Thanks for Trump (and Biden), Obama

Part 1: “Wall Street Barry”

The fascist leader Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump’s menacing Fulton County Jail mug shot is like something out of the movie Clockwork Orange. The nasty pledge of sadistic retribution is written all over the putschist Trump’s scowl.  The promise should be taken seriously by anyone in power who has dared to criticize much less indict and prosecute the wannabe Amerikaner strongman for life, who will have a real chance of winning a second term in the White House even if he is convicted (twice perhaps and possibly before next year’s election) for trying to subvert and cancel the 2020 presidential election – for basically trying to overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law.

Looking at Trump’s lethal glower, I reflected, curiously enough, on the noxious fascism-incubating failure that was (as I predicted) the Barack Obama presidency.

When lefties in the “progressive Democrat” mold talk about how the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats hatched the Trumpenstein, they tend to focus on Hillary Clinton’s horrific 2016 “My Turn” campaign, a nauseating monument to corporate-neoliberal demobilization and arrogant over-confidence. The progressives score points for resisting the RussiaGate narrative, which preposterously postulates that Vladimir Putin and the late Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, not America’s own plutocratic fake democracy, put the malignant fascist Trump in the world’s most powerful and dangerous job.  But I doubt they are correct that their hero Bernie Sanders would have defeated Trump in 2016. Corporate money and media would have shift strongly to the Republican candidate, no matter how noxious, had the Democrats nominated the mildly social democratish neo-New Dealer Sanders.

Echoes of Weimar Germany Under The Empire’s New Clothes

“The Dread Sense of the Dark Clouds of Fascism” (Chomsky)

And I wonder why they give “Wall Street Barry” Obama a free pass for his equally if not more central and stomach-churning role in the disaster that was the 2016 election – a debacle that put a man who Noam Chomsky has reasonably called “the most dangerous criminal in human history” on center historical stage. 

It wasn’t just the lame corporate-imperialist Hillary campaign that performed that dark miracle. It was also the Obama presidency. I’m not talking about how Obama’s savage “Omaha Steaks” roasting of Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner lit a fire of vengeful determination under Trump’s rancid, Hitler-admiring ass.  And I’m not referring only to the vastly more important problem of how Obama’s skin color, Muslim-sounding surname, and clipped Ivy League elocution and arrogance fueled faux-populist white racism and racial paranoia across the nation’s “heartland” – a matter to which I will return in part of this essay.   

I’m also and mainly talking here about how Obama’s militantly neoliberal and “brown Clinton”esque service to the capitalist-imperialist rich and powerful helped further erode the Democratic Party’s already badly frayed attachment to working class, poor, and minority voters while turning a significant number of middle- and working-class whites towards the fake populism that is a core component of fascism.

I am reminded of a talk Chomsky gave in Madison, Wisconsin in the spring of 2010, as the racist Tea Party Republican phenomenon was gearing up for its historic victories in Congressional and state elections later that year. “I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” Chomsky said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home. “Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” Chomsky said. “For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy…The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis,” Chomsky observed, “are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels.” And President Obama was linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained:

“The financial industry preferred Obama to [Republican presidential nominee John] McCain [in 2008]…They expected to be rewarded and they were. Then Obama began to criticize greedy bankers and proposed measures to regulate them. And the punishment for this was very swift: They were going to shift their money to the Republicans. So Obama said bankers are ‘fine guys’ and assured the business world: ‘I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.’ People see that and are not happy about it.”

Chomsky reflected that “the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” was driving “the indignation and rage of those cast aside…People want some answers” and “They are hearing answers from only one place: FOX, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.”

Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic and drew a chilling parallel between it and the United States under Obama. “The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy,” he said. It unraveled with great speed: “In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote,” he said. “Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.” The German people fell prey to appeals to “the greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats, and carrying out the will of eternal providence.” When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian churches linked arms with National Socialism, “the center very quickly collapsed,” Chomsky noted. “No analogy is perfect,” he added but the echoes of fascism were “reverberating today…These are lessons to keep in mind.”

Let me pull out and repeat a key sentence in Chomsky’s talk: “The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.” And a key phrase: “the greatness of the nation”

That was no small part of Trump’s appeal: he promised to sweep in and smash all that dysfunctional bickering with a big manly hammer on behalf “the working man” and the holy nation state – to “Make America [the Nation] Great Again.”

