“The problem is with a Congress which can’t compromise for the good of the country.” I heard somebody say this in an NPR interview the other day in the aftermath of the budget crisis in Washington.
The next day at a gathering a friend announced with a twinkle that he was thinking of starting a new political party. He was calling it the Grownup Party.
The widespread complaints about congressional selfishness/childishness/churlishness are certainly understandable. But they are part of the problem.
There are two ways of looking at our government problem. According to the Nasty Politics Critique, what’s missing is good manners and common decency, including the ability to rise above partisan politics when necessary.
The Class Struggle Critique looks at it differently. What’s wrong with Washington is not the nastiness of politics but the confusion over what the sides are and what’s at stake.
The Nasty Politics Critique pleads with politicians to remember what it’s all about, the good of the country. The Class Struggle perspective says there’s no such thing as “the country”. There is no one country, no one good . If by “country” you mean the large corporations reporting obscene profits in the post-bailout period and now allowed to influence elections with unlimited contributions, fat cats now paying the lowest income rate in 80 years, the country has been doing just fine, thank you. If by “country” you mean the vast majority of us on the losing end of all that, then the good of the country has not been served.
A short history of U.S. Class struggle: throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th century we the people made crucial gains with the labor movement, social security, medicare, and progressive taxes. Then the tide of struggle changed and for the last 40 years, we’ve slowly lost much of that ground.
One reaction to the unseemly squabbling in Washington has favored the Tea P arty solution: just get rid of the brats. Reduce the nastiness by reducing the size of government. Sounds attractive. But to the Class Struggle perspective it’s dead wrong. The only way the great majority of us ever improved our lot is through government big enough to redress the imbalance between powerful corporations and the rest of us. Clarity in the present moment is not to shrink government but to make is government live up to its o nly legitimate reason for existing, by the logic of our founding documents, which is to actually serve the interests of the majority.
By the Nasty Politics thinking, Obama’s failure has been the inability to be a more effective executive branch daddy to unite the brats in Congress for good of country.
To the Class Struggle perspective, Obama won sweepingly in ’08 because he managed to inspire with genuinely progressive ideas that promised to turn the tide in the struggle. His failure has been an inability to turn that momentum into genuine progressive accomplishment, in large part from allowing the country to be distracted from class struggle. In ’08, Obama was compared with FDR, who shared many of his ideas. In the Depression era the existence of class struggle was rarely debated, nor the potential of government (of, by, for the people) to weigh in on the side of the vast majority.
“Class struggle” is a concept that has always served the majority, mainly in insisting that there is a struggle, and that we the people are losing it. “Good of the country” and “rise above partisan politics,” in denying or distracting from class struggle, favor those currently making out like bandits.
The fight in the streets of Cairo was not less nasty than our current politics. It’s clarity of the issues that explains why it seemed so stirringly meaningful even to our unrevolutionary souls and the fight in DC seems only contemptible.
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