If I were Barack Obama, I would be frightened right now, not so much because of the likelihood that there would be serious Democratic losses in the 2010 election, or even a strong challenge to my re-election in 2012. No, I would be frightened because I would feel that I was in danger of losing control of my party, of my authority in government generally, and of the respect I had among the American people. I would feel — if I had my pulse on the nation — that the country was in an unstable and volatile situation and that things could go pretty haywire pretty fast, and I wouldn’t be sure if I could control them. I would be frightened that I had taken on a job that was beyond my capacities, if I were Barack Obama.

The fact is that there are proto-fascist elements in America today, and I don’t mean the Tea-Party group or any easy, rightwing target per se. I say “proto’” fascist because I don’t want to be alarmist, and because I don’t want to use the term “fascist” as a meaningless insult. There are, however, situations when proto-fascist or extra-legal authoritarian elements do seem to surface, and this is one of them. In what follows, I want to cursorily list a few of these elements and then say a word about what has brought about the present situation.

1. The anti-Congress mood: One of the most marked aspects of societies that move in authoritarian directions is contempt for Congress or Parliament.

Beyond the Pale

[Editor's Note: We are delighted to welcome Mark LeVine, Tikkun's longest serving contributing editor, to Tikkun Daily. Mark wears at least two hats and another one apart from musician is political prof and Middle East expert. His latest post at tikkun.org is "No Hope for Haiti" Without Justice."]

If the end of 2009 is any indication, 2010 is going to be a difficult year. Whether it’s the economy, foreign policy or just political and cultural pulse of America more broadly, a host of problems confronts our society from the political leadership to the average citizen that hardly anyone knows how or even wants to deal with honestly.

We need inspiration, and few things inspire people to action better than music. For my money, one of the best albums to get your year going in a positive way has to be Postcards, the latest release of the internationally acclaimed Klezmer/world music ensemble, Beyond the Pale.

Based in Toronto, Beyond the Pale’s sound is a paradox — acoustic yet explosive, grounded in Klezmer yet swimming in Balkan and bluegrass elements, with forays into everything from reggae to funk. With its blend of innovative original compositions with classics of the world music repertoire that group is surely one of the most accomplished ensembles on the world music scene today.

It’s not surprising that Beyond the Pale hails from Toronto. The city has a strong Jewish presence, which has been joined in recent decades by a major influx of immigrants from around the world, making Toronto one of the most cosmopolitan and culturally diverse in the world. Eric Stein, the multi-instrumentalist (mandolin, bass, cimbalom, guitar) founder of Beyond the Pale and a leading figure in Toronto’s Jewish music scene, explains that the city and the Jewish music scene there lend themselves to opening up to other cultures, which is reflected in the group’s name. “‘Beyond the Pale’ obviously refers to the Pale of Settlement, but that’s the start, not the end of the musical journey we’re on.” Indeed, while Klezmer is the foundation for the music, the majority of the band is not Jewish, but instead hails from a diverse background, particularly the former Yugoslavia.

“Toronto has been an amazing place to develop our music. It’s one of the only places where a band of such eclectic makeup could come together and do what it does because of all the different musical traditions and the freedom and openness that our cultural environment in Toronto facilitates.”

This is great and hugely promising. There’s a whole generation of young evangelicals out there who are different in certain ways from their parents. Gary Dorrien was talking about this on Monday night on the Tikkun Phone Forum (and I hope we can get the recording up soon). Young evangelicals are more accepting of gay relationships for example. They are also more focused on world poverty. This new initiative is exactly the kind of leadership they need. This is the whole of a press release from a new organization called the New Evangelical Partnership, with a cover note from Kristin Williams at Faith in Public Life, from whom I received it:

A potentially very influential new evangelical organization, with a bold vision, has just launched with a call for total cancellation of Haiti’s debt. The organization is significant in that it brings Rich Cizik (former VP at the National Association of Evangelicals) back fully into public life and into partnership with David Gushee, who led the evangelical witness against torture. Expect this organization to address a broad agenda and have influence in churches, academia and Washington. – Kristin

Richard Cizik was one of the main promoters of environmental consciousness, or Creation Care, at the National Association of Evangelicals and was forced to resign in late 2008 after he supported same-sex civil unions on NPR’s Fresh Air program.

