It’s worth putting the negotiations in a different perspective.

The crisis can tell us a lot about two inter-related processes, both of which are now coming to a head. A declining empire is faced with unpalatable choices, and its political class shows its true colours.

It’s all quite neatly encapsulated by Michael Perelman, who opens with a striking quote from Joseph Schumpeter:

“… public finances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society. The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare — all this and more is written in its fiscal history.” He cites Goldscheid. 1917. Staatsozialismus order Staatskapitalismus. “the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.”

Following Schumpeter, the budget debates illustrate the kind of life that the rich and powerful wish on the rest of society. Get rid of the social safety net, destroy unions, turn the clock back to the nineteenth century. And yes, a bloated military to fight in every corner of the world.

In a similar vein, there’s Jodi Dean, who I think is wrong to surmise that Barack Obama is rapt with delight about the situation, but otherwise makes some telling points. Where she errs is to imagine a ruling class frenzy, as if the “executive committee of the bourgeoisie” were plotting around the White House cabinet table. What I suspect is much closer to the truth is that the fight over priorities and political advantage is laying bare the underlying logic of US government and politics.

What we’re seeing is a governmental edifice that can no longer ensure a reasonable standard of living for a fast growing number of its citizens, and whose fiscal reliance on the rest of the world is now becoming more evident. At such a moment, denial and ideological smoke and mirrors shape politics, even if, as Perelman suggests, the real nature of the US polity is revealed in the fiscal numbers themselves.

But I don’t think the politicos are wholly aware of that – it’s something akin to the sort of partisan maneouvring and ideological obfuscation that might have characterised the elites of the Roman Empire as it began to implode in the 3rd or 5th centuries.

Andrew Bartlett:

For the last few months, I’ve found it hard to shake the idea that the Liberal Party’s overriding approach to politics and policy has deteriorated to a level little better than where the US Republican Party now finds itself. I think the reason why things have sunk this low has a lot to do with the perverted nature of the so-called culture and history wars which were embraced with such fervour by the Howard government.

The Liberal’s incoherent, self-contradicting approach on a whole range of policy issues – most worryingly even on economic and tax policy – might be sufficiently obscured by their continuing inchoate war on everything as to provide electoral benefits for them. But once rational thinking is no longer required – in fact becomes an impediment to launching the latest barrage – then there is no guarantee it will ever be returned to at some stage down the track.

Charles Richardson: [paywalled]

Fraser’s generation, having lived through the Second World War, could never forget the importance of liberalism; even down to John Howard?—?whose similarities with Fraser are often overlooked?—?it was understood that there were potential enemies to the right as well as to the left.

With the current generation, that realisation has been lost.

The Liberal Party of Fraser’s time, whatever its faults (and there were many), would never have flirted with torture, with creationism, and with the repudiation of international law over Tampa and later Iraq. There are still liberals in the party today, but they are outnumbered and outgunned by the acolytes of an American-style “movement” conservatism?—?militant, intolerant and anti-intellectual.

I’m not sure the Libs are the Tea Party equivalent; that movement has spun out of the Republicans’ control, as the victory of Rand Paul in the Kentucky Senate primary, Governor Charlie Crist’s defection from the GOP in Florida, and the results of the Utah convention show. Mark Lillia, writing in the New York Review of Books has a rather interesting take on the Tea Party – libertarian anti-politics, he suggests. But the Liberals have certainly taken over a huge slice of the Republican/Fox News/Noise Machine playbook. The soil for constructing an electoral majority on these lines may be more fallow in the US than many think – I’m not at all sure the expected Democratic wipeout in the mid terms will eventuate. But I do strongly suspect it’s even more fallow here in Australia. Rudd may be in trouble; but Abbott’s probably still unelectable. In the mean time, we have nothing like a sensible political debate on the issues confronting our country.

It may be that this is actually inherent in the American system of government – it’s a very difficult balancing act for one figure to be simultaneously symbolic head of the nation and executive of the political state. It’s pretty clear, too, how the particularity of Obama’s identity can be mobilised by the Fox News noise machine to disrupt the first identification, leading the President to spend far too much time rising above politics rather than practising it. It’s always going to be more difficult for a president of the centre-left to straddle this divide, but as Bromwich suggests, it’s rather puzzling that a man as intelligent as Obama goes on making the same mistake again and again.

