Newsflash: The 2032 Triumph of Obama’s People’s Crusade.

Newsflash: Sixteen years after he left office, former President Barak Obama has been awarded a second Nobel Peace Prize, this time for leading a People’s Crusade to stem the tide of climate destruction and authoritarian governments throughout the world.  As people begin to trust the victory, joyous, raucous celebrations have begun on the streets of New York, Paris, London, Moscow, and even Beijing.

Most people expected Obama to take a break after eight exhausting years as president.  He had fought valiantly, if a little too gently, against the irascible and relentless opposition of right wing legislators and a Supreme Court determined to undermine decades of movement towards the civil and economic rights of working people and people of color.  Instead, he began the People’s Crusade that has crowned his heroic struggle against tyranny and small-mindedness.

It would take books to describe how Mr. Obama turned the seemingly unstoppable and increasingly reactionary Trump—Putin-Le Pen locomotive.  But here is a very brief synopsis of how the little train, begun in 2017 grew into a powerful engine of social transformation.

Immediately after turning the White House over to Donald Trump, Obama moved to Akron, Ohio and began to organize—his first and greatest skill.  He organized what was left of the unions and the social justice organizations housed in nonprofits. He organized Black people, White people, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in common cause: the need for jobs, housing, rights, and hope. There was a vacancy and he ran for Mayor and won handily.  This was his new pulpit and he immediately turned things around by creating food, job, and child-care collectives, and housing starts. All of these created jobs.  Harking back to the New Deal and Keynesian economics, Obama insisted that sufficient taxes would eventually flow from good jobs. Within a couple of years, the Akron economy proved him right.

This became Barak Obama’s talking points in Ohio, where, in 2020, he won a Congressional seat, and around the country.  In his campaign, he dropped some of his celebrated civil tone.  He stopped trying to please everyone.  He grew more urgent and insistent, and he emphasized the need of poor, working class, and middle class people to unite against the 1% and their dominance.  It has been a long time—since the 1940’s really, that the anger of disenfranchised Americans has been educated and built into a powerful collective force.  The spirit of FDR spoke through him.  The betrayal of Democrats, the Republican, and the banks, who gathered power and fortune to themselves, became the core of Obama’s new narrative.

As he traveled the country, Obama brought small and medium-sized business owners into a growing coalition.  They, too, understand that more income for the lower and middle classes meant more income for them.  He brought in the universities, not in the spirit of the sixties, which left out and alienated the working classes, in common cause—and to help articulate the new agenda: higher wages, more jobs, health care for all, voters rights, affirmation of immigration, and a strong but conservative foreign policy, neither isolationist nor aggressively pushing the American agenda onto other nations, but resolute in defense of our shores and our strategic interests.   Within a year—say 2021—there was a great stirring in the country.  Everyone could feel it.  At last, a cause and a leader the great masses of Americans could unite behind.

By 2024, Obama and a burgeoning group of charismatic and diverse young leaders had won the House of Representatives, the Senate, and a majority of state legislatures.  Now they could get to work. Now they could reverse all the voting rights restrictions, the cripplingly low taxation, the nasty culture of us against them.  The People’s Crusade began to represent an overwhelming majority.  There was less and less need to demonize “them.”

It wasn’t just the brilliance of Obama and his allies that won the fight.  It was also the utterly self-destructive fury of the Republicans that brought them down.  There were the tax cuts that left the poor poorer, the sick sicker, the homeless and the drug addicted even more destitute.  It was the three wars, the two in the Middle East and one in South America, that bankrupted the country.  Each of the wars had been begun with an insult that President Trump could not ignore.  Angry words followed angry words—and led to retribution, with Trump believing that his bullying ways could translate to international relations.  And, like all wars since Vietnam, we couldn’t win those wars.

