Washington is in gridlock and no matter how I analyze things, I cannot see how that can possibly change even after the next election. The best possible foreseeable outcome of next year’s elections will be that the president is reelected, the Democrats retake the House of Representatives, and maybe pick up two or three seats in the Senate. If that happens, the Democrats will still be four or five seats short of the sixty senators needed to do anything. We’ll be back to the early part of 2009, before we briefly had 60 senators. We won’t be able to do anything substantial about climate change and nothing will be done that isn’t approved by Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Dick Lugar, and whomever else is willing to make a deal. The left will continue to wonder why the president can’t do anything to the left of Joe Manchin and Mark Pryor.
So, yes, the system is broken and isn’t even capable of being fixed through the normal political process. Maybe that helps explain why there’s a nascent movement on the left that is anti-Wall Street but has no concrete demands.
The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What’s different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.
Yet, for the left to organize into something that can break the deadlock in Washington, they have to have some kind of political impact. And it’s very hard to have an impact that doesn’t primarily empower the right. Disruption tends to lead to calls for law and order. The truth is that the progressive left has almost no power in this country, and almost no progressives who actually hold office have much interest in carrying the ball for radicals to their left.
The last time we had an economy like this, we also had a strong, global communist movement and a growing fascist threat. Those two movements created a lot of room for Roosevelt to maneuver in the middle. Roosevelt also had supermajorities in Congress that allowed him a lot more freedom to experiment. We can’t replicate those conditions in today’s climate. But if I can make any constructive advice to those who are marching in anti-Wall Street protests around the country, it is to make these people less interested in selecting our next president for us and more concerned about unruly mobs who want to know when they’re getting their future back.
Also, this guy needs an attitude adjustment.
For those of you who can’t watch videos, it’s a BBC interview with a trader who is predicting the collapse of the EuroZone and is excited to make money off it even as he predicts we are all going to lose our life’s savings.
He could be right. Maybe you should follow his advice. But it’s hard to overcome the impulse to drag him through the streets, isn’t it?