Influential Evangelicals Call for Cancellation of Haiti’s Debt

New Evangelical Group Launches to Mobilize Christian Support for Loan Forgiveness

As the death toll of last week’s earthquake in Haiti climbs into the hundreds of thousands and the country’s infrastructure lies in ruins, prominent US Christians are calling on governments and international lending bodies to cancel the Haitian government’s foreign debt. A statement released today, organized by the recently-formed New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good and signed by more than 60 prominent Christian leaders, states in part:

In a stunning announcement this morning, President Obama unveiled a detailed proposal to heavily regulate big banks (which he called “fat cats”), forcing savings and loans to divest themselves of the investment banks that gambled away taxpayers’ savings, and forcing the largest banks to be broken up. The most heavily impacted financial institutions will be Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the like. It is probably not coincidental that these are the same banks that caused the near collapse of our financial institutions, sucked up billions in tax funds and then planned to hand the same amount out to top execs as bonuses.

Congressional Republicans obstruct this bill at their own peril. It is believed that Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, will make bank regulation an exception to his obstructionist strategy.

It is probably very significant that Obama made this announced flanked by Paul Volcker. Neither Geithner nor Summers were present, nor were they mentioned by name in the press release. Some of you may recall that Volcker, who advocated for increased regulation of banks and a large jobs bill, was frozen out of the administration at the outset by Geithner and Summers.

We lost a seat in MA, but we may have won the war. Certainly, we have won the right to engage in battle.

In other disturbing news, the Supreme Court ruled this morning that campaign finance restrictions are illegal, at least in the existing regulations. Congress is gearing up to pass new legislation.

It is unclear where health care reform stands. I am of the opinion that Obama’s very tough stance on banks will win him the cred he needs to finally pass a meaningful health care reform package, even if it means passing it in bits and pieces.

We moved him to the left guys! He’s very, very moved.

“If there is one place that never sleeps, it’s the dump. Being the final output of society, it constantly has to keep up with our waste.” — Erik Otto

Just south of America’s littlest big city, across the highway from where the 49ers play, a raucous city of refuse rages 24 hours a day, fed by a never-ending river of San Francisco’s garbage.

This is Recology, also known as the San Francisco dump.

Recology is on the front line of an effort by the city of San Francisco to achieve a state of garbage transcendentalism known as “Waste Zero” (nothing wasted, nothing buried, nothing burned). One innovative approach they have taken is to create an artist residency.

Artists are given studio space at the dump and given free reign to scour the landscape collecting whatever is useful to them in their process of creating artwork crafted from materials scavenged from San Francisco’s waste stream. Since 1990, 79 artists have participated in the program, transforming a generation’s trash into treasure.

The two current artists in residency, Erik Otto and Christina Mazza, will show their work this weekend at the Dump’s studio at 503 Tunnel Avenue in San Francisco.

During the residency, Christina Mazza photographed the many piles of raw materials she collected at the dump and posted them on her blog. One of those photos inspired Mazza’s wall mural of shredded packing paper (below).

After spending most of my day wondering how the Democratic Party managed to pull off the stunning achievement of losing Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to a far right wing former centerfold model, I am feeling reassured. The dust is settling and the panorama does not look so bad. In fact, the future looks far brighter to me than it has for weeks.

Obama has acknowledged that White House bears more than a little responsibility for the loss. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that he has scheduled a press conference tomorrow to announce his adoption of Paul Volcker’s strategy to break up and regulate “too big to fail banks.” (No this is not a hoax!)

President Barack Obama on Thursday is expected to propose new limits on the size and risk taken by the country’s biggest banks, marking the administration’s latest assault on Wall Street in what could mark a return, at least in spirit, to some of the curbs on finance put in place during the Great Depression, according to congressional sources and administration officials.

A push to break up and regulate the banks will be extremely popular with both progressives and independents. It will also place the party of “no” in the position of blocking reforms that their tea-party base are clamoring after. Plus, it will fix the economy.

While the White House and Harry Reid have announced they will not push through health care reform prior to seating Brown, this does not appear to be the act of capitulation that was initially reported. Barney Frank, who called on the Senate to drop health care reform efforts in the wake of the Massachusetts debacle, has retracted his remarks. He now says he will consider voting in favor of the Senate bill if Congress commits to amending the bill rapidly through reconciliation or other parliamentary procedures.