Aided by social unrest and European economic collapse, the American economy was on bring of a disaster comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  At the same time, China and Russia grew stronger.  Together, they organized Asian-centered trade deals that Americans, at first invited, refused to join. Even in decline, America under Trump believed in its general entitlement, and its special mission of world dominance.  America and the West grew more isolated, less able to dominate through economic power and more dependent on its bullying threats and its weaponry.  The brittleness of that stance was the most frightening of all.

Most Americans had never liked or even trusted Trump in the first place.  He had represented an opportunity to protest the growing disenfranchisement they felt.  But once the thrill of protest began to wane, Trump’s ruinous domestic and out-of-control foreign policies became evident to all.   An alternative awaited: impeachment.  Once the Republicans joined the uproar—he wasn’t helping their cause either—impeachment was easily accomplished.  Trump’s narcissistic and thuggish imitation of Putin’s enrichment of his own business empire provided an easy target.

In 2019, Mike Pence, the guy the Tea Party establishment wanted all along, became president.  He kept his ego out of foreign affairs, providing a show of strength and stability, but he continued to implemented the Tea Party’s nativist, misogynistic, and bellicose attack on fifty years of progressive political accomplishments with a quiet fury.   Never popular with the majority of Americans, Pence began to look slick and inept.   Once again, Paul Ryan tried to step into the breach with a disguised version of Pence-Trump policies, but within months of what the Tea Party saw as Ryan’s presumption and perfidy, he was assassinated by a White Supremacist.

During the early years of the Trump-Pence regimes, militias had grown bigger and bolder but they were almost as disenchanted with the Republicans as they had been with the Democrats.  Their grandiose dreams of power seemed close to realization. Secessionist sentiment in Texas, Alabama, and Idaho went mainstream.  America seemed on the edge of civil war and chaos.

Into this terrible cauldron of violence and lawlessness, came the Obama’s People’s Crusade.  Throughout the states, both Blue and White, growing fear and yearning led to the desire for a leader who would bring them back to the good old days.  Only now it wasn’t the ante-bellum South they sought.  It was the post war years, the late 1940’s and 1950’s when Americans seemed united in their optimistic pursuit of happiness and success, when individuals—though not, of course, African Americans—almost all felt they were on the rise, and that their interests were protected by a stable, powerful government.

Obama and a great swelling coalition of working people, people of color, immigrants, youth, women—and men seeking jobs and dignity—were ready.  They stood as the obvious choice to right the wrongs of the Tea Party, Donald Trump, the Koch bothers.  The Crusade had continued to give voice to this new and not so silent majority, and to win seat after seat in state and federal elections.  By 2028, the Crusade controlled both Houses of Congress and the Presidency—now held by Julia Perez, forty five, brilliant, and unafraid of taking charge.  The Supreme Court would soon follow.

That brings us back to 2032, the day of celebration.  Not only is this the day of Obama’s Peace Prize but, with a second term coming, Julia Perez now represents the consolidated reign of our first woman as president, and a Latina at that.

 

Suing others does not Lead to Justice

While the huckster and the hurricane have kept us glued to our TV screens, a very important event has passed by with much too little attention:  the passage of a bill that permits Americans to sue Saudi Arabia for the death and destruction of the World Trade Center bombings.  It is called Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA).  What makes this bi-partisan bill so important?  Implicit in the Act is the belief that Americans can take legal action against governments but people from other countries will not or cannot reciprocate.  I’d like to explain how short-sighted, dangerous, and distorted this reasoning is.

First, let’s review the facts.  There was the 9/11 attack, planned and executed by Osama Bin Laden.  There is no proof that the Saudi Arabian government participated in this terrorist operation.  If they did, we might have taken the attack as an act of war; even the bellicose Bush administration didn’t do that.  Second, there is the internationally shared legal doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” which says that “a sovereign or state cannot commit a legal wrong and is immune from civil suit or criminal prosecution.”  To date, the United States has agreed to this doctrine.  Yet the Senate voted 97 to 1 and the House voted 348 to 77 to override President Obama’s veto of the bill.

