Born in the USA: reflections on Barack Obama's victory

I was born in the United States a little less than 50 years ago. Among my most enduring visual memories comes from the age of three as white cops, faces contorted in hate, unleashed Alsatians and turned fire hoses on black children and teenagers marching peacefully and unarmed through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama. Of course, I would later learn this was not Sharpeville, South Africa, but such images frequently made me doubt that I would live to see the election of an African-American as President of the United States.

As I’ve already pointed out elsewhere (see Permanent Revolution 8) Barack Obama is a most atypical African-American, but it is important to appreciate that the majority of the black population in the Southern states, the former components of the Confederacy had been systematically disenfranchised until the mid-1960s,so within his life time and mine. For a large proportion of African-Americans the election of Obama is the realisation of the often cited dream, articulated by Martin Luther King in his historic August 1963 address that marked the culmination of the March on Washington.

In my view the politics King had come to espouse by the time of his assassination in Memphis in April 1968 were far to the left of any perspective entertained by Team Obama. But without an awareness of what is still very much a part of the collective memory of Black America, then the outpouring of joy witnessed on the streets not only of Chicago, where the outdoor victory party was underway, but in many other American cities might seem quite inexplicable even allowing for the Obama ‘wow’ factor. After all, leaving aside the individual narrative so beloved of the media, he is an undeniably charismatic figure and an inspiring orator – perhaps the best speaker in mainstream US politics for two generations."

Hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets in the immediate aftermath of an election is quite simply something that did not happen in the United States before 4 November 2008. For a few hours –and it was by no means  an exclusively "black thing" - there was a "carnival of the oppressed" on the streets of Harlem, Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue and Chicago’s Michigan Avenue among other thoroughfares. There were many other scenes broadcast around the globe that were quite atypical of US elections, not least people queueing in their hundreds for four and five hours simply to cast their ballots. Though no final figure was yet available on voter turnout, it almost certainly exceeded 65 percent with a record number of voters – some 134 million. The non-participation rate is now almost certainly lower than Britain’s.

In addition, voter registration soared among African-Americans, who had previously abstained in large numbers, and also among those under 30 years of age, who appear to have backed Obama by a margin of two to one and among whom a majority took part in a presidential election for the first time since the extension of the franchise to 18-20-year-olds in 1972.

The largely spontaneous reaction witnessed late on Tuesday night and in the early hours of Wednesday morning was also a reflection of the liberating relief that the end of the waking nightmare of the Bush presidency was at hand. However much he sought to distance himself from the legacy of “Dubya” John McCain ultimately could not do so. George W Bush has seen his opinion poll ratings plummet more or less continuously over the course of his second term to the point where his approval ratings now hover just above 20 percent – a record low. To a large extent he dragged the Republican party down with him.

The efforts of Karl Rove, the Republicans’ supposed master strategist of the last decade, to cultivate the growing Latino electorate, seen as socially conservative and subservient to the teachings of the Catholic Church, ultimately failed, not least because pragmatists such as McCain and indeed Bush could not overcome the opposition from within the unabashedly racist and xenophobic right within their own party to the introduction of modest immigration reforms.

Not since Jimmy Carter in 1976 had a Democratic presidential candidate secured an absolute majority of the popular vote, while the Democrats strengthened the majority they had regained in 2006 in the House of Representatives and added six seats to their tally in the Senate. They have, however, most probably fallen short of a filibuster-proof 60 seats. This time the quadrennial question posed to revolutionary socialists in the US about which - if any – third party candidate to the left of the Democratic standard-bearer to support proved even more of an academic irrelevance. Ralph Nader, standing for the fifth consecutive election, captured around one percent of the vote in a handful of states, while Bob Barr from the libertarian right achieved similar scores here and there. In short, the November 2008 election generated not a shred of evidence that such candidacies had contributed to breaking the duopoly of bourgeois politics in the US – indeed, quite the opposite.

