In the United States, everything is about race. We are,
after all, the inheritors of racial capitalism, of the racialized settler-colonization
of this hemisphere, of racialized genocide and expropriation, of wealth built
up on race-based slave labor, of racialized imperial expansion, embedded in a
racial “progress” myth . . . and we live today with official xenophobia, with
the New Jim Crow of redlining and mass incarceration, and stubbornly
well-sustained racial gaps on every social index.
Our public discourse is still white, phallocentric,
imperial, and capitalist — this is part of what hegemony means, and why it’s so
difficult to uproot. The colonizers oversee the development of land and labor;
but they also oversee the colonization of our minds. White supremacy, male
supremacy, imperial noblesse oblige, “social hygiene,” and the myth of progress
are the epistemic architecture of capitalism. Historically speaking, white,
phallocentric, and imperial have always been constitutive of real capitalism
(and inextricable from it).
Celebrity worship is part of that epistemic architecture,
too. In a world with no afterlife, public esteem becomes a sort of desperate
currency, a check written against the perceived nothingness of eternity. We
worship celebrities, but also celebrity itself, something about which we can
fantasize ourselves. This is the world of modern simulation, our entrapment by
modernity’s cold, sterile objectivism, our attempted escape into
representation.
The problem, from the perspective of some of us, is that
social orders become self-organized within their hegemonic frameworks, almost
like a biome wherein each organism finds its niche until the whole becomes
cyclically stable. The difference being that capitalism is a biome that systematically
destroys its own diversity — a slow suicide system.
When social orders are generalized across large scales, this
niche-maximization (by post-subsistence people who have to seek out money to
survive) becomes niche-dependency. I have my little spot, my little job, my
little home, and I have to protect it to survive. In this way, I come to
protect the larger social order by protecting my little piece of it, situated
there in the stable whole.
Cognitive dissonance kicks in around the contradiction between
my belief in some form of justice and my need to survive as a dependent within
hegemonic structures. To live with myself I seek out narratives that seem to
reconcile my actions with my sense of justice. I rationalize, extensively and
elaborately, and find that I have now accepted, even naturalized and become
apologists for, the epistemic architecture of capitalism.
This phenomenon is even more powerful when we leave the
context of one “individual” in his or her niche to encounter actual people —
who live in families, with obligations to others that further complicate the
moral dilemmas of the subaltern. I could rebel, but what will that mean for my
children? I think it was David Harvey who said something like, “The greatest
force for working-class conformity in the United States was the 30-year
mortgage.” Defy the establishment, and your children will suffer.
Within the United States, there is another nation (in the
older sense of a shared history, language, and culture, not a nation-state) we
might call African America. As a whole, this nation is very like a colony —
colonies being subaltern social formations that are simultaneously politically
suppressed and mined for profit.
World system theorists divide the world into centers, or
metropolitan cores, and peripheries (colonies or post-colonies, where value is
extracted under the supervision of colonial surrogates, and that value is
returned to the cores where even the working classes can get an imperial
benefit). There are also semi-peripheries — places like India, for example —
where the colonial surrogates begin to amass enough power vis-à-vis the cores
to begin building up a “middle-class” base of support for colonial and
post-colonial ruling classes. African America is further complicated by geography,
because it is an internal periphery (and, for some privileged few, a
semi-periphery).
Peripheries adapt, and one of those adaptations is this
generation of liaisons between the white capitalist core and the most powerful
members of the periphery which develop into political alliances. These
alliances are developmental of colonial surrogates. In many cases, colonial
surrogates become powerful in their own right. In the US, this often means
“delivering votes,” in exchange for support of careers and pet projects. But
again, we come back to that cognitive dissonance. If one is performing as a
power-broker between the periphery and the core, that person needs a
rationalization. No one, even the most cynical, believes he or she is a bad
person. We can’t. We need rationalizations, and when there is a threat to our
sense of justifiable personhood, we can be quite aggressive in our own defense.
People readily believe their own rationalizations.
