peacocks and lilies

It is a well known fact that the Republican Party has employed a strategy designed to avoid compromise by jerking the political center to the right. This was my first opposition to Barack Obama—his desire to compromise with people who avoided compromise. I thought (and continue to think) it showed his political naiveté.

And he is politically naïve, at least as far as actual governance is concerned. He’s plenty savvy when it comes to underhanded ways to win—he is a master of the electoral realm. But when it comes to actually doing something after a win, his record is pretty clear, and by clear, I mean slim. His record as an Illinois State legislator has been well hashed out, and we now know he accomplished what little he did in that last year, and that he was basically walked through it by his mentor in the General Assembly. His achievements, such as they are, in the U. S. Senate have also been hashed out by disaffected Hillary supporters and others who oppose Obama.

No, I’m not here to rehash any of that. What I want to talk about tonight is the real Barack Obama and what he represents to the Democratic Party. The real Barack Obama, as he has clearly demonstrated in recent weeks, isn’t liberal in the least. That’s the funny thing about his press coverage. You read and watch of all of this coverage, and you see clearly how people are projecting exactly what they want to on what they think is a blank canvas, but which is not. Take this Washington Post article from February, 2007. The author, Peter Slevin, a major Obama apologist and pusher, says this of Obama’s Illinois record:

He cobbled together legislation with Republicans and conservative Democrats, making overtures other progressive politicians might consider distasteful.

“[O]ther progressive politicians might find distasteful,” as if Obama were ever truly “progressive.” But he’s not, and that’s why he wants to work with Republicans and conservative Democrats—because he agrees with them. It’s that simple, and yet, the media and the so-called progressive base just don’t see what is right there at nose-length.

Coincidentally, progressive is the term the media and Democratic leaders have hit upon to replace liberal because Democrats have allowed the word liberal to be tarred and feathered by those uncompromising Republicans. But here’s the thing—it fits. Because people like Obama, and power brokers like Dean and Brazile are progressive, not liberal. Progressive actually fits the source of all of this too: the Netroots attempts to “crash the gate.”

Progressive fits here because that is all they are after: progress, in the form of winning. They haven’t given any thought to what comes after that, just so long as they win. That’s what Crashing the Gate was all about: winning. The book did not offer any advice or formulations on what to do once Democrats won, just that they needed to win and how they could do it. That’s not Democratic territory, that’s Republican territory, and that’s why so many of us are mad enough to find our ways to Denver for one hell of an historic convention. Obama, Axelrod, as well as a slew of other people associated with the Obama campaign, Dean, Brazile, and the Netroots as embodied by the DKos community are all of the same carelessly stitched cloth.

I would go even one step further and call them Neoprogressives. Neoprogressivism is the mirror of neoconservatism, and shares many of its goals, such as the obsession with wielding raw power without thinking about how to use it. That’s what made Hillary the superior candidate—she was the first candidate since Gore who was already giving considerable thought to how to wield power. You can bet your sweet ass Obama and Axelrod haven’t. Neither has Dean and co. We have seen what that kind of limited vision can lead to in Iraq.

If you have any doubts about neoprogressivism and the Obama campaign, read this introduction to the book The Progressive Manifesto, by Anthony Giddens. The intro itself is titled Neoprogressivism: A New Agenda for Social Democracy. Neoprogressivism is, like neoconservatism, authoritatively-minded. This authoritarianism is, however, couched in terms of the greater good, just like neoconservatism. It appeals to our higher ideals for rationale while acting for control of more and more of our lives.

Please know that is the point: control. The world is growing so fast that losing control can happen fast. Resources have to be allocated so that rich people can continue to “survive” on more than they need. All people who ascribe to this kind of thinking are aware of problems like population control and resource consumption, they know it will ultimately come down survival, that luxury as we know it is a dying art form, and they just want to make sure they get their slice before the pie is gone. And they’ve developed some pretty strange ideas about how to feel okay with their gluttony and hoarding.

But dig deeper and it all starts to come into focus (Because, let’s face it, keeping the masses confused and the media running this way and that has been an excellent strategy for the Obama campaign in their pursuit of the win.) Check out this excerpt from the Gidden intro:

Third way thinking has been directed to two main aims. One is electoral recovery. By the early

1990s, social democratic parties had been out of power in some of the leading industrial countries,

such as the UK, Germany and Prance, for a long while. In the US, until Bill Clinton came to office

in 1993, there had been no Democratic president for twelve years. Left of centre parties had been

slow to adjust to a society in which their traditional constituency, the working class, was shrinking away.

This is the ultimate in creating your own reality, which is a major feature of neoconservatism. Working classes are not shrinking. Not by any comparative measure unless you are going by pre-1940s statistics. What is actually happening is that stratification, the layered disparity between the rich and the poor, is growing more pronounced. It is the middle class that is shrinking. And it’s shrinking because with globalization comes a much broader playing field. The end layers grow thicker and are more pronounced as those middle rings disappear.

There are people in this world that live in huts they build themselves, and they sweep daily the patch of dirt they built it on. Others live one or two in 10,000 square foot mansions made of imported building materials, filled with extravagant furniture, some of it never used. They never clean anything except their own bodies. It’s easier to feel good about that opulent lifestyle when the lowest man on the totem pole makes $4.50 an hour than it is when the lowest man on the totem pole makes $1 a day.

But I am digressing a bit. Back to neoprogressivism and its twisted twin sister, neoconservativism.

There are several other interesting parallels between the twin movements, notably the University of Chicago. The so-called father of neoconservatism, Leo Strauss, was a political science professor at the University of Chicago. Might we one day we open Newsweek to find it has named Saul Alinsky the father of neoprogressivism? He’s a University of Chicago graduate. And Bill Ayers currently heads up several education initiatives in his role as Professor of Education for the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Education. Something is definitely up with Chicago education if it can produce the seeds for two such powerful movements. Maybe the political corruption is so pervasive that it poisons every faculty one has. That would be scary if true.

There are many other similarities, some of which I will be outlining in the coming days and weeks. This post is getting quite long, and I know you have other blogs you’d like to visit as you surf today. Do give this some thought in the coming days. And before I go, let me summarize the reason for this post. Obama and all of the players from this campaign season spell doom for the Democratic Party. They are not Democrats; they are neoprogressives, and they will eat the Democratic Party from the inside out if they succeed in their single-minded goal. Without a plan for governance, Obama will be open to influence from every industry, every smarmy lobbyist, not to mention mature foreign politicians with tough international reputations. We’ve seen what that can do too, with Bush and his Puti-Put. I hate to say it, but it’s really true—Obama is Bush 2.0.