(a new People's History poster by Tim Simons)

The Egyptian Revolution is the latest, and most important of a new type of revolution that originated in the 1960s: spontaneous, bottom-up, decentralized, youth-dominated, non-ideological, non-violent, fueled by new media, and profoundly generative of dignity, media, social theory, and new moral practices. Predecessors include the French May of 1968, the Philippine Revolution of 1986, the East European and Chinese Revolutions of 1989, the Palestinian intifada of 2000 and the Tunisian Revolution of 2011. Unlike previous revolutions, made by parties and states, no one owns this new type of revolution, which is anti-authoritarian, anti-patriarchal, and even anti-organizational, at root.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 was another example of this new, post-Marxist revolutionary wave. It seemed to come from nowhere, to be coordinated in new, polymorphous ways, and to represent the deepest instincts of youth. The median age in the Middle East is 22; overwhelmingly, most people in the world are young. Added to that, most are people of color. Given Obama’s place as the anti-war candidate, the person who called not just for a changed policy but a changed mind-set, those who supported Obama hoped that he represented this coming wave in global politics. No one could have predicted the wonderful news from Egypt but anyone who traveled and read and followed the media must have known that this sort of shift was in the works, and it remains in the works, for the rest of the Middle East, for Iran, for Thailand, for Burma, for Mexico, for Colombia and elsewhere.

All one need do to understand the Obama effect is to imagine that George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney are still running the country.

Egypt, the oldest continuous civilization in the world, mounts one of the largest and most amazing outbursts of democracy that the world has ever seen. The United States — which has supported a police state and a military dictatorship in Egypt since the late nineteen seventies, to the tune of about one and a half billion dollars a year — hijacks the revolution by bonding with the dictator, his chief henchman, and both the police and the military. The usual means of dealing with revolutions are mobilized. For a few days there are gangs of thugs, a few leaders are jailed for a while, but mostly just stall them off, buy out a few leaders, talk a good line about reform, count on the inertia and fear and daily pressure that people face — half the country makes under two dollars a day — and just wait them out.

Do you think that American leftists and progressives would allow Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld to so obviously deny a popular and inspiring revolution in one of the most important spots in the world? Or would they not recognize that what Bush and his gang were doing was nothing more than continuing America’s disgusting, anti-democratic support for police regimes? Would they not call the former president out?

Let me tell you a story from the 1960s. As so often happened in those fabled times, students at a major university occupied the university President’s office to protest a war-research laboratory. After a few hours, the President appeared and said “Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention. You have really performed a public service. This is what democracy is about. I am going to study this question now. Certainly, there will be reforms.” The students stood up and began to disperse. Then one of them confronted the President: “How stupid do you think we are?” he asked. The sit-in continued. I actually don’t know what happened to the lab.

When will Americans stand up and say to Obama, “How stupid do you think we are?” From the first moment that the demonstrations appeared, everyone knew that everything rode on the attitude taken by the American administration. Every word spoken by Obama, Biden, Clinton and others would be scrutinized as to how much of a revolution the Americans would allow. Of course, the administration has constantly revised its position so as to stay ahead of the demonstrations, and to give the appearance of supporting the aspirations for democracy and freedom that are so palpable and moving in Tahrir Square, but anyone who thinks that that public face represents the actual American maneuvering does not understand history.

Fair comment today on Al Jazeera

I feel as if I know the young people who organized the demonstrations in Egypt. I am a Professor of History at the New School for Social Research, which has been connected to the forces of protest and revolt for almost a century. Begun by figures who were fired for speaking out against World War One, it welcomed refugee Jews from Germany in the thirties, sixties refugees and survivors, Samizdat East Europeans and Russians and intellectual avant-gardes. Today it has many politically-oriented students from Latin America, Japan, China and the Middle East. There is no litmus test, but the overall culture is on the left. Arendt, Foucault, Marx, Habermas, feminism supply the normal coin of the realm.