It’s more complicated still, because one might become part
of what I’ll call African American civil society for the genuine purpose of
helping one’s community. When you live in a stable biome, you seek out the
niches that are available. Let me do a short excursus on this thing I call
“civil society.”
Civil society has several meanings, but for our purposes, it
means influencers. In capitalist society, there is a hierarchy of power. The
ultimate power resides with the ruling class — the big bourgeoisie, the
mega-money folks . . . in our neoliberal phase over the last four-plus decades,
these are Wall Street types . . . or finance capital, to which productive
capital has become subordinate. These capitalists exist in a partnership with
the state, the state-finance nexus if you will. The state is the official arm
of power with its legal monopoly on violence. So far, this class is a fraction
of around one tenth of one percent.
On the other end, there is the bottom 90 percent of the
people have no appreciable power at all . . . unless they unite against the
ruling class.
In between is civil society, the retainer class. Civil
society, this class of influencers, are in that zone between the one-percenters
and the 90 percent. This civil society fraction (9.9/100?) is what stands
between the tiny ruling class and that vast working class. They engage with the
working class on behalf of the ruling class (knowingly or not) to prevent
and-or attenuate any restlessness among the 90 percent that might threaten the
ruling class. They influence the working class to accept and even embrace the
existing hierarchies. Civil society does this through media, entertainment,
think tanks, non-profits, churches, businesses, and charities.
I worked for non-profits for a while, and we were plugged
into think tanks, other bigger non-profits, churches, businesses and charities.
Some do projects, some do issues. We did issues. One was money-and-politics
(for which we received some of the actual “Soros money”), another was nuclear
power, still another was Veterans For Peace against war, yet another dealt with
environmental justice . . . all these are good things. In the current system,
the only way to get the resources (money) to advance our cases (and construct a
few jobs [niches] in the process) was by filing for corporate status as
501-whatevers. Availability, right? Maybe not, as we’ll see further down.
In subaltern communities — like African America — fewer
people have the means and opportunity to get the formal education alongside the
informal cross-cultural competencies of relative privilege to participate in African
American civil society. Liaison with the white “core” is among the key duties
and responsibilities of African American civil society, and it creates a kind
of brain drain from the working class into this hazardous demilitarized zone of
liberal civil society, by those of good will as well as opportunists. There are
many non-profits, for example, that are organized to answer real crises, crises
created by the very structures whose epistemic architecture we are obliged to
inhabit.
All that to say, I am not conflating all non-profits. Some
folks inhabit structures tactically for the purpose of deconstructing them. But
in the larger scheme of things, where capital calls the shots, those
initiatives that support capital or give it cover will be better resourced than
those that do not. The rest will be used as pressure release valves. Whoever
pays the piper calls the tune.
Historically speaking, African America — from Reconstruction
forward — has struggled to exist inside this white supremacist nation-state. During
Reconstruction, African American civil society germinated among self-help
groups, schools, churches, funeral societies, cooperatives, and other
formations. The general belief (though not totalizing) was that African America
might be eventually incorporated into the surrounding society as equals.
With no access to the means of production, however, upward
mobility was restricted. The emergent African American sub-bourgeoisie did not
control banks or factories, and so could only engage in entrepreneurial
activities that remained dependent on credit from white financial capital and
supply chains from white productive capital. Wealth within the internal colony
was accumulated by church leaders alongside retail and service enterprises —
barber and beauty shops, funeral homes, corner stores, etc. Big capital cashed
in from afar, concealing their presence behind black bodies, but retaining all
power.
These were the upwardly mobile families that learned two
things: first, you have to be able to work with suppliers (white folks), and
second, your credibility depends on performing white respectability. The latter
emphasis on respectability politics remains powerful today. In 1998, Randall
Kennedy wrote about the struggle for respectability in African America:
A . . . core intuition of the politics of respectability is that, for a stigmatized racial minority, successful efforts to move upward in society must be accompanied at every step by a keen attentiveness to the morality of means, the reputation of the group, and the need to be extra-careful in order to avoid the derogatory charges lying in wait in a hostile environment.
