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http://www.thenation.com/authors/melissa-harris-perry
All,
Ever heard of being able to chew gum and talk/walk/gawk at the same damn time?...Yeah, yeah I thought you had...Me too!...Which is all the more reason why these endless tirades about the personal and political behavior of (black and white) public intellectuals by other (black and white) intellectuals are so often utterly bizarre and hopelessly and hilariously DUMB--especially when the real major subtext of and reason for these rhetorical jibes and jabs have far more to do with what the Obama Administration is or is not doing and whether one generally supports or is actively critical of the actual performance of the President of the United States vis-a-vis U.S. corporate elites, The Republican and Tea parties, Wall Street, the massive imperialist war machine (ever heard of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan folks?), not to mention chronic structural unemployment, the dire need for major education, Health care, and financial reform, and transparency in government (just for starters)...
In the following scathing, witty, and highly lucid piece Melissa Harris-Perry eloquently and judiciously takes her Princeton colleague Cornel West to task for stupidly conflating silly personal motives with serious political ones in his most recent critique of the President in his interview with Chris Hedges and does a fine, wicked job of exposing the fundamental hypocrisy of West's friend Tavis Smiley's own fawning public relationship with the corporate elites of Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, and McDonald's, among others in their ongoing contradictory claims to "speak truth to power" in the current national economic crisis. Perry goes on to also point out that tenured university professors with large salaries and considerable access to material resources and institutional support that the "average citizen" could not possibly equal puts them both in a privileged position that must be honestly confronted, acknowledged, and accounted for in their own publicly critical assessments of the meaning of events and issues facing the national body politic--especially as it relates to the actual policy positions and programs of the President. Perry's clear-eyed ability to cut through the fog of personal ego and self serving grandstanding is thus important and timely and generally can't or shouldn't be dismissed...
Yet at the same time it must also be said that despite whatever obvious flaws, shortcomings, weaknesses, and contradictions of public intellectuals from academia it's very important that one not lose sight of whatever substantive critical analyses by West and Perry can be and have been made of President Obama and the national government as well as the wealthy elite economic and political institutions and interests that they far too often service and privilege above the masses of people. So that even though West has had a bitter and contentious 'personal' relationship with the former major Obama economic advisor Lawrence Summers in the past when Summers was still the President of Harvard and Cornel still taught there, it is still important to recognize that his intrepid critique of Summers goes far beyond their own personal acrimony and speaks directly to West detailing and exposing the reactionary economic policy 'advice' Summers gave to the President that he and the Democratic Party later implemented. Given these larger realities one must not lose sight of the far bigger and vastly more important responsibility of truly speaking truth to power and publicly advocating and fighting for radical grassroots change via the instruments of mass organizations and actual political involvement and participation. In other words there is ample room and a great necessity for real useful knowledge that even privileged academics and intellectuals can and must provide if their commitment is to a much broader vision that goes far beyond that of mere ego reinforcement and taking idle 'personal' potshots at professional colleagues and associates who also seek a forum that exceeds that of the corrupt and cynical soundbite obsessed media and the lucrative financial and head expanding lures, temptations, and traps of the national lecture circuit...
Kofi
Cornel West v. Barack Obama
by Melissa Harris-Perry
May 17, 2011
The Nation
Professor Cornel West is President Obama’s silenced, disregarded, disrespected moral conscience, according to Chris Hedges’s recent Truthdig column, “The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West went Ballistic.” In a self-aggrandizing, victimology sermon deceptively wrapped in the discourse of prophetic, Professor West offers thin criticism of President Obama and stunning insight into the delicate ego of the self-appointed black leadership class that has been largely supplanted in recent years.
