Entering a new reactionary era?
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
It seems only yesterday that the election of Barack Obama and enough Democratic senators and representatives to control both houses of Congress promised the end of a long era of domination by an increasingly right-wing Republican Party or a denatured faction of the Democratic Party. For progressives, the thrill was indescribable, the hopes boundless, the excitement palpable.
One reason for the exuberant climate is that since the end of the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1968 — an administration marred by the murderous war in Vietnam but also marked by a quantum advance in civil rights for minorities and the enactment of the most liberal social legislation since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s — there has not been a president in the White House pushing a progressive agenda.
While in comparison with today’s Republicans, Johnson’s Republican successor, Richard Nixon, looks like a flaming liberal, he was nothing of the kind. The Nixon administration did create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — much maligned by today’s Republicans. Yet Nixon hardly had a progressive policy agenda, and as new White House tape recordings continue to surface, the depth and breadth of Nixon’s racial and ethnic prejudices are revealed. Ford’s short status quo presidency was understandably focused on reestablishing trust in government and fighting inflation. Carter, a Southern Democrat, did not have any progressive ideas besides promising to make the tax code more progressive, which he failed to do. George H. W. Bush also was a status quo president. Clinton, another Southern Democrat, was a faithful representative of the Democratic Leadership Council wing of the party, which argued that the road to the White House required that the Democrats move to the right. Accordingly, Clinton ended welfare as we knew it, to the delight of Republicans. The devastating effects of this legislation for the poor were masked during prosperous times but they are visible in stark relief during these times of economic crisis. Finally, the George W. Bush administration, with its huge tax cuts for the very rich, represented the very antithesis of progressive ideals.
Decades of frustration, along with youthful idealism, created very high expectations of an Obama administration. Obama himself did nothing to temper such expectations. He promised change we could (and wanted desperately) to believe in: to pull U.S. troops from Iraq, to close the infamous detention camp in Guantánamo within one year and end other “war on terror” brutalities carried out under Bush, to rescind tax cuts for the wealthy, to provide universal health care, and to enact humane immigration reform.
Republican intransigence and some administration missteps have guaranteed that Obama has scored at best an incomplete on almost all his promises. Then the Great Recession proved more intractable than the administration expected. And the Republicans, for political and ideological reasons, have denied the administration the tools to overcome the crisis.
The result is that the Republicans, blaming the administration and government spending for the stagnant economy, have come roaring back, fiercer and more reactionary than ever. What had a blink of the eye ago seemed like the dawn of a new progressive era now threatens to become the nightmare of a new reactionary ascendancy.
The evidence is everywhere, from the state legislatures to halls of Congress. Terrifying cuts in programs for the middle class and the poor, for the environment, indeed in everything except the military and homeland security are already being implemented or have been proposed. The highly unequal relations between capital and labor will become even more lopsided. Unless there is a big, popular backlash against the headlong rush toward plutocracy, the remaining bases of democracy will become a hollow shell. While in the Middle East authoritarian governments based on raw power have proven vulnerable to sudden disintegration under the weight of popular pressure, the frustrating experience of the Obama administration is a chilling demonstration of, how in the United States, the power of concentrated money can negate the popular will and neuter democracy itself.
