presidential candidate with a chance of appealing to the broader electorate.  Without enthusiasm among the base, Mitt can't get the vote out, and will thus lose.  Because of his moderate record in Massachusetts and his passage of a health care plan very similar to Obama's, Romney can't run on his past accomplishments, since this will inflame the anger of his base against him.  Instead, he must harness the deep and scary reservoirs of paranoid hatred against the president lurking in right wing circles, much of it motivated by the mere fact that a black man is the president of the United States.


Outside of his base, Romney's still got a lot of problems.  Unlike the president, who is tremendously charismatic, Romney lacks the common touch, and when he opens his mouth in informal situations, usually makes a complete ass out of himself.  The examples are legion, but here are just the highlights: his tendency to guess the age of people he's just met, his casual discussions of ten thousand dollar bets and his wife's Cadillacs, his admission that he knows NASCAR owners rather than fans, and finally, his rude and ill chosen remarks about the London Olympics.  To my ears he comes across like every insensitive, authoritarian, jerkward boss I've ever worked for.  Voters aren't exactly excited about having their asshole boss as their president.

Many uncharismatic candidates in the past have run on their credentials and abilities, but Romney can't do that, either.  His time as a governor is off limits for aforementioned reasons, and his record at Bain has been a millstone around his neck because of its rapacious business practices.  Romney is in a situation where he has absolutely nothing to run on, only the president to run against.  The poor economy makes the president weak, but that's not enough for Romney to run on, since he has not really offered many specifics about what he would do to fix it.  To draw a contrast between himself and the president, he is stooping to reminding voters that he is the "white" candidate, and his opponent isn't.  The sad fact is that our modern elections are won less by making broad appeals to voters than by turning out one's respective base.  (For example, back in 2004 the GOP put anti-gay marriage initiatives on several state ballots in order to drive up turnout among evangelicals.)  That's why Republican state governments are suppressing potential Democratic voters, and why Republicans are calling the president "un-American."  Even if it doesn't work, the consequences for the body politic will be dire.

How the President's "Kill List" Exposes Our Current Political Dysfunction

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I have only been around this earth for 36 years, but at least in that time I have never lived in a period when our nation's politics have been so divided, crazy, and downright dysfunctional.  Things have become so surreal and disheartening that I have pretty much stopped writing about politics for this blog.    Every now and again, however, there is a moment in our political life that actually lends itself to analysis, rather than pulling out my hair or plugging my ears and screaming in agony.  (The "private sector is doing fine" misrepresentation and its aftermath is one of these wretched kerfuffles that seem to pop up on a weekly basis.)

Two weeks ago the New York Times revealed leaked information about the president's secret anti-terror policies, including a "kill list" of suspected terrorists used to determine targets of what amount to assassinations.  Even more disturbing, the government's claims to have minimized civilian casualties in these drone strikes were undercut by the newly revealed fact that all men of military age in the vicinity of these strikes were labeled terrorists.  (This is an eerie parallel of America's war in the Philippines in the early 20th century, when all Filipino men over the age of ten were labeled insurrectionists.)  It is apparent that president Obama has been overseeing a secret war on al-Qaeda, one with far-ranging implications using highly questionable methods.

I am not going to debate the merits of the policy in this post, but instead point to what it reveals about our current political life.  In the first place, the president's enemies, who normally attack whatever he does, found themselves in a quandary, since they had whole-heartedly supported the Bush administration's extra-legal tactics of torture, extraordinary rendition, and secret prisons.  Instead of going after the president for having a kill list and engaging in targeted assassinations, they accused his administration of deliberately leaking the information in order to make him look good!  On the other hand, many folks on the Left, like myself, are disturbed and outraged by the president's policy, but that outrage seems to have little to no impact on the public discourse.  Much of this has to do with the fact that progressives are mortified of criticizing the president, even when he does things they greatly disapprove of, out of fear of giving ammunition to his rabid enemies.  Essentially, our country's principles have become so debased by the decade-long War on Terror that the president can be exposed in the act of ordering targeted assassinations (including an American citizen) in nations where the US is not officially at war, and few people seem to care, much less object.

The Republican response has been surreal, and fitting with the ideological death-trip that party has been on since Obama's election.  They have accused the president of leaking the information to make himself look like a "strong leader," without a single shred of evidence to back up their point.  In truth, they are mortified because they have beating the drum of Democratic "weakness" in foreign policy ever since the days of Jimmy Carter.  That narrative is what helped put George W. Bush over the top in 2004, but now it's been undercut by the death of bin Laden and these recent revelations.  Of course, reality is no inhibitor to the conservative movement, and since people on the Right can't assimilate the facts of the Obama presidency's terrorism policy with their belief that he is "weak," they are just lashing out and throwing a tantrum.  Their hatred of the president is palpable, and even when he enacts policies that they actually approve of, it just makes conservatives that much crazier, because it calls their rhetoric of the president being "anti-American" into question.

We have a president who has engaged in policies that are anathema to many in his base, and yet he is getting most of the flak from the people who actually support those policies.   Those who object most to the president's actions have been largely mute out of fear of his enemies.  Journalists have revealed to the American people a secret and dirty war fought in their name, and they don't seem to care.  Our nation should be having a serious discussion about the "War on Terror" and where its limits ought to be, instead the same useless mud pie fight continues.  I am having an increasingly difficult time mustering the urge to care about it anymore.