Last month I visited Ecuador. The occasion was a government-sponsored conference entitled “New Directions for the Left.” I had the honor of meeting many figures in the government. They reminded me of my students: young, smart, political, savvy. They are trying to build a government based on social justice, economic redistribution, recognition of indigenous rights, feminism and ecology. They identify themselves as a “new left.” In Egypt, of course, the mix would be somewhat different, with a strong dose of social conservatism at least, and a place for Islamism.

In 2008 I along with many other Americans hoped we were electing a President who could see the winds of change, and recognize that a new generation was coming into its own all over the world. At that point it was very hard to imagine that a young, educated African-American with a Muslim name could be anything but sympathetic to the aspirations one sees among youth everywhere in the non-Western world. That Barack Obama chose to identify himself with everything reactionary in American life, with the banks and the military, with the very forces that had put people like Mubarak in power and kept them in power for decades, this was a tragedy.

Obama’s statement on Egypt was exactly what we have come to expect from him: a progressive veneer combined with cynical sycophancy toward all established power. After saying that the US stands up for “universal human rights” — the now familiar battle charge of American exceptionalism — he went on to say, “I just spoke to President Mubarak, after his speech, and told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to his words. Violence will not address the grievances of the Egyptian people. What’s needed is concrete steps that advance the rights of the people.”

Given that every commentator has reported that what the crowds demand is not “reforms” but that Mubarak must go, everyone who understands diplomacy understands that Obama’s statement was a strong expression of US support for Mubarak. Biden played the bad cop and was even clearer. He said Mubarak should not resign, that the protests throughout the Middle East had no relation to one another, and that it was wrong to compare them to the protests that ended Communism. Mubarak he reiterated, is “no dictator.”

This was not a defeat for progressives. With a few exceptions such as Russ Feingold, and Nancy Pelosi, there were no progressives on the ballot. This was defeat for the corporate politics that Obama, Geithner, and Schumer represent. No one should mourn for a defeat of this politics.

Obama lost because he made the most elementary mistake that a president can make. He ignored, dissed, and was even ashamed of, his base. He was put in office by people who wanted, not change in general, but change toward peace and away from unregulated markets. Once he became President he ignored them in favor of the bankers and generals, insisting we have to get beyond left and right. As a result, all the ideas, all the passion, all the hard work was on the other side. Very few progressives should be upset to see him rebuked today, even if they are worried about the future.

There are many indications that large numbers of Americans are depressed about their prospects. Democrats, historically the party of hope, are 20% less likely to vote than Republicans. 15% of the country is unemployed, and no one outside the financial industry feels good about his or her economic prospects. Something close to 70% of Americans tell pollsters that they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Large numbers of Americans, including even immigrants, are afraid that their children will have worse prospects in life than them. International affairs specialists tell us that America’s global position is in decline.

All of these indicators are important but none of them explain the core problem: the affect of depression that is at the center of American life today. That affect has a specific cause; it is not the result of a series of adversities. It is rooted in the institution that historically has been integral to the country’s optimistic, “can-do,” forward-looking character: the Presidency.

The problem started with George W. Bush or, more specifically, with the opportunity that 9/11 gave Bush to remake American society and government in the most drastic ways. Certainly the young men who attacked the World Trade Center hoped that the United States would overreact to their provocation, but even in their wildest dreams they never could have imagined anything as stupidly self-destructive as what ensued. Like a blinded Cyclops, an over-muscled nation rose from the debris to mindlessly rain technological destruction on another colored people. With a great roar of self-righteousness, a victim psychology, a martyrology, was used to justify the discarding of civil liberties, the institution of torture, wiretapping, surveillance, and every variety of illegal power. When one adds to this the setting in overdrive of the mercenary greed in place since Reagan, the corruption of money, real estate, accounting, corporate law, and most forms of investing – it became very hard to be an American during the Bush years.

