Wright & Obama
No way to stay out of this one, so I’m linking a piece by Illinois resident, political scientist, and writer Adolph Reed. Wright, of course, is being subjected to a one-sided vilification-fest by the media. They hate uppity Negroes; they hate anyone who is tainted by a whiff of Black nationalism; and they really hate anyone who doesn’t go along with the cherished white delusion that race is no longer an issue here.
Obama, as I predicted, is throwing Wright under the bus.
I’ve taken plenty of time out to beat up on Senator Clinton for her phony-baloney perception management campaign; and since I’d rather eat shit than endorse either one of these opportunists, I’m linking Reed’s piece on Obama (even thougth I have disagree with Reed a time or two in the past (on the role of Black nationalism, eg).
Nationalism is what Wright elicits, by the way, because he insists on bringing up the evidence of the colonial relation Black America is subjected to by white America. This is his cardinal sin… reminding us that we are not a melting pot, that we are not equal, that it is not all in the past, and that all the prophets of working class unity can’t conceal the fact — except by rhetoric — that the white working class in the US is complicit in the colonial subjection of African America, because as in all imperial relations the white working class gets a cut. The ruling class hasn;t had to divide white and Black workers since the 18th Century. Since then, the white working class was in the vanguard of whtie supremacy.
That’s why Clinton’s veiled appeals to racism work. That’s also why Obama is trying to play an opportunist’s (and a fool’s) game: talking racial reconciliation and unity as if it were a fact to whites and hoping he can mobilize phenotype authenticity for African Americans (as a righteous reaction to Clinton’s race-baiting, imo).
THIS is why some of us insist that elections can only be engaged tactially, and why we should place no hope in them.
I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.
His political repertoire has always included the repugnant stratagem of using connection with black audiences in exactly the same way Bill Clinton did—i.e., getting props both for emoting with the black crowd and talking through them to affirm a victim-blaming “tough love” message that focuses on alleged behavioral pathologies in poor black communities. Because he’s able to claim racial insider standing, he actually goes beyond Clinton and rehearses the scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has made infamous.
It may be instructive to look at the outfit where he did his “community organizing,” the invocation of which makes so many lefties go weak in the knees. My understanding of the group, Developing Communities Project, at the time was that it was simply a church-based social service agency. What he pushed as his main political credential then, to an audience generally familiar with that organization, was his role in a youth-oriented voter registration drive.
The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine precinct captain. This fabrication, along with those embroideries of the candidate’s own biography, may be standard fare, the typical log cabin narrative. However, in Obama’s case, the license taken not only underscores Obama’s more complex relationship to insider politics in Daley’s Chicago; it also underscores how much this campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance.
There is also something disturbingly ritualistic and superficial in the Obama camp’s young minions’ enthusiasm. Paul Krugman noted months ago that the Obamistas display a cultish quality in the sense that they treat others’ criticism or failure to support their icon as a character flaw or sin. The campaign even has a stock conversion narrative, which has been recycled in print by such normally clear-headed columnists as…
DeAnander:
A Canadian acquaintance asked me whether I favoured Hillary or Barack for the next Prez. I shrugged and said “Pepsi, Coke… but still, Pepsi or Coke is marginally preferable to rat poison.” That was mostly rhetorical flourish — I’m not sure that I actually regard McCain as quite as scary as rat poison — but he does seem scarier than the Dembots (in an unhinged, Strangelovian way, vs the predictable finance-capitalist-puppet scariness of th other two). My ticket I guess would have been McKinney/Kucinich, with Nader as head of EPA… and heck why not M Gravel, J Edwards, B Lee, B Sanders, A Gore all somewhere in the cabinet… if that’s the best we can manage for now. It’s really sad, how impossible that sounds.
29 April 2008, 7:54 pmchidy:
gosh i wish progressives would see the truth about nader. he regularly meets, and has taken money from, republicans. he’s done exactly nothing to build an alternative third party, you know, the hard work of actually getting one active and serious in all 50 states. he perpetually makes himself, and not the issues, the center of discussion.
i like what you said a lot, DeAnder, and i agree with most of it. but people have got to let go of the myth of nader, and see the man in truth.
as for wright/obama, all i can say is that i hope various dem strategists are doing the numbers here. i have argued for a long time as a black woman that white america is just not ready to elect a black man. that the media can make so much out of this wright thing is supportive of that theory. in a nonracist country, people would be turning off all news about it, even protesting and taking action at such racist coverage. the silence and acceptance on the part of most of wright’s villification is proof that they more or less agree with it. and to people like that, there isn’t a difference between wright and obama; all that matters is that they are Scary Black Men.
30 April 2008, 12:05 amG.:
What was that old axiom? Beware of false idols?
30 April 2008, 9:21 amnasrudin:
Neoliberal imperialists — supporters and practitioners of what MLK,Jr called the triple evils — don’t get a pass based on their race, gender, disability, or anything else. I don’t want O-bomb-a in the Senate, let alone the White House; same goes for Hillary. And McCain. Joe Bageant said it well:
“For me, listening to politicians talk, then listening to the media talk about politicians talking, rates right up there with swapping spit with a gingivitis victim. I do not like nor trust nor much listen to Hillary, McCain or Obama. And I wouldn’t vote for any of the three even if they knocked on my door bearing a bucket of smoked pork ribs and a bottle of Jack Daniels.”
30 April 2008, 11:42 amjack:
i’ve gotten to the point where i see this election as a fight to be america’s gorbichev. i once thought that oboma might (like 1-5% chance) turn around and be the next FDR, not that i particularly admire FDR. i did indeed feel just a slight glimmer in my jaded heart that he might shake things up if even just a little. i never gave him a free pass, but i saw nothing inspiring or even really admirable in clinton, so i felt he might be ok to vote for. now i feel like who ever wins will only have the privilege of piloting the titanic. mccain will just push the throttle to full steam ahead, and rip out the pilot wheel. oboma or clinton will try to make a good show of it, but between the economy, energy, war, failing infrastructure,along with all the other fun things going to hell in this country, well i only see iceburgs ahead for us all. guess its time for some community organizing of our own.
30 April 2008, 5:53 pmStan:
Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report
What does it tell us about power when Barack Obama has to become white to be viable and Hillary Clinton has to become a man (incinerating Iran)?
30 April 2008, 6:17 pmDeAnander:
it tells us what we already knew, I guess.
30 April 2008, 9:36 pmpeggy:
Anybody seen “The Daily Show” of April 30? It comes complete with multiple recitations and variations of “under the bus.”
1 May 2008, 5:35 amWinston Warfield:
I gotta weigh in this Obama thing has got me so worked up. So what did Wright say that was so out-of-line (actually the problem was that it was “out of line”). Unlike Obama’s zombies, I actually live in da geto and have black friends, mostly through coaching (baseball) tough-ass kids from struggling families who have to put up with starved public schools, minimal opportunities for healthy play, hostile cops, and a racially balkanized Boston where segregation is cheek-to-jowl, social and by-neighborhood. My head coach and I are a salt and peppa team (I’m the salt), and we discuss what interests us (urban youth, and politics) all the time. He’s got no problem with what Wright said, at all (even though he supports Obama). We argue the contradictions therein. I drive my two sons to school every day through areas of geto Dorchester (think Boston’s Sadr City) where our short-cut route lets us “take the pulse” by observing the Obama political sign-count in front yards. These are stressed areas, where parents stand with their kids at bus stops, because its sort of a combat zone. THERE ARE NEXT TO NO OBAMA SIGNS, NONE. Funny. You would expect a groundswell of support, wouldn’t you? Sounds like a poll to me.
1 May 2008, 7:14 amStan:
FULL
5 May 2008, 11:24 amCharles:
http://www.manningmarable.net/works/pdf/peacemakers.pdf
8 May 2008, 3:23 pmStan:
Black Commentator just summed this up pretty well. I myself voted Obama in the NC primary, because the barely-concealed race-baiting of the Clinton camp has become so obscene.
The Wright controversy was likely a Clinton tactic, and one that worked well enough. Obama knows what every other politico knows nowadays… there is no viability outside certain boundaries. So they forced the “uppity” poltician to denounce the “uppity” preacher… again and again and again. The system works, eh…
Critical support (that is, support without stopping criticism) for Obama is now inescapable, in my own view. Clinton turned this into a referendum on race; and forced us all to answer that old labor question: which side are you on? Doesn’t take away the complexities and contradictions. Doesn’t change the fact that Obama is likely to disappoint nearly everyone, or that he is Wall Street’s creature.
Not only is John McCain a scary lunatic; it is really true on one level that the attacks on Obama (from DEMOCRATS) are attacks against African America.