West begins with a bit of historical revision. West suggests that the president discarded him without provocation after he offered the Obama for America campaign his loyal service and prayers. But anyone with a casual knowledge of this rift knows it began during the Democratic primary, not after the election. It began, not with a puffed-up president but when Cornel West’s “dear brother” Tavis Smiley threw a public tantrum because Senator Obama refused to attend Smiley’s annual State of Black America. Smiley repeatedly suggested that his forum was the necessary black vetting space for the Democratic nominees. He needed to ask Obama and Clinton tough questions so that black America could get the answers it needed. But black America was doing a fine job making up its own mind in the primaries and didn’t need Smiley’s blessing to determine their own electoral preferences. Indeed, when Smiley got a chance to hold candidate Clinton “accountable” he spent more time fawning over her than probing about her symbolic or substantive policy stances that impacted black communities. Fiercely loyal to his friend, Professor West chose sides and began to undermine candidate Obama in small and large ways. Candidate Obama ceased calling West back because he was in the middle of a fierce campaign and West’s loyalties were, at best, divided. I suspect candidate Obama did not trust his “dear brother” to keep the campaign secrets and strategies. I also suspect he was not inaccurate in his hesitancy.
West may have had principled, even prophetic reasons, for choosing this outsider position relative to Obama, but it is dishonest to later frame that choice as a betrayal on the part of the president. After what I had written about Senator Clinton during the campaign I wasn’t expecting an offer from the State Department.
Furthermore, West’s sense of betrayal is clearly more personal than ideological. In Hedges’s article West claims that a true progressive would always put love of the people above concern with the elite and privileged. Then he complains, “I couldn’t get a ticket [to the inauguration] with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration…. We had to watch the thing in the hotel.” Let me get this straight—the tenured, Princeton professor who collects five figures for public lectures was relegated to a hotel television while an anonymous hotel worker got tickets to the inauguration! What kind of crazy, mixed-up class politics are these? Wait a minute…
What exactly is so irritating to West about inaugural ticket-gate? It can’t be a claim that the black, progressive intellectual community was unrepresented. Yale’s Elizabeth Alexander was the poet that cold morning. It can’t be that the “common man” was shut out because the Neighborhood Ball was reserved for the ordinary women and and men who worked to make Obama ’08 possible. It must be a simple matter of jealous indignation. While I appreciate the humanness in such a reaction, it hardly counts as a prophetic critique.
Since the inaugural snub, Professor West has made his personal animosity and political criticism of the president his main public talking point. There was that hilariously bad documentary with Tavis Smiley and the rest of the Soul Patrol in 2009. There is the tiresome repetitiveness with which West invokes the name of his erstwhile Harvard nemesis Lawrence Summers as indicative of President Obama’s failed economic vision. And just a few weeks ago there was the eminently watchable screaming match on MSNBC where love-the-people West called Rev. Al Sharpton a “mascot” for the Obama administration. Add to this three-year screed the current Hedges article and it looks more like a pissing match than prophecy.
Take for example West’s ad hominem attack on the president’s racial identity.
“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men.… It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation.”
This comment is utter hilarity coming from Cornel West who has spent the bulk of his adulthood living in those deeply rooted, culturally rich, historically important black communities of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Princeton, New Jersey. And it is hard to see his claim that Obama is “most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they” as anything other than a classic projection of his own comfortably ensconced life at Harvard and Princeton Universities. Harvard and Princeton are not places that are particularly noted for their liberating history for black men.
Let me be clear, being an Ivy League professor does not mean that one has no room to offer critical engagement on issues of race. Like Professor West, I too make my living at elite, predominantly white institutions. For the past five years we were on the same payroll at Princeton. Like Professor West I supplement my income by giving lectures about race, politics and history. Like West, I hope to influence policy, inspire individuals and intervene in public conversations about race. My criticism of West is his seeming unwillingness to acknowledge how our structural positions within the academy and in public intellectual life can be just as compromising to our position vis-à-vis black communities as is President Obama’s.
