Domestic Counter-Insurgency

Success is a funny thing. It fathers humility on some, arrogance on others. By the year 2007, the ruling class of the United States had become giddy with its successful run of damage control. Concessions that had been made throughout the first 3/4 of the 20th century to members of the lower and middle classes, to women and people of color, to immigrants and ethnic and religious minorities--concessions forced through political activism in American schools, churches, factories, and streets--had been slowly rolled back during the final 1/4 of that fateful century--thanks, in large part, to the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan.

Some slight amelioration of those regressive trends had been effected during the two terms of the Clinton Administration, but, by and large, Clinton and Gore had demonstrated to the militarized corporatocracy that they had no intention of altering the power-sharing arrangement of the Republicrat-Democan duopoly. Furthermore, they were personally invested in the economic basis of the American ruling class: Clinton as a nouveau riche member of the establishment, Gore, the son of a U.S. Senator, as something of an "old money" Southern patrician. In any case, their two terms in office provide ample evidence that they had no intention of biting the corporate hands that fed them.

Little wonder, then, that the theft of the election of 2000 by the Bush family in Florida hit Al Gore like a ton of bricks. Had the previous eight years not amply proved to the more arrogant (not to say paranoid) elements of the ruling class that he could be counted on? What more did they want from him? He was entitled, damn it! Just as George H. W. Bush had been entitled after eight years of Ronald Reagan.

Alas, when you bed down with thieves you had better be prepared to awaken one fine morning with your boon companions gone and your purse and spurs with them. Be thankful on that morning if you awaken at all: for your throat is likely to be cut as part of the bargain. In the wake of his betrayal, Al Gore, as so many Americans before him, turned for solace to the Dream Factories of Hollywood and, lo and behold, was presented with the consolation prize of an Academy Award (2007). The Nobel Peace Prize Committee also contributed further reassurances (2007). If you keep your mouth shut, the plutocracy takes care of its own. Witness the Prize bestowed upon the current occupant of the Oval Office, Barack Hussein Obama (2009). Consider the award of those two Peace Prizes in light of the fact that Mahatma Gandhi, the non-violent liberator of the Indian sub-continent, was never awarded one.

But let us return to 2007. For after stealing the election of 2000 and very possibly repeating that crime through vote tampering in southern Ohio in 2004, the Bush-Cheney White House's signature combination of arrogance, naked greed, and incompetence had finally soured the mood of a significant percentage of the American electorate. People were genuinely angry with the state of the nation and began to question the prerogatives of the ruling class. At that point, the business of damage-control-as-usual would no longer suffice. The corporatocracy understood that something had to be done: and it would have to be something both daring and decisive.

And what they chose to do was both daring and decisive.

Now, in retrospect, the meteoric political rise of Barack Obama ought not to have surprised anyone. After all, he had been groomed in some of the most distinguished institutions of higher education that the American ruling class provides to its members (Columbia University and Harvard Law School). Moreover, his family background is obscure and there have been suggestions of parental involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency. But his vetting by the Chicago Democratic Party's political machine--the same political machine that helped to undermine the Presidential bid of one of the very few establishment candidates ever to present a genuine threat to the status quo, George McGovern (1972)--ought to have set off bells of alarm.

Only it didn't--or couldn't--because of the brilliant way in which the corporatocracy branded Obama, taking advantage of his race, his vague, childhood experience with Islam in Indonesia (a non-Arab Muslim majority country with a ruling class that has deep and firm ties to the U.S. corporatocracy), personal charisma, and the blinding determination of people throughout the United States to effect authentic political change. In 2007, no one--absolutely no one--in the political class of this country presented better credentials as Agent-of-Change-in-Chief than Barack Hussein Obama.

And that is precisely the wager that the ruling class made in order to accomplish its stunning victory in the domestic counter-insurgency operation of 2007-2008. As the architects of the counter-insurgency divined, no one would suspect Obama of being the savior of the power elite. Indeed, to this day, despite a term in office that has been, by any standard, astonishing in its slavish devotion to the prerogatives of Wall Street and the Military-Industrial complex, many middle class Americans, cut off from reality by their enduring hatred for the man--a hatred that I presume to be racist to the core--accuse him of being a "socialist" or "crypto-Muslim" (terms that denote, in the topsy-turvy Wonderland world of Tea Party members and fellow travelers, "anti-American"). Would that Obama had such tendencies in his personality: they would make him a far more interesting and thoughtful politician. Instead, he has consistently demonstrated himself to be something much less attractive: a condottiero of the ruling class.

So all the Tea Partyesque noise and stink about Obama as a "leftist" and a "traitor" is subterfuge. It is designed to prop up support for him among the more sensible and well-meaning elements of the American body-politic and allow them to overlook the painfully obvious evidence of his true Presidential legacy: more ruling class damage control. Greater disenfranchisement of the poor, of people of color (ironically), and of the middle class. For as long as Obama retains the good-will of those who might potentially object to the continuing disenfranchisement of the so-called "99%," it can proceed according to schedule.

The most important component of this counter-insurgency operation has yet to be made explicit: Obama (to whom we might as well refer from now on as "Obamney") is just the counter-insurgency's poster child. The real weapon that the ruling class used against a discontented populace was its most ingenious one: the ballot box.