This kind of grasping at respectability, especially among
classes of people who are trying to “move up,” for whatever group in whatever
time, is not primarily motivated by economic concerns; money is a means to an
end, but the goals are status and acceptance. This grasping for status,
however, has powerful economic consequences. Respectability has fashion and
consumption codes; but they materially demand the circulation and accumulation
of money. Respectability, then, lives inside the epistemic architecture of
capitalism, and its closest material companion is consumption.
Complicating an already contradictory situation is the
struggle of any subaltern community to overcome the dominant narrative of
innate inferiority and its attendant self-loathing and loss of self-esteem. The
fightback against these conjoined phenomena includes “proof of equality”
strategies and the quest for paragons.
In a world of limitations, the most talented and driven will
press into those arenas which are available. In the US, those available arenas
for racial paragons have been entertainment — whether media or sports (often
the same thing) — both of which remain dependent upon “white money.” Now, some
few African Americans are actual members of the haute bourgeoisie, and identify
with its interests completely, which means stability in a system where the
subjected status of African America is built into its structures.
Politics has also become one of those arenas . . .
Democratic Party politics, that is, for our day and age.
Barack Obama went to law school, worked in non-profits, and
rose up as a political figure inside Chicago’s “Daly machine.” Comfortably
bi-racial, with an uncanny practical political instinct, he fitted himself into
that bourgeois racial demilitarized zone where the one-percent celebrates its
own diversity without challenging the structures of capital still dependent on
the broader stability of racial capitalism.
Barack Obama became, as the first African American head of
the American settler-colonial state, a racial paragon. And I cannot dismiss
this . . . our own biracial children were buoyed by his victory, and it gave
them — and millions of other black kids — a refreshed sense of their own
potential. Symbolism is not mere. It has material force.
Obama was not only a paragon and a symbol. He fitted in with
a form of African American political conservatism that is still dominant. It is
not ideological conservatism, but tactical conservatism.
Joe Biden’s candidacy is a perfect example or this. Black
folks know damn well that Biden was one of the chief attack dogs against Anita
Hill, that he was an apologist for racist opposition to busing, that he
promoted the carceral state, that voted consistently for war, that he peddled
influence, and that he can drift into incoherence at the drop of a hat.
The political calculus — possibly from long association with
the multiracial Democratic Party — is based on a linear-continuum theory of
American politics. The theory goes: there is an ideological left, a center, and
a right — equally populated by the white majority — and that to win against the
right (read, hostile racist Republicans), it’s necessary (as a form of
collective self-defense!) to have candidates that are marginally better than
Republicans who can “appeal to the (white majority) center.”
This is a niche-protection strategy, and it’s generational.
As a rule, the older we get, the more firmly we are committed to our beliefs
and the more conservative we become with regard to dramatic change, or the
threat of it. One thing that most, older Democratic voters agree on, white,
African American, and other, is this linear-continuum theory of American
politics. Because, for a time, it was true during that generation’s most
politically formative years.
The problem is that it was true only with respect to
defeating the rightest right-wing electorally. This culminated with Bill
Clinton, who once elected rode the speculative wave of the nineties to
sustained popularity (a highly leveraged speculative orgy that went bust a few
years later under Bush with little modification), and it has not worked since.
Gore, Kerry, and Clinton all crashed and burned. Obama defied the trend with a
powerful grassroots ground game and strong youth and African American support —
riding Hope-and-Change to victory against dreadful Republican opponents who
were strapped to the Bush II legacy like a giant shit-bomb.
There’s no doubt that Obama is a skilled politician, as well
as a skilled orator, and a man who, with his family, exudes respectability.
“They’re such a classy family.” It’s a potent mix, and all of us can remember
how people admired the First Lady’s social skills, civility, and decorum . . .
which has come into stark relief as a comparison with Trump’s family of
psychopathic opportunists, mashers, thieves, and bullies.
The irony is that black respectability — once seen as a way
of gaining white acceptance — has not won over white society except among a
fraction of white civil society that was already in Obama’s camp. As African
America performed respectability all the way up into the Oval Office, the most
reactionary fraction (and a big one at that) of white society has abandoned respectability
altogether in favor of open fascistic intimidation and terror.
