The Second Time as Farce

The second set of numbers we need to look at is the election finance data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/sectors.php). This data shows clearly that while Capital has pulled back somewhat from the extraordinarily high level of support for the Democrats that it demonstrated in the 2008 General Election, the broad sectors of capital remain clearly in the Democratic camp. Specifically, the Democrats seem to be consolidating their support within the advanced sectors of the economic, adding the defense/aerospace and health sectors to the information and technology sector as firm supporters. Financial capital continues to be divided, with commercial banks, consumer credit, and insurance leaning Republican and investment bankers, real estate, and especially venture capital leaning strongly Democratic. If you want to find overwhelmingly Republican sectors, you need to look well down the technological ladder to agribusiness, construction, energy and natural resources (other than alternative energy), and low to middle technology manufacturing such as textiles or steel (though the garment industry and the auto industry lean slightly Democratic).

Labor remains solidly Democratic, with only a handful of unions contributing anything to Republicans.

This suggests, of course, that the Republican victory represents an alliance between backward sectors of Capital and the middle strata. But here too we must be careful. Education, law, the nonprofit sector, architects, engineers, and the civil service remain strongly Democratic. Health professionals as a whole just barely lean Republican, though the divide between physicians and dentists on the one hand (Republican) and others, especially nurses (Democratic) is quite dramatic. Accountants lean Republican. The clergy just barely leans Republican, with progressive clergy having invested much less in this election than they did in 2008.

In other words, except where they are allied with Capital from backward sectors, the professional middle classes, to the extent that they are organized and engaged as an organized constituency, are strongly Democratic.

Republican money and Republican votes come from those sectors which feel they are being left behind by globalization and technological progress. While it is true that the Republican victory was helped along by large contributions from wealthy individuals, these individuals either come from the backward sectors in question or are contributing on the basis of ideological idiosyncrasies, not consolidated, institutionally mediated, class interest.

***

The numbers themselves, then, effectively exclude the Right’s claim that the people as a whole have rejected Obama as an extremist. They also call seriously into question the Left’s claim that “big business” bought the election for the Republicans. Capital is divided and leaning Democratic.

This said, the numbers do seem, at first at least, to support the Left’s other principal claim: that Obama’s mistake was to advance too cautious, rather than too radical an agenda, and thus he failed to mobilize the millions of voters who stand to the left of him and of the Democratic Party on most of the issues. In its fully developed form this analysis would cite, among other things, his preference for cap and trade to a carbon tax, the inadequate scope of the stimulus, his cautious approach to health care and financial reform, his incomplete withdrawal from Iraq and his decision to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan. What, precisely, is wrong with this analysis?

First, we should point out, that while Obama’s policies may well be a bit to the right of his personal preferences, we have absolutely no reason to believe that he embraces the full social democratic agenda of the Left. He is clearly a liberationist theologically, in the sense of finding his principal religious meaning in the struggle for social justice (though his liberationism bears the distinct influence of Reinhold Niebhur). But this is not, in and of itself, warrant to assume that he embraces the Left’s political agenda on climate change, health care, the economy, foreign policy, or anything else. Obama’s political record puts him to the left of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, but not by much. From the beginning he has run as a moderate linking an authentic commitment to social justice with a close relationship with progressive sectors of Capital.

Second, even if Obama did favor the Left’s agenda, the political and economic conditions for realizing it never existed. It was only with difficulty that he was able to pass the modest but significant reforms that he did. A more radical agenda would have been dead in the water. And many of the compromises he made were dictated by economic as well as political imperatives. Consider the question of insurance mandates. Obama ran against requiring people to buy health insurance and the mandates are undoubtedly going to be among the politically most costly of the reforms enacted over the course of the past two years. But given that a single payer system was never really politically viable, he had little choice. Requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions without requiring healthy people to buy insurance is tantamount to putting the insurance companies out of business –something even a single payer system would not have done, at least not so completely and irrationally.

Similarly, on the foreign policy front, it is certainly possible to advance credible criticisms Obama’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama himself, even though he ran on a commitment to escalate in Afghanistan, thought long and hard before he did. But he cannot be blithely branded as a imperialist because he has chosen to maintain some presence in Iraq and to prosecute the struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even those of us who opposed the invasion of Iraq need to recognize that once we were there, we had an obligation to stabilize the country before pulling out. And removing Saddam Hussein created a strategic imbalance in favor of Iran that we have no choice but to address.