Still, we would not be talking about such a conclusive Democratic win – or perhaps even an Obama victory of any magnitude – but for the events that swiftly unfolded from Monday 15 September with the collapse of the Lehman Bros investment bank, triggering dramatic falls in share prices on Wall Street and stock markets internationally along with a virtual paralysis among lending institutions.

The sharp intensification of the financial crisis, mirrored increasingly by the worsening of the ‘real’ economy (the official unemployment rate rose to 6.5 percent three days after the election) – these factors sealed Obama’s victory and made McCain’s efforts to label Obama’s mildly redistributive tax proposals as ‘socialist’ look both desperate and somewhat ridiculous.

In the meantime, long before the early autumn meltdown and the Paulson/Bush bailout of the banks, key sections of US-based capital – not least on Wall Street, which had ceased to be a monolithic Republican bastion in the 1990s – had decided that continued Republican rule was simply not desirable. Indeed, the Bush administration had effectively become dysfunctional for their interests both at home and abroad. The evidence of this new consensus among sections of big business emerged with the data about corporate campaign contributions, which heavily favoured the Democratic frontrunners in the primaries – Hillary Clinton and Obama - over the Republican candidates. Ultimately, we witnessed the first ever election where total reported spending exceed $1 billion.

The Obama camp took the calculated risk of breaking a campaign pledge to accept public financing and with it a cap on election spending, and so went on to break all records for fundraising and spending with money to spare going to purchase half an hour of prime time on all the television networks on the Wednesday prior to the election. While the average donation may have amounted to less than $100 and there is no doubt that the Obama campaign made unprecedented and effective use of Facebook and MySpace, amassing a ‘virtual’ army of some three million online contributors and volunteers, his coffers also overflowed with contributions from the likes of Goldman-Sachs and Google.

Meanwhile, both sides of the 2005 split in the US trade union bureaucracy – the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win coalition – poured enormous resources into the Obama and Democratic Congressional campaigns. Though union dollars probably accounted for less than 15 percent of all financial contributions to the Democrats, support in kind was enormous through the provision of staff on ‘phone banks to canvassers on voter registration drives. There can be little doubt that in a number of swing states with high union densities this effort helped Obama secure the highest share of the white vote won by a Democrat since 1976.

Organised labor expects a little something, albeit not very much, in return for its time and money. One concrete objective, however, is the Employee Free Choice Act, which Obama supported in the Senate but where Republican opposition doomed it during the last Congress. This legislation would assist union recruitment and recognition drives by curbing the right of bosses to force secret ballots of a workforce around the question of worker representation. Otherwise, the union agenda is less focused, but includes expectations around healthcare reform, increased investment in the nation’s rotting transport infrastructure and modification of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Quite a few in Britain have seen remarkable parallels between Blair/New Labour’s sweeping victory in May 1997 and Obama’s in November 2008 and, yes, there are certain obvious comparisons. But Blair, of course, entered 10 Downing Street against the background of a sustained economic upswing, having done much to dampen down expectations in the preceding two and a half years as party leader. Obama, on the other hand, will take office next January with the US economy almost certainly in recession, which may prove the sharpest downturn of the post-World War II period. With the unceasing if often vacuous promise of ‘change you can believe in’, Obama also stoked expectations over the course of much of the campaign, but he was already deploying his rhetorical skills to rein in those high hopes in his victory speech to a crowd of 200,000 supporters and a television audience of tens of millions.

Certainly, there is the possibility of a notably different domestic agenda, with greater state intervention in the economy and the partial reversal of some the key tenets of neo-liberalism around taxation and federal spending that started to exercise a decisive grip during the Reagan years and persisted through both Clinton administrations, exacerbated by the failure of the healthcare reform programme and the triumph of the Newt Gingrich ‘counter-revolution’ in the Congressional elections of 1994. There is much talk of economic revitalisation through the creation of up to five million green jobs, but the detail is sketchy at best so a 21st century equivalent of the New Deal’s Conservation Corps is not necessarily on the cards.