9 May 2008, 6:39 amsteve:
I just hope folks take advantage of this moment to organize at the base. I could care less about the campaign for the White House. I do note however, the people in motion who have rarely if ever been engaged in any type of political activity that devoted time and energy to the Obama campaign.In the carefully bounded political sphere of the contemporary US, electoral politics is often the first point of engagement.If Obama is elected president, I think those people expecting real change will be sadly dissapointed.A clearly articulated counter-narrative about Imperialism, Patriarchy, Capitalism, National Oppression etc is an absolute neccessity.Surfing through White Supremist and Neo-Nazi web sites, browsing the Southern Poverty Law Center KKK watch page makes it very evident that the powers that be have extra-legal options to exert control.A look at the diminished availability of reproductive choice illustrates how extra-legal action compliments the agitational efforts of more respectable outfits.The anti-abortion movement was the programatic glue holding together fascist currents in the US body politic, today anti-immigrant organizing plays the same role. I would assume that after an Obama victory, extra-legal direct action will increase, much as it did during the Clinton years, with the net result of curtailed civil liberties for progressive movements. Several weeks ago, I observed a neo-nazi march and rally in Washington DC.I was struck by the level of security provided them by DC`s finest. No matter what the circumstances,the police always turn the riot shields at the progressives–unlike Nazis.
10 May 2008, 1:28 pmCharles:
In his talk to the Detroit NAACP dinner , Rev. Wright discussed linguistics (Black and Standard English) . He mentioned the old “left-brain/rightbrain” thingy from about 30 years ago. His dichotomy was “subject thinking” /object thinking”.
As I thought about it later, this could be “subject thinking” is to “object thinking” as imitative thinking is to symbolic thinking.
subject thinking : object thinking :: imitative thinking; symbolic thinking
(Actually thought of the latter when a little boy imitated me with a salute greeting)
picture or imtiative thinking is one function ( we share that with other species;”monkey see monkey do”). Symbolic thinking as highly developed as our’s is ,is unique to humans. Symbolic thinking involves using something to represent something that it is not , an object or something outside something else represents something that it is not. The marks on a page ‘dog” are identified with something that they are not identical to, an actual dog. ( See anthropologist Leslie white’s deinition of “symbol” in this regard; see any elementary anthroplogy textbook. Picture thinking or representations on the otherhand “imitate: or similate what they represent. They are similar, not different , than what they represent.
The prime example of the most objective thinking is writing. originally it was speaking, but at any rate through language.
Wright actually referred to “learning styles”. His “subjective” thinking involved learners who sympathize with the teacher. They learn by thinking in terms of “subjects” or imitating other human individuals (subjects). The other learning style is through “objects” as, Wright put it.
I then made the “mental slide” from thinking though objects to “objective thinking”. Then I though of sympathizing with another subject as imitating another person type thinking.
Anyway, it was an update and connection ( in my frontal lobes ; smile) between that old ideas of rightbrain/leftbrain, subject/object, picturethinking/wordthinking, imitate/symbol.
A while ago I dropped some of this symbolic/imitative thinking stuff on the blog when Stan was discussing the mirror genes. I was trying to explain why I thought the unique human gene would not be a mirror gene which seems like it would have to do with an imiitative function, not a symolic function. A mirror gene would help to picture, to imitate , to simulate, not symbolize. A mirror gene would help with monkey-see-monkey do, not to symbolize, which is to represent something with something that is dissimilar to it, not with somethign that is similar to it , lie a picture.
10 May 2008, 5:39 pmCharles:
Here’s a compendium of some stuff from the Wrighteous events.
CB
On the other hand, I must say that I think Rev. Wright missed an historic opportunity in his speeches to the NAACP here in Detroit last night, and evidently at the press club today.
He , as a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, could ( should ?) have made a speech about forgiveness, reconciliation and loving thine enemy with respect to racism in America. He has already thundered Old Testament righteous indignation and condemnation of slavery, Jim Crow and racism. We know and have said he is correct in those criticisms. But why not follow Barack Obama’s lead ( since he is only getting all this attention because of his association with Obama)and preach on the natural theme for a Christian minister of extending your hand to those who have wronged “you”, forgiving trespasses against “you”, seeking a new day of unity between Blacks and whites, taking the first step ( again) to get beyond racism. This would also be a revival of a theme that Martin Luther King, jr. was famous for from his “I Have a Dream” speech. Sure King was also sharply critical of all that is wrong with America in his Riverside Church speech, et al. But King also had an extraordinary theme of reconciliation between the races.
Ultimately, unity of Blacks and Whites is necessary for the working class to advance the class struggle.
By this approach, Wright could have helped Obama. Wright has already stood firmly against racism. He wouldn’t be selling out. He could have used his status as a steadfast anti-racist to advance principled Black -White unity, which is in the ultimate best interest of Black people.
@@@@@@@@@@
Wright”s logic ?
Maybe Rev. Wright is trying to protect O ?
Most vet’s of the movement, MLK’s assassination, et.al have noted O’s
courage in running in the face of that history.
MLK was not assassinated for the “I have a dream” dimension to his
political persona, but for his condemnation of imperialism, poverty and
racism.
O’s campaign has had both dimensions, with the latter especially or
mainly in his connection to the person of Wright.
By forcing O to more sharply separate himself from the condemnation of
America dimension, Wright may be seeking to diminish the “confederate”
threat to O.
CB
——————————————————————————–
“The way to challenge racism is to call the racists out”
^^^
CB: True. But beyond a certain point, this has to be done mainly by
White people. Black people ( like Rev. Wright) have been calling out
racists forever. But that doesn’t work beyond a certain point. White
people are the one’s who must change their conduct, in the main, to end
racism. They are not going to listen to the protests of Black people to
do that. They have to be persuaded by other White people.
Take the current situation. How many White people are going to listen
to the outrage of Rev. Wright ? They use his anger as an excuse to
ignore him. It is when whites fight racism that real progress is made.
The role of Blacks has to be more in the manner of Obama or Martin
Luther King - extending a hand in friendship, figuratively speaking.
While agreeing that whites have an important role in fighting racism, I
don’t think that white campaigners against racism have any right to
demand that those on the receiving end of racism should not be angry. We
actually have to earn the right to criticise by fighting for unity while
explaining (and defending) the anger and the angry.
Einde O’Callaghan
^^^^^
CB: I think this is true. And the explanation of the anger is part of how the persuading has to be done.
But perhaps the central explanation to white workers is not so much sympathizing with non-white workers’ anger, but seeing how racism hurts white workers’ own most important interests and concerns.
Actually, given that the small indication from the N. Carolina and Indiana primaries are that the Wright incidents didn’t hurt Obama as much as many (I ; smile) thought it might, maybe there is a significant change in many white people’s understanding of “Wrighteous” anger. The next test of US mass white consciousness on racism probably will be in the general election.
Meanwhile, with right-wingers winning elections all over, is more and more of Europe going through a new test of racist consciousness ,and getting low grades ?
10 May 2008, 6:41 pmpeggy:
yo no comprende
11 May 2008, 1:42 amSTacia Tolman:
Uppity women come in for as much abuse as uppity blacks. For many years, Hillary has been subjected to a stream of virulence (backed by implicit violence as a message to the rest of us); all because she has dared seek power in this macho land of ours. A lot of the discussions about her focus on the body—her laugh, for instance: it used to be her hair. A lot of the things that have been thrown at her—that she’s ‘a monster’ was one I read on this site—imply that for a woman to seek power is physically unnatural, that it turns her into a beast, a subhuman. Comparing oppressions—racism vs. sexism—is a degenerate and counter-productive activity: the answer to ‘Is it worse to be hit by an east-bound bus or a west-bound bus?’ has to be that it’s better not to be hit by a bus.
12 May 2008, 10:41 amOf all the shit we’ve had to swallow over the course of this election, the one that sticks in my throat the most at this point is the political blackmail to which we’re subjected by the Democrats—either vote for us or get something much worse. From the local level to the presidential, they all think we HAVE to vote for them!
We don’t!
Charles:
I got no problem with Clinton being uppity. I got big probems with her trying to bring out votes by appeals to racism. Big problems.
She needs to read Sojourner Truth, bel hooks or Angela Davis.
12 May 2008, 4:13 pmDanielle Zora:
interesting- i have never seen evidence of her being uppity in any kind of anti-authority or pro-people way. she is a member of a conservative dc prayer group and went out of her way to pour coffee for her fellow male senators-she demeaned tammy wynette while actually standing by her no good lying cheating husband- she has never fought for women- one internship and some political friendships do not make a fighter for women or children or the family or anything.
12 May 2008, 8:49 pmi find her to be a monster-i am a women who respected sister souljah and lani guarnier- speak of people that got thrown under the bus. which women did she defend or promote?
Stan:
De and I have been here before. The issue that Stacia brings up is legitimate (so no reason to take it personally or get defenseive). Neither Senator Clinton’s policy positions nor her religious affiliations nor her amoral brand of politics hs anything to do with it, when we are talking about special maltreatments that target er for her gender (her clothing, hair, weight, “harpiness”, etc, et al.
Some time back, there was a nasty bit of prose ciruclating around the internet on Ann Coulter, one of the most morally repugnant political commentators we might find in the US.
Part 1 and Part 2 are linked, written by “The Liberal Avenger.”
When we disapprove of public figures, it is still okay, by librul-boiz standards, to gender an attack on them… another example is the picture that had Osama bin Laden anally raping George W. Bush… or in film — as pointed out here — for the protag in Man on Fire to symbolically anally-rape a terrorist with explosives.