The issue with Afghanistan is rather different. The Taliban is not a force for authentic national liberation, but rather for imperial restoration and it is one of the most viciously oppressive political organizations on the planet. I am inclined to question Obama’s decision to prosecute this struggle because I very much doubt that anyone can definitively defeat them. The United States, especially after the last decade of anti-Islamic crusading, is poorly positioned to win the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan people. We would be better off creating “safe havens” for Afghan women and other potential victims in the cities and leaving the tribes to sort out the hinterlands for themselves. But I do not think that Obama is engaged in an imperial adventure in Afghanistan.

Third, and most important, however, the social democratic Left fundamentally misunderstands the historical moment –as radically and completely, in fact, as the populist right. They all share, in fact, a conviction, that politics is simply a debate about values, even if the values in question are different: property rights for the populists, and compassion for the social democratic Left. They miss the fact that we are entering a period of profound civilizational crisis which is driving political developments, and which renders their particular agendas largely irrelevant, whether they happen to be on the winning or the losing side of a particular election.

I have already laid out the main lines of this civilizational crisis elsewhere and those who want an in-depth discussion should consult The Death of Secular Messianisms: Religion and Politics in an Age of Civilizational Crisis. Here I will just summarize. Modernity, which promised to liberate human beings from the bounds of finitude by means of scientific and technological progress and by giving birth to collective political subjects which would make us masters of our own destiny, has turned into a nightmare.

v We have dangerously and perhaps irreversibly altered climatic patterns on the planet in a way which, if it does not threaten life itself, certainly threatens our existing civilizational arrangements.

v We are in the midst of a demographic transition which, while it may halt population growth before it exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet at current technological levels, will in so doing place unprecedented burdens on the young, who will be asked to support more elders than they can bear.

v Technological progress, while stopping far short of liberating us from the bounds of finitude is, nonetheless, rapidly rendering entire industries and entire forms of labor obsolete, setting in motion desperate reactions on the part of backward sectors of capital (reflected in their willingness to subsidize Tea Party demagogues they know to be dangerous) while effectively wiping out the gains made by labor’s forward march during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

v Capitalism and socialism both have profound internal contradictions. Capitalism, faced with rising technology costs, systematically allocates resources towards low wage, low technology activities, a pattern which in turn leads to underconsumption tendencies and economic crisis. Socialism, once it has elevated workers and peasants out of poverty, is faced with a choice between investing in long term civilizational progress, leaving the people with little to consume and, given their low level of spiritual development, little incentive to work (the Soviet pattern), or allowing workers to keep most of the surplus they produce, in which case there is no economic growth, nothing for the workers to buy, and the same dynamic of stagnation (the pattern which was emerging in the Soviet Union under the New Economic Policy). The Chinese solution, allowing the reassertion of market forces, effectively reduces the meaning of socialism to rule by a Communist Party, something which allows some innovative long range policy making, but hardly solves the underlying contradictions of either capitalism or socialism. Attempts to create a “new humanity” by means of ideological campaigns, meanwhile, have a record of descending into anticivilizational chaos, as we saw in China during the Cultural Revolution and even more dramatically in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and in regions of the Andean Highlands controlled by Sendero Luminoso.

v Democracy has, thus far, been a failure. In capitalist societies the growing demands of the marketplace erode the mediating institutions which, de Tocqueville taught us, make ordinary people behave like statesmen. Instead, as we have seen in this last election, they either don’t vote or vote against civilization itself. Socialism has thus far failed to find a way to allow real institutional pluralism in the context of an effective economic monopoly by a party state.

v While humanity’s rich wisdom traditions continue to offer valuable resources for engaging fundamental questions of meaning and value, we lack a viable civilizational ideal. We quite literally don’t know what we are doing, what we are striving for civilizationally, much less why. Without a civilizational ideal, the old ruling class is no longer able to rule, but no new ruling class can either.

