Is the US now a “post racial” society? Definitely not. Will the Obama presidency bring changes as sweeping in public welfare, education, health and the environment as the New Deal did during the later 1930s? Probably not, unless allowed and compelled politically to do so by economic crisis and a popular mobilization that goes far beyond voting and may revive third party prospects at the local and state level (the Working Families Party enjoyed some modest advances in several states as part of an Obama team). Will an Obama presidency rein in the American pursuit of total global control and pull back upon the brutal demands of the American empire? That is the biggest question of all.
It should be remembered how ferociously Democratic power-brokers resisted supporting student peace demonstrators in the 1960s and early 1970s, how determinedly Democratic hawks (including the leaders of the American labor movement) deserted George McGovern’s peacenik presidential bid in 1972, and how the same figures schemed, gathered financial resources, and punished peaceniks within the Democratic party, as they returned to power within the Democratic party even before the Reagan years. The successful centralization of power by the Democratic Leadership Council, with its sources in Democrats for Nixon was foreshadowed by Nixon Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s defeat of antiwar “old left” congresswoman Bella Abzug in the New York Senatorial primary of 1972, and accompanied by the heavily-funded attacks against the Jesse Jackson campaign of 1988. In the same years, Harry Belafonte was widely discussed as a possible Senatorial challenge, from New York against the repellant Republican rightwinger Alfonse D’Amato. He was dropped when the redbaiting by Democrats and Republicans set in. This story, however, brings us up strangely toward a moment, a symbolic image, in the present.
Belafonte, the global citizen dressed in his signature windbreaker on the cover of Life magazine at the end of the 1950s, looked like nothing so much as a late-campaign photo of Obama in the New York Times, dressed in a rain-spattered jacket. They were handsome brown men, almost beyond handsome in their charismatic looks. They were, everybody knew, also really intelligent, measured in their judgment, shrewd in their public personae. Belafonte, who began his activist career under the most difficult possible circumstances of the Henry Wallace campaign, had carried his generation’s message as far as it could go within the deeply racist society and the militarized economy of mid-century. Obama, former community organizer, is the figure of a new century, with the combination of unprecedented prospects and complications faced by any multi-racial (in standard American terms: nonwhite) leader.
Would the Empire drag him down? That was the question as large as the economy, and marked by the same immediate issues of “experts” brought over by the president-elect from the Democratic Clinton years. No presidential aspirant likely to win can avoid promising to defend America’s global supremacy, with the military budget (and near-certain bloodshed) to go along. Would an Obama presidency squander the extraordinary good will of a global population desperately eager for a new path toward peace and some greater degree of cooperation on the environment, health and all the other related issues? Or would some way be found, by Obama and beyond Obama, to make the mobilization across the US become a global mobilization?
These are questions for the near and further future, unavoidable and difficult. For now, the faces of the crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park tell us what we need to know. A new day has arrived.
as previously posted in The Rag Blog / November. 8, 2008
http://theragblog.blogspot.com
[Paul Buhle, publisher of the New Left journal Radical America during the 1960s, has written or edited many books on radicalism and culture. He now organizes leftwing comic books.]
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