I know what Obama should do in the wake of his Massachusetts disaster: he should fire Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, and Larry Summers, and pivot 100% Populist and left: go for extending Medicare to 55 year olds, and dare the right to sustain a filibuster; go for a bank tax and regulation; start using the power of the government to create jobs, support state governments, put money into education, and start changing his really disastrous escalation in Afghanistan, and start trying to get on a realistic path to international security by demilitarizing the Middle East.

These policies would not only be right, in the moral sense, and realistic in the sense that they would be based on how the world really is, rather than the incredible folly of today’s American public sphere, they would be his best chance of rebuilding his majority and getting reelected.

Unfortunately, the best predictor of what a person will do is what they have done in the past, and for that reason, I don’t think Obama will do any of this. I think he will move to the right, just as he moved to the right when he was elected. He will kiss off the Left and position himself as the responsible rightist, in contrast to the Palinesque conservatives. He will place deficit reduction at the center of his program (“cost-cutting”), and step up the so-called war on terror. He will continue to cultivate Republicans like David Brooks. After all, we have already seen that this is a man who acts without principles, and who thinks almost always in terms of what might benefit him. I would love to be proven wrong.

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Mahatma Gandhi’s famous statement on the nature of God, which was broadcast to America from London in October 1931:

Below are some of my favorite quotes on a variety of different spiritual themes. I find it useful to reflect upon them as I think about the upcoming year. May you find wisdom and inspiration.

Presence
The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Embodiment
The Church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta.
- Eduardo Galeano

Paying Attention
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
- Simone Weil

Play
The truly great advances of this generation will be made by those who can make outrageous connections, and only a mind which knows how to play can do that.
- Nagle Jackson

What was the relationship between 18th and 19th century revivalists, one of the greatest of whom was George Whitefield (1714 - 1770) above, Americans' personal and communal spiritual development, and the rise of progressive politics, notably Abolitionism?

Two comments in my inbox this morning: the first was left here on our magazine site by Robert Bruce Burns:

I am a practicing Buddhist monk, and a member of our local Congregationalist Church here in Ledyard Connecticut, and a farmer as well. I ask all of us to please have patience. What Obama does, and what politicians do simply reflects who we are as a nation of humanity. We are learning, as things get rougher and rougher, and the lessons more lucid, we will move, as history dictates, in our time. Obama, a great leader, came too soon, his leadership skills have been stolen from us simply because we are not ready, be active, but be patient..WE WILL OVERCOME.

The second is from an email by a professor at UC Berkeley:

I heard the Democrats lost Massachusetts. When people are in pain they sure don’t act in their own self-interest. I wonder whether those times of pain could provide occasions for a healthy religion or spirituality to have a stronger influence..?

In response I can only say that the whole relationship between existential pain, personal and communal spirituality, and successful political appeals to our more hopeful and loving natures is a puzzle to me. I totally get Michael Lerner’s points in his post about yesterday’s loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat and I urge everyone to read it. I think he’s right and I wish this analysis was at the center of the public debate about politics. But what I don’t understand

Two months ago, I discussed on this blog how the sun was setting on the two state solution in Israel. At the time it felt a bit hypothetical; while Palestinian leaders and commentators were saying that a single state was the only solution, I didn’t find many in the mainstream (neither Stephen Walt nor Philip Weiss can yet be characterized as “mainstream”) who were saying anything in favour of the idea. But suddenly, things have changed and there’s all sorts of talk about it.

In The Nation, Harry Siegman (former executive director of American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America) writes a stunning piece that concludes that an “externally imposed solution” is the only route to two states, and that without such intervention only a single state solution is possible. Here’s a taste of the piece:

"G.O.P. Senate Victory Stuns Democrats" is the NY Times headline today. Sadly it did not stun many of us who had warned Obama that this is what his "realism" was leading to. Photo: Robert Spencer/Getty Images

The defeat of the Democrats’ choice to succeed Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate is being treated as though there is a decided shift of mass opinion to the Right in the U.S. But it is the Obama Administration, not the people who supported him in 2008, which moved to the Right–in the name of being pragmatists or realists. In the process they emptied their own agenda–in regard to health care, the environment, human rights, social and economic justice, and global peace–of the critical elements that made those programs sound hopeful. That left many of their supporters feeling confused, disillusioned, and unable to rally around a politics that seemed so very far from “the change you can believe in” that we had been promised.