And let’s remember that the right to sue is not the same as holding people and nations to account by bringing them to world tribunals for war crimes and crimes against humanity.  This we can do.

Imagine what might happen if we really do abandon the doctrine of sovereign immunity.  How, for example, would we respond to Vietnamese families, who grieve their dead as much as we do, if they decided to sue the United States for the millions of people the United States killed and maimed in a useless war?  Would we accept the legitimacy of these legal claims?  What about Iraq, where we began a war on the false premises of weapons of mass destruction, murdering thousands, destroying homes and public buildings, and, in the process, precipitating civil war?  What about the relatives of those murdered—we call it “collateral damage”—during drone attacks.  What about the relish that people around the world would take in seeking reparations—or a big payday—by suing the wealthy American government.  The courts would be brought to a standstill by thousands of law suits and would be hard pressed to rule that the United States is different from other nations.

In short, the United States Congress has demonstrated both a clear double standard and an almost total absence of strategic foresight.

Beyond the strategic implications of JASTA, there is the symbolism: what it tells us about our society.

American society is destructively litigious.  When Americans feel wronged, they sue.  Why?  To lash out, to punish, to get even.  This is the biblical doctrine of “an eye for an eye.”  But is there really solace and satisfaction in vengeance?  Does that make up for our losses?  Does it relieve our grief?  Does it bring back our loved ones?  I don’t think so.  When there is injury and costs involved in caring for the injured, I am very much in favor of legal action.  But death is another thing.  Then we must mourn.  We must come to terms with our losses, however terrible and however difficult.  If possible, we mourn with others and, in that strange, awful twist of fate, grow closer through tragedy.  But vengeance tends to divide and embitter.  It leaves a sour taste in our mouths.  It solves nothing.  It makes a mockery of our belief in justice.

How about deterrence, the power of law suits to send a warning to those who would harm us?  I have seen virtually no proof in the sociological literature that punishment deters criminals, no less terrorists.  Let’s just dismiss this idea.  It is a rationalization for our desire for revenge.

Then there is the profit motive.  As the personal injury ads that pollute our TV screens tells us, there’s a potential gold mine out there.  If we’re miserable, maybe we can feel a little better if we’ve got money to spend.  There’s something to be proud of.

While our litigiousness tends to rot our society from within, our belief that America is different from other nations, that we are special and not subject to the same rules as others, does the same to our standing in the world.  We believe with our whole hearts that America is the greatest nation on earth.  And it’s true that our democratic ideals and the structure of our government are exceptional.  But there are two problems with exceptionalism.  First, we are in a period when the practice of democracy is strained.  Wealthy people, supported by decisions like Citizen’s United, wield more power and have more privilege than at almost any time in our history.  Voting rights are wantonly denied in many states. We are on the verge of becoming more a plutocracy than a democracy.  Poverty remains extremely high.  The presidential campaign—the symbolic centerpiece of democratic process—has people round the world horrified and repulsed.

We may still be one of the better places to live.  People still flock to our shores in search of the American dream.  But we are in a period of nativism, rejecting the very people who have made us strong.  And our foreign policy, in the name of great ideals, has never been so pure.  For centuries now, we have undermined regimes around the world when they do not agree with us or threaten our interests.  We believe ourselves to be superior to others, and that superiority gives us the right to tell others what to do—not in the candid language of realistic self-interest but in the language of ‘making the world safe for democracy.’  We do this with a straight face, even as we support some of the world’s worst regimes.  Here are a few: them Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, Marcos in the Philippines, Saddam Hussein, Franco in Spain, Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Batista in Cuba, and Pinochet in Peru.  Apparently, America’s exceptional qualities give us this right. This is the second problem with exceptionalism.

Let’s return to my original premise: We cannot construct an ethical and strategically sound justification to sustain our own “sovereign immunity” while denying it to other peoples and nations.   If we try, we will continue to undermine our own credibility, moral suasion, and international power.