It was an easy transition, because behind the public
political scenes, this intimidation and terror remained part and parcel of
black life in America, even with a select group of black leaders and
influencers invited into the champagne rooms of the capitalist retainer class.
All of this is new and not new. There is an echo of the
historic struggle within African America here, between the ideas and practices
of accommodationists, separatists, and rebels — each of whom presented
compelling narratives. If we think back to W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and
Booker T. Washington, we can find it. DuBois embraced a race-conscious class
struggle narrative. Garvey was one of several popular separatists. Washington
was an accommodationist. Of all these, it’s easiest to denounce Washington
(from this far distance) for being unmanly or whatever; but we have to bear in
mind that Washington did not see the struggle as between rebellion and accommodation
— as DuBois had framed it. These debates were backgrounded by waves of
lynching. Washington saw the choice as one between accommodation and
extermination. It’s never simple.
Right or wrong, this is the essence of tactical political
conservatism. There are still black communities where this stark choice is
closer to the surface than any white community can fully comprehend. White
“progressives” (I hate that word!!!) would do well to get their teeth into this
reality and not let go. There is a lot more to reasonably fear from dramatic
change of any kind for subaltern communities than there is for white people
drinking overpriced coffee as they discuss how they want to “build a new
future,” engaging in facile and wholesale reductions of Obama to (oh, ick) a neoliberal.
(Yes, he is, but there’s more to it than that!)
Surely we remain aware of the ways we who opposed Clinton in
2016 and critically supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 had to call out Obama and
Clinton on their dreadful policies on the one hand, while defending them
against attacks that were explicitly sexist and racist on the other.
It’s a delicate dance for anyone — especially white folks —
to criticize Obama. Obama-as-paragon and Obama-as-symbol are not going away.
Because, while it should not be a totalizing idea, it’s still important. And I
will say this to the chagrin of some, but white people have no standing to judge
on this account. Nonetheless, this has to be understood and further elaborated
as part of a shared, and yet unshared, political reality.
What is shared is a ruling class, money-dependency, and the
state. What is not shared, or partially-shared, is a great deal of lived
experience. Even in our multiracial family, the white folks have a different
experience of the world outside our homes.
The background is changing. For starters, the capitalist
end-game is coming into view right now — with runaway climate catastrophe less
than two decades away, the house of financial cards growing higher and more
precarious, and a resurgence of fascistic political tendencies (capitalism will
always rely on the mailed fist in the end). The latter is mirrored by a growing
anti-austerity movement around the world . . . and one growing inside the
United States, embodied for the time being in the Sanders electoral challenge —
essentially an anti-austerity campaign by another name. Anti-austerity — whether in Haiti or Spain or Ireland or
Iraq or Sudan or Chile — means anti-neoliberal.
The present-day African American political establishment has
been thoroughly incorporated into Democratic Party politics. The way up, through
civil society, was a selection process. Whether through non-profits, small
business, or the Academy, the way up is competitive. When I was getting paid
with Soros money, we were in a cutthroat competition for grant money, even
against our ideological allies . . . sometimes especially against out
ideological allies. Upward mobility means pleasing the money-people, and
pleasing the money-people means delivering something in return. You have to
demonstrate your ability to persuade and organize a real base. You have to have
influence.
It should be unsurprising that much leadership in black
communities emerges from the church. Preachers are, by definition, influencers.
Among black academics, business administration remains the most popular major.
Every gate upward is controlled by capital; and they make
people compete with their peers to get through them. Here is a niche, if you
can “earn” it. Once you’ve earned it, be aware, you can always lose it again.
This demand to fit in is closely related to the respectability politics that
was embodied by Obama, a veteran of non-profit-dom.