The irony of our time, now apparent in presidential politics, is that Clinton has to run “like a man,” and Obama has to run “like a white man.” This just tells us who is still in charge in our culture.
Constructing sex as a form of revenge, or demeaning someone because of her gender, even when it is deployed against “enemy women”, is still a reflection of our cultural misogyny (and its attendant homophobia).
13 May 2008, 5:55 amDeAnander:
Yep this gets us back to the theme of “Enemy Women” which we’ve explored to some extent before — how in conflicts between gangs of men, the “other guy’s women” come under attack *as women*, i.e. become licensed targets for misogyny even more virulent than that which is expressed against the boyz’ “own” women. Obviously campaigns of mass rape in warfare are one reflection of this behaviour, a big obvious one. But gendered attacks on political/ideological opponents are so normal, so everyday in political discourse, that we almost don’t hear them. The misogyny is so fully embedded in phatic utterance and colloquial discourse that when the one set of boyz calls the other set of boyz “sissies” or “girly-men”, it’s just “the rough and tumble of public debate” and we are not supposed to attach any significance to it.
Almost as ubiquitous is targeting “the other guys’ women” as a surrogate for targeting the other guys, or as a provocation to the other guys. In public discourse in modern times I always think of the many US Cold War Era political cartoons featuring large, ugly, ill-dressed Russian women — “hey, their women are fat and ugly and ours are pretty and young and stylish, neener neener.” This theme ran deep enough to get encoded in feature length movies — the humourless, unattractive Soviet female was a stock figure in US spy movies for decades, and often her “conversion” into a “normal” woman who (a) falls for a handsome US fellow and/or (b) is seduced by feminine consumer goods from the capitalist system (Ninotchka, or Silk Stockings) was a surrogate narrative for the triumph of capitalism over socialism, the triumph of trophy womanhood over feminism, and the triumph of male power over female self-respect… [Capitalism here being anthropomorphised or embodied as the powerful wealthy male with cash and trade goods in hand who can entice any woman to prostitute herself, abandoning her principles and learning to conform to his expectations…?] Similarly we might recall Left cartoons and lit that embody/personify wealth and decadence as a “spoilt rich woman” (”Swept Away” anyone?), or Eldridge Cleaver’s notorious call for angry Black men to commit violence specifically against Anglo women to advance the struggle against white supremacy.
Cleaver’s Obit, CNN
For a feminist, there’s an obvious partisan line — gender — crossing these various politics-among-men; the fractures and enmities between men create a license to hate specific women (the other guys’ women, Enemy Women) openly.
And this is a pattern that permeates patriarchal politics. While imputations of imperfect masculinity are common currency in political mudslinging and cartooning directed at male public figures, direct and virulent misogyny is dumped on those few women whose heads are visible above the Kinder/Kirche/Küche parapet. Photoshopped porn pics grafting politically visible women’s heads onto porn models’ bodies in humiliating or ridiculous poses are common fare, as are more elaborate text-based pornoganda efforts like the one linked (reluctantly) above; and even at the less intense end of the scale, “catty” attacks on publicly visible women for imperfect femininity — i.e. not being beautiful or stylish or motherly or sexy or sweet or quiet or decorous or thin or pleasant or whatever enough to suit the intrinsically contradictory and unattainable state of Perfect Woman-ness — are heard and seen non-stop.
I see this as the “handy half-brick” gambit. When it might take a slight amount of mental/intellectual effort to engage with the reasons why a pol or public figure is wrong or misguided or untrustworthy, it’s easier and quicker to heave the handiest half-brick of misogyny or racism instead. The object is simply attack, rather than engagement — mockery and ridicule rather than reasoned opposition. The reasons for hostility and anger may be perfectly sound — I dislike Condi Rice as much as the next person — but the tools that get pulled out of the toolbox are the blunt objects of bigotry. Basically, we’re back to the schoolyard and the refuge of the inarticulate in “you’re ugly and your mama dresses you funny” when incapable of explaining the real reasons for dislike; or (also back to the schoolyard) the hostility really is unreasoned and consists in a mere chauvinistic hatred for the other team — a sporting or war mentality in which party affiliation (or colour of headscarf) is the deciding factor in whether to hate or admire a visible figure.
One of the complex and daunting things about us humans is that we seem to enjoy hating people — there’s some kind of reward mechanism at work in the brain when hatefests are indulged in (like tantrums). Party politics offers an ostensible excuse for indulging in hatefests. Men do obviously get some kind of jollies out of misogyny — a feeling of superiority? a release of endorphins? an adrenalin high? a sexual buzz? — and so, I think, in the case of partisan/misogynist attacks on Ann C, Hillary C, Condi R, etc we see politics as an excuse for enjoying the buzz of a “legitimate” fit of misogynist vitriol. Same goes — for those still naif enough to display open enjoyment of their own bigotry — for race-based attacks on Black public figures, anti-semitic fits over Jewish public figures, etc.
I think naming the Enemy Women behaviour and recognising it would go far to undermining it as an acceptable form of public discourse. But maybe that makes me a hopeless optimist.
13 May 2008, 3:26 pmStan:
Here is something that exposes a jillion contradictions, and one glaring fact: the accepted condition of women is to be reviled and humiliated. This article on sexual humiliation as a torture technique (it is) doesn’t mention that sexual humiliation is an integral part of the lives of most women.
13 May 2008, 6:13 pmpeggy:
Word has it (this is a current Anglophone stereotype) that Russian women are generally gorgeous and desirable in every respect whereas Russian men are generally louts. Don’t know how current that stereotype is in the U.S.
Eldridge Cleaver was a very brave man, imho, and exceptionally self-knowing, to write as he did. But he hurt black men a lot, by telling his own truth.
” . . . and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman.” Profoundly insightful, De. I mean it. Not being sarcastic. That phrase hit me between the eyes. Makes me think about how I feel, being a woman. But I definitely would not want to be a man. So what do I want? Freud’s old question. I know rather specifically what I want. But few people ask me, and of those who do, the greater percentage would rather I not have what I want.
Hillary has finally found her role in life - to play the role of a stereotypical uneducated beer-swilling racist et cetera white man. A ballsy woman. That’s a type in itself. Wonder how many working class men will buy into that. Wonder how it will play in Minneapolis. I fear that particular mask will crack pretty soon.
14 May 2008, 6:59 ampeggy:
Sorry, it was not De’s quote, it was someone else quoting Dhia al-Shweiri, a man. Puts the whole quote in a whole different light. Some men find it the ultimate insult to be made to feel like women. Doesn’t mean that a woman would necessarily feel insulted to be made to “feel like a woman.” My mistake.
The feelings of men are diverse, as are the feelings of women. There are quite a few men who like to feel like women. Of course they are reviled by many, but they have also strongly resisted, fought against the revilement, and won many important battles. Perhaps more attention and honor should be accorded to them.
14 May 2008, 7:17 amkathy miriam:
Stan,
14 May 2008, 7:41 amI NOTICED this article- I didn’t even open your link and know which one you’re talking about. It’s APPALLING–I COULDN’T EVEN READ IT, I SKIMMED. I can’t add anything to what you’ve just said, but thanks for bringing it up.
kathy miriam:
re: “enemy women” behavior. YES. De, this analysis is so incisive– This phenomenon has irked and disgusted me for so long and I never quite put it together as you did here. It’s especially important in terms of seeing the hatred coming from different “poles” of the political spectrum.
about the “half brick”- Yes, it’s easier to hate, to simplify the world into us and them, to avoid the complexity and challenge of thinking, and avoid- some basic fears about co-existing with others, with one’s self.. It’s a massive form of self-deception. I don’t know how to get at it..
But more specifically and concretely-(re the misogyny) this is hatred towards women, and in the context of both left and right- hatred towards feminism, towards any woman that “crosses the line”… And you’ve put your finger on how - as “woman of the enemy” a vehicle is provided for this hatred that few people see, because they hide behind it has hatred for “the enemy” period. and that is always legitimate, of course. left and right. And this “enemy woman behavior” — you should write a piece about this and circulate it!!! — shores up the basic heterosexual presumption, woman belong to men, are appendages of men.
14 May 2008, 7:51 amI really think this analysis is IMPORTANT- please write an article about it and send to Counterpunch!
Bruce F:
I came across a site that you might find interesting.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174931/ann_jones_changing_the_world_one_shot_at_a_time
I’m the first to admit that there might be/are problems with Americans going off to save the world with the latest piece of technology. That said, this seems to fit in with what you guys do here.
14 May 2008, 11:39 amCharles:
Evidently, the vast majority of Black people don’t think that Barry has “run like a white man”. A whole lot of left Black activists and intellectuals do not agree with you on that, which should really give you pause.
STAN: Really.
FULL
So is Margartet Kimberly… what? Not Black? Not left? Not intellectual?
Your fallacies are showing again.
14 May 2008, 12:59 pmCharles:
Well, the most common , everyday exhibit of the “enemy women” concept might be calling a boy or man a “son of a __”, putting some fault of the male on his mother.