But the one thing Bush did not destroy was hope. On the contrary, the longer that grinning caricature of a Wild West sheriff stayed in office, the deeper and the more intense the longing for change became. Bush created many of the problems we are saddled with today, but he did not create the hopelessness. That was Obama’s contribution.

Scientists have discovered a sixth reason why the Democrats are in trouble. Barack Obama is using his pre-frontal cortex while the rest of us are all caught up in the limbic system, the reptilian brain that triggers emotion. As the President explained to a group of Democratic donors in Massachusetts: “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared.” Apparently it never occurred to the hard-wired, no-drama community organizer, that if people were scared it was his job to reassure them, not offer “facts and science and argument,” but what do I know.

[See here for Eli Zaretsky's other five reasons. Ed]

1. Democrats thought that when they elected Barack Obama he would just snap his fingers and solve all the problems. Democrats don’t understand that change takes time.
2. Democrats don’t realize that no President in history faced the problems Obama faced. It was like the Civil War, the two world wars, Vietnam and the Great Depression all wrapped up in one.
3. Obama made the right decisions, even if they were not popular. Democrats don’t understand that a President has to make the right decisions.
4. The Republicans opposed the President, instead of helping him consolidate a victory that would have made the Democrats the majority party for a generation. Democrats don’t understand how mean the Republicans can be,
5. Obama is a positive thinker. Democrats are sourpusses, always seeing glasses as half-full.

The question: how stupid does the White House think rank and file Democrats are?

If there is one thing that characterizes American politics today it is the idea that leftists are idiots. This, of course, is a long-term derivative of the original idea, formulated in the late forties, which was that leftists are traitors. The original charge has been endlessly repeated, worked over, softened, even sublimated so to speak, so that now it seems benign: oh yes, the leftist, still in the playpen, the charming but no longer dangerous idiot of American politics.

Given the widespread assumption that the real action in American politics lies in the struggles between “realistic,” “mature,” “problem-solving” “progressives” and Neanderthal Republicans, one has to wonder why it is so important for defenders of Obama to scapegoat leftists. Why, in other words, they have to explain that there are “limits” to what any President can do, that it is “necessary to compromise,” that previous periods of reform also had “fits and starts,” as if they were speaking to children who know nothing of politics, history and human nature.

How are we to understand the malaise, the feelings not only of disappointment but also of disinterest, depoliticization and even hopelessness that the Obama Presidency has brought in its wake? The “liberal” supporters of Obama, such as David Remnick, Hendrick Herzberg or Jonathan Alter give us two contradictory explanations. On the one hand, the campaign raised too-high expectations, there was bound to be a let down. On the other hand, they also tell us that Obama has been a spectacularly successful President, “delivering” health care, financial reform, and saving us from a Great Depression. In either case “we” – the disappointed Obama supporters, in a word, the left – are subtly reproached for our immaturity, our lack of realism; their’s is a sort of: “thank-you-very-much-for-your-help-in-the-campaign-but-lets-leave-things-to-the-grown-ups-until-the-next-campaign” approach.

There is a deeper way to understand the Obama malaise, however, one that frees us from focusing on the man, and helps us to see our society. That way is to situate the campaign, and the Presidency, historically. In this regard no context is more important than the one that remains the deepest, most important and most unmastered part of our collective history and imagination – the 1960s. For the Obama Presidency was inconceivable without the sixties, and it is precisely the sixties that Obama has repudiated.

The greatest division in America today lies between people who have genuine political values, like Shirley Sherrod, and people who live by images and market values, like Fox News and like the Obama administration. Of course, it is true, that people like Sherrod are rare. But as Bob Moses used to say when in 1960 he first ventured into the frozen heart of segregationist Mississippi, if we could find ten people willing to die, we could end segregation in America. Charles Sherrod, Shirley Sherrod – that made two; Bob made three, and the other seven were eventually found.