In terms of US imperialism’s ‘foreign policy’ there will almost certainly be a radical rebranding of the ‘war on terror’ and a renewed emphasis on multilateral approaches, but no fundamental change. After all, Colin Powell, decorated general and Bush’s first Secretary of State, did not endorse Obama’s candidacy because of a sudden Damascene conversion, however much he might now deplore the incompetence and duplicity of the outgoing administration. The extremely flexible pledge from Obama is to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq, possibly within 16 months of his inauguration, but that might still leave tens of thousands occupying the country even as others head for Afghanistan. 

The anti-war movement in the States declined sharply after 2004-05 for a variety of reason including the decline in US casualties in Iraq, but also because the single largest coalition, United for Peace and Justice, effectively through its weight behind the Democrats both in the 2006 Congressional elections and in this year’s presidential campaign. Street protests and other signs of militancy most definitely fell off the agenda.

Numerous figures from the Clinton administration are lurking in the background and there is much talk of Obama even including a Republican or two in his eventual Cabinet. The hours and days since the result have sounded numerous alarm bells for those investing progressive optimism in the new administration. Even Michael Tomasky, the Guardian’s relentlessly pro-Obama enthusiast, noted with concern the absence of a single union bureaucrat from the circle of advisers that flanked Obama at his first post-election press conference. The loudest alarm bell may have come, however, with the appointment of one-time Clinton aide, now Democratic member of Congress, Rahm Emanuel, as the White House Chief of Staff. Emanuel is an ardent Zionist, whose father fought with the Irgun in the 1940s. That’s not altogether surprising, especially after Obama’s June address to the American-Israeli Political Action Committee, but he has also been seen as among the most aggressive champions of neo-liberal globalization and "was the top House [of Representatives] recipient in the 2008 election cycle of contributions from hedge funds, private equity firms and the larger securities/investment industry”

Still, Obama will have to confront some hard choices and these could see him become the more or less willing manager of US imperial decline. Even in the context of the booming 1960s the Johnson administration was unable to sustain both the domestic reform embodied in the ‘Great Society’ and the war against Vietnam without serious economic consequences.

So, how to sum up? At an ideological level, the result of 4 November suits the interests of US imperialism well. The election of an African-American to be head of state in a contest where voter turnout reached a peak confers a renewed legitimacy on the United States as a meritocracy, where for now at least the worst aspects of overt racism have dissipated, even though nothing can expunge the ‘original sin’ of chattel slavery. Similarly, the immediate contrasts between the names and images of Barack Hussein Obama and George Walker Bush, the son of generations of WASP wealth, who reinvented himself as a Texas outdoorsman, could hardly be greater to a global television audience.

At the same time, however, the terrain of struggle is rather more favourable than if the McCain-Palin ticket had won the election. Of course, the Democrats are not, have never been and never will be a bourgeois workers’ party in the sense of the British Labour Party, a variety of European social democratic organisations or even the Canadian NDP, but with this election they may just have reinvented themselves as the kind of popular front party that first emerged under Roosevelt in the 1930s and endured to a significant extent until the late 1960s.

We - and by this I mean the revolutionary left in general – need to resist the reflex reaction to say that the result on 4 November makes no difference and engage simply in ritual denunciation of the new administration. Disillusionment is certain to set in amid frustrated expectations, but for now we can only speculate about the timing and how that discontent might be channeled.

The tasks for leftists in the US over the next four years are likely to be patient exposition of the new administration’s policies, highlighting the continuities with Bush (not to mention Clinton), combined with attempting to mobilise elements of the working class and oppressed, which supported Obama, around specific concrete demands, with the aim of forcing the new administration and Democratic Congress to act on their progressive pledges.
 

This article is an adaptation and updating of remarks by George Binette at the Permanent Revolution London meeting the night after the US presidential election
 

Mon 10, November 2008 @ 14:27