Gender and race are on the mass consciousness writ large at this concrete moment in the Presidential campaign with a woman and a Black person (running as a Black person !) as candidates. As far as representations of feminist issues and Black freedom issues to the vast majority of the People, women and Black acivists are stuck with the Presidential campaign as the main way that these issues are raised in the public’s mind.
“Enemy women” concepts don’t have much to do with this Presidential campaign. There’s nobody doiny any “enemy woman” rhetoric in the context of the current Presidential campaign , so raising _that_ is more like the defeniveness on this thread.
14 May 2008, 1:42 pmThe issue of feminists and Black activists in the campaign is the classic problem of a woman carrying the issue of advancing women falling deep into racism, besmirching the feminist banner big time, as critiqued by Black _feminists_ from Sojouner Truth, to Angela Davis, to all the Black women supporting Barry and criticizing Clinton in this campaign. What conscientious feminists need to deal with in this concrete , real world situation is the “Margaret Sanger” problem ( See _Women , Race and Class_ by Angela Davis).
Stan:
Huh?
When news commentators say “I can see Hillary’s adams apple,” what is that? And the fact is, when Bill Clinton was race-baiting, he was called everything from pragmatic to racist, but not monster (unnatural).
It’s “defensiveness” to bring forward the issue of “enemy women”? Have you read anything written above?
15 May 2008, 5:38 amkathy miriam:
There is now “favorite website of the day” on Counter-punch which equates CLinton with Hitler- it inserts an English language script into a scene from the German movie, Downfall–called the Downfall of Hillary Clinton (also on U Tube). It’s unfortunately very clever. Feminazi anyone?
15 May 2008, 7:29 amDeAnander:
@km I think this — and a lot these Enemy Women gambits — fall under a broader category of Taint-tagging. Hitler is one of the ultimate Taint memes in US culture, so comparing someone to Hitler is like a Taint-tag (Taintball?), his bad mojo is supposed to rub off by association on the person being put in the frame with him…
Hitler has been a Handy Halfbrick ever since the real horror of WWII receded into pop pabulum history.
it also compares her (again) to a man, thus reinforcing the gender kapu slur… I wonder why a leftyboy web site would not hit closer to the mark and compare her to Maggie Thatcher, who also ran on an “iron lady” neolib/authoritarian strategy…
15 May 2008, 10:45 ampeggy:
Just from a detached point of view, whatever else one might say about the Obama-Clinton race, it surely is interesting, because it brings out many aspects of racism and sexism in America, and the complex interactions between these two mindsets, if they are that. Disagreements between what statements are racist and what ones are sexist can run hot. And at the same time, the U.S. is facing all kinds of crises, and these in turn - like the immigrants crisis, the veterans crisis, and the education crisis - play into prejudices of many kinds. Like I said, it is interesting. But it is also damn scary.
15 May 2008, 6:25 pmpeggy:
The proclamation “I can see Hillary’s adams apple” (which is actually small and feminine as one can see via numerous photographs) is not at all serious, or even necessarily mean, precisely because it is visibly not true. In general, the attribution of masculine features to Hillary has run in her favor. Everybody knows that she is an acceptably pretty heterosexual woman, married to a man to whom she has proved faithful, and the mother of a child. Therefore, I feel that she is effectively invulnerable to sexist slurs. Even to call her a bitch is the mildest of mild criticisms, because she is a woman. To call a woman a bitch just says she can talk back and cause pain by her talk. It means little these days, for women. I have a t-shirt that says boldly on the front, “Get in touch with your inner bitch.” I bought it for myself, and wear it often. Now, to call a *man* a bitch, that is another matter, inviting a physical fight. For women, there are other, far more derogatory words. I haven’t heard or read any of these words as descriptors of Hillary Clinton.
And anyhow, identifying flag-words is easy, too easy. The actual sexism that has been used against Hillary is far more insidious. In trying to be whatever the (still primarily male) crowd wants her to be, twisting and shaping herself in impossibly contradictory ways, she has gone half-crazy, as have so many of us women. Men have their own severe hardships to endure, but few of them have the slightest clue what woman must do to meet the demands upon them as women. Hillary, being more ambitious than most (not a problem for men) has contorted herself, and been contorted, so badly that she is even crazier than the rest of us. That degree of craziness is dangerous, I feel.
I disagree with the contention that Obama, being a black man, has undergone equally serious contortions. First of all, he is culturally white. He was raised by his white mother and her white parents. In addition, this white mother, although she was not rich, was highly educated and professionally active to the end of her life, so Obama had a special advantage in being raised by her. Many values and understandings and a lot of knowledge is passed on by an educated mother, as long as she is an active mother, without her even thinking about it. Only after he was an adult did Obama enter the world of cultural blackness. And as he has shown, he can still distance himself from that, if he wishes. That is the way with a second culture, acquired in adulthood. In short, Obama as he is today is doing what comes naturally, as a gifted human being of mixed background. Full-white male politicians have it even easier. Bill Clinton, for instance, remains totally himself, although he is getting old and possibly slipping - *pretending* to be his wife’s devoted and passionate advocate, but in actual fact undermining her. Anybody else seen that before? I have. And old Bill, if ever challenged on this matter, can and will maintain total deniability. *That* is now sexism works. Let nobody fool themselves into thinking this is a simple thing.
15 May 2008, 7:23 pmRequired:
Yeah, it’s definitely got some political potency for anti-women forces, but I would hazard a guess that the real reason that film was chosen was because about 50 thousand parodies of that scene have recently hit the internet. With Hitler getting furious over everything from not getting a PS3 to his baseball team losing. It’s like the Chris Crocker thing when every moron with a bed sheet and some eye-liner thought they were hilarious. Including the painfully embarrassing late entry from the US Greens Party saying “leave Ralph Nader alone.” It’s so cringe worthy when old people try to co-opt pop culture and fuck it up. It’s even worse when old progressives do it.
15 May 2008, 9:15 pmMichael Anderson:
Go to:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0803/S00452.htm
and read ALL the articles on Obama by Ms. Pringle. He’s a Chicago politician of the Mayor Daley school. It’s gonna get ug-a-lee.
16 May 2008, 4:23 amStan:
I think he’s out of the Daley School now. Whatever the circumstances leading to where he is now, there is one compromise-hurdle left… he has to keep John McCain from getting the “white vote” (the voters who vote their whiteness). His best ally may be John McCain on this one.
If he wins the presidency, however, he is faced with the dual burden of the office itself, and the fact that he is under a microscope as an inescapably Black president (even though — as Peggy points out — he is culturally closer to Euro-America than African America).
What he inherits on January 20th is a giant barrel of shit, and the expectation to turn it into a barrel of roses. Too bad he hasn’t read the thread on composting.
The war. Destabilized (nuclear) Pakistan and Lebanon. Global recession and an expanding food crisis. $200-a-barrel oil. Deepening stratification, homelessness, petty crime, xenophobia, and a twitchy “middle class” that is being swallowed by a big anaconda called debt. The SCO is quietly carving away at US influence in the Pacific. Latin America continues to drift left. Obama has saddled himself with support for Zioinism. Russia is coordinating a natural gas OPEC. Saudi Arabia is seething at the rising influence of Iran. Strategic Turkey is on the cusp of a social upheaval… on it goes. That big world that was a life support system for the American way-of-life (TM) is unravelling. The US economy is on the brink of its own implosion; and Obama will be faced with either turning his back on his Wall Street benefactors to begin a historic turning-inward for our imperial core… or he will fail, then fail, then fail again.
All this on him… as the Black president. The fact is, the circumstances he will inherit are beyond the capacity of any president to handle (and that hoary trope of Black incapacity for governance is coiled under the table… waiting to strike). The gist of this presidency will either be coordination of a soft landing for the diminution of US global power, or the catastrophic continuation of the current attempt to hang onto that power. The gender/nation/class that runs politics in this country does not have the least intention of seeing power shift into community… though at this point it is no longer just some moral imperative from a bunch of lefties; it is the difference between transient pain and protracted horror.
If he starts running for a second term on January 21st, that will be a grave sign. Then we need to know… our survival depends on growing our strengths outside the electoral-legislative arena. Our best hope is to contest for political power… but not the fixed, disembedded game of national politics. Local, local, local. Turn neighborhoods against municipal ordinances, municipal ordinances against county law, county law against state statutes, and state statutes against the central government.
Toto, I don’t think we are in Chicago any more.
16 May 2008, 5:54 amCharles:
“Enemy women” concepts don’t have much to do with this Presidential campaign. There’s nobody doiny any “enemy woman” rhetoric in the context of the current Presidential campaign , so raising _that_ is more like the defeniveness on this thread.
Huh?
When news commentators say “I can see Hillary’s adams apple,” what is that
^^^^
It’s not _enemy_ woman. Enemy woman is a woman member of the enemy. The white commentators don’t consider the white Hillary to be an _enemy_ woman. She’s a member of their own group, whites.
Eldrige Cleaver is engaged in enemy woman attack when he legitimizes attacking white women because they are the “enemy”. Somebody wrote about Eldridge Cleaver here. There is no Black man justifying attacks on Clinton by appeal to teh “enemy woman” demoagogy in the current campaign.
