It is too bad this post-2018 elections analysis from Michael Tomasky is behind the subscription wall at the New York Review of Books. Tomasky is a liberal-left leaning corporate media pundit (he originally wrote for The Village Voice), which means he has read some Noam Chomsky, but is unable to apply Chomsky's insights. Tomasky was one of those who thought Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump, and, during the 2015-2016 Democratic Party primary, had a hard time dealing with the implications of the Bernie Sanders candidacy. No matter, as Tomasky has written the best analysis from a corporate media pundit, largely because he recognized the blue wave moment, the way in which Republicans suppressed votes in various States, and, conversely, the rural-urban divide in voting patterns across the nation. Tomasky restates, in a compelling manner, the "city mouse/country mouse" dichotomy. And here is another analysis of this rural/suburban-urban divide, which the online magazine, Axios, has highlighted. My critique of the city/country mouse divide is embedded in this post, where I show how people are more united than we think on issue after issue which Bernie Sanders has done so much to raise, and how we push the dichotomy of rural v. urban/suburban to our electoral peril in various States in our nation.
But let's explore this analysis in the context of former President Barack Obama recent admissions to a fawning elite group in Texas. Specifically, here is Obama admitting what he never wanted to admit when he ran for office in 2008 and again in 2012, or while in office: That the Washington Consensus was one which promoted globalization, and how that consensus leadership watched with indifference the decline in many former industrial areas of the nation and rural areas of our nation. This is extraordinary because it shows Obama knew what Noam Chomsky, and also Ralph Nader, the Institute for Policy Studies' John Cavanaugh, Public Citizen's Lori Wallach, and labor oriented economists like Robert Kuttner and Thea Lea, and others, understood, and yet...Obama refused to admit any of this while he held and exercised power, and refused to do anything about it, which is most damning.*
In 2016, I took the time to re-read the works of the great 20th Century American historian, Richard Hofstadter. He was born in 1916 (the same year as my mother's parents, trivially enough) and his centennial was 2016 (Hofstadter died of a heart attack in the fall of 1970). One of the books I re-read was The Age of Reform, which is about the period in American history of 1870-1935. The book reveals how the growing industrialism in the United States displaced and left behind rural areas and farmers across the land, and how this resulted in a political backlash historians have referred to as a populist "revolt." Hofstadter also inter-splices the labor-management wars of that era, and how the rising proletariat/industrial workers were also in revolt. But all the while, because Hofstadter was writing in the shadow of the New Deal, he had less than what I think is required sympathy for the populists, highlighting their ignorance and willingness to embrace racism and anti-Semitism, and assuming our leaders had learned the lessons he was imparting. To read him now, and with a Chomskyian interpretation, is to recognize Hoftstadter's overall brilliance, but also Hofstadter's limitations in terms of how one should see the populist rural and urban unrest of that period--and to see how important a guide Hofstadter's book remains for our current era.**
It is telling to me how Obama's statements have not been well-publicized in our corporate media. I doubt there was any significant discussion of Obama's statements on MSNBC, for example, and certainly not, CNN--and if there was, it was only to highlight how smart Obama is compared to the ignoramus currently occupying the White House. I can bet there has been no critique of the remarks in any way that would resemble the type of critique one only gets reading intellectually left political journals--and people wonder why I so support social media while recognizing its dangers. What is also revealing is how Obama describes the immediate post-WWII consensus among the elites in our nation. Obama only sees the bright side, and not the dark side, of that consensus. We like to focus on the Marshall Plan, which admittedly helped millions in Western Europe. Yet, we refuse to realize the flip side of that consensus was one which was terribly racist and imperialistic against the rest of the people around the globe. The U.S. literally recruited Nazis to help us formulate our foreign policy (it is not only the scientists we recruited) and formulated a doctrine designed to arm right wing dictators in what we called "Third World" nations. We spoke of spreading democracy against Communism, but what we ended up promoting most of the time was fascism and religious fundamentalism. We should be even more precise: The U.S. fanned Christian religious fundamentalism at home, fostered Jewish religious fundamentalism in Israel, and Islamic religious fundamentalism against pan-Arabists, who had as much Alexander Hamilton nation-building within their worldview as anything else we may have otherwise found unpalatable. As I am fond of citing, here is Egyptian President Gamel Abdul Nasser in the mid 1960s making light of the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and how silly it would have been to force Muslim women in Egypt to wear a hijab. During that time in which Nasser was speaking, U.S. media, and the Washington Consensus the U.S. media dutifully followed, portrayed Nasser as the Devil Incarnate. However, was Nasser really worse than the dictators we armed in Central and South America, or even the dictators we were forcibly holding up in Vietnam and Laos? We never ask the question this way on corporate media television and radio, as asking the question would expose the propaganda behind "we're fighting for democracy against godless Communism," something my generation and my parents' generation bought into in large numbers, and still can't get their heads around. As for Nasser's hatred of Israel, Michael Oren, in the paperback version of his masterful book on the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, wistfully sees far more nuance regarding Nasser (see pages 334-335 of the book, which is part of an interview with Oren in the paperback edition). The point here is that the War Against Vietnam, the systemic murder of priests and nuns, and civil society people, in Central and South America in the 1970s and 1980s, and that embrace of Wahhabist Islamic fundamentalism were features, not bugs, of American foreign policy.