Anyone who listens to Shirley Sherrod’s extraordinary speech will recognize in it the authentic cadence of the civil rights movement. Born in rural Georgia, Sherrod spent her childhood ogling Northern Negroes who visited the South in rented Cadillacs. She swore to herself that she would leave the farm, leave rural life, leave Georgia and go North but all that changed when, in 1965, when Sherrod was seventeen, her father was murdered. She swore to stay in the South and devote her life to civil rights, which she did. Sherrod’s decision echoed the deepest moment of the civil rights movement, not Thurgood Marshall’s magnificent and ultimately successful pleas before the Supreme Court, not Martin Luther King’s transcendent and soul-uplifting leadership of the Atlanta and Birmingham marches, but those young, mostly but not entirely black kids, who left school, left jobs, left home and went to live in segregated, rural black neighborhoods, over which pistol-toting sheriffs and plantation bullies ruled with impunity.

There is a name for what people like Sherrod did: community organizing.

How embarrassing for America. For eight years their President was a kind of junior bully, a swaggering, bow-legged, sarcastic naïf, who made most of the country ashamed of their nationality. One apologized continuously for being that pariah in global culture — the American, the one with the drones and the barbed wire and the mines and the maimed children and the spy systems and the banks. One watched Europeans treat America as a Walmart nation, showing up for weekends with empty suitcases to buy the cheap goods, but with contempt as well as shame for its tawdry values, its greed, its mercenary and bullying ways, its sneakiness.

And then hope appeared. Just as in the cowboy stories and other American romances, a stranger came out of nowhere, a hero, someone who everyone believed could save the day. Pas si vite, mon vieux. As an American, one could hold one’s head up again with a deeply intelligent leader, who knew how to use our precious language, who could speak truth to power, someone who was also black, and therefore could redeem us, not just for eight years but for four hundred. Be still my beating heart, Americans thought throughout the campaign: Get out of his way, Hillary.

By dismissing McChrystal, did President Obama reassert civilian authority over the military, pull his “national security” team together, and enhance the power of our democracy? So it would seem. But in fact, the dismissal provides a classic example of what Marxists used to call ideology: it represents reality in an inverted form. The truth is that the dismissal of McCrystal is another giant step in the defense establishment’s control over American policy. Let me explain.

The key thing is to understand the Rolling Stone story. The news accounts have provided a series of speculations concerning “how this could have happened” including the role of alcohol, hardworking military men unwinding after 18-hour days, or (my favorite) the Icelandic volcano that supposedly trapped McChrystal, his team and the reporter (Michael Hastings) in a Paris hotel for a week during which the General and his aides let their guard down.

In fact, nothing like that occurred. Duncan Boothby, McCrystal’s PR man who has since resigned, carefully arranged for the story. From the moment that Hastings arrived he was shocked at how open and candid McChrystal and his aides were about their vituperative opinions. According to Eric Bates, Rolling Stone‘s editor, every insult in the piece including the view that McChrystal found Obama distant, uninformed and intimidated, and the slams at Eikenberry, Biden and Holbrooke were repeatedly run by McChrystal for approval, which was forthcoming. Many other things that were said were off the record, and none of these were printed. In other words, this was no careless thoughtless loose talk. McChrystal and his aides deliberately planted this story, pretty much as it was written. The question is what were they thinking?

It is not possible to imagine a better symbol of the miserable condition of the United States today than an oil company destroying a huge swath of the American ecosystem, society and economy, while the President sits by helplessly, saying that he is meeting with experts in order to find out “whose ass to kick.” Obviously, Obama should have seized all the equipment that BP had available to plug the leak, deputized their engineers, brought in the US navy and coast guard, and spent as necessary to deal with the problem within days, or even hours of the original spill, when it became clear that BP was in over its head.

That is what Lincoln did in 1861 when he took control of the railroads and telegraph lines around Washington DC, what Wilson did in 1916 when he nationalized the defense industries, what Roosevelt did in 1941 when he seized an aviation plant, and again in 1944 when he seized Montgomery Ward, it is what Truman did in 1947 when the government took control of the steel industry, in a sense it is what Reagan did in 1980 when the government fired the air controllers. These acts were all controversial but that is what strong Presidents did when facing threats no less severe than those in the Gulf today.