21 May 2008, 1:44 pmCharles:
It’s “defensiveness” to bring forward the issue of “enemy women”? Have you read anything written above?
^^^
21 May 2008, 1:51 pmYes, I read it, and there is no reason to bring up the “enemy woman” concept to analyze “Wright and Obama” or the current Democratic primary campaign. Obama , nor anybody else has raised any thing that can be characterized as an “enemy woman” ploy or attack. So, why is “enemy woman ” mentioned ? Why is defensiveness mentioned ? There isn’t anything defensive in the comments. Defensiveness and “enemy women” are straw arguments above aimed at arguments that don’t exist on this thread or in the Presidential campaign.
Stan:
Charles, the “enemy woman” shtick is the Republican and right-wing press trope. And it does operate… now. That’s why the R’s want to contest Clinton. They know how potent it is.
There is a bigger world out there than Obama/Clinton. This primary has brought — re ZE — all the contradictions to the fore. It has also brought Clinton to an openly racist campaign, which has terrible echoes of Sanger and the “progressive eugenics” movement (when “feminists” adopted openly racist ideas and language).
That in now way cancels out the fact that Clinton is frequently attacked on account of her gender. When people do that, then point out that she is a creepy character, that is an enemy women appeal. She is Bad; therefore it is okay to attack her using gender.
And while the Obama campaign hasn’t gone there, there are Obama supporters who have and will. This is part of the cultural air we breathe. Remember the prison-rape-joke thread?
* * *
[I need to add here — not to demonize Margaret Sanger — that Sanger was simply in step with the “progressivism” of her time — the reason I never refer to myself as progressive… as in “progress”. Mainstream social gospel churches, to their shame, got caught up in the early 20 C eugenics movement, too. Feminist theology professor Amy Laura Hall has taken this issue on more than once… pointing out that the creepy meritocratic assumptions behind “raising (2) healthy, productive children” is the absolute antithesis of the spiritual equality that is at the core of early Christianity. It’s part of the whole “progress” meme of the 19/20 C that Illich and others took to task. And communists were as guilty as capitalists of copping to the “progress” thing.]
21 May 2008, 3:54 pmCharles:
Not according to the below, Stan. Clinton is a white woman, which is the Republican and rigtwing’s “boyz” own woman.
The Repubicans and right wing are engaged in plain ole male suprmacy/misogyny. No need to introduce some special brand of misogyny termed “enemy women” misygyny to analyze that.
&&&&&
this gets us back to the theme of “Enemy Women” which we’ve explored to some extent before — how in conflicts between gangs of men, the “other guy’s women” come under attack *as women*, i.e. become licensed targets for misogyny even more virulent than that which is expressed against the boyz’ “own” women.
Then Eldridge Cleaver is brought in somewhere.
21 May 2008, 4:50 pmCharles:
The limitations on the concept of progress as used in the 1800’s is a complex discussion, however I don’t agree that they are so great as to make “progressive” an empty or political incorrect political position. I still refer to myself as a progressive in the positive sense. Basically, it will be progress to abolish exploitive and oppressive class relations and to achieve communism, the realm of freedom as defined by Marx and Engels. It will be progress to achieve a new technological regime not based on fossil fuels. This all goes back to my disagreement with your level of critique of Marxism. Marxism preserves a rational kernel of the notion of “progress”.
21 May 2008, 5:13 pmDeAnander:
[sigh] there are more kinds of competition or enmity than just race conflict. HRC may be lily-white and hence “our team” to some extent for white-supremacist males (the HRC campaign droids are betting on it), but as a woman she is by def not on any boyz’ team. and furthermore, there are many layers of Them-ness and Us-ness at work.
for Repubs, Demos/liberals are partisan enemies/competitors (the other team), so for them, HRC is an Enemy Woman (just as Ann C is an Enemy Woman for US Libruls, including white ones; I would bet good money it was a white dude who wrote that godawful Ann Coulter porno pastiche).
for Obama supporters, HRC is an enemy/competitor w/in the Demo party machine, hence an Enemy Woman. partisan politics again. f’rexample see this recent post at MoA:
link — a satirical list of HRC’s “qualifications”:
Note the highly gendered — and trivialising — references to china and linen, servants, tea with other women: in other words, HRC is framed in the “company wife” category and hence not to be taken seriously. This is low-level stuff compared to the more vicious misogyny from more frothy sources, but it’s still gender-baiting. Similar attacks have been mounted from the Right and from the HRC camp against “Mrs Obama”.
the point that Charles seems determined to miss, despite repeated exegesis, is that there’s a cognitive overlap between the categories Enemy and Women in patriarchal thinking, so that all women are suitable candidates for enmity (Eve in league with the Enemy, responsible for the Fall, etc), and all enemies are suitable candidates for feminisation and contempt… including, of course, race enemies, who are (as we’ve pointed out before) described with the same tropes traditionally used to trivialise women, i.e. “emotional”, “undisciplined,” “hysterical,” “primitive,” etc. … the Dusky Other and the Female Other are interleaving categories, blurry, overlapping, not fully distinct.
21 May 2008, 8:04 pmCharles:
Your fallacies are showing again.
^^^^
CB: Uhuh , Stan. My logic and argumentation throughout my posting on this blog are excellent. It is you who has exhibited a whole host of fallacies. You might want to go back and read what I have been writing , because evidently, you are not getting it. Anytime you have to redact as many of my posts as you do , it’s a sure sign that you are “losing” the argument. Censorship is a fear of the strength of one’s opponent’s arguments.
STAN: Charles, you weren’t redacted, you were bled in over time because you were carpet-bombing the comments section, in one case nine posts in a single day. If you do that again, you will be held up in the queue again… and it has nothing to do with the strength of your arguments… a claim that is itself fallacious, ie, “redacting” = “losing”.
This site will not be carpet-bombed.
23 May 2008, 8:11 amCharles:
So is Margartet Kimberly… what? Not Black? Not left? Not intellectual?
Your fallacies are showing again.
&&&&&&&
The overwhelming majority of Black voters are voting for Barry. So, for one thing Kimberly is in a minority. As to intellectuals, there are plenty of Black intellectuals supporting Barry O. I posted Alice Walker’s endorsement here, Manning Marable, Danny Glover, JoAnn Watson, there are lots of left, Black intellectuals here in Detroit supporting Barry. I’m about as much of a left intellectual as anybody I know, and I’m Black. So… My general criticism of the writing of Black left intellectuals like Kimberly’s critique of Barry O as you post here is that they are ultra-leftist. That “Obamamnia” stuff is really getting tired. If you want to see my critiques of them take a look at Marxims-Thaxis, and Lou’s Marxism.
The most important point they are missing is that masses of Black people, Black _women_ are supporting Barry O. The masses are ahead of Kimberly , et al. on this one.
23 May 2008, 8:42 amStan:
I wondered when that would come out: “ultraleftist.” This is the first page in the CPUSA playbook, one I studied diligently for three years. Any time the CP was backing Democrats (which was almost always), anyone who critiqued them for it was subject to be labelled “ultraleftist.” The “ultra” thing works on many levels. Jarvis Tyner also reminded me that we “couldn’t follow ultra-feminists,” citing bell hooks (!) as an example of ULTRA-feminism. That was not long after he and Scott Marshall were sharing a laugh about how many women at an activist conference didn’t shave their legs (tee-hee).
I’ve acknowledged that the majority of African Americans, as well as a signficant fraction of the white petit-bourgeoisie, as well as students, etc etc, are supporting Obama. There will be plenty of disaffected big-bourgeois putting wind under his wings, too. And they, not the students or the folk from the ‘hood, will be determining policies.
In fact, given that John McCain is a gift from God to the Democratic Party, and barring a lightning bolt, Obama will likely be the next CEO of USA Inc. I also acknowledge that this is important as a reflection of the sensibility that something is terribly wrong and needs to change.
But it is also true that a majority of white working class males still support a host of flim-flam artists whose primary — if now more covert — appeal is to white privilege… contrary to the the same working class’ own best (or even immediate) interests. A majority of the US supported attacking Afghanistan after 9-11 (a whopping majority). For at least three years, there was still a majority who beleived Saddam Hussein perpetrated the 9-11 attacks.
Majorities can tell us a lot about where the masses are, and which direction they might move given the right impetus. But they are unreliable indicators on ontological realities about which majorities really do know next to nothing. The ruling class has done an excellent job of assuring that by making politics a spectacle and actual governance and policy into an impenetrably arcane matrix of legal and ideological mystifications and byzantine techno-bureacracies. Like a fortress surrounded by a toxic moat, built like a vast maze, itself surrounded by a lush landscape architecture called elections… that no one ventures past.
I suspect Kimberly will vote for Obama (do you think she’ll vote for McCain?). What she is not doing is parking her valid criticisms of Obama (have you read the list of advisors he has… straight out of the Who’s Who of neoliberalism?) in order to present a “good communist” united front that makes the Republcians the sole embodiment of evil.
Ultra schmultra.