As tenured professors Cornel West and I are not meaningfully accountable, no matter what our love, commitment or self-delusions tell us. President Obama, as an elected official, can, in fact, be voted out of his job. We can’t. That is a difference that matters. As West derides the president’s economic policies he remains silent on his friend Tavis Smiley’s relationship with Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo and McDonald’s—all corporations whose invasive and predatory actions in poor and black communities have been the target of progressive organizing for decades. I have never heard him take Tavis Smiley to task for helping convince black Americans to enter into predatory mortgages. I’ve never heard him ask whether Tavis’s decision to publish R. Kelley’s memoirs might be a less than progressive decision. He doesn’t hold Tavis accountable because Tavis is his friend and he is loyal. I respect that, but I also know that if he were in elected office the could not get off so easily. Opposition research would point out the hypocrisy in his public positions in a way that would make him vulnerable come election time. As a media personality and professor he is safely ensconced in a system that can never vote him off the island. I think an honest critique of Obama has to begin by acknowledging his own privileges.
Instead, West seems determined to keep black politics tethered to a patronage model of politics. He tells Hedges:
“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested…”
God help us if Cornel West and Tavis Smiley getting arrested is our last chance at a democratic awakening.
I have many criticisms of the Obama administration. I wrote angrily about his choice of Rick Warren to deliver a prayer at the inauguration. I have spoken on television about my disagreement with drone attacks in Pakistan and been critical of the administration’s initial choice to prosecute DADT cases. I worked for more progressive health care reform legislation and supported organizations that resisted the reproductive rights “compromises” in the bill. I’ve been scathing in public remarks and writings about the President’s education policy. My husband leads a nonprofit that is suing HUD for its implementation of a discriminatory formula in the post-Katrina Road Home program. The president has never called me. I got my ticket to the inauguration from Canada! (Because Canadian Broadcast Television who gave me a chance to narrate the day’s events.) But I can tell the difference between a substantive criticism and a personal attack. It is clear to me that West’s ego, not the health of American democracy, is the wounded creature in this story.
About the Author:
Melissa Harris-Perry
COLUMNIST
The Nation
Melissa Harris-Perry, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough. She is a contributor to MSNBC.
http://www.truth-out.org/farewell-mon-amour-prospects-democracys-electoral-defeat64535
All,
The following essay by renowned educational scholar, cultural critic, author, social activist, and radical philosopher Henry Giroux raises profound and very important questions about our current path as a society and culture in the United States and does a scathing critique of how and why our corrupt politics and rapacious economic system-- as well as a general lack of real moral courage and philosophical vision-- is contributing to a very disturbing societal and cultural decline...
Kofi
Farewell Mon Amour: Prospects on Democracy's Electoral Defeat
Tuesday 26 October 2010
by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them. --Tony Judt
In the midst of one of the greatest economic disasters the United States has ever faced, the Gilded Age and its updated "'dreamworlds' of consumption, property and power" have returned from the dead with zombie-like vengeance.(1) Poised now to take over either one or two houses of Congress, the exorbitantly rich along with their conservative ideologues wax nostalgically for a chance to once again emulate that period in 19th century American history when corporations ruled political, economic and social life, and an allegedly rugged entrepreneurial spirit prevailed unchecked by the power of government regulations. Wild West, casino capitalism, unhampered by either ethical considerations or social costs, has reinvented itself and become the politics of choice in this election year. Enthusiasm runs high as billions of dollars flow from hidden coffers into the hands of anti-public politicians, whose only allegiance is to power and the accumulation of capital.
In spite of almost unprecedented levels of inequality, hardship, human suffering and widespread public despair caused by the financial robber barons of Wall Street, the politics and values of Gilded Age excess are now celebrated by conservatives and Tea Party politicians, who define their retrograde politics as "having a flair for business, successfully [breaking] through the stultifying constraints that flowed from the New Deal" and using "their successes and their philanthropy [to make] government less important than it once was."(2) There is more at work here than a neo-feudal world view in which the future can only be measured in immediate financial gains and the amassing of colossal amounts of economic and political power. Massive disparities in wealth and power along with the weakening of worker protections and the destruction of the social state are now legitimated through a set of market-driven values in which politics is measured by the degree to which it evades any sense of actual truth and turns its back on even a vestige of moral responsibility. Under casino capitalism, politics increasingly becomes a front for the legitimation and exercise of ruthless corporate power. As politics loses its social purpose, not only does the state increasingly resort to modes of punishment, but the rules of politics are eviscerated of any moral and social responsibilities. Robber barons now decide the rules, and one consequence of such actions is that politics loses all sense of moral direction. Indeed, under such circumstances, the pathologies of inequality and injustice that cripple viable democracies are now rendered as inevitable and often celebrated as both a cleansing element and condition of politics itself.
