So now I just want to selectively quote Brad Johnson’s brief post over at An und für sich regarding the recent narrative taken up by certain liberal progressives about how this sort of disenchantment was predictable from the beginning given Obama’s lofty rhetoric and promise of hope and change, and that people who took Obama seriously should become more pragmatic, more “realist.” Here’s what Brad writes:

As I reflect on the latest setback to the Democratic party’s legislative agenda in tonight’s election in Massachusetts, I’m reminded of the increasingly prominent narrative making the rounds amongst the A-list liberal bloggers. Basically, so we’re told, we should’ve known better than to expect anything more than what we’ve gotten so far out of an Obama presidency. Sure, he used flashy, inspirational rhetoric to secure an unprecedented coalition of support, but if you really believed the rhetoric, you weren’t actually listening to the message. In effect, those who feel either betrayed or let down are really just feeling the bitter sting that comes on the backside of naivety. Politics is hard; compromise is necessary; Obama has been very up-front about his feeling son Afghanistan, health care, etc. etc etc.

I’m not going to disagree with the practical relevance of this line of thinking. Nor do I underestimate its power as a kind of pragmatic consolation. I am also amongst the first to be annoyed by the residual Obama demagoguery amongst the limousine liberals here in the Bay Area. What I resist, however, is the conclusion drawn: i.e., that those who believed then should either “grow up” or “shut up” now.

…In short, then, it is not the responsibility of the disappointed merely to grow up. More precisely, I should think it is a matter of what they are growing into. If growing up means merely reasoned political pragmatism, then I fear for what the future brings. If it means, however, the disenfranchised become capable of making their demands and expectations effective — that is, of being able to discern the various shades and scales of a leadership’s failure, and responding in such a way that is neither wholly complicitous with its failure or at odds with its professed aspirations — then by all means, let’s grow up, but never shut up.

This all strikes me as exactly right. Furthermore, I think the most problematic part about this whole “realist” attitude about “growing up” is that it’s fundamentally idealistic, in the sense that it relies on the belief that piece-meal progress is the only desirable and possible outcome of the political process. But I think what the past year (and past several years) has shown is that such reform is impossible, that the deck is rigged, yet we continue to play as if it’s a fair game. In that sense, “realism” (and its cynical variants) is at its core an idealism of the present, the most intense form of ideological belief there is: the belief that the system will last forever.

In other words, the “realm of the possible” is at once the realm of the purely ideal, the impossible, because the system in place is designed such that it can’t ever really happen, the “possible” can never actualize itself. From this perspective, I would argue, only the impossible is what is possible, because it means changing the system itself, fundamentally altering the coordinates to change how we organize possibility and impossibility. But you can only do that if you, first, accept the fact that the system is plagued by an irreducible antagonism that can’t be contained within it: this is why, although they’re obviously racist, reactionary, astro-turf stupidity (without granting the liberal class bias in this judgment), the Tea Parties contain a utopian element. Although they clearly misdiagnose the antagonism as one between the People and some abstract notion of the all-pervasive “government,” they are at the very least willing to acknowledge the primacy of social antagonism, which is precisely what is lacking in the Obama administration, its fundamental unwillingness to name the antagonism. This is demonstrated by their not exactly shocking decision to not take a hard-line against bankers and big business, which have ruined so many people’s lives in the recent economic crisis.

If each failure made by the exponents of reform, then, makes me feel that I should be even more cynical, even more jaded, and even more pessimistic, it’s important to keep in mind and never forgot that this is only because the possible is impossible if we accept liberal capitalism as the horizon of our eternal present without a future, that the system is here to stay. What pessimism really means is fighting for the impossible, because the impossible is the only real possible alternative to our present sociopolitical nihilism.

All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories and societies that never before existed. And that’s why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama’s America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things have always worked.

Consider the Wall Street bailouts. By simply giving banks trillions of dollars with no strings attached, our government theorizes that the problem is not the financial system, but a momentary cash drought that can be solved by temporary recapitalization. These bailouts do not aspire to change the whole industry into one dominated by many small institutions rather than a few big ones. They also don’t reach for “a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business,” as Paul Krugman said we once had — they envision the same get-rich-quick casino that generated huge profits and huge losses.

Via @HicSaltus.

I wanted to be the one who links to a Žižek article for a change. I even went to Wikipedia to copy the funny Z’s.

