Obama, tinkerer with the status quo

Brian Leiter interviewed by Richard Marshall:

Take Barack Obama, in whom many on the anemic American left invested their hopes. As President of the United States, his domestic policies, like those of Bill Clinton, have been largely to the right of Richard Nixon, and his primary economic advisors were the various economic soothsayers who orchestrated the deregulation of the financial sector in the 1990s that brought about the collapse of the global capitalist system under George W. Bush. His most ambitious “progressive” legislation was a healthcare plan originally developed by the Republican Governor of Massachussetts. At every moment where Obama, if he had any moral or intellectual core, might have led, he pivoted to the right. How could the great “liberal” hope have turned out to be such a shallow apologist for and tinkerer with the status quo?

If we put aside the romance surrounding the advertising product “Barack Obama,” and even put aside the more genuine emotional resonance of electing a Black President given the history of vicious racism in America, the answer seems quite obvious. In the United States, no one can compete meaningfully for the Presidency without tens of millions of dollars, and no one can raise such money without backing from the richest sliver of American society, i.e., the plutocrats. Since enough of the public can be manipulated at any time to believe just about anything - the entire history of the world is massive confirmation of that fact - it follows that only a candidate who meets the needs of the plutocracy has any chance, since only that candidate can get plutocrat money. The plutocracy has largely become more liberal on so-called “social” issues (e.g., anti-gay bigotry), and so any Democrat who basically respects the prerogatives of the rich is a viable candidate for them. Obama is not a fool, and nor are the plutocrats: they understand each other, and the result is that Obama has had and will have more money than any of his Republican opponents, and Obama will pivot to the right on any economic issue that affects the interests of the plutocratic class. That’s the hermeneutics of suspicion, and we need more of it every day.

Leiter has some interesting views, also, on the Occupy movement, which he would argue succeeded in changing the national dialogue; interesting, too, are the parts of the interview that discuss slightly more esoteric philosophy. On Occupy:

I think Robert Paul Wolff, the distinguished philosopher who has written on Kant and Marx, is quite right to note that the Occupy movement succeeded, in the space of a couple of months, in changing the national dialogue in the U.S. from the need for austerity and cuts to programs that benefit the elderly and the poor, to the actual reality of massive economic inequality. If 75% of the wealth of the richest one-tenth of 1% of American society were immediately expropriated, there would be no need to discuss cuts to spending that affects the well-being of the vast majority. This is a democracy, why isn’t this a major topic of public debate? Why aren’t the national media full of debates between defenders of the right of the Koch brothers to keep their billions and advocates for seizing the majority of their fortune to meet human needs? One only needs to read Marx to know the answer.