Jim Sleeper: Commander-in-What?
[Jim Sleeper, a writer and teacher on American civic culture and politics and a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (W.W. Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).]
Barack Obama spent two years campaigning to become the leader of a corporatist, national-security state whose ways of wielding power aren't those of a republic. "States hover like crows over the nests that nations make," wrote the historian Robert Wiebe, and by the time Obama faced the state's gray ranks of cadets last night as their commander in chief, the crows of national security statism and finance capital had cannibalized so many of the republic's strengths that he found himself in command of the wreckage and Orwellian newspeak they've left behind.
He tried, at times, to tell the truth. At least he didn't promise to do for Kabul and Kandahar what our corporate state and its corrupted polity haven't done for New Orleans or Detroit. But the concentrations of power over which he now presides, and whose language he must speak, have no more truths to tell about how economic and institutional power flow in a free society. They haven't a clue where terror comes from, or what makes a society strong enough to endure and resist terror instead of recapitulating it in its entertainments, let alone its torture protocols.
To become commander in chief, Obama had to mortgage too much of his ability to change what he's now commanding. He needs a deeper, broader push now from the citizens who elected him. Unfortunately, his campaign was a terrific Michael Jackson performance for some, and a symbolic lifeline for others terrified of being swept under by riptides of predatory marketing and finance capital that are destroying their communities. But the campaign didn't become a powerful political organization, and now he's condemned to keep splitting the difference, as he did last night, between the swarming crows' bromides and the civic republic's fading echoes.
He's buying time. But he's not welding a political organization strong enough to keep frantic claims that 9/11 was an "act of war" from stampeding us into tearing up the judicial foundation of a republic -- as the terrorists want -- or to keep fears of the Taliban from driving others to fantasize a re-run of Churchill v. Hitler. Such myopia is for crows, not citizens, not even if they're cadets. The road to "victory" is different now, and Obama knows it. But, last night, he only hinted at it.
Read entire article at Talking Points Memo
Barack Obama spent two years campaigning to become the leader of a corporatist, national-security state whose ways of wielding power aren't those of a republic. "States hover like crows over the nests that nations make," wrote the historian Robert Wiebe, and by the time Obama faced the state's gray ranks of cadets last night as their commander in chief, the crows of national security statism and finance capital had cannibalized so many of the republic's strengths that he found himself in command of the wreckage and Orwellian newspeak they've left behind.
He tried, at times, to tell the truth. At least he didn't promise to do for Kabul and Kandahar what our corporate state and its corrupted polity haven't done for New Orleans or Detroit. But the concentrations of power over which he now presides, and whose language he must speak, have no more truths to tell about how economic and institutional power flow in a free society. They haven't a clue where terror comes from, or what makes a society strong enough to endure and resist terror instead of recapitulating it in its entertainments, let alone its torture protocols.
To become commander in chief, Obama had to mortgage too much of his ability to change what he's now commanding. He needs a deeper, broader push now from the citizens who elected him. Unfortunately, his campaign was a terrific Michael Jackson performance for some, and a symbolic lifeline for others terrified of being swept under by riptides of predatory marketing and finance capital that are destroying their communities. But the campaign didn't become a powerful political organization, and now he's condemned to keep splitting the difference, as he did last night, between the swarming crows' bromides and the civic republic's fading echoes.
He's buying time. But he's not welding a political organization strong enough to keep frantic claims that 9/11 was an "act of war" from stampeding us into tearing up the judicial foundation of a republic -- as the terrorists want -- or to keep fears of the Taliban from driving others to fantasize a re-run of Churchill v. Hitler. Such myopia is for crows, not citizens, not even if they're cadets. The road to "victory" is different now, and Obama knows it. But, last night, he only hinted at it.