Obama’s victory is a sign of history in the triple Kantian sense of signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticum. A sign in which the memory of the long past of slavery and the struggle for its abolition reverberates; an event which now demonstrates a change; a hope for future achievements. The scepticism displayed behind closed doors even by many worried progressives – what if, in the privacy of the voting booth, the publicly disavowed racism will re-emerge? – was proved wrong. One of the interesting things about Henry Kissinger, the ultimate cynical Realpolitiker, is how utterly wrong most of his predictions were. When news reached the West of the 1991 anti-Gorbachev military coup, for example, Kissinger immediately accepted the new regime as a fact. It collapsed ignominiously three days later. The paradigmatic cynic tells you confidentially: ‘But don’t you see that it is all really about money/power/sex, that professions of principle or value are just empty phrases which count for nothing?’ What the cynics don’t see is their own naivety, the naivety of their cynical wisdom which ignores the power of illusions.

…It is unlikely that the financial meltdown of 2008 will function as a blessing in disguise, the awakening from a dream, the sobering reminder that we live in the reality of global capitalism. It all depends on how it will be symbolised, on what ideological interpretation or story will impose itself and determine the general perception of the crisis. When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for a ‘discursive’ ideological competition. In Germany in the late 1920s, Hitler won the competition to determine which narrative would explain the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it; in France in 1940 Maréchal Pétain’s narrative won in the contest to find the reasons for the French defeat. Consequently, to put it in old-fashioned Marxist terms, the main task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown on the global capitalist system as such, but on its deviations – lax regulation, the corruption of big financial institutions etc.

Over the past 30-35 years or so, the world as a whole has retreated from the high tide of state management of the economy that was reached around midcentury, and moved more in the direction of laissez faire. But I think it’s fair to say that though the trend has been perfectly general, the political leadership in this movement has tended to come from Washington and London, where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the loudest and clearest exponents of it and their successors on the center-left tended to confirm, rather than reverse, a new Anglophone consensus. And yet:

The British and American plans, though far from identical, have two common elements according to officials: injection of government money into banks in return for ownership stakes and guarantees of repayment for various types of loans. […] The Treasury’s openness to direct infusions of cash is a remarkable change in tone from a few weeks ago, when the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, discouraged such actions in testimony before Congress. “Putting capital in institutions is about failure,” Mr. Paulson declared on Sept. 23. “This is about success.”

This is what a lot of left-of-center economists said in the first place, but the ideological taboo against nationalization was very strong. Now, though, the forces of looming collapse in the banking sector are proving even stronger. Thus, it looks like it’ll be George W. Bush, Hank Paulson, and Ben Bernanke who bring a very strong dose of socialism to the United States of America. And yet Andy McCarthy’s busy worrying if Barack Obama is a closet Maoist.

It is not stupid to vote for McCain/Palin; rather, it is evil. Republicans are intrinsically, and necessarily, morally depraved. Anyone who votes for McCain/Palin, or supports them, by that very fact demonstrates that he or she is a person utterly devoid of basic morality, and lacking in any respect for others. To vote for McCain is to shit on human civilization, and show utter contempt for human values and human hopes. And not in spite of the Democrats’ hypocrisy, but rather precisely because of this — because their hypocrisy is, as it were, the compliment that vice pays to virtue — the only moral thing to do in this election is to vote for Obama.

(Via I cite.)

Then John McCain took the stage with someone who was apparently an old buddy of his from their rock and roll days. The guy had sagging, but tight white skin, numerous piercings, shades and a soul patch, reminiscent of Tommy Lee. His nickname for McCain was “Toyota Brown,” the origins of which were not explained, except that it was referred to as a term of endearment from when John McCain, too, was evidently a hard rocker in the mid- to late-70’s.

Which is all to say that from now on I’ll be referring to John McCain as “Toyota Brown” on this blog, and hope others follow in my footsteps.

Measured by the low standards of conventional wisdom, the old saying ‘Don’t just talk, do something!’ is one of the most stupid things one can say.

After the Nazi’s rise to power in 1933, however, when the Dessau Bauhaus was closed (the school had moved from its original home in Weimar in 1925), it was forbidden to use modern design or sans-serif typefaces such as Futura, which Goebbels called a “Jewish invention.” Rigid, central balanced composition returned and traditional (and often illegible) Fraktur type was touted as symbolic of the glories of the nation. (17)

For typophiliacs or those interested in the art of the Third Reich, I recommend reading the entire article over at Crooked Timber.

To the surprise of no one, the FISA bill that grants retroactive immunity to telecoms and legalizes warrantless wiretapping has passed today. I think the vote was something like 69-28. Even though pretty much the entire Internet is aware of this, I figured I would post a link to mark the historic occasion.

Anyhow, here is a comprehensive article over at Salon by former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald on why this bill is a great leap forward for democracy and why the Democratic-led congress may be even worse than the Republican-led one. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk!

(All proceeds go to the Obama campaign.)