When Randall Kennedy — himself a promoter of respectability
politics — described “the need to be extra-careful in order to avoid the
derogatory charges lying in wait in a hostile environment,” he could have been
describing what I saw in the non-profit world. Any black director was subject
to the most vicious kinds of opposition research, something true in the larger
political world as well. Any misstep drew glee from the right and “what a
shame” horseshit from liberals. One particularly poisonous thing a friend
described to me was how 501(c)(3)s that were floundering would hire a black
female director. The gamble was (in the “social change” non-profits) that a
token of diversity might improve fundraising, and if the already-failing
project went belly-up, the white liberal funders could cluck their tongues and
say . . . “What a shame,” meaning she just wasn’t ready, or some comparably
insipid trope. The she would be saddled with the failure, while her white
predecessors would have already been hired elsewhere.
Once you’ve earned it, be aware, you can always lose it
again. That’s the white establishment’s finger trap. Remember, we can always
shake our heads and mutter, “What a shame!”
All these interfolding phenomena, over time, have involved a
trialectic between deterministic generalities and structures, particularistic
histories and relations, and singular local realities, as well as the dominant
perceptions and misperceptions of each era. Sometimes — in fact, most times —
the perceptions and misperceptions are based on “legacy-thinking” that hasn’t
caught up with existing reality except “at home.” Most legacy-thinking
originates at home. That’s why belief systems are so generationally resilient.
Our families were our first and most formidable interpretants of the world.
The power of legacy-thinking can be summed us thus:
I can describe with great accuracy what is going on in this
room right now.
If I’m describing the town I live in, there are more
legacy-thoughts — ideas about things I have formed earlier and not yet been
disabused of — in my perception of the town’s realities.
If I’m describing the nation or the world, I have an even
greater reality-deficit.
This spatiotemporal lag is something with a military analog.
In Korea, they fought using WWII tactics through serial
failures, then in Vietnam, they fought using Korea tactics through serial
failures, then in Iraq, they began using Vietnam ideas that resulted in serial
failures, and so on. If the Peter Principle for bureaucracies says that “One
moves up to his or her first level of incompetence,” then my own principle for
these warfighting doctrines would say, “We always fail with the old tactics first.”
Legacy-thinking may be right or wrong; but what is right one
day can be wrong the next. The antidote is more information in new interpretive
frameworks.
The same thing applies more generally to us older folks — of
all ethnicities — because we coast similarly into new realities with old ideas
. . . new wine in old wineskins. President Obama’s popularity is based in part
on this, too. Older white liberals are among the most ardent Obama-worshippers
I’ve encountered. “He has such a classy family.” “He is so articulate.” (yup)
Older white liberals, however, are not in anyone’s gunsights
the way black folks are. Their perception of Obama-as-respectable-paragon is
not the same kind of paragon as he is in African America. White liberals
approve of him because he is, for them, “one of the good ones,” meaning he fits
white-established norms of education, polish, and respectability. He can be
every white liberal’s proverbial “black friend.”
White liberals will never fully comprehend the attitude of
self-defense that African America lives inside every day. African Americans
cannot escape their “blackness” in an increasingly dangerous white world, where
the only political bunker seems to be the perfidious Democratic Party. And for
white liberals, Obama cannot have the same meanings as he does for a people who
are constantly bombarded with messages of inadequacy, who are starved for the
counter-fact that a black man was once the chief-of-state for “the most
powerful nation.”
Does all this lead to reflexive defenses of the
indefensible? Of course. It’s an aspect of hero-worship that’s generalizable.
On the other hand, what indefensible actions taken by President Obama were
consistent with likewise indefensible actions by his white predecessors and
successors? It’s a negative defense, but sometimes that’s what you have. And
yes, Obama substantially strengthened the executive security-state power that
Trump has now inherited.
Bringing me to our situation at the beginning of the year
2020.
We’ve emphasized race so far, but let’s not lose track of
class relations. As I suggested earlier, the US ruling class is all about
diversity these days. There is no problem bringing a few people of color, a few
women, and a few sexual minorities into the ruling class. As long as they
understand their duties and responsibilities. In fact, the more vulnerable on
other accounts the better, because people are going to protect their niche . .
. they will conform. They will not rock that little boat. And the boat they’re
not rocking is built around a framework of structural inequality.