24 May 2008, 7:01 amDeAnander:
Perhaps we can dispense with a certain amount of wrangling by saying up front that (speaking for myself anyway) Charles’ legit criticisms of the Southern Strategy aspect of HRC’s campaign did not sound like an Enemy Women attack on HRC. It would be possible to turn the critique into such an attack — say, with a political cartoon of HRC as the languid plantation belle (highly gendered trope), or worse — some weird porno shtick titillating white men’s fantasies by placing HRC in some humiliating sexual scenario with a Black cartoon figure (as the leftyboys did to Ann C). But imho Charles was not doing anything like this; the Enemy Women discussion was tangential to the theme of HRC’s racist campaign strategy, not a response to same.
It occurs to me also that a clean-cut, preppy, neolib-advised CEO of America Inc is all that can be achieved at this time, because (as Stan points out) the ruling class has got such a hammerlock on the charade of democracy that no candidate can make it into the public sphere w/o having been filtered and vetted. Ross Perot with his private fortune was one exception, and 1) see how poorly he did? and 2) if only people with vast private fortunes can end-run the vetting and nobbling process, then it’s still a process run by/for the ruling class. We may have ruling-class eccentrics vs ruling-class clean-nose good-kids, but no one not approved by the neolib establishment is going to get as far as the debates.
Neoliberalism has to be discredited entirely (a process which I think is underway and gathering some steam) before the political process can escape the deathgrip of this hidebound elite establishment. I see O as an attempt to put a new, improved, more attractive packaging around neoliberalism (the Americans’ own Tony Blair, in other words); and I think that in 4 years or so his policy decisions (like Tony’s) will show us whether that pessimism was justified or not. In the meantime, it will be a relief if McCain doesn’t get the big office with the view…
The process of discrediting neoliberalism and finance capitalism, cornucopianism and contrabiotic fantasy, etc., is a major historical/cultural project; so is its concomitant project, managing the fall of the American Empire. It’s way bigger than one personality in one visible position. Presidents are not all that powerful; between assassination and media meme warfare, they are pretty vulnerable and have to steer a cautious course. Eisenhower only criticised the mil/ind complex when he was on his way out the door; Carter never criticised Israel until he was safely retired; Gore softened and garbled his environmental/energy message when he was a candidate, getting back to serious work on those issues only when the Presidency was no longer w/in reach. Actually, I’m beginning to think that if you really want to create/foster/enable social change, being President is one of the least effective hats to be wearing: all kinds of expectations get built up during the campaign and then the permanent DC Mafia surround the new inauguree and explain, with menacing calm, how “unrealistic” and “inadvisable” any real adjustment to the structure of power would be.
FDR may have just barely squeaked by the goon squad — and his reforms were nowhere near as fundamental as what is needed to get Americans in touch with energy and resource sanity. I do think that voters are sending an important message by voting for Obama; whether he will be able or willing to respond to that message with actual policy, we’ll have to wait and see. As I said earlier, if he does turn out to be another Teflon Tony, then the anger and betrayal of all those hopeful voters may itself turn out to be a healthy thing for the gangrenous US electoral system.
24 May 2008, 12:32 pmCharles:
If you do that again, you will be held up in the queue again… and it has nothing to do with the strength of your arguments… a claim that is itself fallacious, ie, “redacting” = “losing”.
This site will not be carpet-bombed.
24 May 2008, 2:51 pm^^^^^
CB: whatever, Stan. Put it this way, your claim that I am committing fallacies is self-serving argumentation. You can’t be sm independent judge of the validity of my arguments since you are in the argument with me. You have to spell out what the alleged fallacies are , not assert that they are fallacies in a conclusory manner. Otherwise, you are committing the fallacy of begging the question, or just baldfacedly asserting that you are correct and I am wrong in a conclusory manner. What exactly are the “fallaceies” you claim I am comitting.
peggy:
“if you really want to create/foster/enable social change, being President is one of the least effective hats to be wearing”
With that much I certainly agree. On the other hand, if you really want to increase your and your friends’ personal wealth, and do tremendous damage to the rest of the world at the same time, the U.S. Presidency is definitely the spot to occupy. So our job is either to disempower the Presidency (I don’t have a clue how that could be done by the likes of you and me) or . . . try push it in another direction, maybe? I know this is my same old theme, but I still don’t see any viable alternative to this admittedly weak strategy.
“Neoliberalism” means something very specific to me, with mind-boggling complications. I see it as a relationship between (primarily) the World Bank and vulnerable non-U.S. countries. On that level, neoliberalism has been thoroughly discredited by a multitude of researchers. It is an economic policy linked to U.S. imperialism, and it does not work and is in part responsible for the current economic disasters afflicting the U.S. It is not an ideology, although it may be linked to Ayn Rand and her latter-day disciples. It is another thing the undoing of which will be very difficult. To be opposed to it is one thing, actually to dismantle it is another. Explosives have no effect on this kind of structure.
Although I have sometimes been opposed to a totally system-level focus, on this matter I advocate such a focus. Of course, there are bad guys profiting big-time from the effects of neoliberalism, but they are not the engineers of it. The chief engineers, in fact, are dead (from natural causes). It is a matter of taking down the structure itself. To accomplish such a taking-down, a whole gaggle of world-class geniuses working with total dedication on the project is the minimum requirement. Just my opinion.
24 May 2008, 11:00 pmpeggy:
p.s. I don’t quite see how Obama is a neoliberal. Maybe I’ve missed something, but a cursory search turns up nothing but the occasional accusation (some from Clinton supporters!) But the Clintons are far more on the neoliberal side than Obama ever has been. To say nothing of McCain and Perot. Can anybody clarify?
25 May 2008, 12:44 amStan:
Neoliberalism pertains to presidiential candidates with regard to where they stand on US neoliberal foreign policy, embodied in something called the Washington Consensus.
Obama’s employment of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Anthony Lake, Richard Clarke, and Dennis Ross — among others — speaks more clearly to his foriegn policy intent than all his vapid speeches ever will.
Neoliberalism dresses its ideology up in market trashtalk, but the “free trade” practice at its core is about tearing open other nations’ internal markets to US predation and plunder. Obama has never given the slightest indication he disagrees with this; and much of his money has come from Wall Street which manages the inflow.
It’s not Clinton supporters who point this out; because her advisors are just as scary (like Albright, Berger, and Holbrooke) and just as neoliberal (and pro-Zionist, btw).
De hit the most important point: we put too much faith in the power of elections and in elected officials, who are themselves firmly controlled within a system that is supra-individual and supra-electoral.
If Obama wins, as I expect he will (unless Clinton suggestion-power can hypnotize some nut to shoot him before the primaries are through), it will be because he is neither George W. Bush nor John McCain. He’s a smooth, smart operator, and after eight years of neocon overreach, he gives everyone a warm, fuzzy feeling. But the real world didn’t go away, nor did it open up to the new millineum, just because Bush lost a war and displays serial stupidities. Reagan was dumber than batshit, and they talk about him like the messiah now. Democrat policies have far more to do with the economic crisis right now than Bush ever did.
The Bretton Woods institutions are beginning to lose power as instruments of neoliberalism, not because someone wanted “change,” but because the program has reached its outer limits in financial chicanery and the patience of pissed-off poor foreigners.
The best thing I’ve read on neoliberalism, btw, is the book by the same name authored by David Harvey.
25 May 2008, 6:45 pmpeggy:
Thanks, Stan, for the information and reference. This http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070701faessay86401/barack-obama/renewing-american-leadership.html
26 May 2008, 7:15 pmis the most comprehensive statement of Obama’s envisioned foreign policy that I have been able to find. It was published in January 2007. It seems to me that he’s walking a tightrope, but you may interpret the article differently.
The book on neoliberalism that has been most useful to me is “Carrots, Sticks and Ethnic Conflict” by Esman and Herring. It is dry, academic, and carefully referenced. To me it was eye-opening.
rootlesscosmo:
Here–out of context, of course–are some excerpts from Obama’s Foreign Affairs article:
Our starting point must always be a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel, our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy. That commitment is all the more important as we contend with growing threats in the region — a strengthened Iran, a chaotic Iraq, the resurgence of al Qaeda, the reinvigoration of Hamas and Hezbollah. Now more than ever, we must strive to secure a lasting settlement of the conflict with two states living side by side in peace and security. To do so, we must help the Israelis identify and strengthen those partners who are truly committed to peace, while isolating those who seek conflict and instability.
Although we must not rule out using military force, we should not hesitate to talk directly to Iran.
To renew American leadership in the world, we must immediately begin working to revitalize our military. A strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace… We should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines.
We must also consider using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense in order to provide for the common security that underpins global stability — to support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations, or confront mass atrocities. But when we do use force in situations other than self-defense, we should make every effort to garner the clear support and participation of others — as President George H. W. Bush did when we led the effort to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991.
Success in Afghanistan is still possible, but only if we act quickly, judiciously, and decisively. We should pursue an integrated strategy that reinforces our troops in Afghanistan and works to remove the limitations placed by some NATO allies on their forces.
