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.

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.