This year we approach a crucial election, faced in the
immediate term with the necessity to rid ourselves of the self-serving
pyscho-infant in the White House, and faced with the longer (but still short)
term crises of resurgent fascism, climate destabilization, ecocide, mass
migration, civil war, and financial collapse.
Not everyone is aware of how immanent these crises are — in
many respects they are already here. Ruling class perception managers are hard
at work to provide us with the rationalizations we need to reassure ourselves
that we are good people and that things will somehow work out. They’ve already
been effective at convincing most of us that they are motivated by more than the
desire to accumulate more, by some Pollyanna version of the common good (that
only incidentally requires us to buy their shit).
The persistence of Joe Biden’s popularity in the face of his
personal history is in part attributable to his association in the popular
imagination with President Obama. We already know, some of us at least, that
the ruling class, embodied in part in the Democratic Party establishment, knows
how to tip their spears against the left with women, sexual minorities, and
people of color — how to weaponize identity. And that has worked to an extent.
But just as importantly, or more so, Biden is the tactically conservative
choice as legacy-thinking leads us back to the linear continuum theory of
elections.
Seldom mentioned nowadays is that Obama tactically selected
Biden as running mate/VP precisely to appeal to that mythical white center that
leans slightly to the right. And this might suggest that it worked because of
that tactic. It was not. President Obama was the beneficiary of a confluence of
factors, including that phenomenal ground game, strong establishment backing,
really incompetent Republican challengers, strong youth support, and record
turnouts among African Americans. Given his margins of victory, that five
percent that is the actual shifting white center — which includes the
Obama-Trump voters. Obama-Trump voters are those who voted for Obama in
2008–2012 then switched to Trump in 2016.
The white-right center represented by Biden was insufficient
to account for Obama’s victory . . . but this 2016 defection from Obama to
Trump (13% of Trump’s vote!) was determinative of Hillary Clinton’s 2016
debacle.
The reality, which flies in the face of our legacy-thinking,
our old wine in the new wineskins, is that this fraction of voters, who
rejected Clinton but would have substantially supported Sanders, and who
finally voted with Trump, hated “free trade” agreements, had experienced
decades of Democratic neglect and bullshit, and they registered their boiling
resentment in a fuck-you-all vote for the Orange Baboon.
I believe to this day, as a resident of Michigan — one of
those key states Clinton lost — Sanders would have defeated Trump. I believe he
is the only candidate who can defeat Trump in 2020, but let me not digress.
In 2016, Sanders may have lost to Clinton even without the
DNC’s relentless cheating. We’ll never know. This year, he has a real path to
the nomination. As of now, capital has no candidate. Capitalists are not
cooperative. They are all spending most of their time figuring out how to
seagull each other’s customers by any means necessary and drive competitors
into bankruptcy. Capitalism is a blood sport.
We don’t see this clearly here, but during my many sojourns
in Haiti, a nation with the population of North Carolina, this was easier to
see because there were still two distinct opposing ruling classes . . . the
land-bourgeoisie (grandons) and the merchant-bourgeoisie (compradors), whose
rivalry actually included murder from time to time. Their very interests were
antithetical. There was only one thing that could consistently unite them:
assertions of popular will. Any time the great mass of Haitians became restless
and started making demands, the grandons and the compradors went shoulder to
shoulder in support of violent repression of the masses.
What the Haitian ruling class — divided most times against
itself — feared was not (in my day) Aristide, the populist President who was
elected twice and twice deposed by US-supported coups. Aristide was the point
of attack, the head of the snake as they saw it; but the real fear was of all
those people, millions of people seething with resentment and not a hell of a
lot to lose.
What the US ruling class fears right now is not Bernie
Sanders — who they do consider to be an existential threat. But their real fear
is of us — a politically mobilized population. And as the social democratic
rebellion expands, which it will ,being a youth-driven movement, capital’s
perception of the threat will become more vivid and compelling. These insurgents,
we insurgents, are already talking about wiping out insurance companies and
fossil fuel industries, about breaking up monopolies.