Update: In the New York review of Books, Michael Tomasky writes on the right wing street protests and the noise machine, and Elizabeth Drew examines Obama’s performance in office through the prism of the healthcare debate:

In fact, the question has arisen of whether Barack Obama’s particular—one might say idiosyncratic—governing style is right for these times.

Leaving aside the obvious attempt to articulate the health care plan with ‘right to life’ scaremongering through all the nonsense about ‘death panels’, we still have a textbook example of how culture and ideology can cause blindness to collective interests (and indeed self interest). No amount of rhetoric about the possibilities of self actualisation and choice over life goals has any meaning if there is sustained structural inequality in health outcomes (and therefore life chances), and if there is no real attempt to ameliorate this inequality through collective action by the state.

At The Global Sociology Blog, SocProf hones in on the reasons for the absence of any discussion of, or even awareness of, class inequality in American culture and politics.

Obama now faces the familiar dilemma of attempting to save political face through the passage of some watered down bill which will do nothing, and may even be harmful, given the capture of representatives and Senators by the private interests of health insurers. Progressives also face a painful dilemma – an oft repeated one: whether to be complicit in the passage of a measure whose momentum is now driven almost solely by political calculation or whether to take a stand on principle. John Odum poses this well. But it seems unlikely that conditions – under the current political arrangements – for the passage of genuine health care reform will ever be more favourable.

To put it mildly, though, it’s hardly helpful, and it’s illustrative of the despicable tactics which the globally interconnected forces of reaction are prepared to employ.

This issue isn’t directly canvassed by Nate Silver, but he has written a very interesting post at FiveThirtyEight.com on the chances of the Climate Change Bill receiving 60 votes in the US Senate (which it will need to survive a filibuster) – recommended reading.

Certainly, the party swap of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is a fillip for the Democrats.

Although, those with a long memory for the ‘Clarence Thomas hearings’ might question the elderly gentleman’s progressivism when it comes to issues of concern to women. Anita Hill, wherever she is now, probably isn’t over the moon:

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/specter.jpg" align=left Though another way of looking at that is that he’s the very model of the Senex – the governing classes of what passes for the Republic these days.

In truth, I’d suggest, Specter’s defection reflects a real ‘partisan realignment’ – the shift of established power bases to the Democrats, uniting around Barack Obama now that he’s proved that his version of “change we can believe in” is softly, softly muted. This, of course, does leave the Republicans as the party of the noise machine, and an increasingly marginalised voter base, but where does it leave progressive politics in the U S of A? If you’re in a kind mood, you might assume that Obama’s natural instincts will be further pulled rightwards… You read the omens!

scatterplot:

…the last time Democrats won 50%+ of the House popular vote: November 4. The last time the Republicans did? 1946. The graph of the House popular vote is rather telling… Yes, the policies of each of these parties are shifting/emergent. But I must confess that I read this chart with a degree of naive hope: that our brief experiment with conservatism is over. I can even imagine the tombstone:

Conservatism
1992-2004

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/house-1942-date.jpg"

red state blue state rich state poor state:

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/democrats-house-vote.png"

…typical of the Limbaugh-inflected (or infected) movement as a whole is the apocalyptic attitude of right-wing columnist Mark Steyn, who thundered that an Obama victory “would be a ‘point of no return,’ the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America.”

The ludicrous hyperbole of such Jeremiads is self-refuting. Americans are desperate to fix their economy, end a ruinous, endless war and restore a sense of common purpose to civic life. As they face these challenging real-world goals, the abstract buzzwords trotted out by the right ring hollow.

Of course, Obama hasn’t won the election yet, and it’s vaguely possible that he may not, though highly unlikely if the polls are taken into account.

Kamiya’s analysis of the internal contradictions of the American right is sharp, and it’s certainly true that the movement conservatives’ dogmatic bag of tricks isn’t holding up too well in confrontation with reality. (And there’s some amusement to be gained from observing the cognitive dissonance in the right wing blogosphere.) But I wonder whether the implication – drawn by some – that an Obama victory would represent an epochal end to the culture wars craziness is overstated.