“What’s the Dollar Value of a Starry-Eyed Idealist?”

If anything, Chomsky understated Obama’s connection to the financial masters. “It’s not always clear what Obama’s financial backers want,” the progressive journalist Ken Silverstein noted in a Harpers’ Magazine report titled “Obama, Inc.” in the fall of 2006, “but it seems safe to conclude that his campaign contributors are not interested merely in clean government and political reform…On condition of anonymity,” Silverstein added, “one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a ‘player.’ The lobbyist added: ‘What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?’”

The “dollar value” of Obama to his record-setting Wall Street funders turned out to be  priceless. In his book Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (2011), the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind told a remarkable story from March of 2009. Three months into Obama’s presidency, popular rage at Wall Street was intense and the leading financial institutions were weak and on the defensive. The nation’s financial elite had driven the nation and world’s economy into an epic meltdown in the period since Silverstein’s essay was published – and millions knew it. Having ridden into office partly on a wave of popular anger at the financial “elite’s” staggering malfeasance, BTO called a meeting of the nation’s top thirteen financial executives at the White House. The banking titans came into the meeting full of dread only to leave pleased to learn that the new president was in their camp. For instead of standing up for those who had been harmed most by the crisis – workers, minorities, and the poor – Obama sided unequivocally with those who had caused the meltdown.

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” Obama said. “You guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem. And I want to help…I’m not here to go after you. I’m protecting you…I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger.”

For the banking elite, who had destroyed untold millions of jobs, there was, as Suskind puts it, “Nothing to worry about. Whereas [President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt had [during the Great Depression] pushed for tough, viciously opposed reforms of Wall Street and famously said ‘I welcome their hate,’ Obama was saying ‘How can I help?’” As one leading banker told Suskind, “The sense of everyone after the meeting was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob” (emphasis added).

The massive taxpayer bailout of the super fat cats would continue, along with numerous other forms of corporate welfare for the ultra-rich, powerful, and parasitic. This state-capitalist largesse was unaccompanied by any serious effort to regulate their conduct or by any remotely comparable bailout for the millions evicted from their homes and jobs by the not-so invisible hand of the marketplace. No wonder 95 percent of national U.S. income gains went to the top 1% during Obama’s first term.

It was a critical moment. At a key moment of obvious financial capitalist system failure, Obama gave the U.S. populace what William Greider memorably called “a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t.” Americans “watched Washington rush to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it. ‘Where’s my bailout,’ became the rueful punch line at lunch counters and construction sites nationwide. Then to deepen the insult, people watched as establishment forces re-launched their campaign for ‘entitlement reform’ – a euphemism for whacking Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid.” Americans also “watched” as Obama moved on to pass a health insurance reform (the so-called Affordable Care Act) that only the big insurance and drug companies could love, kicking the popular alternative (single payer “Medicare for All”) to the curb while rushing to pass a program drafted by the Republican Heritage Foundation and first carried out in Massachusetts by the arch 1 percenter Mitt Romney. Not long thereafter, the American people “watched” Weimar Obama offer the proto-fascistic Teapublicans he’d empowered bigger cuts in Social Security and Medicare than they asked for as part of his “Grand Bargain” offered during the elite-manufactured debt-ceiling crisis.

“Make Me Do It”

It was at that point that hundreds of thousands of mostly younger Americans had received enough of Obama’s “blunt lesson about power” to join the loosely organized neo-populist Occupy Wall Street Movement, which sought “progressive change” through direct action and loose, Internet-based social movement-building rather than corporate-captive electoral politics. We will never know how far Occupy might have gone since it was shut down by a federally coordinated campaign of repression that joined the Obama administration and hundreds of mostly Democratic city governments in the infiltration, surveillance, smearing, takedown and eviction of the short-lived movement – this even as the Democrats stole some of Occupy’s rhetoric for use against Romney and the Republicans in 2012. Eight months prior to the crushing of Occupy, BTO could not bring himself to offer a word of support for the great public worker rebellion and movement that rose up against the anti-union policies of the arch-right-wing Koch-snorting governor Scott Walker in Madison, Wisconsin.