The principal contradiction in the present period –the conflict which drives contemporary politics-- is between progressive sectors of Capital which, in ways that are profoundly compromised by their own economic interests and capitalist identity but are nonetheless deeply genuine, trying to find solutions to these problems which allow continued, ecologically sustainable, civilizational progress, and backward sectors of Capital which are resisting those efforts –as well as the broader trends of technological and social progress which are leaving them behind, with every force they can muster. To be complete, one should add to the list of progressive forces those elements in the Chinese Communist Party which are using their control of the commanding heights of the Chinese economy to pilot visionary solutions to global problems (e.g. building 100 new “green cities”), though these elements have been in much less evidence of late. And to the reactionary forces we should add the early modern, semifeudal elements drawn from across many different civilizational traditions for whom religious conservatism and fundamentalism represent a way of addressing the demographic crisis (or, in the case of Dar-al-Islam, of turning it to their advantage) by restoring traditional gender roles and thus raising or sustaining birth rates. And we should note, as has become increasingly obvious in recent weeks with the looming trade war between the US and China, the conflicts between the US and Germany over monetary policy, etc., the contradictions within the broad progressive bloc are profound.

The working classes and the peasantry, as an autonomous and organized force, are not really on the political map.

***

What, then, does the election mean in the light of the current civilizational crisis?

The election results are best understood as a tactical victory for the backward sectors of Capital hoping to stall progress towards engagement with climate change and to force less progressive solutions to the demographic crisis, technological transitions, and the other challenges we are facing. But there will be no return to radical neoliberalism. Indeed, the whole debate about “big government” which dominated this election cycle was a sideshow, designed to redirect voter discontent with the economic situation to the right.

The question remains, of course, why the backward sectors of Capital were able to pull this off so easily. Did Obama really just fail to communicate? For a more detailed consideration of this issue, see the companion piece The Protestant Elite and the Crisis of Capitalism, which looks at the profound crisis of the liberal Protestant core of the historic US ruling class. But to put the matter more broadly, it is just precisely because this is a civilizational and not merely a structural crisis, a crisis of modernity and not just of capitalism, that the old ruling class can no longer rule and, even as its most advanced elements outpace the backward agrarian, extractive, and low technology manufacturing sectors technologically and economically, they are unusually vulnerable to political and ideological assault.

Those who understand the dynamics of the historic process have, in this situation, two obligations. First, we must offer constructively critical support to the Obama administration. We don’t need to pretend that modest reforms are going to resolve the current crisis. But when we criticize the administration’s decisions or suggest alternatives we need to do so in a way which takes into account all dimensions of the current political situation, and point the President towards those politically viable alternatives that contribute most towards warding off global civilizational collapse while creating openings for progressive developments, especially on the ecological, demographic, and economic fronts. While it would be destructive to emphasize with a politically immature electorate the fact that they are unlikely to experience significant improvement in their material situation in the short run, no matter what happens, we should not be attacking the administration for failing to deliver such an improvement when we know it to be quite impossible under the circumstances.

Second, we need to undertake the difficult work which is involved in building organizations which can actually lead humanity through the current crisis. This means, on the one hand, cultivating a leadership which is spiritually, theologically, and politically mature –which understands the dynamics of history and which is able to act in historically effective ways to ripen being. This leadership must forge a new civilizational ideal, rooted in humanity’s wisdom traditions but committed to engaging questions across as well as within traditions and to creating a sapientially literate laos. And we must reverse the decline in mediating institutions, drawing people into active engagement in labor and civic organizations and local congregations, then bring these organizations, in turn, together to create a new “formed” electorate actually capable of responsible citizenship. While we need to organize across social classes, it is especially important to organize the working classes, whose rootedness in creative activity gives them an epistemologically and ontologically privileged vantage point, as well as the dispossessed who, living the current crisis more deeply than the rest have the potential to see the need for fundamental structural and civilizational change more profoundly. Mobilization for targeted issue and electoral campaigns must certainly be part of this organizing process, but it cannot be its essence. We are talking about creating a new way of life, civically and spiritually engaged, civilizationally and sapientially literate.

These two aspects for our work taken together –autonomous organizing and education coupled with a strategic alliance with the progressive sectors of Capital who alone, at this point in the history, have the power to act effectively to contain the crisis and avert ecological and civilizational collapse—constitute the basis for a new alliance for humanity and for the earth. Only such an alliance can both make the critical short-term reforms necessary to avert ecological, demographic, and economic collapse and chart the next steps in the human civilizational project.