Obama’s election would, more than almost any other Democratic candidate, represent the long-overdue crushing of the barely-disguised racist “Southern Strategy” pursued by the GOP since the time of Richard Nixon. In doing so it would also represent the effective end of the Christian Right as a driving force in US governmental politics.

On more than one level, it almost certainly won’t. The noise machine – which is crucial to sustaining any culture wars electoral strategy – started up during the Clinton presidency, and took off along with talkback radio (after changes in FCC regulations), cable tv and the internet. It would be a brave soul who’d suggest that the culture wars were less virulent in the Clinton administration, and certainly his second landslide victory didn’t put a stop to it all – quite the opposite.

Similarly, the wilder reaches of the religious right are going truly troppo in anticipation of “Obamageddon”. (Here, it’s necessary to point out that by no means all evangelicals, let alone mainline Protestants and Catholics, subscribe to the crazy fundie principles, and in fact Obama has had some success with his religious outreach program.)

Thirdly, the institutional apparatus of the culture wars will remain in place – Fox, the talkback stations, the right wing press (now with added Murdoch) and the wingnut blogosphere.

All this, of course, could be relatively ineffectual if there’s an Obama administration, and obviously his election would demonstrate there’s a limit to the effectiveness of so-called “values” politics.

But it’s important to remember that the politics of division is not new.

In Nixonland, which I found an enticing read in its own terms, Rick Perlstein traces back the Republicans’ turn to cultural wedges to the immediate postwar period. He’s been criticised – in a review by Andrew Cockburn which I think is somewhat unfair and certainly unkind – for painting a picture of a golden age of social and political consensus shattered by the evil Richard Nixon. Perlstein also stands accused of hankering after a transformational President who would heal and knit together all the wounds of decades of division.

Although his cyclical theory of American political history is a bit questionable, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was right to argue that culture wars predated Nixon – immigration, Communism, sexual mores, race, feminism and Prohibition all caused massive ructions in the 1920s, for instance. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of Schlesinger’s three Presidential biographical subjects, came under vicious attack throughout his long tenure in the White House.

While it’s absolutely the case that FDR’s electoral appeal, though waning over time, was long lasting, his domestic dominance was rapidly eroding shortly after his election to a second term. Nevertheless, FDR did lay the groundwork for Democratic electoral hegemony for a long period, and certainly shifted the terrain of American political debate and policy practice. Both the circumstances and the size of his first and second victories were important in creating an enduring legacy.

A big Obama win next week – and a big Congressional win for the Democrats – would need to be entrenched over more than one electoral cycle to constitute a realigning election. And most importantly (and obviously key to future electoral prospects) he would need to govern effectively to meet the expectations created in order to reinforce a choice of a social and economic agenda over cultural identification. That’s a tall order, and it wouldn’t stop the culture wars, just render them less relevant. In politics, conflict is endless.

Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson on Kamiya at Public Opinion.

Crucially, it was House Republicans who defied their president’s appeal. For some, the choice was ideological. They would rather die than vote for an expansion of government’s economic role which they regard as tantamount to socialism. No, Bolshevism. Listen to Representative Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, chair of the House Republican policy committee and co-sponsor earlier this year of a resolution urging the president to make 2008 “The National Year of the Bible”, as documented in the Congressional record of Monday’s debate: “The choice is stark, and it was put forward in the book by Dostoevsky. In The Brothers Karamazov, the grand inquisitor came to Jesus and he said: ‘If you wish to subject the people, give them miracle, mystery and authority; but above all, give them bread.’

“It has always been the temptation in a crisis especially to sacrifice liberty for short-term promises of prosperity, and it was no mistake that during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution the slogan was Peace, Land and Bread. Today you are being asked to choose between bread and freedom. I suggest that the people on Main Street have said that they prefer their freedom, and I am with them.”

Main Street Jesus against the Dostoevskyan Bolshevik bail-out. Who was it said American reality trumps its own fiction?