If the first rule of robber baron politics is to make power invisible, the second is to make it unaccountable and the third rule is to give as much power as possible to those who revel in barbaric greed, social irresponsibility, unconscionable economic inequity, corrupt politics, resurgent monopolies and an unapologetic racism (parading as an attack on political correctness no less). The mainstream media and its rarely changing talking heads may wax endlessly about the populist anger fueling the current political climate, but it is a tragic mistake to overlook the fact that populism driven by authoritarian politics, while supplying an unmistakable enthusiasm to the current phase of electoral politics, is distinguished by and should be analyzed critically for the threat it poses to a democratic society.
A marauding market fundamentalism now rules most aspects of American life and the ever present and aggressively marketed forces of insecurity, fear, racism and retrograde common sense have become the organizing elements shaping everyday life. Global flows of capital now work in tandem with the logic of deregulation, privatization and commodification, while democracy at home is invoked under the conceit of the all encompassing "war on government," portrayed by Republicans in some cases as even more dangerous than al-Qaeda. This tawdry mobilization of fear and vitriol in the service of the most naked financial interests and elements of economic power is now staged as a 24-hour media performance that mimics the tawdriness and deceit of a rampant culture of corporate corruption and secrecy, now fully sanctioned by a Supreme Court, which in its 5-4 passage of the Citizens United decision, has willingly handed the government over to the Wall Street bankers, energy companies, insurance giants, hedge fund executives and the likes of the high flying stooges from the likes of Goldman Sachs. As finance capital reigns supreme over American society bolstered by the new and peculiar depoliticizing power of the corporate controlled media, democratization along with the public spheres needed to sustain it becomes an increasingly fragile if not dysfunctional project. Civic courage along with critical dissent are now in short supply, expunged to the margins of the alternative media and disdained by official power, even at the highest levels of government. Left and progressive critics are now described as whiners by both Obama and his politically and ethically deaf advisers. And while President Obama surfaced initially as someone who symbolized the antithesis of the moral vacuity and politics of illegality that characterized the Bush presidency, moral courage and civic leadership have been in short supply during his last two years in office. Rather than giving new life to the values of civic courage, economic justice and political idealism, Obama sacrificed such ideals to the advice of the gang of thieves who became his chief advisers. Consequently, Obama's unwillingness to fight for the democratic ideals he gave lip service to during his election campaign has given way in the last few years to a willingness on the part of his administration to overlook both the crimes committed by the financial elite, who brought us the current economic recession, and the political elite, who savaged civil liberties and made an illegal war and torture itself officially state-sanctioned policies. Forever appealing to the ideal of post-partisan politics, Obama lost sight of his moral compass and his capacity to fight for the democratic ideals he gave lip service to in his presidential campaign. One small indication of his bad judgment and the cleansing nature of his Harvard University acquired cultural capital came early in his presidency when he chose Beyonce over the inimitable Etta James to sing the latter's signature song "At Last" at his inaugural ball - a glimpse of the poor judgment and bad faith to come. James embodied the courage, poverty, bawdiness, passion, desire, history, suffering and perseverance of groups that Obama left behind once elected - a stark reminder of the kind of cultural and intellectual capital he would avoid as he began to surround himself with the alleged best and brightest.