At this stage, that has meant promoting the
Biden-electability myth, the linear-continuum theory of elections and the
tactical conservatism that goes with it. They pump the bellows around this
epistemic flame, and it’s holding a few lines . . . including the line in
African America, especially African Americans who are over 40.
In 2020, this “Southern wall” has come up against a bloc of
equal strength — the renewed movement-centric, multiracial, explicitly working
class campaign/movement of Senator Sanders. The movement is heavily weighted
toward the young, including substantial numbers of African American youth.
In February, the voting begins. If Sanders wins Iowa, then
New Hampshire, he has a good chance of taking Nevada, too. Trends indicate that
this is very possible. In South Carolina, Sanders has climbed to 20 percent as
this is written, decreasing Biden’s lead (now at 27 percent). This is obviously
the strategy of the Sanders campaign. Moreover, Sanders just broke the five
million mark on individual donors in the last quarter of 2019, putting together
almost $35 million in one quarter while Biden’s campaign is in the red.
In December, we saw the establishment media suddenly take
notice of Sanders’ durability and strategic acumen. This is the media of the
ruling class, the Svengalis of spin . . . or once they were. Even they are
being hollowed out by popular exhaustion with thirty-five years of the same
meaningless pap, but they still have a hold on those of us over 50 who still
get most of our news from television.
Network media are kind of a barometer. That barometer just
registered alarm. The ruling class is marshaling its forces. We already see a
sustained and expensive campaign against Medicare For All. They are trying to
figure out how to kill the Sanders candidacy without leaving their fingerprints
at the scene.
This year, we can expect ex-President Obama, in accordance
with all the norms of establishment respectability, to assist in the sabotage
of the Sanders campaign. Big threats requite big guns. Obama is a big gun,
especially on Super Tuesday when much of the South will vote at once.
Obama’s power is considerable, given his unshakable
popularity among the majority of black voters and the fact that the bloc of
black voters now has the limited but substantial power to select nominees and
the unlimited potential power to stop the Democratic Party in its tracks. This
power, however, is a based on mutually assured destruction — the Democratic
Party as institution versus African America’s voting bloc . . . each can kill
off the other by walking out. They are bound together, because they can no
longer exist without each other, even if and when the Democratic Party
establishment forgets most of African America once they’re in office.
The Democratic Party itself is an institution in deep crisis
with a lengthening track record of political incompetency. Black leadership within
the Democratic Party and its civil society cohort are now in the unenviable
position — only years after African Americans gained real power within the
party — of being locked into a room with a bomb . . . or a corpse. The real
danger is that when this moribund party fails — barring a social democratic
takeover and makeover — African America might be left politically homeless in
an increasingly dangerous milieu.
The insularity of the ruling class means the ruling class
perceives “through a glass darkly.” As society becomes less stable — and we are
inside a deep political crisis in the US — the old epistemic architecture
shudders on its foundations. As of now, the tattered Democratic establishment
(a party that is now broke and in debt) is seeking a new position — further to
the right, of course, that’s their MO — alongside Bush neoconservatives. The
new line is that of the national security state. MSNBC and CNN feature dozens
of talking heads from the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency — a national
security establishment with a long history in African America . . . as its
implacable enemy. This is their answer to Trump. It’s not working. His minions
do not follow the rules, and even the rule-breaking is a cause for celebration
by the Trump cult — a huge rump of white proto-fascists, many of whom fantasize
about race war . . . and genocide.
Here is where the Democratic Party establishment strategy is
aimed directly at another defeat in 2020 if they come to the fight with Joe
Biden (or, as I will explain, Elizabeth Warren). Biden’s “moderate” appeal in
the Democratic Primary will spin down and burst into flame in the General
Election campaign.
The electorate is not particularly political, not in the way
people who read political blogs are. But as the grinding insecurity and
subterranean anger of the post-2007–8 crash continues, it sensitized voters to
political bulshittery. We’ve heard politicians spout glittering generalities
and obvious equivocations while doing jack shit for decades. Part of Trump’s
appeal, especially among that Obama-Trump voter fraction, but more generally as
well, is what-you-see-is-what-you-get: that mysterious quality called
“authenticity.”
