The good-king fantasy

As we've known for some time, I could pretty much just link to Taibbi every day and consider the thing well-said.

Everywhere I go I keep hearing people say, “How come Obama is letting X happen or Y happen, how come he’s letting his underlings do Z? It seems so unlike him!” It reminds me of the way people view leaders in Russia. Going back centuries, Russian peasants wrote impassioned letters to the Tsar, sure he was completely unaware that his Grand Dukes were all thieves and his okhranka agents were rapists and torturers. Now that Obama’s on the scene a lot of Americans are demonstrating a similar public desire to believe in the good king. Obama seems so decent and intelligent, it’s hard to imagine that his act is just a big sales job, that he’s really just a smooth-talking shill for a bunch of Wall Street bankers and Pentagon generals. So people tend to scramble for the exculpatory explanation: he’s being tricked, he’s unaware, his hands are tied, and so on.

You can sort of see that, maybe, with the economic policies. If you were bent on clinging to the good-king fantasy, you could hold your nose and imagine that Summers/Rubin cast a spell on poor Barack. But this Gitmo thing is different. It’s not like Barack Obama doesn’t know what habeas corpus is. The guy was a freaking constitutional law professor (or “senior lecturer,” if that controversy over his academic title still rankles you). And yet Obama seems to be determined to preserve the whole concept of preventive detention, which is every bit as jarring and upsetting as the preemptive invasion concept Bush introduced. In fact this whole Gitmo episode should serve as a reminder that the upper crust of the current Democratic leadership has not, for the most part, even publicly renounced preemption.

But then I've always said Obama would give us a more-or-less Clinton II administration. The fact that Obama shows little or no enthusiasm for shaking off the darkest aspects of the Bush foreign policy only makes matters worse.

The unfortunate key is that many so-called liberals are just fine with this. As long as the good king demonstrates an ability to "feel pain" and "empathize" or whatever, most middle-class white voters are just fine with private health insurance (as long as they're employed... and not too sick) and an economy directed by a kleptocratic financial class (as long as they're employed and their mortgage isn't in default).

The only real reason that alternatives to those policies are even on the table is that fewer people than normal are employed (or at least reasonably assured of continued employment). But even then, the discussion involves enough muddled talk and scapegoating that we can all remain confident that, at the end of the day, our good-king won't really overturn the apple cart.