Dark clouds are forming on the political and economic landscape of America, and while the precise nature of the current election is still unclear, one thing is resoundingly obvious. We have now entered another and more dangerous period of Gilded Age excess in which the primary political and economic forces dominating American life add up to what is unique about the current political conjuncture: its hatred of reason, freedom and democracy.(3) The possibilities of democracy are now addressed not through reason and critical debate, but with lies, stupidity, ignorance and a seething disdain for critical analysis, thoughtfulness and truth, all bought and sold through the power and money of goose-stepping billionaires such as the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch, who view democracy as a disease that must be crushed.(4) In an age of great insecurity marked by a persistent fear of losing one's job, house and control over the routines of daily life, the billionaire demagogues offer a politics without substance, shared fears rather than shared responsibilities and freedom without the benefit of social protections - and they do it by drowning out other voices through the sheer power of their deep pockets of wealth and power. There is no language about injustice and unfairness in these discourses, just the ramped up anger and noise of those who want to hand over all the social obligations of the state to private agencies so that "nothing remains to bind the citizen to the state but the fear of authority." And as Terry Eagleton has pointed out, "The result ... is an 'eviscerated society,' one stripped of the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found" in democratic states that celebrate rather than demonize the common good and public values.(5)
As the economy collapses and the call for austerity is used to punish the victims rather than perpetrators of economic corruption, the welfare state and social protections are relegated to a jaded memory. At the same time, a market ideology and morality reminiscent of the Gilded Age has once again become a triumphal success aggressively narrowing the meaning of freedom and the relevance of all public good and public institutions at odds with the logic of privatization and capital accumulation for the rich. With these transitions the more abstract concepts of individual agency and citizenship have been utterly devalued, stripped of any substantive meaning in an aspiring democracy. Right-wing politicians spend millions to win elections, distinguish themselves by calling for the dismantling of the social state and refer to those who need social services as burned out houses or jerks and freeloaders. The ideology of privatization is used to disparage not simply social services, but all public institutions whether they be schools, hospitals or transportation systems. Violence and a culture of cruelty now spread through the society like a wild fire and the costs can be seen in the suicides of gay teenagers, heartless images of firefighters laughing while a house burns down because the owners did not pay the required fee for the service, talking heads equating all Muslims with terrorists and billionaires such as Bill Gates calling for cuts in the pensions of hard working teachers. The survival-of-the-fittest ethic is no longer the narrative driving reality TV; it is now a central conception of politics and everyday life. Economic discourse now trumps social justice, reinforced by the ever popular chant of market evangelicals who unabashedly call for a society, if not a world, in which "all human activities and spaces can and should be absorbed into economic systems."(6) But there is more at stake here than the rise of iniquitous relations of wealth and power and the profound hardships that ensue for most Americans, there is also the rise of a punishing state that increasingly views a number of everyday problems as matters of law and order. With a prison population of 2.3 million, the United States now incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world; it also resorts increasingly to governing through a crime complex to deal with social problems far removed from the discourse and culture of criminality. How else to explain the return of debtor prisons, the modeling of urban public schools after the culture of prisons, or the recent call by a county prosecutor in Michigan for a law that "could punish parents with jail time for repeatedly missing their children's parent teacher conferences"?(7) As the state is removed from supplying public services, the only relationship the public increasingly has with it is one marked by suspicion and fear. The lesson here is that the rich get rewarded for their bad deeds as made clear in the Bush-Obama bailouts of the too-big-to-fail banking and investment houses of Wall Street, while the middle class and the poor are evicted from their homes under threat of criminal action or threatened with jail time if they don't pay their soaring debts. Fraud in high places becomes an investment opportunity as indicated in the case of Angelo Mozilio, the godfather of subprime mortgages and the former chief executive of Countrywide who managed to pocket $521 million as a result of criminal practices, but was "punished" by the Securities and Exchange Commission by having to pay back only $47.5 million out of his own pocket. Crime truly pays, except for the poor and middle class.(8)
We have become a country in which democracy is no longer a viable dream; rather, it is a living nightmare haunting those who now control the reins of financial power, the media and the Supreme Court. What we are witnessing in the 2010 elections is the triumph of an "argument against politics, or at least against a politics that attempts to govern society in social rather than economic terms."(9) If we are to believe Sharron Angle, Sarah Palin, John A. Boehner, and all the other cheerleaders for free-market fundamentalism, freedom only becomes meaningful when decoupled from any vestige of the social, while most welfare provisions are seen as benefiting those deemed immoral and lazy, if not utterly unworthy. Government responsibility only applies to servicing the defense budget, providing tax relief for the rich and providing handouts for corporations. When used to service the public good, government responsibility is disparaged by being called a form of socialism, a term that no longer has any meaning except to discredit an idea unacceptable to market-driven fundamentalists. At the same time, those who opposed the notion of social provisions and the social state now wrap themselves in the mantle of victims who are being unduly taxed and victimized by a government that is out of control. This is more than the hypocritical mourning of the super rich who somehow have become the primary victims of the Obama government, but also the hard-wired common sense ideology that floods the right-wing pedagogical machines such as Fox News. While it is often pointed out that there is a contradiction among railing against deficits while supporting two wars and supporting tax cuts for the ultra-rich, what is missed in this critique is that there is more at stake here than faulty logic, but also an unabashed support for a politics that despises democracy and welcomes an authoritarian economic system that largely benefits mega-financial corporations and the ultra rich.