Thousands of us saw this coming, and tried to warn Obama, but he wouldn’t listen.

On April 29, 2009, Tikkun and our education arm the Network of Spiritual Progressives bought the entire back page of a special supplement published in the Washington Post on the occasion of the 100th day of Obama’s presidency. We warned him that his presidency was in grave danger. Our point was simple and direct:

Your success depends on helping people believe that they can count on each other, that they are not alone in a ruthless world in which people are out for themselves, and there is a possibility of building a society based on kindness, generosity, and caring for each other. Unless your programs actually allow people to feel in their own lives that they are part of building a new society based on love and generosity of spirit, they will soon fall back into the older paranoid view–that we are all competing with each other and have to look out first for number one. And that will likely put them right back into the hands of the most conservative forces in this society.

It’s that simple, President Obama: if your policies do not give people a personal experience of caring and generosity, people will quickly succumb to the fearmongers who compete in the media over who can make people most afraid, most cynical, and most angry.

Our ad went on to tell President Obama that his supporters were beginning to feel immobilized because they cannot explain to themselves and others:

Why you are bailing out the bankers and the Wall Street crowd rather than prioritizing the needs of people who have lost their jobs and homes

Why you are not backing single payer (Medicare for Everyone) health reform but are instead preserving the interests of the health care profiteers and insurance companies that make our health care system so costly

MLK Day is drawing to a close. Have all the tributes and videos shaken us up, radicalized us, and renewed our resistance to the systems of imperialism and racism that Dr. King fought in his day?

At its best, MLK Day leads us to hear King’s powerful call for justice resounding in the present moment, to hear him urging us to dismantle our racist judicial/prison system and end the mass incarceration of black men, to oppose U.S. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to take seriously his idea that militarism leads to the “spiritual death” of a nation. At its very worst, the memorialization process reduces King’s legacy by offering a saccharine history lesson that leaves people thinking that King did all the necessary work and racism is over.

Jack & Jill Politics has done a particularly smart job of projecting Dr. King into the present rather than freezing him into the past. In response to the Washington Post‘s call for YouTube videos about Martin Luther King, Jr., blogger Baratunde Thurston (aka Jack Turner) created this video to draw attention to Dr. King’s radical critique of militarism and imperialism, which has such clear relevance to U.S. foreign policy today:

In response to one of the comments on my humorous post “Satan Responds to Pat Robertson on Haiti,” I found this article on the Voodoo view of the quake. Vodou is the earth-based religion of Haiti, so it makes sense that a Vodou priest would view his country as a manifestation of Mother Earth.

From the Washington Post:

Voodoo’s view of the quake in Haiti

By Elizabeth McAlister
Associate Professor of Religion, Wesleyan University

Vodouists in the Haitian diaspora are praying on their knees today, just as Catholics and Protestants are. Why did this devastating earthquake have to happen in Haiti, a country already so vulnerable that people live on a dollar a day, where on a good day, the government cannot employ or educate or provide health care for the majority? In Port-au-Prince, they are coping by searching and rescuing, sharing resources, crying, and praying. In Vodou most ritual is about finding balance, putting yourself into equilibrium with the spirits, with your family, and with yourself. In Haiti things are way out of balance. We might say that spirits of death have launched a coup d’état.

My friend and colleague, the artist, educator, and priest of the spirits, Erol Josué, has been praying and crying in Brooklyn. Through Twitter, Facebook, and his cell phone he has learned of at least twenty dead friends in several Port-au-Prince congregations. He told me today that for him, as a spirit-worker, this event is both scientific and symbolic. This is indeed a natural disaster for Josué. But the land in Haiti is a person, he said. We consider it a woman, our mother. “Haïti Chérie,” as the well-known ballad goes. She wants to know, ‘who will make me beautiful, put clothes on me, and take care of my children?’ When you mistreat her, and uproot her trees, when you give her too much responsibility, she is like a woman with cancer. The tumor metastasizes, and explodes.