Why hasn’t Obama done anything like that? Ultimately the answer depends on understanding his individual character, but there are at least four large conditioning factors that will help us understand, if not the man, then the event.

What do Obama’s three greatest failures — health care, Afghanistan and the oil spill — all have in common? Each one was preceded by an elaborate attempt on Obama’s part to portray his decisions in non-partisan, quasi-scientific and technical terms. Each one was presented as seizing a middle-ground between unreasonable partisans on the two extremes. Of all of the masks worn by this carefully constructed persona, that of the man of reason is the most prominent. Let us look at how it works.

At least since the New Deal, progressives argued for health care as a universal right. They did not want to live in a world where their fellow citizens, or even their fellow human beings, died because they didn’t have access to doctors or medicine. Obama dropped this emphasis for one that foregrounded cost-cutting. According to him, evidence-based scientific research would be used to mandate medical decisions. The possibility that raising the level of the country’s health might cost money, not save money, was never directly considered.

Obama’s first expansion of the Afghan War occurred only a few weeks after taking office, but his second large-scale expansion was preceded by an elaborately choreographed set of seminars in which all the different options were supposedly considered. Those who still believe that this was anything more than a charade have to tell the rest of us what Obama learned from his seminars, i.e., in what way his post-seminar understanding of “the good war,” as he calls Afghanistan, differs.

As to the oil spill, Obama announced his support for offshore drilling on March 10, unfortunate timing for him as the BP spill occurred a few weeks later. In his announcement he said he would provide “order and certainty to offshore exploration and development … ensuring we are drilling in the right ways and the right places.” As to spills, he promised we would “employ new technologies that reduce the impact of oil exploration…. And we’ll be guided not by political ideology, but by scientific evidence.”
Once again, we got the message: the non-Bush, the thoughtful ratiocinator.

Imagine a woman who has been in an abusive marriage for so long that she no longer knows that she is in one. Her husband defines the world for her. She is on her knees all the time, anticipating his wishes, giving him what ever she has, telling him what he wants to hear, working overtime to please him. Her world is grey, depressing, anxiety-ridden and dark. She has forgotten the dreams of her childhood, and she doesn’t know there is an alternative.

One day she meets someone who offers hope – a minister, a rabbi, a therapist, a friend. Suddenly everything brightens and it seems that she can find a way out. She will leave her husband, or transform the relationship. One way or another she will regain her sense of self. But then it doesn’t happen. The person who was expected to help her tells her that there isn’t much that can be done, and besides he or she has already done so very much for her. That’s the way the world is, she is told. You can’t really change things that much.

The American people today, a year and a half after electing Obama, are in the position of this woman. A concentrated claque of banks, insurance companies, corporations, and the Pentagon dominates their entire world. For two thirds of a century, after winning their great victory in World War Two, they have known nothing but war. They have been told, and they believe, that they live in a world overgrown with enemies of their “interests,” meaning the interests of their rulers. For most of that time, the enemy was an ill-defined “communist conspiracy,” a catch-all phrase that included anti-colonial nationalists, pan-Arabs, Latin American state-builders, and simply those who criticized America. Today there is scarcely a nation in the world in which they have not placed land mines, barbed wire, tanks, and stands of explosives; there is no sea they have not polluted with blustering, oil-dripping ships; no quartile of near space is not surfeited with their satellites; no half-formed nation they have not transformed into their serf.

