But if Obama were to be aced out of the presidency due to clear illegalities and outright theft of the election -- being the third Democrat to be so denied under suspicius circumstances in just a few years -- the despair and anger unleashed would be incalcuable. Talk about "revolution" and/or leaving the country might suddenly become very real for many. This would especially be the case if the "losing" candidate and the Dems hadn't put up a fight in the courts for an honest, transparent recount in states where the evidence of electoral fraud is widespread.
Internally, there would be major blood-letting and transformation of the Democratic Party. As with the Republicans, the Dems might well carry out a political civil war between two opposing camps.
One can well imagine that the more centrist/party establishment camp would think long and hard before nominating another African-American as its standard-bearer. They would look for a plain vanilla, non-controversial candidate, one willing to compromise principles and imitate what the successful Republicans do. GOP lite, in other words.
The more progressive wing of the party might well argue that the party "lost" because it moved away from its traditional Democratic values and principles in a desire to make itself more palatable to Independents and wayward Republicans. In other words, because it "wasn't liberal enough."
As speculated above with regard to the Republicans, it's possible but not likely that the fractured Democratic Party could split into two openly warring political entities, with the progressives, for example, attempting to make an alliance with the Greens, Naderites and disaffected moderate Republicans under a new party banner.
THE APPEARANCE OF SEMI-"SOCIALISM"
But regardless of who is installed in the White House in January, one thing is clear: American capitalism's financial and social/political system, which has undergone enormous shocks in the past few months, may never revert back to the status quo ante.
The clearest signs of this transformative shift:
1. George W. Bush and Henry Paulson, true believers in unregulated
free-market capitalism, overnight became semi-"socialist" in behavior. Reality made it necessary for them to compromise their free-market ideology and partially nationalize banks and giant financial institutions. A monumental catastrophe does that to you. You can't return to the conservative shibboleths that clearly had failed.
2. Alan Greenspan, the grand doyen behind the American economy for nearly four decades, admitted in public testimony before Congress that the laissez-faire deregulation philosopy that has guided his life is badly flawed. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank said the current economic meltdown in the U.S., which has now spread its major recession all over the globe, rested on faulty "models." He was shocked, shocked!, to learn this. We're supposed to believe that the possibility of widespread failure of those greed-at-any-price models never occurred to him. Right.
Those "models," which were pushed by far-right conservative thinkers like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, derived from an ideological belief that a free market always corrects its excesses, thus keeping the dread hand of government off the financial tiller. Now, Greenspan admits, there appears to be a necessary role for government regulation when banks and other financial institutions don't act in their own self-interest. It's still "SELF-interest," you see, since the Randian conservatives, of which Greenspan is one, refuse to recognize the concept of a "PUBLIC interest."
REGULATION NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL
Given the complexities associated with a global economy, and the unsupervised power of financial entities to do harm to themselves and others, in a sense it doesn't really matter whether it's McCain or Obama in the Oval Office. Both would have to concern themselves with righting the ship of state and the financial institutions that keep it stable and functioning. Doing so requires government oversight and regulation of the giant corporate and financial behemoths. In short, America will become, to a greater or lesser degree -- with enough greed-loopholes built into the new system to satisfy the Wall Street elites -- a distinctly American variant of the "social democracies" in Europe.
Even McCain now realizes the necessity for action in this direction; Obama would be more amenable to the kind of regulatory change that will be required, and might even borrow other ideas and policies from FDR's Great Depression/"New Deal" era in the 1930s, such as temporary, government-sponsored jobs programs that would quickly pump money back into the economy from the bottom up.
What's taking place right before our eyes is a seismic shift of tectonic
economic plates in America, with all sorts of transformative implications to society, the economy, the political parties themselves. We are in for mighty interesting times in the decades ahead.
THE ATTACK ON SYRIA
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
