Even as the presidential debates hog the limelight to the real contest next month, the surreal world of American politics is a bewildering exercise. Take for example the claim of the American right and its corporate world that President Barack Obama is a dangerous socialist bent upon starting a class war in the country. In most other countries, Obama’s “socialist” credentials would be laughed at. After all he is the president who bailed out America’s beleaguered banks and other financial institutions and gave the rich of America another lease of life. At the same time, America’s 46 million poor (they do not count in the country’s ever-raging political debate) and the middle class are the biggest losers. With these kinds of facts, one has to question seriously the socialist epithet thrown at Obama by the rich and powerful in the Republican Party.
Obviously, this is meant to sharpen the ideological divide between the two contending political parties in the US, made worse by the racial innuendo and identity issue (whether or not he was born in the US) that has plagued Obama all through his term. Therefore his ‘socialism’ is somehow sinister and unwholesome in the eyes of his many critics. For instance, Mitt Romney has said, “This president doesn’t understand freedom.” Another Republican, Mike Coffman, reportedly said that “in his heart…[Obama] is just not an American.” And Rush Limbaugh, a popular conservative radio host has come to the conclusion: “I think it can now be said, without equivocation… that this man [Obama] hates this country.” And, “He is trying… to dismantle, brick-by-brick, the American dream.”
Let us look at why socialism is hated so much by so many Americans. First, for many Americans socialism is an evil creed associated with the failed Soviet Union. Therefore even a suggestion that an American president might be espousing it is considered dangerous and even un-American. It is meant to stir a class war in the United States, turning one section of society against the other: the rich against poor. And what is the proof that Obama is doing this? Because he is making a case that America’s well off and the rich should pay a bit more tax to repair the country’s damaged economy.
Obama’s critics call it “a philosophy of disdain toward wealth creation.” There is a concerted political movement, funded and articulated by the country’s ultra-rich, to bring down Obama by throwing all their weight and resources behind Mitt Romney. One of the leaders of this club of rich men, described as the “pope of this movement”, is Lee Cooperman, a hedge fund billionaire. In a letter to President Obama in November last year, decrying his provocative tone against the country’s rich people (partly reported in The New Yorker), he said, “…Capitalism is not the source of our problems, as an economy or as a society, and capitalists are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be.” He added, “As a group we employ many millions of taxpaying people, pay their salaries, provide them with healthcare coverage, start new companies …”
In other words, instead of praising and encouraging the capitalist class for their tremendous contribution to the country’s economy and society, President Obama’s framing of “the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment.”
What most worries America’s rich is that Obama’s mild advocacy of fairness in paying taxes by the rich is somehow debunking the much hyped-up myth of the American dream, which means that any American, however low, has the potential to reach the top because this country is special. It is true that now and then even a poor and disadvantaged person can make it to the top in any society, but such examples are few and far between in the US or anywhere else. The US’s economic mess, with the rise in the numbers of the poor (now numbering about 46 million) and the unemployed and under-employed (at 23 million), is stripping bare this myth. The recent spontaneous rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement against the ‘one percent’ that hogs America’s wealth has created fear among the country’s rich. And they fear that Obama’s talk about fairness might create an environment of popular insurrection against the rich and their powerful political allies, the Republican Party.
The point though is that Obama’s so-called socialism is not the real danger. What is dangerous, according to Joseph E Stiglitz, an American Nobel laureate economist, as he says in his book The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future: “In important ways, our own country has become like one of these disturbed places serving the interests of a tiny elite.” And he seems to suggest that unless these inequalities are addressed, the United States might not be able to avoid for long the kind of popular revolts that are engulfing the Middle East.
But this is not the kind of stuff the Republicans and their rich supporters are interested in. If anything, they just want to forget the 47 percent Americans who, they believe like Mitt Romney, look to the state for handouts and pay no taxes. In his view, they will not vote for him because his party is against welfare spending by the government, of which they are the beneficiaries. In other words, Romney, if elected, will work only for nearly half the population; others might have to fend for themselves.
The absurdity of the US political debate is further highlighted when some of his rich opponents are even starting to see a Hitler in him. For instance, Stephen Schwarzman, a billionaire businessman, has compared President Obama’s proposed measures to eliminate some of the preferential tax treatment of the rich to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. If you think that Schwarzman might be one of those odd people seeing Hitler everywhere, it is not so. He is not alone. Cooperman, a hedge fund founder, shares the same broad view, though he does not want to be that blunt. He told The New Yorker’s Chrystia Freeland, “You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world [USA] put a 47-year-old guy [Obama] that never worked a day in his life [which is not true] and made him in charge of the free world.” Which, in his view, is “not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied.” Elaborating on this, he said, “Now Obama is not Hitler…But it is a question that the dissatisfaction of the populace was so great that they were willing to take a chance on an untested individual.” And look what happened in Germany. In other words, Obama is creating an inflammatory situation in the United States by turning the poor against the rich, when the country’s rich have been at the forefront of creating jobs et al. Therefore, Obama is not only a dangerous socialist but also an agitator and provocateur trying to stir up things like Hitler did in Germany.
This level of debate in the United States, where the electors are pilloried for electing Barack Obama who, in turn, is pilloried for his socialist and Hitlerist views, is a sad reflection on the state of politics in the “largest and greatest country in the free world”. No wonder, the United States is in such a parlous state.
The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He can be reached at [email protected]