At The Guardian, Ned Temko looks at past inaugurals, and writing in New Matilda, Aron Paul observes:

Obama’s inauguration may well promise republican and democratic renewal. Paradoxically, however, this year’s is the most monarchic and imperial inauguration ritual that America has ever witnessed.

I think Adrien is right to observe on a related thread here that we’ve rarely seen so much international interest in, and widespread coverage of such an event. To some degree, I think this is an artefact of the end of the Bush era. Certainly, the symbolism of Obama’s train ride tracing Lincoln’s route to Washington DC, the rhetoric of a “new declaration of independence” and even the significance of the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech won’t have the same resonance here as it does for American citizens.

On one hand, I think Obama’s inauguration is to be welcomed heartily (if realistically in terms of what it promises), and the pose of permanent cynicism some like to adopt rejected as a symptom of the failings of Western political systems themselves.

On the other hand, the degree of international attention, I think, obscures the degree to which Obama’s role will be the management of a superpower in decline, both economically and politically. While George W. Bush no doubt accelerated America’s decline, the fact that it will be so difficult for the new President – armed with record popularity, a strong electoral college margin and Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress – to achieve universal healthcare is telling. Healthcare for the middle class traditionally rested on employer coverage, which was in turn dependent on America’s comparative economic dominance. Though the story is more complex than this, the withering away of this hegemony is both cause of and metaphor for many of the travails Obama was elected to address.

In foreign policy too, Obama’s options are probably more limited than they appear. I think we’ll see that in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the continuity signalled by the renomination of Robert Gates as Defence Secretary and a panoply of other Republicans to his national security team is significant.

We might do well to remember all this, and whether or not we’re personal fans of the President of Our Great and Powerful Friend, that looking to America to salve all the world’s ills hasn’t exactly been working so well recently. Though Obama will undoubtedly be a much better President than his predecessor, his own commitment to multilateralism (such as it is) might be better served if we in Australia were to rely more on our own resources, even if our politics lacks pageantry and soaring rhetoric.

Update: New post here with links to the speech and commentary on some interesting but probably overlooked angles.

But, anyway, the lame duck President made his ritual obeisance to the virtues of American leadership and the glories of the free market. One imagines there’s some personal and political imperative there, but the reality of his governance is better disclosed in the fate of the TARP funds which Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was given by Congress – it appears that crony capitalism and socialism for the rich is the name of the game according to American blogs such as naked capitalism, Obsidian Wings, firedoglake and naked capitalism again.

But Bush will soon be fading into history, and Barack Obama sensibly declined to act at the summit without executive authority, so what emerged from the G20 is more in the nature of a directions statement for the way forward, as The Big Picture foresaw:

Hopefully, a long term agenda for regulatory cooperation and communication can be set with the next meeting’s agenda decided upon. Far better to talk then not, but no real decisions will come out of this meeting. There will be gnashing of teeth and venting of rage at the mess that excess securitization has created, and the international regulation of and accounting for such derivatives will probably be a focus.

Planet Money looks at what transpired, and links to the text of the communique here. SocProf is right, in my judgement, that we’re seeing the eclipse of the Washington consensus, but the shape of what will replace it is still a work in progress, and some yardsticks to measure the work of the G20 have been provided by the Guardian. Bretton Woods itself was the culmination of some years of intellectual work and economic diplomacy, and if there is to emerge something we might call Bretton Woods II, it isn’t a bad thing that the interregnum in the US presidency implies that decisions won’t be made on the run.

In forming a judgement on what does emerge, I think we as global citizens could do worse than to keep in mind the choice posed by one of FDR’s brains trust in 1932, Adolf Berle:

Between a political organization of society and an economic organization of society, which will be the dominant form?

Elsewhere: Peter Martin has helpfully posted a link to John Quiggin‘s presentation on how the global financial crisis transpired, which should provide some necessary context.

<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/obama-hope.jpg"

What’s intriguing about this win is that Obama will exercise influence immediately. George W. Bush is the lamest of lame ducks, and arrangements have already been made for the next president to participate in shaping economic policy, and former Times Economics Editor Anatole Kaletsky thinks that influence will make a difference quickly:

If tomorrow’s election delivers a clear economic mandate to a competent new Administration, the financial markets will soon stabilise — and the US economy could recover surprisingly quickly from the blundering incompetence of Henry Paulson and George W. Bush.

Obama will be naming cabinet members and other key administration figures very quickly, and we won’t have the traditional waiting game for policy and names to trickle out before mid January.

How will he govern? One of the most interesting comments he’s made is when he told Jon Stewart that difficult times enable a President to achieve big things. There’s a bit of an FDR game in play, perhaps, with the modest promises of the campaign potentially being eclipsed by the pressure of events. We’ll see – expectations will certainly be high.

Related posts: The archive of all US election 2008 posts at LP can be accessed here.

Update [by Mark]: The text of Obama’s speech is here.

…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.

Have you noticed that every person suddenly knows everything there is to know about how the economy works? Wow, it’s all so simple.

Maybe there’s a point there, but not the one John Amato thinks he’s making. I’ve consistently been of the view that the economy should be a subject for civic and political discussion, and that we shouldn’t hold back because of the “not an economist!” cries that sometimes echo around the place. If one of the continuing problems with the US financial sector is the lack of transparency which is causing the crisis of solvency – because no one still knows where all the securitised bodies are buried – so too a bit of transparency in demystifying the fiscal arcana whose complexity was part of the reason for this mess should be welcomed.

So, with that in mind, I wanted to share some links (from econobloggers and non-economists both) I’ve found particularly insightful and interesting over the last few days.

First, Tyler Cowan’s take at Marginal Revolution is succinct and informative.

Secondly there’s no lack of alternative proposals to the TARP bailout around in the blogosphere. I haven’t reviewed all of these carefully, and there are a lot more out there, but there are some samples at Crooks & Liars and Boztopia. It’s good to see some policy thinking going on among online activists as well as political pointscoring. That leads me to my next theme – which is exemplified in this post from Ian Welsh at Firedoglake – the indictment of the neoliberal consensus for what’s gone down and a call for a new New Deal. FDR’s getting more than a few hat tips at the moment, and Barack Obama has certainly made the first part of the case, and it may not be entirely wishful thinking to expect an Obama administration – it one eventuates – to make a genuine attempt to reshape the governing structures and logics of the American economy. The enormous bill that’s being presented to the taxpayers may provide the political opening.

Publius at Obsidian Wings also argues for the possibility of a “Progressive Moment”.

Of course, it’s also possible that an Obama administration would be Clintonomics as usual. We’ll see, but the discussion itself will hopefully build some momentum.

It’s hard to see how the immiseration of the American middle class can be permitted to continue (I don’t expect any real action from the Democratic Party on actual poverty) for another four years, if the culture wars card fails to trump economics.

On a somewhat more theoretical note, it’s also pleasing to see attention being paid to the work of Karl Polanyi and his work back in the 1940s on the constructedness of markets. At the same site, Saskia Sassen joins the new New Deal chorus and calls for a refocusing of policy on the real economy.