Charles Blow in today’s New York Times has most of the story right. According to Blow, each day brings “more news of unconscionable conservative tilts in the electorate.” The string of bad news compounds “an already palpable sense of loss and longing on the left, an enveloping fear of the inevitable: rejection…. By most accounts, Nov. 2 is going to be a blue day in blue America. That is in part because of a sizable enthusiasm gap that favors Republicans.” Nevertheless, Blow concludes, “the right may win the day, but the left will win the age. That’s because the right is running an intellectually bereft campaign of desperation and disenchantment, amplified by a recession. Great Recessions don’t last. Great ideas do.”

Bravo to Charles Blow. Everything in his article is correct, including his explanation for the Republicans’ enthusiasm. What he fails to do, however, is explain the sense of “loss and longing on the left.” The explanation is simple. After living through twelve years of Reagan and his Vice President, the first President Bush, then eight more disappointments from Bill Clinton, then eight nightmare-like years under the second President Bush, liberals, progressives and, if you will, leftists, hoped that the country would give its core liberal and progressive tradition a chance. And it had every reason to believe that with Obama as the nominee, it would have that chance since Obama positioned himself to the left of Hillary Clinton, as the anti-war candidate, as the candidate who had the most liberal voting record in the Congress, and as the candidate who was looking not just for a changed policy but a changed mindset.

Once he got the nomination, however, and especially since he became President, almost everything Obama has done has been aimed at sending the message that the difference between left and right, progressive and conservative, even Democrat and Republican, is an outmoded “partisan” or even “ideological” stance, and that what we need are people who will “solve problems,” not people who will “strike poses.”

In my last piece, I argued that a very special almost intimate resonance existed between Obama and large numbers of intellectuals and opinion-makers, and that this resonance gave a distinctive stamp to his Presidency. This resonance has deep roots in such things as the special character of the American Presidency, the decline of the party system, and the rise and character of the media. Here, however, I simply want to identify Obama’s particular and unique appeal, without yet judging or even analyzing, except briefly at the end.

The first major characteristic that gives Obama his special, in many ways unconscious, appeal is the fact that he is an African-American. Since the days of slavery, when the spirituals identified the slaves as the chosen people, Americans have believed that a young, black Moses would save them from what WEB DuBois called this “empty desert of dust and dollars.” The hope for a black salvationalist figure pervades evangelical Protestantism, Communism (and not only in the United States) and artistic modernism, e.g. in popular music and humor. Like Martin Luther King, Obama comes out of a Salvationist and messianic tradition, but what is interesting is what he does with that tradition: He seeks to repudiate it (The Reverend Wright incident showed how difficult this is). Nonetheless, Wright notwithstanding, Obama does not present himself as a representative of black America, as King or Jesse Jackson did, but as someone who can bring red and blue (NB: not black and white) together, Furthermore, certain aspects of his biography – birth in Hawaii, African father, Indonesian upbringing – soften and muffle his African-American image in ways that make it more global in an age during which America is struggling with global isolation and rejection of its supposed leadership.

Obama has been on a tear since Reconciliation. Told that the Republicans planned to repeal the Health Care bill he said, “Go for it.” Understandably perturbed by new settlements, he cancelled a scheduled dinner with Netanyahu telling the Israeli Prime Minister to “call when anything changed.” Friday’s New York Times had a front-page picture of Obama mockingly pointing to the cover of Romney’s autobiography, an attractive young blond woman standing admiringly by.

Such examples of cockiness are not necessarily perspicacious. “Go for it” channeled Bush’s “Bring it on,” once again legitimating the former President. Insulting Netanyahu united the Israeli people in support of their Prime Minister whereas a divided Israel is crucial to the peace process. Magnanimity is a wiser response to success than crowing.

These are minor errors, perhaps, but we have also seen Obama’s cockiness at play in major ones. Asked why there were no radical voices in his economic team, he said HE would be the radical voice. Asked why he hadn’t appointed someone like Stiglitz or Krugman, he said “Why, I read all those folks.” As is now apparent, Obama’s economic policies were written by the large banks, insurance companies and other major “players;” so in that case Obama’s cockiness hid other key aspects of his personality: deference to power, and not knowing what he doesn’t know.