[Pen-l] McCain and Republican anger

[Doyle Saylor <doylesaylor@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
The context for the subject line is the recent press response to  
campaign rallies for McCain where the character attacks produce angry  
right wing calls for more direct attacks against Obama and taking the  
fight to the 'enemy'.  The main line in the press is that this 'goes  
over the line' whatever that means.  Let's examine this line in a  
political sense.

The line is a consensus they are seeking to establish in the face of  
crisis.  The economic crash is breaking up the previous 'capitalist  
era' as they note in various mainstream publications.  The republican  
base garnered from decades of a southern strategy knows what the dying  
era was about.  The gradual loosening of racist politics was countered  
over and over by republican efforts to dilute the end of Jim Crow  
rule.  The anger being stoked by McCain's running mate, Palin, is  
about that base.

But

That era is collapsing along with the economy.  The pillars of the  
era, military power, and dollar strength, were fed into the maw of  
imperial ambition.  These calculations seemed at the beginning  
(electing Reagan) to yield results.  The bulwark of republican bases  
went along with the promises of maintaining the old hatreds.  What  
else to do?  Give up racism?  Hence the anger that McCain warms his  
hands against during the bitter losing campaign.

This consensus is necessary and vitally important to U.S. capitalism  
right now.  Otherwise a rapid collapse of U.S. power goes further than  
the Soviet Collapse ever did.  Enveloping the whole globe.   Truly the  
republican base has no chance to endure in the face of global forces.   
They may endure as a formidable anger against change which is a good  
tool to have to threaten change with.  The gamble is the consensus of  
the democrats can be built to last like the southern strategy.  That  
is the context of a line to not cross and what is in question.

As is clear from Obama, the consensus is being built around the same  
U.S. power assumptions as before but around a hopefully better social  
base for consensus.  What would oppose this consensus and threaten  
it?  The sense that international power relations would suddenly go  
bust.  That is U.S. power would go rapidly away.  The engine behind  
U.S. hegemonic collapse is energy requirements for the planet, and a  
freeing of international relations as U.S. economic power withers.   
Military power has already been demonstrated to be a paper tiger in  
Iraq and Afghanistan.  Freeing of states to go their own way is at  
stake because that would destroy hegemony power.

The quick loss of the southern strategy as a means to consensus is  
absolutely necessary to maintain the U.S. power hegemony because post  
sixties everyone knew racism was too narrow in the face of economic  
crashes.  The wobbly reformist theory of consensus depends upon the  
military and dollar power inherited from the southern strategy.  To  
discipline that reformist consensus the anger being fomented helps to  
steer the consensus along existing U.S. power lines - a Nixon  
strategy.  Abandoning those angry republican warriors and their U.S.  
power dreams is not politically acceptable because that would admit  
defeat of the Reagan era capitalism first, and second the viability of  
the pillars of power in a new consensus.

The problem is they don't know for sure that economic might is still  
there.  The rapid unraveling of the financial investment arm of  
banking seems to suggest a more dangerous possibility of 'collapse'.   
Collapse happens, Argentina for example.  And sometimes collapse is  
managed as in Turkey with anger from religious avenues of anger.  But  
internal anger in a nation state is quite different from global anger  
across boundaries.  States that are outside the U.S. sphere have an  
open avenue to walk now.  Perhaps painful because of the fall of U.S.  
power, but at least open.  South America obviously offers a viable  
alternative to international cooperation with U.S. power.

Reformism in the U.S. absolutely depends then on the maintenance of  
the pillars of U.S. power.  The Obama democratic alternative being the  
only alternative allowed to exist in the U.S. in a public sense  
because it does not threaten U.S. hegemony.  The reformers are forced  
to keep the faith with hegemonic power pillars.  And that is what is  
at stake, a desperate clinging to the pillars in an earthquake as the  
question is settled that a reformist vision can work to maintain power.

I suspect that the decline of the U.S. which we could see (right up to  
this September) was decades long based upon various schemes of  
political consensus to support hegemonic power is being tested to the  
limit.  And the limit can only be Obamaism beyond which real reforms  
and social change await.  I think though that real reforms can appear  
in a legitimate sense during this period because the certainty of the  
reformist plans is very unclear and defining reform that works is an  
effort in progress with no great clarity.  Reform that works must keep  
the pillars of power, but only in the sense a lasting political  
consensus is created.  After that, if the question is not answered by  
political stability of the hegemonic power then the counter global  
trends of cross border international anger will emerge as all  
powerful.  And real reforms will become possible.  They being fomented  
now in the public mind due to the crisis but blocked by the bars on  
the window of the pillars of U.S. hegemonic power.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
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