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.

There is no question but that the health care victory marks a turning point in the Obama presidency. Obama can now legitimately present himself as a strong president, a man of principle and genuine achievement, someone who, after Massachusetts, snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. With his leadership, the Democratic Party can claim to have remained true to the spirit of its New Deal and populist roots, albeit with a recognition of changing times. Meanwhile the Republicans have once again over-reached, as they did under Gingrich in 1993-1995, and Bush in 2002-2003. Obama’s accomplishment is genuine, and will soon be revealed in the 2010 elections. He now has a record to run on, and the political landscape has shifted tectonically.

From the beginning of his Presidency, Obama has been guided by one fixed principle: keep the right wing of the Republican Party at the center of the nation’s consciousness. The reason is obvious. Compared to Neanderthal Republicans, even the lamest, most conservative, most devoid of ideas Democrat will look good.

Let us examine how this works. Find a Republican who thinks we should not help people out of work; by comparison, a Democrat who wants to spend a thousand dollars on jobs looks like a latter-day Franklin Roosevelt. Find a Republican who wants to use small-scale nuclear weapons in Afghanistan; just one row over, a Democrat who only sends an army looks like Gandhi. One sees the method in Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann nightly: right wing idiocies are trotted out so that the liberals and Democrats can feel superior. Above all, never examine Obama’s policies. That would be “divisive.”

Every President has to balance two imperatives: defeating his political opponents, and dealing with the problems that the country faces, but only a few Presidents get the opportunity to do both at once. Barack Obama was one of the few, and all of the media attempts to explain why 2008 was not 1932 or 1936 or 1964 or whatever cannot obscure the fact that he failed to rise to the occasion. Without grasping that failure, the significance of his State of the Union Address cannot be understood. When we do grasp it, we see that Obama’s Presidency rests on a carefully drawn contrast in appearance with ill-informed opponents, and on a careful convergence with their actual politics, and not on a program to lead the country in a new direction. This was especially clear in the central theme of his speech last night, deficit reduction.

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.

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.

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.

Hendrik Hertzberg, in the New Yorker, has described left criticisms of Obama as “pathetic.” According to Hertzberg, quoting Obama, we are about to pass “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act … and the most important reform of our health-care system since Medicare passed in the nineteen-sixties.” But the left just doesn’t get it. Spoiled children, nothing is ever good enough for them. They didn’t get the public option so they want to sink the whole thing. As usual, they don’t understand the “limits” that are so apparent to wiser minds.

These sentiments are so familiar as to be dreary, but they are accompanied by a new and original explanation of the left’s blindness, “the pathetic fallacy.” “All violent feelings have the same effect,” John Ruskin wrote. “They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things.” The left, in other words, is blinded by anger. Aside from the fact that Ruskin’s term “pathetic fallacy” has nothing to do with anger (it concerns the confusion between nature and human emotion), I will respond to this argument under three rubrics: 1) the relevance of anger, 2) the left’s critique of Obama and 3) the left’s critique of the health plan. I will then return to the heart of the matter: the “limits” on what Obama can do.

What are we to make of this strange tribe, the American? During the day, in their conscious minds, they actually believe that the 1000 military bases they have built throughout the world, the huge nuclear arsenal, the attempts to militarize space, the half million men and women in arms, the aircraft carriers, the drones, the nano-drones, and all the rest are there to “protect” them from the 1-2000 person ragtag band of al queda and affiliates. They cannot imagine any other way to deal with conflicts abroad except through expanding their military. They believe that people don’t like them because they are “free” and not because they are bullies. And they imagine that by hiring a good talker as their front man, no one will notice that their pugilistic culture has not changed.

Then they go to dark palaces, put on three-D glasses, allow themselves to sink into a fantasy state and witness the truth that is denied to them every day in their conscious public sphere. As if in a mirror denied, they there see themselves as the over-muscled, hulking, racially tinged, exploiters that they are, destroying nature, stomping underfoot people who are physically weaker than they are, people who fight back with bows and arrows, but are often spiritually superior. In the dark, they see the indisputable reason they have militarized large parts of the globe: to control resources, notably energy, and not in order to “protect” their own people.

