final thoughts before the count

So here it is. In twenty-four hours or less we may have elected Barack Obama president of the USA. Besides the Grant Park party for a million, and the four years of occasional traffic snarls that would accompany a President Obama traveling by motorcade and/or helicopter to and from Hyde Park, there is the feeling (already!) of a let down.

We on the Left knew all along that we would be disappointed by an Obama presidency. And yet we jumped on the grassroots end of the campaign, contributing time, labor, creativity, and money

1) because of Sarah Palin
2) for the chance to elect a man embodying the multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial American reality
3) because anybody the Right negatively links to Bill Ayers and ACORN deserves our support
4) because it is about time we had president who is from a Northern big city
5) and because...did I mention Sarah Palin???

It will surely be a sweet defeat of the Right, but it won't be a victory for the Left. I've read and mostly bought into the analysis that FDR's early administration was a pitch-perfect co-optation of the socialist Left by the Democratic Party liberals. But never did I understand the conditions of that cooptation until now. I can see it happening. Bill Clinton's presidency didn't even offer the pretense of a Left, or rather only granted the most pathetically shallow lipservice (such as playing Fleetwood Mac at the inaugural ball), and as a result the radical activist underground went its own way in the Nineties, coming out in full flower in Seattle in '99.

But here we have the prospect of a president with the talents and vision to bring new and needed programs into being, and Congress that just might be willing to go along. Not another New Deal, but at least some kind of serious re-investment in the national body. Naomi Klein's words, quoted on John Cusack's blog, are worth keeping in mind.

"I have been talking about the need for a progressive shock doctrine in speeches a lot. I call it disaster populism and the key difference is democracy. The right has been using shocks to suspend and sidestep democracy, declaring states of emergency and the progressive use of shock to enlarge and deepen the democratic space to bring more people into the political process. This is why it is important to remember that the New Deal did not come only from kindly elites handing it down from on high, but also because those elites were under massive popular pressure from below. We can all use shock and crisis to move the political direction of the country, but the progressive route is a democratic one, the right is an authoritarian one, even if it takes place within an electoral democracy."

So how can we maintain a distance from the candidate we supported and worked for, now that the Right is reduced to a fringe element? How does the Left, as the ascendent extreme, demand and get the results that the social conservatives never were able to?

I'll be pondering this thought as I drive in the opposite direction, away from Chicago and Grant Park, listening to the election returns on the car radio.