Gary Younge considers the charge of critics that Barack Obama is now worse than George W Bush. My interest in Younge’s handling of the question is not the comparison as such but what it shows about his conception of political representation and the nature of the democratic state. On the charge itself Younge says that it is ‘not unreasonable’ but that it ‘also misses the point’. Why it misses the point is:
It should go without saying that Obama the individual is responsible for all that he says and does. It should also go without saying that once he ascends to the Oval office he is no longer simply talking for himself, but, as commander-in-chief, for the state of which he is the head.
Just as one head of a chamber of commerce may be more or less hostile than another to the labor movement, but is ultimately charged with representing the interests of the business community, so Obama’s room for maneuver is constrained by the institutions in which he is now embedded.
A fairly routine observation about structure and agency perhaps: as an individual Obama is responsible for his choices, but these choices are limited by the institutional context, and in this particular case the institutional context makes him an agent of the US state. Notice, however, that in saying this, Younge also seems to be saying that in that role the president speaks for a state with interests distinct from those of the people who elected him. Younge also quotes himself as having said before:
He [Obama] has been elected to represent the interests of the most powerful country in the world. Those will not be the same interests as those of the powerless.
But then it turns out, again, that Obama’s role isn’t the role of a complete captive to the institution – the US state – by which he is constrained. For:
None of this is inevitable. But changing it cannot be entrusted to a single person at the top. It will change because there is a demand from Americans that is both large in number [sic], deep in commitment and active in pursuit, to enable a fundamental change in America’s role in the world.
In Younge’s vision, in other words, the US state appears in two different guises. According to one, it is the guardian of the interests of the powerful; according to the other, it could be a vehicle for the popular demands of the American electorate. Instrument of capital or framework for expressing the democratic will? Younge isn’t too sure. But he concludes in any case with a final twist:
When given the choice of representing the interests of those who voted for him and the interests of American military and economic hegemony, he chose the latter.
Well, well, well – Obama could have freed himself from the constraints by which Younge earlier said he was bound, and there is already a popular will among the voters for what Younge thinks ought to be happening.
You will find, as it so happens, some similar material in a column today by John Harris. Cutting this one shorter, I will just say that the modern liberal-democratic state is presented by Harris in the guise of an instrument of capital. He speaks of ‘closed networks of power that tie together corporations and government’, and says that ‘[p]ower… is ever more vertical, sealed off from daily life, and guarded by hardened cliques’. He disparages ‘a worldview little changed since the early 20th century, whereby the top-down state can supposedly be captured, and used to tame an inhuman market.’
Yet we know, according to Harris, from the protest movements around the world, that there is – already – a popular will in favour of progressive change. How we can know this accurately when the existing democracies are not what they seem but closed circles of power, and Harris offers for his part no other index of the state of democratic opinion, is a mystery to me. Anyway:
It is in the nature of protests that people are impatient for change. But all this is so huge that it will take decades to work itself out.
I’d say he was probably on to something with ‘decades’, but the old, old question returns in Harris’s case as it does in Younge’s. How come these guys just know, in advance of any reliable democratic expression of it, what the popular will really is? Have they ever thought to ask themselves why their own version of a progressive politics cannot secure large voting majorities, or indeed majorities of any kind? They should develop the humility to understand that until people are persuaded of what they (the critics of power) would favour, they (the critics of power) have no basis for assuming that deep down people at large think politically just like they themselves do.