A Brit looks at current American politics and compares it to class-based portions of British politics. It's an interesting read, and the following is our quote of the day:
The president's determination to transform the US into a social democracy, complete with a centrally run healthcare programme and a redistributive tax system, has collided rather magnificently with America's history as a nation of displaced people who were prepared to risk their futures on a bid to be free from the power of the state.
BINGO. Look at how succinctly and piquantly he has identified one of the core problems of the Obama Administration's domestic policy initiatives: we don't want European-style big government statism.
Even more quotable goodness after the fold below:
Liberal politics is now – over there as much as here – a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for "not the right sort".
The petit bourgeois virtues of thrift, ambition and self-reliance – which are essential for anyone attempting to escape from poverty under his own steam – have long been derided in Britain as tokens of a downmarket upbringing. But not long ago in America they were considered, even among the highly educated, to be the quintessential national virtues, because even well-off professionals had probably had parents or grandparents who were once penniless immigrants. Nobody dismissed "ambition" as a form of gaucherie: the opposite of having ambition was being a bum, a good-for-nothing who would waste the opportunities that the new country offered for self-improvement.
But now the British Lefties who – like so many Jane Austen heroines looking down on those "in trade" – used to dismiss Margaret Thatcher as "a grocer's daughter", have their counterparts in the US, where virtually everybody's family started poor. Our "white van man" is their Tea Party activist, and the insult war is getting very vicious. It is becoming commonplace now for liberals in the US to label the Tea Party movement as racist, the most damaging insult of all in respectable American life.Hear, hear. I remind you of my standby measuring stick of political discourse: in any argument, the first party to say "racist" or "bigot" (or "Nazi") automatically loses.
Also, is it just me, or does your mind also boggle at the thought of a place where self-reliance (the lodestar of my life) is not considered a virtue but a liability? Good grief!
1 comment:
I think your commentator has confused the President with some of the center-left people who voted for him. The President is, ironically enough, cut from the same center-right cloth as the commentator. The idea that Obama is some mindless socialist Archon is pure right-wing fantasy completely at odds with Obama's fundamental policies. Obama never supported a universal insurance program much less the public option -- the former never made it to the negotiating table and the latter was quickly tossed aside -- the current program is a subsidy sop to the insurance companies, just as the climate bill is a joke that simply hands out more subsidies to fossil fuel firms. His advisors and cabinet members, with a few exceptions, are all similarly center-right establishment types with deep roots in the corporate establishment -- Summner and Geithner and Bernanke from Wall Street, Salazar from oil, Jeff Bader, his Asia guy, comes out of Stonebridge, the consulting firm that does a ton of business with China, as do several of his other foreign policy people. Etc. It's a big administration so a few progressives managed to sneak in here and there. But on the whole it would be hard to think of an area where Obama has not displayed a weak-to-strong continuity with Bush, and in many areas exceeded the latter's worst excesses, especially with regard to surveillance and civil liberties. And the idea that Obama can or wants to engage in redistributive taxation is, at best, amusing. Tinkering with the massive tax cuts for the wealthy that have created vast structural imbalances in US society and impoverished the government is something even a complete Randite loon like Greenspan essentially supports.
The essence of the Obama Administration is that it is a center-right Establishment administration owned by the big banks (Wachovia was just busted laundering $380 billion in mexican cartel money, no serious punishment). It would be great if commentators on the right got a handle on the actual political economy of the US.
Michael
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