I'd take issue with part of Eric's assessment: Of course Obama's campaign incorporated hope as a key ingredient and emotional draw in 2008. After all, we'd all suffered through eight years of lies and bullying and loss of respect in the world at large, a world that was rightly mystified by the descent of our politics into a cesspool of fear and paranoia. If the Bush era didn't beget a social movement buoyed by hope, nothing could. Obama simply rode the wave into the White House.
My own problem with Obama is that there wasn't much politically underneath the hope. By that I mean I from the get-go had deep suspicions about Barack Obama's politics. If he truly believed that talking up a post-partisan version of politics could put an end to the poisonous polarization, then he ought not to have been elected. What troubled me then and troubles me more now is that Obama seems not to have much in the way of a policy foundation or objective to his notion of politics: it's all "process," lovey-dovey "hold hands and march off into the sunset, singing kumbaya" understanding that, by its very nature, is anti-political. And to the effect that the hope he embodied invited us to "escape from politics" as a conflict-laden, heavy-lifting endeavor, I'd agree with Eric to a point. But the agreement is not that hope is by itself a bad thing; it's that it's not enough; and when it's used to disguise the fact that there are few if any policy ends that Obama sees as worthy enough not to trade away -- tax cuts for the rich, a public option for health care reform -- it's a problem. But by itself, hope is certainly preferable to fear as a emotive frame for political leadership.
In my view the hope that Hoffer is referring to is more aptly embodied by the Tea Party types who insist that Orrin Hatch, Olympia Snowe, or Richard Lugar aren't purely conservative enough to run again under their party's banner. It's more true of what Krugman calls the "Free Market Fundamentalists" -- i.e., the true believers in an economic mantra that has failed repeatedly in thirty years since it was introduced by Ronald Reagan. The kind of hope that energizes the true believers in this snake oil is, in my view, not even real hope. Instead, it is a selfish, intolerant alibi that offers yet another escape from politics and demonizes public life while worshipping at the alter on a non-existent free market that exalts privatization -- in public policy and in political psychology, where a turn away from politics to an embrace of the hallowed private sector produces a psychic privatization that is far worse than the hope Obama embodied.
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But doesn't it seem that we were duped? I generally think that I know how to weed through the crap in order to get to the truth behind politics, but I feel like we were thrown for a loop. It makes sense that people would gravitate towards that hope, I certainly don't see fault there, but people gravitated so quickly that they forgot to look at the true issues behind the politicians and what was best for our country. I will be honest, while I don't agree with 70% of what the Tea Partier's say, I feel like they don't attempt to blow sunshine quite as much as other political entities. For me, I see this book not only as a overview of our current Tea Party situation, but as an overview of our politics in general.
ReplyDeleteWere we duped? I think this is a fairly natural feeling in the wake of all recent American elections, not just 2008. In part, it's because we project onto candidates the qualities and issue-positions we'd prefer that they take. Our latitude in doing so is constrained by reality, to some extent. They do have websites and the selection process, particularly in primaries, does require that they put out issue positions. But they will fuzz it up when they can -- Obama, for example, was deliberately ambiguous on what he'd do in Afghanistan -- and, in their defense, circumstances do change. Obama's economic policy positions were rendered largely irrelevant by the financial meltdown. He had to do a stimulus package, and he couldn't immediately terminate the Bush tax cuts. But remember from PS101 and 220, voters vote largely on valence issues, not position issues, and candidates play with tactics that work. "Adult, post-partisan, hopeful politics" was essentially a post-Bush valence issue, though it was inherently anti-political. There were enough signs that this might be problematic if Obama was elected before he sealed up the nomination, but many -- including me -- discounted them because Obama had "electability" and he could, with the help of a ground game, turn out young voters. More to follow.
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