There are some positive things in the article, especially with regard to backing away from the Bush-Cheney practices of torture, “rendition” etc., and in any case I think the link between what candidates say (hopeful or scary) and what Administrations do is tenuous at best. But the invocations of FDR and JFK are disturbing, as though Roosevelt’s “not destroyers but builders” weren’t a cruel joke over the ashes of Tokyo and Dresden, or as though JFK’s extension of Cold War policy to fighting Third World national liberation movements hadn’t led to the war in Vietnam. Maybe Obama is walking a tightrope; which side is he likely to fall off on? Not ours.
26 May 2008, 10:19 pmpeggy:
Here’s something to think about:
” LA’s defence industry began to improve only after 9/11, and is now booming like it’s 1989. Indeed, California gets about 15 per cent of all Iraq-bloated US defence spending; that works out at as much as $30 billion a year, by my Wikipedia-aided calculations. . . .
And would you want to be the man or woman responsible for taking $91 billion a year away from hundreds of thousands of the world’s most talented killers, many of them veterans, who have access to the very latest in weapons technology? Me neither. ”
Full article at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/chris_ayres/article4009693.ece
26 May 2008, 11:00 pmStan:
An extremely interesting link, Peggy… the one Obama’s foreign policy.
It pretty much demonstrates his committment to what some have called the “realist” school of imperial foreign policy…. brutal and pragmatic by turns, always taking US power as its sine qua non, couching in the language of Wilsonian technocrats.
Not macho enough for the real-men-don’t-ask-or-apologize neocons; but the end state is identical. Preserve American international dominance.
Geopolitically, and from the most frostily pragmatic perspective, this leads to exactly the same conclusions the neocons have about the so-called Middle East, or Southwest Asia… albeit done with more “consensus-building” to ensure a higher level of legitimacy and buy-in from “allies” and the club called “the international community.”
US power is predicated on monetary leverage (dollar hegemony) and the ability to backstop it with military intervention.
The collapse of the Eastern Bloc accelerated the expansion of dollar hegemony, but it rendered the disposition of the US military obsolete.
The challenges to US monetary-military dominance were, first, China in the Pacific — which which the US has a complex and contradictory relation that is both antagonistic and symbiotic at once — then, with Putin’s breakaway renationalization program, Russia — now the world’s largest oil exporter, and — and, as Cheney’s energy clique correctly inferred, the objective threat of a global oil production peak in the face of incresing demand with mass industrializations like China and India (and even Brazil).
The only thing that made sense, then, from the persective of Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces, was to transfer the obsolete disposition of armed force that “contained” a Soviet Union deployed along the borders of Western Europe (etc) to a strategic advantage that anticipated the growth of these new threats… ie, Southwest Asia, ie, Iraq. (The use of Saudi Arabia has already caused enough trouble with the Salafis.)
I still contend that Gore would have found a way to try and impose bases in Iraq, too. None of the US power elite anticipated the unforseen consequences of this occupation, though some intuited it with a level of discomfort. What they surely didn’t anticipate was a Russian-Chinese condominium that would converge on Iran, even as the US occupation of Iraq strengthened Iran’s hand as a future regional umpire.
So now, they have done exactly what happened in Vietnam; created a situation that is politically “impossible” to abandon, and militarily impossible to win… like one of those little finger-trap things we played with as kids.
Obama cannot make this go away. He has no control over most of the variables; and his position as CEO will be to preserve American dominance at all costs.
The only way he might extricate himself and do something would be to declare on January 21st next year that he is not running for reelection in 2012, then exercise his executive authority openly and without regard for electoral consequences (for him or the DP), and begin to manage a transtition away from American dominance (even at the cost of being called the Betrayer of universal American manhood).
Don’t hold your breath.
Oh yeah, wait until Clinton stops running. This campaign will become all about gender… we’ll see and hear so many manly-man tropes, it’ll make us want to puke. McCain will start the game; but Obama will play. It will be a Rorshcach test of contemporary American gender. And this will drive the US further and further into the corner it’s gotten itself into.
27 May 2008, 5:46 ampeggy:
As you have noted, Stan, if a person doesn’t stay within certain very narrow parameters of speech and behavior, that person stands no chance of entering the highest levels of the American political fray. Therefore, it has been necessary for Obama to talk the talk. It would be foolish to expect anything else.
27 May 2008, 7:55 pmThe need for a transition from universal American dominance will be a difficult one for an elected politician to begin to address, even if he wants to, because (I believe) that the vast majority of people in America would reject such a stance out-of-hand. You are out on the ideological edge, Stan, as to a lesser extent am I. You (or I) may be smarter and see more clearly than the vast majority (although I do not subscribe to that philosophy) but that in itself isn’t going to change anything. To expect someone running for president to do what you or I want is unrealistic and unproductive. Perhaps you feel that Obama is a hypocrite or that he just doesn’t get it. My judgement of him is different. The point is, Obama is not talking to you; he is talking to the people who hold power in the U.S. as well as to anyone who actually reads “Foreign Affairs” magazine, as well as to anyone else who might use the information in this article for good or for ill.
Originally, this sub-thread was about neoliberalism and whether Obama is a neoliberal or not. I still don’t see any evidence of him supporting that particular method, or any other, of dominating other countries. He says he wants the U.S. to be a leader “by example.” I see that as a clear sign, among many other signs, that he wants to move away from the politics of dominance, full stop. But he has to say this very politely - precisely because it matters so much. If you can find something in his foreign policy statement to the contrary, please point it out to me.
One more thought I have had. IF Obama wins the nomination, and IF he wins a second term also, he will still be only about fifty-five, and he can expect another thirty years of productive activity. Then he will be free to say and do what he really believes in and make the kinds of differences he really wants to make. Unless, of course, the hatred against him is so intense and powerful that it results in the outcome at which HC has hinted.
Shaukat:
How one can possibly interpret the self-serving statement of a mainstream politician on “leading by example” as evidence of a legitimate desire to move away from the “politics of dominance” is beyond me. The history of the United States is filled with such vapid and grandiose assertions by presidential nominees. To take just one example, Jimmy Carter came to power on the platform that he was going to use US foreign policy in the service of universal human rights-”the soul of our foreign policy.” Once he took power, however, he supported Somoza’s murderous National Guard up until the very end, enabled a near genocide in East Timor through his continued support of Suharto, and funded the bloody activities of the army in El Salvador. In the end, his high sounding rhetoric did not guide his actual policies, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that Obama`s fiery and inspiring speeches will guide his. Certainly, statements linking US foreign policy to human rights sound far more promising than “leading by example.`The main point is that so long as the institutions and structural factors that shape US policy remain intact it is foolish to believe that any politican who rises to power through the conventional channels has any chance, or desire, of altering the trajectory of US dominance. Furthermore, it is not the vast majority of the American people who would oppose a transition away from US control of the world and its resources. In fact, the American population is largely kept in the dark about the ugly realities of Americna power through sophisticated forms of ideological mystification. Those who would truly oppose any such transition are the same people and institutions who are funding the Obama campaign, as has been pointed out many times on this blog. Finally, there is no evidence to support the notion that Obama is playing a cunning game of political deception by telling the ruling class exactly what they want to hear while biding his time until he takes office so that he can begin a revolutionary transformation. And there is absolutely no reason why such an argument could not be used to explain the `true`motives of any other politician. Perhaps John McCain is a secret dove, who is simply going through the motions until he takes power so that he can then smash monopoly and finance capital and cut of all aid to Israel. It`s possible, but I doubt it.
27 May 2008, 10:00 pmRequired:
“To expect someone running for president to do what you or I want is unrealistic and unproductive.”
It seems to me that Stan’s comment did not say or imply that he did expected Obama to behave any differently to how he is currently or that Obama is speaking only to him. However, Peggy’s comment that a very ambiguous two word quote (“by example”) is a CLEAR sign that Obama will abandon neo-liberalism, (which at this stage in history is almost equal to abandoning capitalism) seems to hint at that she may guilty precisely the charges leveled at Stan.
If the acknowledgment is that Obama is prepared to placate various groups (neo-liberals) with nice words and concessions in order to gain office, then one must site something apart from those same words and concessions in order to prove that they (anti-neoliberals) too are not merely being placated. The point is the President doesn’t have much power. This discussion is about what impact Obama is going to have on the world as president, not whether or not he’s a nice man who wants to do more then he can.
27 May 2008, 10:19 pmpeggy:
Required, Shaukat, and Stan — It just seems as though the three of you are speaking different languages from me. I am planning to respond to the things you say. But just at this moment, the time needed is not available. Tomorrow.
28 May 2008, 2:53 ampeggy:
Okay, this will be brief, then I’m off.
1.) All heads of state that are or have ever been - whether kings, queens, presidents, whatever - have blood on their hands. Maybe there are a few exceptions, but off the top of my head, I cannot name any.
2.) Nobody can know, on the basis of Obama’s words at present, exactly what he will do if he becomes president. Same for all the other candidates.
3.) If the president does not have much power, than we need not worry so much about what the nominee will or will not do.
