Wednesday Hangover

At least in the US, graduate school tends to disillusion people from electoral politics. Nevertheless, I'd guess there's one conversation going on in grad-lounges from Cambridge, Mass to Oxford, Miss: why didn't most of the country come out and stop this? I don't want this conversation to swallow up this blog, but it's hard. In fact, I started having this conversation myself with an old friend, a Denver attorney with a big political future. So, it bears some note.

Scholarly demographers like Ruy Teixeira and analytic designers like Charles Blow have been saying for a long time now there's no way the Republican Party can speak to a majority in contemporary America. Their policies never poll all that well, and the party brand name conjures associations of old embarrassing relatives one doesn't introduce to friends. So, what explains the massive success of the Tea Party, a right-wing faction that revitalized the party and has dictated discourse in Washington since Barack Obama's inauguration? Why don't more young people, more working people, more non-white people turn out to resist forms of politics that regard them as criminals?

There's a basic problem with this question that surrounds us today: it implies a duty of a people on the outs to support the Democratic Party. I think we ought to ask questions with another formula in mind. In the media and popular imagination, this is a personal question: what has Obama done for vulnerable people?

But the "plus" column in Obama's case seems to come down to his idea of forcing poorer people to buy health insurance and trusting the industry to transform into a profession of caregiving out of the goodness of its conscience. The "minuses" only add up from there: Guantánamo, the normalization of the security state and low-heat forms of international aggression, the blessing of income inequality through deference to the global financial and trade system.

But those were Bush's legacies! My friends and I will protest. In this, one ignominy stands out, one innovation for which Obama himself is singularly culpable: the historically unprecedented deportation of undocumented people.  In claiming he was seeking good faith from conservative allies for the greater good of immigrants, his administration has vied with Alabama and Arizona for the title of most committed to emiseration of people who might not be here under the rules, their families and their communities.

So what has the Jefferson-Jackson legacy, a legacy of populism, done for the people lately? Of course, that party or any alternative would depend for significance on the sustained commitment of those who don't have as much to give as well as the middle-class progressives who are soldierly Democrats today.

What form is such a commitment-worthy movement to take? This is a much harder if much more productive question than the one that liberals are asking today. If that open-endedness in disappointment can suffice, I hope I can be done with politics in the US in this space. But to take the faux-folksy mode of a campaigning politician: you might say fat chance.