The repression of Occupy was a profound rebuke to the silly leftish liberals who told us from privileged perches at places like The Nation and The American Prospect that Obama, like (supposedly) Franklin Roosevelt in the early middle 1930s, wanted grassroots pressure from workers and citizens to “make me do it” – that is, to make him undertake progressive and social-democratic policies. Well, the young Americans who took over city parks on behalf of “the 99%” made Obama and Democratic city governments do it, alright, if “it” means crush popular protest.

Five years later the revisionist “radical” academic “abolitionist” and Obama backer and apologist  Angela Davis continued the Obama mythology by arguing (in her 2016 book Freedom is a Constant Struggle) that the problem wasn’t the neoliberal imperialist president but rather the failure of social movements to make him do the progressive things he supposedly wanted to do. I guess Professor Davis didn’t read my early 2008 book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, which exhaustively detailed Obama’s history as a dedicated neoliberal imperialist[1] and objective white supremacist[2] on the wrong side of each of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had called “the triple evils that are interrelated”: racism, capitalism[3], and imperialism.

Just to be clear, this was the neoliberal and neo-Weimar enablement of fascism not simply by Obama but by American capitalism-imperialism speaking through one of its specially selected vacuous vessels and the imperial capitalist government he nominally headed. Capitalism produces fascism by (among other things) simultaneously creating great crises that require big government intervention while de-legitimizing “democracy” in the eyes of millions through the corrupting and democracy-cancelling impact of concentrated wealth on politics and policy.  The door is thereby recurrently opened to more openly authoritarian “solutions” and maximalist leaders who claim to be the “chosen ones” who “alone can fix” broken nations.  The hyper-narcissistic billionaire Trump was and is no anti-Wall Street “populist,” but he campaigned somewhat effectively as one in 2015 and 2016, cleverly claiming that his own personal wealth meant that he couldn’t be bought off as he acted to smite the “globalists” and restore economic greatness to the American industrial heartland.

Thanks in no small part to Obama’s cringing eight-year neoliberal record and not just to Hillary’s creepy neoliberal campaign, the mantle fell to Trump of what Christopher Hitchens once aptly called “the essence of American politics” – “the manipulation of populism by [capitalist] elitism.”

“It Doesn’t Take a Lot of Courage to Aid Those Who Are Already Powerful, Already Comfortable”

Fewer than five months after “handing the baton” of “democracy” (Obama’s language in a White House Rose Garden speech given after Trump’s election victory) to a demented, malignantly narcissistic, racist, sexist, and authoritarian demagogue he all-too privately knew to be a “fascist,” Obama received a “Profiles in Courage” award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston. “We live,” Obama said in his acceptance speech at the Kennedy Library, “in a time of great cynicism about our institutions…It’s a cynicism that’s most corrosive when it comes to our system of self-government, that clouds our history of jagged, sometimes tentative but ultimately forward progress, that impedes our children’s ability to see in the noisy and often too trivial pursuits of politics the possibility of our democracy doing big things…It actually doesn’t take a lot of courage,” Obama observed, “to aid those who are already powerful, already comfortable, already influential.”

How freaking cynical was that?

Nobody in the tuxedo- and evening gown-wearing crowd stood up to tell “Wall Street Barry” that the U.S. had no “system of self-government,” no real “functioning democracy” to speak of. Nobody rose to observe that – as the mainstream political scientists Martine Gilens and Benjamin Page had shown six years into Obama’s presidency – the nation had for decades been “an oligarchy” where wealthy “elites” and their corporations “rule” and “ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does.” Nobody stood up to note that “Wall Street Barry” Obama’s Citigroup presidency had been dedicated to serving and lining the pockets of “those who [were] already powerful, already influential.” Or that his militant allegiance to the rich and powerful (so extreme that he spent the last two years of his presidency trying to push through the arch-corporate globalist Trans-Pacific Partnership) fed the very cynicism he claimed to denounce, helping thereby to pave the way for Trump.