Yet these same people whose conscious minds are so full of fantasy and delusion, but in whose unconscious minds the truth blares out so clearly and unmistakably, these are the same people who reject Freud – and for the same blind, technology-worshipping reasons that they feel gives them the right to exploit others. They are so sure of themselves, these delusionals; what are we to make of this strange tribe?

My fellow Americans, and men and women throughout the world:

Like all people of good will I condemn the actions of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Killing innocent people to make a political point is repulsive to me, whether it is done by individuals or by governments, as I will explain. As President, I am also ordering a full-scale review to be sure that everything that can be done to prevent terrorism is being done. However, I have been rethinking this question and come before you to say that heightened security is not enough.

In recent days, in response to the disappointing health care and climate change initiatives, several commentators have described Obama as a “pragmatist.” Ross Douthat, for instance, calls him “a doctrinaire liberal,” but one “who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf.” According to Ryan Lizza, “every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.” For David Axelrod, referring to health care, “The president wasn’t after a Pyrrhic victory — he wasn’t into symbolism. The president is after solving a problem that has bedeviled a country and countless families for generations.”

At first glance these judgments seem indisputable, but there is one exception, one moment in which Obama did not accommodate himself to existing institutions, did not take half a loaf, but rather ventured boldly and imaginatively forth in what he himself called an “improbable” adventure.

Given the ubiquitous tolling of church bells, the public spaces swept by Christmas music, the decorations, the stores open late at night on Christmas Eve, and the “good news” on the Christmas Morning Front Page concerning the Senate’s passing of health care reform, this may be a moment in which it is worth reflecting on what it means to be Jewish and, in particular, what it means to be a Jewish intellectual, recognizing that intellectuality is one of the most pronounced traits of the Jewish people.

To be Jewish means to be in the minority. It means to oppose the overall consensus and to hold on to certain principles against a dominant consensus, the common sense of one’s time, the overwhelming pressure of public opinion, the group. It is interesting that when Jews go to Synagogue or celebrate together they mark such foundational moments of Jewish history as the Covenant between God and Abraham, and the exodus from Egypt, but they neglect another moment, which was of nearly comparable importance, namely the Jewish rejection of Christ’s message.

That rejection was not an easy one. Jesus, after all, was no alien bringing in a foreign religion. He was a Rabbi, preaching not the foundation of a new religion, but the realization of Judaism. Furthermore, the intellectual and emotional, not to mention religious, character of his teaching was not so easy to dismiss. To this day, such arguments as that love and mercy trump justice, or that a truly universal creed must burst the integument of community, retain their force. Any Jew who does not take Christ seriously as one of the greatest of all Jewish thinkers has not reckoned deeply enough with the problem of being Jewish.

Yet the Jews rejected the “good news” that Christ and his followers brought. They did so not for riches or prestige or most forms of emotional satisfaction, for their rejection brought none of that. They did so, because they felt they had a better idea: the individual’s direct, personal, one-to-one, relation to God, not mediated by God’s son-messenger or a Church, and loyalty to an ethically-defined, particularistic community. This rejection, almost as much as the Exodus, gave the Jews their character, often described as stubborn, stiff-necked, and negationist. But it also helped consolidate the great Jewish tradition, which goes back to the ban on graven images, of thinking. When modernity brought the freethinking intellectual to the forefront of social life, the Jews were well prepared to take advantage of that opportunity.

I write this as a Jewish intellectual who has rejected the “good news” of Obama’s coming in general, and of the health care bill in particular. This does not mean that I would have voted against the bill; on the contrary, I would have voted for it. But unlike another Jewish intellectual — one who for years exemplified stiff-necked resistance — namely Paul Krugman, I am not yet ready to celebrate. I prefer to keep thinking. And what I am thinking is that the Obama administration continues the more or less perfect merger of corporate interests and party interests which the Democrats pioneered in the 80s, in good part with the help of Jewish Neo-Cons and New Democrats who see the relation of Judaism and the dominant majority differently than me.