One of the most distinctive features of politics in the United States in the last 30 years is the inexorable move away from the promise of equality, human dignity, racial justice and freedom - upon which its conception of democracy rests - to the narrow and stripped-down assumption that equates democracy with market identities, values and social relations. Hollowed out under a regime of politics that celebrates the trinity of privatization, deregulation and financialization, democracy has been replaced by a politics of disposability and a culture of cruelty. Driven by the imperative to accumulate capital and consume at all costs, the current form of casino capitalism rewards those who participate in casino capitalism with the protections of a devalued form of citizenship, while those who can't take part as consumers are seen as "failed" and "ever more disposable."(10) In this scenario, freedom is transformed into its opposite for the vast majority of the population as a small, privileged minority can purchase time, goods, services and security, while the vast majority increasingly are relegated to a life without protections, benefits and support. For those populations considered expendable, redundant and invisible by virtue of their race, class and youth, life becomes increasingly precarious. But if consumerism and an indifference to the common good are the defining features of citizenship under casino capitalism, a galloping inequality and the privileges it brings to powerful corporations and the ultra rich is the ultimate badge of acceptance and success.
Mounting signs of increasing redundancy, dispensability and social death are evident in the depression-level jobless rates in which one in six Americans are either unemployed or underemployed,(11) 44 million live in poverty, one in seven adults receive food stamps and 51 million people are without health insurance.(12) It gets worse. As David DeGraw points out:
we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat and a stunning 50 percent of U.S. children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhoods. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five U.S. households didn't have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24 percent, as the hunger rate among U.S. citizens has now reached an all-time high.... Over five million U.S. families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million U.S. families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25 percent of current mortgages underwater.... Every day 10,000 U.S. homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless Americans and the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children.(13)
Such statistics give new meaning to the slogan "live free or die." The cost of this politics of disposability becomes clear in heartbreaking stories about 15.5 million young people who are living in poverty, dropping out of school in record numbers, suffer serious health problems that go untreated, or literally end up in prison. What advocates of casino capitalism ignore in their homage to market relations and individual responsibility as the essence of our national spirit are the growing numbers of bodies, the mounting despair, the ever-growing forms of social death and disposability under a regime of market-driven discourses and policies that support the irrational belief that the market can solve all problems. The collateral damage that reveals the lie of this allegedly unassailable form of common sense can be glimpsed in the fate of millions who are now homeless, out of work, out of luck and living in despair, as well as in the moral vacuum that has overtaken a country awash in the idiocy of celebrity culture, game shows and a dominant media that shamelessly refused to exercise any sense of political and moral accountability. Instead of focusing on the uncomfortable truths that emerge daily in the expanding narratives of despair and neglect facing millions of families caught in the grip of economic devastation, the country is treated daily to an infomercial provided by the ultra rich and aired through all the channels of the official cultural apparatus, urging us to mimic the very values that brought us the current recession and the ongoing human hardships it has produced.
