(Recently, Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs tackled the uselessness of this state-corporate partnership in their film Planet of the Humans. See my review.)
Just as important as nukes and climate change is the tottering of global democracy under the pressure of neoliberalism and the perhaps fatal divide between the so-called 1% and the 99%. Even when it seemed to be going swimmingly, back in the Ancient days, the model from which Americans supposedly draw their model of exceptionalism, Socrates was regarded as a "gadfly" who was forced to kill himself when he refused to stop getting people, especially uni-aged kids of the day, roused up with critical-thinking skills. Imagine asking someone to justify why they believe what they believe. The shock of the new. The way we think of grooming child molesters today is the way many of the slumberous dogmatic leaders of "democracy" saw the dialectician back then. Ouch. Eisenberg seems to be keenly aware of this demise in the only model of governance capable of controlling the masses with the illusion their voices matter. And now that postmodernism informs us that each of our voices is relatively equal, democracy has never had more pressure on it.
Depressingly, Eisenberg brings in the Democracy Ranking index to show that we are tripping if we think We're Number 1. Actually, we're #16 on the index, just ahead of Slovenia (didn't we just have a coup to overthrow the elected government there? Or am I thinking of some other country resistant to neoliberalism's distinctive charms, such as voluntary servitude to banks?). In any case, Eisenberg is keen to let us know that we actually dropped a spot during Obama's tenure.
Similarly, and inexplicably, just as Obama was about to leave office in 2017, he challenged the press to own their mission in a democracy of 'keeping the bastards honest.' Eisenberg cites lines from a speech Obama gave to the White House Press Corps:
'You're supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power,' Obama said. 'Having you in this building has made this place work better. It keeps us honest, makes us work harder.'
This would have seemed rich to any number of critics of his media approach during his tenure from free-thinking bloggers to the Columbia Journalism Review. Citing the World Press Freedom Index, Eisenberg notes the "precipitous" plunge in the US rank, from 20th to 41st place, during his presidency. What a dishonest bastard.
He notes how Obama had promised to be "the most transparent" president, only to end up being the one who over-classified government documents, making them only accessible to the press through "leaks" from "high-ranking anonymous sources," in a George W. Bush-like maneuver to manage the media. He writes,
[B]y March 2010..., the Associated Press found that seventeen major agencies under Obama were 50 percent more likely to reject FOIA requests than under his immediate predecessor. Records that were released were typically redacted, sometimes heavily, with a black felt-tipped pen obscuring contents deemed to be secret.
Some of the major revelations of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning came under Obama's watch, and instead of a transparency and keep-the-bastards-honest approach, he went at the three with the 1917 Espionage Act leading them all to be jailed or isolated and exiled.
Like Obama, Biden favors scaled-down, specialized military presence to deal with 'terrorism' overseas. Eisenberg notes,
Joe Biden, to whom Obama devolved significant foreign policy influence, championed a combination of drone strikes and special forces to fight terrorism, an approach he called "counterterrorism plus."
Such special ops and drone strikes carry the risk of being under-accountable. We don't really know what they get up to. And, add in private contractors, like Blackwater, who are essentially soldiers of fortune, it can be difficult to justify their role in the establishment and promotion of democracy and the maintenance of state sovereignty. We can expect Biden to continue along these lines. One notes that former counterterrorism director for the CIA Cofer Black is on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma and that he is associated with the mercenary company Blackwater. Just sayin': Keep an eye out (but worry if you see flies coming your way).
All in all, the Obama/Biden combo did little in Eisenberg's eyes to promote democracy, and, in the case of the president, did much to ensure that he became personally wealthy by his relationships with Wall Street types (a relationship that journalist Paul Street and Black Agenda Report have said began when they preened him on the campaign trail). Eisenberg reminds us that Obama received $400,000 per speech to Wall Street groups after his departure from the White House. Biden is in similar straits, currently ducking questions about his son Hunter's cushy salary for working with the Chinese (for which early indications are that Uncle Joe took a cut).
In addition, Biden brings with him a lifelong commitment to economic conservatism; he's unlikely to even want to address the current and growing economic disparity extant in America. He also favors conservative justice-system rules, which combined with Vice President Kamala Harris's rigid tenure as California's AG could prove worrisome for blacks, Latinos, and the poor. (Plus, she once jailed a Jew.) Biden has already begun backing away from hints that he would seek relief for students buried in loan debt, suggesting that bankers have called him and explained. And Biden recently shored up Obamacare, suggesting that he will continue with the flawed program rather than seek a progressive new direction, such as Medicare for All.
In the end, The Center Did Not Hold leans toward tasty chicken mcnuggets (pretend you're Paul Newman eating 100 nuggets in one sitting, something nobody is advised to do, even with some of the new dipping sauces they have out) rather than a solid, sustained intellectual thesis on the Obama presidency (with the avuncular Joe as VP) and detailed expectations of how Biden may separate himself from the gone years. Eisenberg's method is to react to news articles that have tracked the Obama/Biden policy cave-ins over the years, rather than bringing in 'thought-leaders' for analysis of the policies. While this process is cogent enough, at times it feels like we're just reading a journal Eisenberg kept of news clippings and his take. Still, it doesn't pretend to be more. It's a depressing drip-drip reality check that fails to make one comfortable with a vision of the four years ahead. For those looking for a deeper dig into what Obama Nation meant and what it could mean should Biden prove to be an extension, Paul Street's recent Hollow Resistance and Hopeless: Obama and the Politics of Illusion by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank are better intellectual reads.
The Center Did Not Hold is a book that will depress nugget by nugget as Eisenberg's balance sheet clearly comes to the in summa conclusion that Obama failed Americans most in need of deliverance of the Changes he promised during his Hope-filled campaign -- failures, which, arguably, helped inevitably lead to a populist blowhard becoming president. But its chunkiness is also a reasonably good place to look for areas of governance to tweak, one by one, over the coming years; a kind of checklist for those activists and demos looking for a place to start demanding change. The Center did not hold, and that's probably just as well. We need Big Change.
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