Character is fate. This is true for nations as it is for individuals. Only when we understand both Obama’s character and America’s will we able to fathom the tragedy — the loss, the unfulfilled promise, the disappointment — that attends his Presidency.

Who is Barack Obama? One telling moment can be found in his description of his mother’s death in The Audacity of Hope. Obama writes: “More than once I saw fear flash across her eyes. More than fear of pain or fear of the unknown, it was the sheer loneliness of death that frightened her, I think.” Obama’s mother was an anthropologist. She viewed all cultures from a distance, and did not have a commitment to any particular one. In his own childhood, Obama rediscovered his mother’s isolation. He resolved that he would not live without contact, without commitment, without something to fill the void, the emptiness. He joined the black church. He became a community organizer. He married and had children. All of this led to his famous words at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there’s not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”

Obama’s ability to articulate a common identity for the United States won him the nomination. Unlike John Edwards, Obama saw the US in terms of what Rousseau called “the social compact,” as opposed to an aggregation of interests. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he tried to bring people together, not to split them apart. His opposition to the war in Iraq was at the core of his extraordinary victory. To get a sense of how remarkable it was, remember the Grand Inquisitor episode in Dostoevsky, in which an auto-de-fé is going on, and a calm, quiet, reasonable man appears who all pundits and politicos want to put to death.

In anticipation of the coming passage of a “Health Care Reform” bill, we are already hearing a great deal about “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Liberal Senators like Tom Harkin are hawking the idea that we’ll get the public option, or the expansion of Medicare, “next time.” Make no mistake about it. Such homilies are as empty as Obama’s reference to “Fat cats.” The bill marks a turning point in the history of American social reform, and it is a negative one.

Of course the bill will accomplish good, and this needs to be recognized. It will extend coverage and it will prevent some insurance company abuses. However, the true meaning of the bill lies not in the steps it takes toward universal coverage and toward reform, but rather in the meaning it assigns to those steps, namely cost control. Rather than a future in which liberals expand coverage further, the bill marks the deepening of the divide between the “two Americas,” and a decisive step toward abandoning long-standing ideals of equality.

Universal health care was the central demand of progressives because issues of life and death are great equalizers. Accordingly, people of good will can tolerate living in a society in which some people have bigger houses or bigger cars than others, but not in which some people have better health care. Health care is the one thing we should never compromise about, because it is morally intolerable to allow two Americas in this sphere.

Many have praised Obama’s Nobel Prize speech, but few have read it with critical attention. The speech is actually two speeches artfully woven together. One, which is unexceptionable, concerns war in general, its place in human society. The second concerns the USA, its place in the history of war. In equating the US with the world, Obama repeated a trope used by many Presidents (Franklin Roosevelt was an exception). However, this sliding between the US and the world leads the speech into three major contradictions which can be seen 1) in the awarding of the Prize in the first place, and in Obama’s acceptance of it, 2) in the intellectual framework of the acceptance speech, and its presumed audience and 3) in the content of the speech.

The first act that set everything askew was the awarding of the Prize in the first place. Nobel Peace prizes are given for positive accomplishments, such as the negotiation of a treaty or the banning of a weapon. Obama received his prize not for anything he had done, but for what he was not, namely Bush or, more precisely, Cheney. Thorbjørn Jadland, the head of the Committee, actually stated this in an interview. But if the Prize is given for the repudiation of something bad in the past, why did not the later Bush get it for repudiating the mistakes of his first two years. Why didn’t Gates get it for not being Rumsfeld? Why didn’t Nikita Khruschev receive the prize in 1956 for his repudiation of Stalin, a far more thorough break than Obama ever made with Bush? In fact, the prize was a craven kow-tow to the American President expressing the hope that he will not only talk but act for peace, which he certainly has not.