Clinton failed the authenticity test in 2016. Kamala and
Beto failed it in 2019. When and if Joe Biden goes up against Trump, Trump’s
campaign will only have to run loops of his idiotic gaffes, punctuated by the fact
that he used his power to enrich his family.
Once the Democratic Party’s stupid impeachment strategy of
focusing exclusively a campaign finance violation in Ukraine — where the trail
leads to Biden’s influence peddling — has been a gift to Republicans. Trump’s
popularity has increased with this limitation strategy (necessary, because
wider investigations open up questions about many, many Democratic party
elected officials).
This strategy on impeachment will result in (1) pulling
Democratic Senators running for the nomination, Sanders and Warren, i.e., off
the campaign trail for the Senate trial, (2) forcing Biden to continue his indefensible
defense of his own actions as a self-serving influence-peddler, and (3) giving
the Trump campaign the beautiful gift of “Biden The Inauthentic” against whom
they can run . . . and win. This is real, and it’s scary as hell. We are on the
cusp of a dangerous war this moment because this jackass plays with the
military like he’s a four-year-old general. He still has access to nuclear
launch codes.
In the past couple of weeks, it has come to light that
ex-President Obama’s surrogates have been linking in to the Warren campaign. As
every tactic they’ve used so far to stop the social democratic rebellion in the
party has failed, and as a Sanders victory becomes a real possibility, this sad
vestige of an establishment has been forced to consider a retrenchment with
Elizabeth Warren. Warren has repeatedly signaled that she is open to this
approach.
Obama is likely reluctant to associate himself with any
failed project, which is a tricky position today in the Democratic Party; but
if Sanders walks into South Carolina with a big bag of delegates in his
knapsack and pulls 25 percent (the split-and-share threshold is 15 percent),
Obama might be tapped as the artillery cover for that retrenchment. If Biden
appears to be dissolving, Obama might endorse Warren before Super Tuesday.
I’ve explained elsewhere why Warren would also be a precious
gift to Trump, because — Pocahantas, Pow-Wow Chow, the beer commercial — inauthenticity.
But these are the moves left for a disorganized army in retreat. I give an
Obama endorsement of Warren a 50–50 chance, because a legacy is not something
an ex-President wants to subject to any hazard, especially by submitting to be
a cynical weapon in a losing battle — a person who might be reasonably held
responsible in any degree for a 2020 Trump victory.
There is only one candidate in the Democratic race right now
who is most immune to the charge of inauthenticity: Bernie Sanders. He is also
the Democrat who beats Trump in head-to-head polls among that Obama-Trump
fraction — the fraction of Trump’s victory over Clinton. Of course, these
voters are not going to the polls on Super Tuesday (with the exception of
Minnesota).
Do I believe that Super Tuesday will determine the rest of
the race? Yes, and no. Yes, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, and
Virginia are voting that day (March 3rd). African America will have a strong
voice that day, as African Americans are a huge fraction of Southern Democrats.
But the other states include Texas, a giant, and California, a leviathan.
Sanders is very competitive in Texas and already dominating in California.
What does this all mean, apart from horse race analysis and
who and what-to-others is Barack Obama? It means we have to patiently engage
with our elders, white and black and other (I’ve not excluded “others,” but
contained my focus to Obama and African America for this piece). We aren’t
looking at just an election. We are looking for a strategic orientation that is
aimed at rescuing the world from a calamity that is already a rumbling dark
cloud on the horizon.
Capital will kill every one of us to stay in power, the most
vulnerable first, and they will destroy a planet as well. Everything must be
oriented on this. The election is only a first small but essential step,
gaining a hand hold on the state.
African America is high on capital’s
kill-the-most-vulnerable-first target list. That’s why I hope fewer and fewer
people will listen to ex-President Obama; but we better understand his
positives, his enduring status as The First, the Paragon, the Symbol. It’s not
simple, and it’s never easy.