“You Have to Tend to This Garden of Democracy”

The Kennedy Library speech was not the first example of noxious self-whitewashing irony in Obama’s post-presidential comments amidst the fascist takeover of the White House. In December of 2017, Obama gave his first major public address since Trump’s election at the posh and corporate Economic Club of Chicago—a fitting setting since his political rise had depended on his connections with Chicago’s wealthy elite (see the first two chapters of my aforementioned 2008 book). “You have,” Obama told his well-heeled business class audience during a Q&A after the talk, “to tend to this garden of democracy. Otherwise,” Obama warned, “things can fall apart fairly quickly.” By “fall apart fairly quickly,” Obama meant that the country could descend into authoritarianism and even, though he did not use the word, fascism. The former president made a somewhat awkward and indirect but unmistakable reference to the rise of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. “We’ve seen societies where that happens,” Obama said, adding this: “Now, presumably there was a ballroom here in Vienna in the late 1920s or ’30s that looked pretty sophisticated and seemed as if it, filled with the music and art and literature that was emerging, would continue into perpetuity. And then 60 million people died. An entire world was plunged into chaos…So you got to pay attention—and vote!” It was quite an historical reference, rendered more ominous by Obama saying, “here in Vienna.”

Nobody in the audience stood up to point out the obvious: the corporate neoliberal globalist Barack Trans-Pacific Partnership Obama had spent his eight years in the White House poisoning the so-called garden of democracy, helping render his party’s progressive and democratic pretense transparently inauthentic in ways that demobilized Democratic voters and thereby paved the way for the virulently racist fake-populist Trump.

Here we are six years later. Another corporate-imperialist[1] president, Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden, stands in danger of “handing off the baton” of unmentionably bourgeois and fading bourgeois “democracy” to the orange-hued fascist maniac again – a far more dangerous Trump this time, as I’ve been trying to explain. We are stuck with the dismal, dollar-drenched horror of “Status Quo Joe,” the ancient, lumbering, and massively uncharismatic and deeply conservative neoliberal imperialist Biden, who was probably put in the White House by Covid-19 (and perhaps also by Derek Chauvin) and whose tepid corporate nothingness and insipid centrism have all too predictably brought his 2023 public approval numbers so far down (lower than Jimmy Carter’s in 1979) that he might actually be defeated (with the usual assistance of the right-tilted democracy-flunking Electoral College) next fall by a fascist beast possibly convicted of trying to overthrow US electoral “democracy” and rule of law, such as they are. (Not that I pretend to know what’s going to happen in 2024-25, for how could I? We are in uncharted waters given the trials of Trump and he remarkable polarization afoot from top to bottom).

And to whom do we owe the bourgeois bumbler and reckless imperialist Biden’s precarious position on the center stage of history?  That’s right – “Wall Street Barry,” the Dollar O’bomber[1]. The 44^th POTUS acted to make sure that Biden, who he rescued from the condescension of posterity by making “Sleepy Joe” his running mate in 2008, was the Dems’ NOT BERNIE candidate in 2020 (see the sixth chapter of my 2020 book, Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement).   

Just another reason for the grateful masses to say “Thanks, Obama!”

Part 2 of this essay will appear tomorrow.  It tackles a different but intimately related aspect of Obama’s contribution to Trump’s rise to power: the 44^th president’s betrayal of Black American and consequent demobilization of the Black vote in 2016.

Notes

+1. Obama’s dedicated and foundational imperialism is covered at length in Chapter 4 (titled “How Antiwar? Obama, Iraq and the Audacity of Empire) of my 2008 book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (New York: Routledge, 2008) and  Chapter 3 (titled “Empire’s New Clothes: Deeds and Words in Obama’s Foreign Policy”) of my 2010 book The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (New York: Routledge, 2010).

+2. See Chapter 3 (titled “How ‘Black’ is Obama? Color, Class, Generation, and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era”) in Street, Barack Obama and the Future and Chapter 4 (titled “Barack Obama, the Myth of the Post-Racial Presidency, and the Politics of Identity”) in Street, The Empire’s New Clothes.  

+3.  See Chapters 1 (titled “Obama’s ‘Dollar Value’”) and 2 (“The Other Hidden Primary”) in Street, Barack Obama and the Future and Chapters 1 (“Business Rule as Usual”) and 3 (“Corporate-Managed ‘Health Reform’”) in Street, The Empire’s New Clothes.