For Erol Josué, the earthquake was mother nature, the land of Haiti, rising up to defend herself against the erosion, deforestation, and environmental devastation that have been ongoing for the last few decades. “Everybody was smashed to the ground,” said Erol. “Rich and poor. But look how symbolic this is. The Palace is smashed, the legislative building, the tax office, and the Cathedral. The country is crushed. We are all on our knees.” This Vodou priest is not speaking about divine retribution, as has Pat Robertson. God is not punishing us for disobedience. Erol is speaking about a giant natural rebalancing act, a reaction against human dealings with the ecosystem.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. – Dr. King

If Americans permit thought-control, business control, and freedom control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism. – Dr. King

Video interview with Dr. King (apologies for the 30 second ad at the start, it’s worth waiting it out):

We don’t talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. enough. When we do speak about him–on the few days surrounding the national holiday–the public discourse is a watered down, misleading and shallow version of his life. Like so much of our current news we will learn about Dr. King this holiday in repeatable soundbites deemed acceptable by the mainstream media. The “I Have a Dream” speech will be played, his civil rights legacy will be reflected upon and presidents and preachers will encourage us to engage in service from his grave site in Atlanta. Yes the King Holiday is a day to “serve”–a day on, not off as the King Center states. And yes of course Dr. King was a courageous champion for civil rights. But the true Dr. King is deeper, more complex and much more radical than you will ever hear about in mainstream press or will be taught about in school.

King resisted the many systems of domination of his day-war, capitalism, U.S. Imperialism, fundamentalism and racism. For this in addition to his progressive synthesis of faith and reason he is extremely relevant to us. But understanding his vision requires more than I can convey in one blog post and more than alternative media outlets can provide. Ultimately we must engage him through reading his own words, listening to his speeches and sermons and watching him being interviewed. In this post I am providing links to a number of interesting writings, interviews, speeches, papers and books that shed light on his radical views on war, Imperialism, Religion, poverty and capitalism.

Yesterday I posted some ecofeminist reflections on Avatar. Today I want to take on the racism issue that several Goddess Scholars as well as bloggers here at Tikkun Daily have raised. Originally I thought this movie was carefully crafted to bring the (mostly) white audience into an understanding that indigenous people already have — the importance, even sacredness, of their world ecology. The hero is Jake Sully, a human who becomes a Na’vi, thereby moving from one world to the other. He begins by betraying the people who ultimately become his own, so it’s not like his first actions are laudable — he’s actually an anti-hero in the beginning, not meant to be liked. But he realizes his mistake, and fights to rectify the situation.

This plot structure reminded me of one of the most subversive literary strategies I’ve encountered when it comes to women’s issues, used by Jean Auel in Clan of the Cave Bear. Every reader of this book has to identify with the female protagonist Ayla, even men, because she’s the only Cro-Magnon person in it; the rest of the characters are Neanderthals. As a result, men get to experience the degradation of rape, and hopefully understand it from a woman’s perspective.

I think the same sort of thing happens in Avatar. Indigenous folks don’t have any trouble identifying with the Na’vi, but for those white folks for whom that’s a stretch, they can identify with Jake, moving from invader to become a part of the land (indigenous). My first thought was that this narrative strategy might actually win us some allies in our environmental fights. And I recognized it as a part of the strategy that I use in my work — to invite people to become indigenous, i.e. a part of the land they inhabit, something we ALL need to do more of. Pat Monaghan on the Goddess Scholars list summarized this take on the the plot most succinctly by saying

A man, crippled because of his involvement with militaristic capitalism, is helped by five female powers (an Amazonian pilot, a sage scientist, a lover-huntress, a female shaman, and the Goddess herself) to discover that his culture is utterly wrong. Through them, he learns to give up the apparent privilege that comes with the culture and to literally become a being that was not only alien but defined as “enemy.”

Two revolutionaries: MLK and Malcolm X in 1964.

It’s extraordinary to me how such a polarizing figure as Martin Luther King has apparently been embraced by the whole society, with street and school names and a national holiday. Conservatives like the Heritage Foundation hold lectures and symposiums honoring his legacy. He is surely a much more radical figure than any of other people who are so widely celebrated by the American mainstream in its holidays and public life.

I could understand it a little more easily if he had “only” stood for full inclusion of African Americans in capitalist society, so that he would have measured it a complete success if there ever came a time when African Americans were rich, middle class and poor in the same ratio as whites, and had no more glass ceiling to the U.S. presidency and boardrooms than whites (a day that is still very far off, of course, despite our current president — as Pastor Lynice Pinkard said in church today about Obama, “Audre Lorde told us that we can never dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools”). The conservatives who praise MLK, apparently think this is what he did stand for. How many of them celebrate this quote by King?

