Andy Newman is engaging in a bit of wishful thinking today, by arguing that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States will buy space for the left to grow. In particularly:
If Obama wins, then that is a mass popular endorsement of hope — that things should and can change. The revival of trade unionism in the sit down strikes in the 1930s could not have happened without the confidence given by Roosevelt’s New Deal. The growth of the 1960s civil
rights movement, and the growth of women’s liberation and black power movements were linked to expectations of injustice being ended by Kennedy and LB Johnson.
I’m skeptical, as it reminds me too much of similar guff heard when New Labour was first elected, back in 1997, as witnessed in such thriumphal books like John O’Farrell’s Things Can Only Get Better (Andy seems to recognise this, considering the title of his post). But more importantly, it seems to me Andy has got the relationship between a strong progressive or leftist mass movement and a left leaning president wrong. The movements he mentions, trade unionism and the civil rights movement, existed and knew success before they got a president on their side. Roosevelt started off a moderate and was largely forced into the New Deal, Kennedy gave lip service to the civil rights movement but it was only with his successor LBJ that civil rights legislation really got going. And in both cases this wouldn’t have happened without pressure from a broadbased, grassroots uprising, didn’t go as far as the movement wanted or extended itself to foreign policy, which was just as reactionary under Roosevelt and Kenndey/LBJ as their under their predecessors.
With Obama we’ve seen that his first instincts certainly aren’t anything but centrist or even rightwing. He got lucky in that he didn’t have to vote for the War on Iraq, but it took a long time for him to take a real stand against it once he was elected. Even now, he only wants to leave Iraq to strengthen Afghanistan and he’s hawkish on the “threat” of nuclear armed Iran, as well as saying all the wrong things about Georgia. He does talk the talk about poverty in America, but also felt the need to urge Black fathers to take their responsibility. As Andy admits himself, he has a lot of support from Wall Street which is despairing of the Republicans bollixing up the economy and his core advisors are not exactly leftist firebrands either…
To come back to Andy’s main argument, that Barack Obama will bring a feeling of hope that has been missing for the past eight years, which will open space on the left, I’m with John Pilger, as quoted by Andy. “ An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.” We’ve seen it happen already, as the various centre left organisations like MoveOn have fallen in line behind the Democrats.