Disturbing No One
by digby
Jonathan Schell at The Nation has written an excellent critique of the president’s speech that captures the nagging problem I’ve had with it since I first read the transcript. As with so many policy discussions lately, it seemed to be forcefully addressing a problem that isn’t acute and ignoring the ones that are:
Why has that moment, now more than a half century past, been dragged out of obscurity to define the present? And why was the associated theme of American competitiveness in the world market chosen as the theme of the president’s State of the Union speech? After all, no superpower is aiming terrifying new weapons at the United States, as the Soviet Union seemed to be doing with its ballistic rockets during the cold war. As a matter of fact, even this was an illusion. The Soviet lead in rocketry almost immediately gave way to clear US superiority, although the mistaken belief in a “missile gap” persisted for years and was in fact instrumental in producing the Cuban missile crisis.
Neither does any economic event or trend seem to explain the use of this historical reference point. It’s true that the United States’s educational system is measurably slipping. It’s also true that the country’s infrastructure has decayed badly. And yes, the United States would benefit from whatever technical innovation it can bring off, just as any country would. But none of those problems, needful of attention as they are in their own right, is the chief cause of the United States’s economic doldrums—its stubborn high unemployment, its persisting housing bust, its galloping economic inequality. These were the fruit of an economic crash brought on by a misguided, corrupt, incompetent, larcenous, unregulated financial establishment. The relevant remedies are not better technology or some contemporary equivalent of sending a man to the moon. (In any case, although Obama insisted “We do big things,” he didn’t offer one.) The remedies needed are a re-regulation and reconstruction of the financial system, plus a major, Keynesian style stimulus program to create jobs and purchasing power, and so to jar the economy out of its stupor. But none of that was in Obama’s speech. On the contrary, his proposal to freeze spending for five years threatened more economic stagnation.
It seems, then, that our new “sputnik moment” is no more real than the first one. The difference is that it took a while to puncture the illusion of the original while the emptiness of the remake is immediately apparent.
He goes on to write that in his quest for bipartisan favor the president sought to give a speech that “disturbed no one and no one was disturbed.” But I actually think he did something more than that. Evoking Sputnik was no accident. The subtext of that whole speech was that the Chinese are “beating” us and we need to get into the race and beat them. The problem, of course, is that if we are going to “compete” with China on the terms that actually exist today, we are going to be racing to a lower standard of living for American workers and higher profits for American companies. I suspect that’s the unspoken goal of many members of the global elite (and perhaps it’s even inevitable) but I’m not sure Americans would see that as “winning the future.”
It does, however, offer the promise of bipartisan support in some fashion. Democrats are leery of China’s human rights record and safety and labor practices while Republicans simply see them as “Evil Empire Part II, must dominate.” I suspect there will be plenty of “common ground” there, and I feel quite certain that American companies are going to be well taken care of by both parties in the process.
I have to say though, that if you’re going to go for it, the tried and true policy that brings everyone together is war. Too bad we’re already fighting a hot one in Afghanistan already and mired in a quasi-occupation in Iraq (not to mention outposts all over the planet.) It could be a big bipartisan winner.
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