The second distortion of the speech lay in its framework and audience.

I felt an enormous sense of sadness watching Obama last night. To begin with, there was the moral disintegration of the United States, the enormous weight of the military it carries: 3,650,000 active armed forces, plus 850,000 men and women on reserve. 1000 bases, spread everywhere throughout the world, many of them secret. Think of all the steel, the barbed wire, the tanks, the aircraft carriers, the mines, the crippled children. Think of the secret services, the drones, the chemical warfare, moles, assassins, double agents. Then there is the network of businesses, corporate allies, privatized services, bought congressmen, government agencies, dependent communities. The cemeteries, the wounded, those with brain injuries, spinal injuries, paraplegics, the mentally ill, the drug-addicted.

One also must remember the lies that have put this military in place: the lies of the German and Japanese Occupations, the lies of the cold war, the lies aimed at Arbenz and Mossadegh and Nasser and Castro, the Gulf of Tonkin lie, the Granada lie, the Panama lie, the 9/11 lie, the WMD lie, the other Iraq lie. And this does not even get us to the very big lies, the lie for example, that the world is a dangerous place, a lie that is only true when one considers how dangerous the US is, and how small and local and containable the strictly military problems of the globe would be, if only the United States breathed a little bit more softly down everyone’s backs.

When one considers the enormous guilt and worry that Obama must have it is impossible not to feel compassion for his situation. At the same time, it is also impossible not to despise the decision he came to. Just as with the economic crisis, in which he gave a completely free hand to the top banks, insurance companies and corporations — handing them the checkbook of the United States people and having them fill it out as they want — so in regard to Afghanistan he has submitted completely to the military recommendations, in both cases a few pr details notwithstanding.

More important, even, than the details of his decision is his reaffirmation of the myths — the myth of American goodness and innocence, the myth of the bad guys, the denial that only a few years ago we created them, and the myth which makes it impossible for Americans to see the negative results of their own actions, the inability to grasp that the US’s world is not Afghanistan’s world, or Pakistan’s world, or Russia’s world, or France’s world. Truly, this is a time to feel sad for our country, which has squandered so much of its great legacy and potential, including now its remarkable but unhappy President.

1) The US Has a Mercenary Army.
Since the ancient world conscription has been a fundamental principle for all democratic and republican forms of government. The reason is obvious. When people are going to die for a cause, they should spread the risks evenly. In 1974 the United States abolished the draft, supposedly temporarily, for one reason. If there were a draft Americans would never tolerate the kind of adventure in which Obama is engaging. The people who support this war are relying on the poor, often racial minorities, to fight for them: people who have no opportunity for jobs and education other than what the military provides. Ask the supporters if they would support the war if they had to fight, or their children.

2) The Taliban Will Not Take Over.
Everyone knows by this point that there are more “safe havens” for terrorists in Hamburg, London or the Paris banlieues than in Afghanistan. Supporters of the war argue, rather, that the Taliban will return if America doesn’t expand the war, and that the Taliban will protect “Al Queda,” whatever that may actually be.

This argument rests on a little knowledge: the Taliban did run the country from 1994 to 2001. However, they are much too weak to take it back. The reason the Taliban gained power in 1994 was that Pakistan backed them as an anti-India ally, as did Saudi Arabia, because of their anti-Shia policies. Behind Pakistan and Saudi Arabia was the United States, which created the fundamentalist movement in Afghanistan in the first place as a way to hurt the Soviet Union. The Taliban will not return to power if Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the US do not back them.

3) The Messenger Is Not Reliable
Obama supporters claim that during his campaign he promised to wage this war in Afghanistan. This is not true. Obama ran as the antiwar candidate, filling the vacuum left by Hillary Clinton’s refusal to apologize for her vote supporting the war in Iraq. He did often refer to Afghanistan but had he ever said he want to expand that war, Hillary Clinton would be in the White House today.