4.) I never said that the two words, “by example”, were a clear sign that Obama would not adopt neoliberal policies. I was asking my debate partner(s) here whether they could show a clear sign that he *does* advocate such policies.
5.) I never claimed that Obama (or anyone else) was “playing a cunning game of political deception” et cetera et cetera.
6.) I never said anybody was trying to “placate” anybody.
I could go on, but that would be silly and pointless. See y’all on some other thread.
28 May 2008, 6:03 pmRequired:
Peggy, it’s difficult to tell whether the brievity of your last comment was due to time restriction s or offense. I’m sorry if I was rude. Hopefully this is not.
“He says he wants the U.S. to be a leader “by example.” I see that as a clear sign, among many other signs, that he wants to move away from the politics of dominance, full stop.”
Maybe it was an exaggeration to conclude that it was those two words alone, obviously there were other words that accompanied them, but it seems that you were saying that they “were a clear sign that Obama would not adopt neoliberal policies.”
29 May 2008, 8:50 pmStan:
Neoliberalsim is the default. It is not reproduced in the active voice, but in the passive. Abandoning or reversing it would mean halting priviatization wholesale and beginning to reverse it, the reclamation of the commons, reliquishment of special rights within the IMF, abrogating “free trade” agreements, accepting other nations protections of their own capital markets, etc etc. Being “mainstream” means being neoliberal.
30 May 2008, 4:46 pmDick Reilly:
IMO, Probably the best commentary on this comes from Glenn Ford and Bruce Dixon at Black Agenda Report. [http://www.blackagendareport.com/
Obama has now formally resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ. I’ve never seen an entire church thrown under the bus before. No doubt soon to be joined by Tom Hayden and the cheerleaders at “Progressives for Obama”. It’s getting pretty crowded under there.
2 June 2008, 2:08 amDeAnander:
Link to a Glen Ford article at BAR which takes B.O. to task for his American Exceptionalist jingo, among other things.
2 June 2008, 12:01 pmY.K.:
I’m not so convinced that the Clinton dynasty will quit. They have certainly denied Obama the momentum of a primary election victory. They could extend the contest all summer and possibly prevail at the end. She claims that she is an “underdog” with the “popular vote” while Obama has the “delegate count”, making him the “elitist” focused on a technical win and supported by “the media”. Although there was a strong reaction against her assassination comments by liberal intellectuals, there has not been as strong and consistent reaction against her populist claims, especially as the Clinton faction has continued to lie loudly about the spirit and letter of the Democratic primary contest rules. Her claims have resonance with some Democrats due to the last two presidential elections and effectively strengthens her populist credentials, creates a electoral strategy of tension, and perpetuates a racist and sexist discourse. Finally, the atmosphere of cynicism and the erosion of the party “elders”, specifically Kennedy (materially with cancer) and Carter (ideologically with criticism of Israel), has opened up space for the ambitions of the younger bosses in the Democratic right. Soon, there are no more contests, just big money and media manipulation. There is a fascist whiff to all these developments and I’m not sure whether this opens or closes a space for the left, especially with the specter of an attack on Iran and the effective delay of the credit bubble collapse, two events which could reshape sufficiently the discursive focus toward “national security”.
This article discusses possible outcomes for the Clinton faction:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JF03Aa01.html
This mealy-mouthed CNN article counts the delegates and popular vote three different ways, aiding Clinton:
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/02/democrats.race/index.html
YK
PS I refuse to vote for the Republocrats/Demopublicans, so I’m more interested in the social politics of these electoral machinations.
PPS I further maintain that the relative dead-heat of recent electoral contests is due not only to direct manipulation but also to the increased presence of financial sector cash, which hedges bets through campaign money to create relatively zero risk to themselves.
2 June 2008, 1:53 pmCharles:
Neoliberalism dresses its ideology up in market trashtalk, but the “free trade” practice at its core is about tearing open other nations’ internal markets to US predation and plunder. Obama has never given the slightest indication he disagrees with this;
^^^^^
CB: Tax cuts for the rich, Reagan’s Laffer curve, rightwing tax cut revolts, as in California Prop some number, Howard whathisname, are neo-liberalism. Barry O has spoken against the Bush tax cuts for the rich and for tax cuts for the middle class. This is anti-neo-liberal rhetoric.
Obama as spoken ( talk is cheap) against tax breaks for corporations who runawayshops and still get tax breaks in tax haven. Tax havens for runaway corporation is neo-liberalism, thus this is speakng out against neo-liberalism.
5 June 2008, 12:09 pmStan:
You cannot redefine the term in order to show that doesn’t apply to Obama. Neoliberalism is a global (read inter-national) phenomenon. It is not domestic capitalism, but a retrenched form of imperialism… it takes in goods from the periphery to the core, then exports the waste and disorder back onto the periphery. If Obama abrogates NAFTA etc, then we might take him seriously on this account.
6 June 2008, 5:48 amCharles:
I’m not redefining the term. I am using “neo-liberalism” as defined by most left thinkers on it.
Neo-liberalism , as generally defined, includes domestic capitalism. Neo-liberalism is privatzation overseas, and privatization in Detroit, domestically. I wrote papers years ago on how privatization in Detroit ( not only domestically, but locally) was part of neo-liberal privatization globally. Privatization started with Thatcher _domestically_ in Britain. Neo-liberalism includes deregulation of banking , _domestically_ in the United States. When the Reaganites deregulated _domestically_, that was part of neo-liberalism.
Neo-liberalism includes the reduction of welfare, welfare _de_form is a component of neo-liberalism. Gingrich’s “Contract on America ” was part of neo-liberalism.
_Neo-liberalism_ refers to both international and national (domestic) capitalist poliicies starting especially with Reagan’s presidency. Neo-liberalism is Reaganomics.
6 June 2008, 12:54 pmrootlesscosmo:
California Prop some number, Howard whathisname
During the 1970’s, for multiple reasons, there was rapid inflation in California home prices. Under the laws then in force, this meant that homeowners, including retirees on fixed incomes, found their homes being reassessed annually and their property tax liability climbing much faster than their ability to pay (or the general rate of inflation for that matter.) The outrage over this was readily translated into anger at the supposed beneficiaries of tax-funded government generosity, i.e. the Black poor, who for reasons no one could explain were believed to enjoy special favor from “the politicians.” (I heard variants of this argument from my white fellow-railroaders all through 1978.)
Into this situation stepped Howard Jarvis, a lobbyist for an association of commercial real estate owners. He and others crafted Proposition 13, which promised to freeze or roll back assessments on real estate, with reassessment taking place only when property changed hands. Of course most of the benefit went to his corporate clients, since commercial property turns over much more slowly than private homes, but he had tapped into a combination of economic desperation and racist vindictiveness, and the measure passed with a large majority. Thirty years later, though the negative effects are obvious (the best book is Paradise Lost, by longtime Sacramento Bee reporter Peter Schrag), 13 is still regarded as sacrosanct in California politics, and polls show most voters still support it–even those who barely know what it provided, or that it’s the reason a simple court filing fee jumped from $14 to $300, or that local governments (barred from raising property taxes) have been forced to offer lavish inducements to “big box” retail (a fortress of anti-unionism) in order to collect sales taxes, or that California schools and roads, once among the nation’s best, are now a national disgrace… I could go on.
Is this “neoliberalism”? I don’t think it is. It’s part of the general response of corporate capital to the crisis that began in the 70’s, which was, one way and another, to “solve the crisis at the working people’s expense” as European leftists used to put it in those days; neoliberal economic policies in foreign investment, credit, and trade also are part of this general solution. But I think they’re distinct, and are oriented on different sectors of capital. Prop. 13’s supporters didn’t, and don’t, care about Argentina’s debt service; they mostly think “foreign aid” is another case of brainless largesse to the undeserving. Their politics is a nasty brew of spite, greed, and self-righteousness, what I’ve come to think of as the “foot-stamping” response to social problems: don’t tell me a lot of details, dammit, just shoot somebody or lock somebody up and make it go away. There was a rival measure in 1978, supported by organized labor, the Democrats, local government officials, PTAs etc., that would have amended the State constitution so commercial property could have been taxed at a different rate than homes; most voters found this not only too complicated but also emotionally unsatisfying. The Jarvis enthusiasts wanted more than tax relief, they wanted tax revenge, and by God they got it, good and hard.
6 June 2008, 5:09 pmCharles:
Is this “neoliberalism”? I don’t think it is. It’s part of the general response of corporate capital to the crisis that began in the 70’s, which was, one way and another, to “solve the crisis at the working people’s expense” as European leftists used to put it in those days
^^^
7 June 2008, 10:04 amI disagree with you. Neo-liberalism is precisely ” the general response of corporate capital to the crisis that began in the 70’s, which was, one way and another, to “solve the crisis at the working people’s expense ” . Reaganism and Thatcherism are Neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism is _not_ confined to foreign policy. It has domestic and foreign aspects.
Sam:
Re: “All heads of state that are or have ever been - whether kings, queens, presidents, whatever - have blood on their hands. Maybe there are a few exceptions, but off the top of my head, I cannot name any.”
Therefore….?
7 June 2008, 12:29 pm