Social and political death becomes the fate of more and more people just as the current crop of right-wing politicians and anti-public intellectuals argue that social problems can only be solved through the depoliticizing vocabularies of the therapeutic and emotional, often enmeshed in the rigid political and moral certainties of bigotry, intolerance, racism, ideological purity and religious fundamentalism. The language, values and policies of casino capitalism have become the template for solving all of society's problems. As such, it employs the first rule of politics in which power becomes invisible and the root causes of our social, economic and political problems are simply canceled out through a shameless appeal to the discourse of self-help, personal responsibility and self-reliance, operating under the conceit of neutrality and efficiency, while effectively erasing everything required both to understand the demands of responsible citizenship and to address the major social issues of our time. As Frank Rich points out, casino capitalism has done more than create an economic crisis, it also offers a future for the United States in which an obscene inequality and economic unfairness drive young people into careers in which getting rich is their only motivation, public services collapse and a economically stressed middle class loses faith in government and turns its back on any sacrifice in favor of expanding the public good.(14) Young people are increasingly presented with a future in which there is no language of democracy, justice, solidarity and the public good. Instead, they offered a language that maximizes self interest, undermines any shared sense of purpose and devalues public service. Under such conditions the formative culture necessary for critical citizens and a vibrant democracy collapses into a Hobbesian world in which the competitive, self-absorbed, unattached, materialistic individual consumer is the only meaningful category of citizenship.
There are many commentators who believe this upcoming election is a referendum on the policies of Barack Obama and they are partly right. But more importantly, this election is a referendum on the call to do away with democracy once and for all, to make the politics of disposability a central feature of everyday life and to usher in a form of casino capitalism in which the democratic state is replaced by the corporate state. Obama's failure of nerve now seems beside the point. His deplorable record has less to do with bailing out the rich, undermining crucial civil liberties and reinforcing the permanent war policies of the United States than with losing touch with any vestige of moral and civic courage in confronting myriad attacks on democratic life. His is the pathetic legacy of squandered public faith and support that ushered him into office; he could have drawn upon it to make power accountable while mobilizing those populations for whom democracy has always been more of an ideal than a reality. The collateral damage we now suffer is not only the frightening image of a soon to be governing party that embraces enthusiastically all of the sordid elements of casino capitalism, but one that will do its best to put democracy to rest once and for all.
Footnotes:
1. Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, "Introduction," Evil Paradises (New York: The New Press, 2007), p. ix. On the return of the Gilded Age, see Michael McHugh, "The Second Gilded Age: The Great Reaction in the United States," 1973-2001 (Lanham: University Press of America, 2006).
2. Louis Uchitelle, "The Richest of the Rich, Proud of new Gilded Age," The New York Times (July 15, 2007). Online here.
3. Jacques Rancière, "Hatred of Democracy" (London: Verso, 2006); Henry A. Giroux, "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007); Henry A. Giroux, "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism" (Boulder, Paradigm, 2008); Henry A. Giroux, "Politics After Hope: Obama and the Crisis of Youth, Race and Democracy" (Boulder, Paragidgm, 2010).
4. See Lee Fang, "Memo: Health Insurance, Banking, Oil Industries Met with Koch, Chamber, Glenn Beck to Plot 2010 Elections," Think Progress (October 20, 2010). Online here.
5. Terry Eagleton, "Reappraisals: What is the worth of social democracy?" Harper's Magazine, (October 2010), p. 78.
6. Lawrence Grossberg, "Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America's Future" (Boulder: Paradigm, 2005), p. 117.
7. Duborah Brunswick, "Prosecutor Proposes Jail Time for Parents Who Miss Teacher Conferrences," CNN.com (October 21, 2010). Online here.
8. See Frank Rich, "What Happened to Change We Can Believe in?" The New York Times (October 23, 2010), P. WK10.
9. Ibid., p. 117
10. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming," Public Culture 12: 2 (Duke University Press, 2000), p. 301.
11. Paul Krugman, "Defining Prosperity Down," The New York Times, (August 1, 2010), p. A17.
12. Erik Eckholm, "Poverty Rate Rose Sharply in 2009, Says Census Bureau," The New York Times, (September 16, 2010).
Online here.
13. David DeGraw, "The Economic Elite Have Engendered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class," Alter Net, (February 15, 2010). Online here.
14. Frank Rich, "What Happened to Change We Can Believe in?" The New York Times (October 23, 2010), P. WK10.