The saddest, though most hopeful, part is our children and grandchildren have learned more about the malevolence of American foreign policy from Iron Man films and Captain America: Winter Soldier than they would in a lifetime of watching cable news, listening to talk radio, or the consensus news of Cronkite/Huntley-Brinkley, which has remained the propaganda of choice for Baby Boomers and oldsters for over 60 years. See my blog post essay on superhero films and this snippet from the Captain America: Winter Soldier film. Yes, if we read Christopher Simpson's Blowback, one learns all about "Operation: Paperclip" and the extensive recruitment of Nazis after World War II. While the film snippet says it was scientists, it was far more than scientists, as Simpson's book details.
People wonder why I keep harping on supporting Bernie Sanders in 2020, and strongly supported Sanders as the best candidate for president in 2015-2016. The reason is Bernie Sanders knows how to speak to rural white America in a manner where many of them properly find him credible and genuinely interested in helping them.*** He speaks to their best values, while Republicans and Trump speak to their worst values. Some have cynically criticized Sanders for this very reason, as if Sanders is not a pro-Black Lives Matter person, when the fact is he stood more with those seeking to change the systemic racism in the criminal justice system than nearly any other politician in the past forty years. Sanders' worldview speaks to the best among the supposedly divided city and country folks. And this time around, Sanders has something he lacked the first time he ran for president, which is name recognition and national popularity unique among current American politicians.
* The majority of Americans have largely and consistently been wary and not supportive of the globalist trade deals the American elite, with the important assistance from American corporate media, foisted on the nation. See, for starters, Harper's writer, John MacArthur's, outstanding journalistic history of the "selling" of the NAFTA and WTO.
**Those who know Hofstadter's work may be surprised I am not citing his work on what he called paranoid worldviews in American history and politics. However, I find that long essay fairly overwrought for its trying to tie in the Populist movement, which, while it had certain elements of right wing paranoid groups that formed in the 20th Century, were still far more economically radical and had an economic basis. Hoftstadter is correct to connect loss of white status to the rise of paranoid right, and Hofstadter's paranoid style essays bear more re-reading in the age of Trump. He was still a product of his time, and in parts reads far too complacent in his assumption the Washington Consensus would continue to save our republic. That of course is not his fault, as he cannot be expected to be fully clairvoyant. I adore Hofstadter and should not have been as dismissive of the paranoid style essays he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s. Right now, they look like prophecy in lots of ways. (UPDATED: July 17, 2019).
*** I got a kick out of how this former mine worker, in the West Virginia town hall discussion Chris Hayes of MSNBC had Bernie appear at, talked about Bernie being a senator from the "northeast" who cared more about him and others in West Virginia than Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell. It reminded me of the first episode of Trial and Error where the wealthy brother-in-law wants to hire a "northeastern" lawyer, a euphemism for "Jew." Back in the 1960s, in places such as the American South and in West Virginia, one heard New York described as "Jew York." Again, I get there is sometimes racism and anti-Semitism among some white folks in rural areas especially. However, we should speak to their positive values and re-affirm our best values for inclusiveness and pluralism in a manner which shows them they will no longer be left behind. People are complicated and have multiple motivations and viewpoints.
