The path forward is difficult to envision amid the fog of culture war, political war and the threat of actual, real-life civil war. But it is clear that Biden is at a crossroads, and still unsure which way to go. He can follow his boss, Barack Obama, who pursued bipartisanship, comity and compromise–accommodating corporate power. Or he can break toward the path of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who did battle with oligarchy, stood down fascism and welcomed the hatred of the rich.
One thing he cannot do is try to go in both directions. The lesson of the Obama administration is that you can have appeasement or transformative progress, but you almost certainly cannot have both.
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[and, as quoted in the article]:
“We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class,” University of California-Irvine professor Bernard Grofman recently told the New York Times. “[Obama] responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama.”
david sirota
let us hope biden rises above obama’s self-imposed sycophancy. he might, because he’s both old and badly complicit in bad shit, experienced and still decent. the morphic symbolism of old white male and youngish, questionable black female prosecutor just might strike the demented US political unconscious imaginary along an effective lay line… and work out for no doubt a very short time, at least until the polar ice caps melt. so, we can all go down together, as laurie anderson has prophesized.
a notebook of epic reflections by mark bartlett 