Still, that trickle -- focusing on the deepening inequities of American society -- has managed to grow into a stream of resistance that is now running through the Occupy Wall Street protests and their attacks on the concentration of wealth and power with the top 1 percent and the worsening depredations on most everyone else.
However, some of those "occupy" dissidents also reject a significant role for government and have vocally abandoned the electoral process. Some say the only hope rests in civil disobedience, while others dream about a third party or even a revolution.
But Americans generally shy away from radical alternatives that would create even short-term suffering, especially when the hoped-for long-term benefits are vague and unarticulated.
It may well be true that today's rapacious capitalism is unsustainable at least without devastation to the livability of the planet and to the living standards of the vast majority of its inhabitants. But most people will opt to cling to the little comfort and security they have rather than throw it away for some ill-defined, post-modern future that is more frightening than it is promising.
So, the question now confronting the Left is whether it can channel the new momentum from the Wall Street protests into a practical movement for solutions (and convincingly explain those ideas to the broad American public) -- or whether the Left will fall into familiar patterns of sectarianism, magical thinking and irrelevance.
Daunting Challenge
Despite the fact that the "99 Percent" movement has clearly touched a nerve among Americans who see nearly all the benefits of today's economy going to a tiny elite at the top, the challenge to translate those sentiments into an effective national movement for change remains daunting.
Just as it may not be enough to rely on street protests and "occupations," it surely is not enough to rely solely on electoral politics -- as was shown in the failure of Barack Obama's campaign to achieve "change we can believe in." But it is a mistaken analysis to put all the blame on Obama.
True, Obama can be faulted for not thinking bigger about how to change the system and for surrounding himself with leftovers from previous administrations, officials who were more part of the problem than part of the solution.
Obama staffed the government mostly with a collection of Establishment favorites who saw their role as patching up failed projects, both foreign and domestic, from Wall Street to Afghanistan. These were people like Timothy Geithner at Treasury, Robert Gates at Defense, Gen. David Petraeus at Centcom, Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel at the White House, and Hillary Clinton at State.
Obama also confronted a national news media dominated by pundits and executives who had cheered on the disastrous "group think" of the previous three decades, from a faith in "free trade" and the "new economy" to the hubris about U.S. military might making America the world's "indispensable nation" unbound by international law.
This "group think" came from both the well-financed propaganda centers on the Right and from influential mainstream outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times. Despite all the sound and fury about smallish details, there was a broad consensus in the Establishment, a deep faith in the "magic of the markets" and a lock-step unity on the nation's imperial ambitions.
Another factor has been that since the 1970s, the American Left largely abandoned the battlefield of the "information war." Some on the Left bought into the notion that "local organizing" would substitute for communicating with the public through a strong national media.
One consequence of these disparate choices -- the Right investing heavily in media and the Left often shutting down or selling off its media -- was that the Right could dictate the national debate while careerists in the mainstream media tilted in that direction to avoid right-wing attacks.
Obama's Arrival
So, when Obama took office in 2009 -- in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 -- he confronted a shaken Establishment but one that demanded comforting, not challenge. He also faced an unrelenting hostility from the Right and from the Republican Party, which was determined to strangle Obama's presidency in the cradle.
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