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Sunday 24 January 2010

Of course, the liberal instinct is to blame this urge to compromise on the lack of brains or backbone or some other crucial bodily organ. I think that’s wrong. The fundamental problem of the Democrats is that they’re a party of capital that has to pretend for electoral reasons that it’s something else. So they make progressive noises to satisfy the base, but once in power, do the bidding of their funders. Sometimes these contradictory tendencies can be seen in one figure, like Obama himself, and sometimes in the wings of the party (e.g. the Progressive Caucus vs. the Blue Dogs). But in both cases, the more conservative faction, whether of personality or party, almost always prevails. That’s especially the case when there are no popular movements pushing them in a better direction. Those popular movements were partially disarmed by Obama’s victory. Maybe they’ll start coming to their senses now, especially as the Dems move right in response to the Massachusetts outcome. But that’s not the whole story. Although a lot of liberals, and even more serious leftists, don’t like to admit it, there’s a deeply conservative streak in the American electorate. The “common sense”—the unschooled instincts imparted by upbringing and inherited ideology—of people in this country is individualist and self-reliant. That common sense has become increasingly dysfunctional. The U.S. reminds me in many ways of a startup company that’s grown so big that it needs a serious overhaul but is incapable of the necessary transformation. In the corporate example, you frequently see that the founders don’t want to turn things over to professional managers. They want to keep running the show on instinct and animal spirits. But those aren’t working anymore. So too the U.S. The dog-eat-dog model of social Darwinism worked well (on its own terms—it was often horribly brutal) while the U.S. was growing rapidly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but ever since growth slowed down in the 1970s, we’ve been in need of a rethink of the old model. But we’re incapable of it. Instead, we’ve tried ever more reckless applications of debt to keep things going. Doug Henwood

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