Only a few weeks after taking office, on March 27, 2009, Obama sent 34,000 new troops to Afghanistan (21,000 combat troops and 13,000), announcing “a comprehensive, new strategy,” the conclusion of “a careful policy review, led by Bruce [Reidel].” In May he fired General David McKiernan, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, and appointed McChrystal. This was only the third time in American history that a General was fired out from under his own command during a war. McChrystal’s memo asking for another 40,000 troops appeared on September 20, 2009. Anyone who believes that McChrystal leaked that memo without clearing it with his boss doesn’t understand America. Since September, Obama has engaged in his usual shell game, meant to demonstrate his thoughtfulness, reflectivity, listening to all sides and all the rest of it. Please give me a break. He is every bit the liar that Bush was, appearances notwithstanding.

The current debate over the age at which women should begin taking mammograms is a good example of the kind of pseudoscience that may be introduced once costs becomes a guiding consideration in health care decisions.

As I have argued previously, health care is the one thing we should not economize about. Of course, there may be health care necessities that we cannot afford, in which case we should try to figure out how to afford them, for example, through taxation. But the first thing we should do is to be clear as to what the desirable health care options are.

Everyone who has lived through the last few decades knows what has been going on. Every institution in American life, and many throughout the world, have been reorganized in the interests of raising profits.

Let us start with the corporations. They previously served several ends including public service and obligations to their employees, to their communities, and to their nations, as well as making profits. Not any more. Downsizing, speed-up, reliance on part-timers: whatever squeezed a bit more profit out took precedence over all other considerations.

In publishing, the push to organize everything in terms of profitability has meant a concentration on a few pieces of schlock and an increasing reluctance to go with quality. In news, it has meant the reduction of journalism (too expensive) and the increase in entertainment (which brings in ads). In universities, it has meant more money for bio-tech and less for the arts and humanities, more part-timers, fewer tenured positions. In pharmaceuticals, it has meant the patenting of pieces of the biosphere and the maintenance of artificially high drug prices. In the schools it has meant testing, teaching for the tests, and an orientation to training for jobs. In immigration it has meant the selling of human organs, of babies, and of massive population transfers, only technically “illegal.”

The Virginia election signals what has been clear for a while: because of the way Obama has governed, the Republicans and conservative Democrats have the upper hand, and that means that they get to define the dominant narrative. According to that narrative, Obama is in trouble because he went too far to the left. In order to regain his political footing, he has to get back to the center: less government, more emphasis on markets, beef up the military, listen to the generals, take most of the social reform agenda off his plate. Jakob Wasserman’s My Life as a German and a Jew, published in 1921 is a good cautionary tale for those who agree with this narrative.

Jakob Wassermann, by Emil Orlik

In Weimar Germany too, there was a dominant narrative: the German narrative. Most Jews who lived in Germany believed in this narrative. According to them and their German counselors, the closer the Jews came to conforming to the dominant narrative, the closer they would come to being fully accepted, accepted as Germans or, as the language had it, “Germans of Hebrew persuasion.” What Wasserman found, however, was that the more he tried to conform, the more his “Jewishness” came into prominence. The more he tried to dress and behave as the Germans did, the more the Germans looked at his nose or his accent. The result was “life-long and never conclusive examination” and, ultimately, shame. As he wrote, “others enjoyed a credit account…I, however, had to present my credentials every time, to stake my whole fortune.”

In fact, we have already seen that the more Obama tries to move to the center (as defined by the right) the more he is stigmatized as a leftist and, not only a leftist but, like the German Jews, as a chameleon, a Zelig who has no real identity, no lasting values. If Obama returns to the politics that won him the nomination for the Presidency he has a chance to salvage his Presidency. But if he continues to try to establish his bona fides as a centrist, he too will become less and less valued by the country, and fewer and fewer Americans will be concerned about his political fate.