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

In 1950, when Philip Roth graduated from Newark, New Jersey’s Weequaic High School (which he immortalized in Portnoy’s Complaint) and still in 1960 when Tikkun Editor Michael Lerner graduated from the school, Weequaic was known as one of the top schools in America. By 2000 it was one of the most violent schools in the 12th most dangerous city in the country. The movie “Heart of Stone” (which includes a spot with Michael Lerner) tells what happened next:

When Ron Stone took over as principal in 2001, gangs ruled the school. Crime and shootings were commonplace and during his first month on the job he watched students engage in a mass brawl in every hallway.

Stone knew his work was cut out for him and devised an unconventional plan to realize his vision of turning the school around. He started by working with the gangs and establishing the school as a no-violence zone. He then partnered with the committed alumni association — comprised of mostly older Jewish and younger African American alums — to raise funds for programs and college scholarships that helped transform the gang culture of the school to one of discipline and performance.

According to the latest National Youth Gang Survey, some 788,000 gang members and 27,000 gangs were active in more than 3,550 U.S. jurisdictions in 2007. As most gang members join between ages 12 and 15 prevention is critical and these kids’ experiences in school can potentially make a great difference in their lives.

In this trailer, wait 20 seconds for the sound to come on after all the awards the movie has garnered:

I’ve really been enjoying the Avatar discussion, both here on Tikkun Daily and on the Goddess Scholars List I belong to. I waited until I’d seen the film to read any of the posts, because I didn’t want to prejudice my reaction to it.

The GoddessScholars’ discussion reminded me a lot of a Women and Science Fiction class I taught in the 1980s. In my classes I always had a check-in before we began (despite the fact that they were university courses), because then we had deeper discussions. One of the odd things about the Women and Science Fiction class that semester was that there was a sizable minority (about 7 women out of 24) who were big football fans. When they checked in they would say things like, “I’m doing great. The Packers won.” Or: “I’m really down. The Vikings lost.”

The discussion I remembered as I was perusing the GoddessList concerned the subgenre of Sword and Sorcery. This subgenre is a lot like Dungeons and Dragons — magic is real, and life is more or less medieval, and battles take place with swords and magic (and battles take place pretty frequently). When I asked whether the class thought Sword and Sorcery was amenable to a feminist message, there was a clear split between the football fans and the rest of the class. The fans were sure this subgenre could be used to send a feminist message, while the others were astounded that anyone could hold such an opinion when the writing was rampant with violent images of battle.

Like my students, some of the women on the GoddessScholars list believe (as I do) that feminism is only compatible with pacifism, while others think that there are situations where war may be necessary and (perhaps) just. Some of the women on the list are also survivors of interpersonal violence (as I am, as a rape survivor) and didn’t want to submit themselves to film violence that might trigger post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As a result, some of the GoddessScholars have avoided Avatar despite its Goddess content.

I actually hold a different opinion than these polar opposites. Although I’m a pacifist, I believe there can be anti-war literature and films that involve warfare, for e.g. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. War is shown as so horrifying that almost any reader or viewer, even those who started out believing in the possiblity of a just war, ends up repudiating that view.

The dramatic downturn in Obama’s poll numbers, the growing support for rightist positions, the unbelievably close Senate race in Massachusetts, and the upcoming losses in the 2010 election all point to a Democratic disaster. Obama may yet save his Presidency by moving dramatically to the left, but barring that we have to look failure in the face. Whenever any great effort in which popular hopes have been invested goes down, there is an inevitable period of finger pointing and blame. It might be better now, before the shipwreck, to try to assess the causes.

We all know the dominant narrative. Expectations for Obama’s Presidency were unrealistically high. In a country that is fundamentally conservative, dubious about the role of government, deeply committed to markets, he encouraged a new New Deal. He went too far too fast. From the ground up, people revolted against big government, big spending and intrusive bureaucracies. A correction was inevitable.

This narrative is more or less shared by the right and the left. The right blames Obama for being a socialist, the liberals praise him for all he got done given how dysfunctional the system is. It is also a narrative shared by Obama. He won the nomination by promising “change we can believe in;” after becoming President he talked about how long a time it will take to bring change (“turning a tanker”); and now he and his followers talk about how a dysfunctional system prevents change at all.

I reject this narrative completely.