The Retort

Ghosts of the Political Past

April 19th, 2010 by Larry Portis For The Retort

It is a strange, but good feeling to write for The Retort after 42 years of absence. The only problem is that I’m not exactly sure whom it is that I’m writing for, as I haven’t read the paper during all that time and I’m no longer familiar with the students and other personnel at the university. Consider me the ghost from the political past, or some other eerie voice wafting in quite accidentally because of a time warp caused by shifting spatial and temporal dimensions.

I worked for The Retort from perhaps late 1965 to the end of third quarter 1968. During that period I was also an elected member (at large) of student government and a member of the debate team. But it was The Retort that interested me most. What did I do there? Well, all I wrote about was politics. Yes, politics, and more politics.

There was a lot to write about in those days—the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the war in Vietnam, the student revolts everywhere, the so-called “counter culture,” plus various and sundry geo-political events and changes. But you understand that saying “there was a lot to write about in those days” is at best a facetious statement. There always has been much to write about along these lines because human affairs have been globally intertwined in the ways that are familiar to us since the sixteenth century, at least.

Even if the issues may have changed in some slight, contextual ways, students and people today are confronted by the same questions of how to reconcile private lives and public questions. This is what politics is really about. Politics is the business of everyone in society because collective decision-making inescapably structures our lives. It is perhaps terrible to say, but simply voting and delegating authority to elected representatives is not enough. There are interests and forces at work that often make a mockery out of the word and idea of “democracy.” It is up to people in general, “ordinary people,” to ensure that elected representatives contribute to decision-making that strengthens the commonweal and the commonwealth, and this implies the greatest possible participation in public affairs. To leave politics to some charismatic speechifying savior and/or to the occult machinations of an oligarchy is to give up on “democracy” entirely.

But how can this popular participation be maximized? Difficult question indeed! And yet there is something that can be said that transcends political differences: collective action, direct or otherwise, must be informed and reflected upon. And this requires a degree of maturity—both emotional and intellectual.

The problem is that “popular movements” can be founded upon ignorance and confusion. When we hear, for example, that the current president of the United States is at once a socialist and a fascist we may suspect that ignorance and confusion are responsible for such assertions. Socialism and fascism are historical phenomena that require careful analysis, in part because their various definitions are highly contested. One can only sympathize with the panicked and sincere members of the so-called Tea Party movement, for long-term trends and recent events have called into question many established verities and perceptions in the United States. But any reassessment of the function of government must avoid the use of reified words whose abstractness only contributes to the fear and confusion they express. Such words are often used cynically because they are so effective in arousing emotional reactions rooted in faulty education.

To gain insight into the present actions and possible historical significance of Mr. Obama’s policies in the present context, a comparison with Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the financial and economic problems the earlier president faced in 1933 is revealing. Today, few informed people believe that Roosevelt was either a socialist or a fascist, although the measures taken by the first and second New Deals were far more “interventionist” and constitutive of permanent state-managed social and economic institutions than anything Obama has suggested or probably even imagined.

How to explain these differences of perception? I would suggest that the mechanisms of capitalist investment and production in the years preceding the crash of Wall Street in October 1929 and the subsequent economic collapse allowed and, moreover, required Roosevelt’s New Deal program in order to re-establish social stability and confidence in existing economic practices and institutions. By March 1933, when Roosevelt was inaugurated, a large majority of the population understood this. He was opposed by most of the powerful business and financial elites, but he had the support of a population so struck by economic dysfunction that standard ideological appeals vaunting the merits of “free enterprise,” and “reduced government” ceased to have significant emotional resonance.

Obama is in a very different situation. The financial meltdown occurred a few months before he acceded to the presidency. His powerful backers, and now close advisors, are from Wall Street. The economic consequences of the breakdown are still developing, and Mr. Obama does not have the political experience, the personal maturity or the social independence possessed by Franklin Roosevelt.

There is a miniscule socialist-minded political left in the United States, but these people have been saying things like: “it is yet to be seen whether Obama will be the new Herbert Hoover or the new Franklin Roosevelt,” and that the new current president is basically a “poster boy for capitalism”. Do these assertions have any basis in fact?

“Socialism”? “Fascism”? “Democracy”? “Capitalism”? Such terms and others demand both historical and philosophical definition. They are terms that we must understand in avoidance of demagogy and the cynical attempts to manipulate a population confused about the weakening force of the United States-based economy and the continuing attempts to impose its corporate power through military dominance over much of the world. The United States is still highly privileged, but the questions of how it can retain its favored status without jeopardizing its own health and that of the entire world are yet to be resolved.