Patriarchy and Appeasement
By Matthew Birkhold

Last Friday, in Israel, George Bush said, “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” Following this, the president said, “We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’” Finally, Bush said, “We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Those who initially supported the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan will probably have no qualms with Bush about his latest statement concerning the strength of America. For those of us who were against military retaliation in the wake of 9/11 however, Bush’s latest tirade gives us a chance to develop insight into the way in which patriarchy is central to US foreign policy.

The first obvious insight into the role of patriarchy in shaping US foreign policy is Bush’s assumption that violence will persuade terrorists and radicals that they have been wrong all along while an ingenious argument will not. Those who pursue war and violence as a means to get things done are not interested in changing their opponent’s argument. They are interested in beating their opponent into submission so that their opponent will no longer have enough strength to pose a threat. This relationship between submission and domination is central to patriarchal thinking.

The second insight we can gain into how patriarchy shapes US foreign policy can be found in Bush’s use of the word appeasement. Appeasement normally occurs when you give someone something to shut them up. Similarly, political appeasement involves granting concessions to an aggressor in an attempt to thwart plans for war. Bush’s use of the word appeasement must be seen as patriarchal because its usage here denotes that the US is somehow not the aggressor in the Middle East. While an argument can be made that the presence of the US military in the Middle East is in response to 9/11, the fact that we invaded the wrong country turns that argument on its head. The US is the aggressor now and was also the aggressor before 9/11.

Radicalism and terrorism in the Middle East are a direct result of years of US foreign policy that has worked to the detriment of many Middle Eastern nations. Because of this, the only way to eliminate the development of radicalism in the Middle East is to eliminate the conditions that give rise to radicalism’s birth. If the goal of the US is to eliminate the possible threat of Middle East radicalism to the US, the US must change its approach to foreign policy.

To create foreign policy that doesn’t create radicals in the Middle East, policy makers must take the time to learn how US foreign policy has impacted those from social backgrounds who are likely to become radicals. As citizens, we must take the time to learn about what policy makers propose in our names and demand that they develop policies that recognize the humanity of people in the Middle East. This can only be done by thinking in ways that are empathetic and not patriarchal. All Americans must arrive at the point where, unlike Bush, we don’t think terrorists are the only ones that are wrong.

Matt Birkhold is an independent scholar, educator and writer living in Brooklyn. He is founder of Political Education Outreach Collective and can be reached at birkhold (at) gmail (dot) com.

Obama No
By Adolph Reed Jr.

I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.

His political repertoire has always included the repugnant stratagem of using connection with black audiences in exactly the same way Bill Clinton did—i.e., getting props both for emoting with the black crowd and talking through them to affirm a victim-blaming “tough love” message that focuses on alleged behavioral pathologies in poor black communities. Because he’s able to claim racial insider standing, he actually goes beyond Clinton and rehearses the scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has made infamous.

It may be instructive to look at the outfit where he did his “community organizing,” the invocation of which makes so many lefties go weak in the knees. My understanding of the group, Developing Communities Project, at the time was that it was simply a church-based social service agency. What he pushed as his main political credential then, to an audience generally familiar with that organization, was his role in a youth-oriented voter registration drive.

The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine precinct captain. This fabrication, along with those embroideries of the candidate’s own biography, may be standard fare, the typical log cabin narrative. However, in Obama’s case, the license taken not only underscores Obama’s more complex relationship to insider politics in Daley’s Chicago; it also underscores how much this campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance.

There is also something disturbingly ritualistic and superficial in the Obama camp’s young minions’ enthusiasm. Paul Krugman noted months ago that the Obamistas display a cultish quality in the sense that they treat others’ criticism or failure to support their icon as a character flaw or sin. The campaign even has a stock conversion narrative, which has been recycled in print by such normally clear-headed columnists as Barbara Ehrenreich and Katha Pollitt: the middle-aged white woman’s report of not having paid much attention to Obama early on, but having been won over by the enthusiasm and energy of their adolescent or twenty-something daughters. (A colleague recently reported having heard this narrative from a friend, citing the latter’s conversion at the hands of her eighteen year old. I observed that three short years ago the daughter was likely acting the same way about Britney Spears.)

Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz, a Clinton supporter, noted that the Obama campaign advisers have tried to have it both ways on the race question. On the one hand, they present their candidate as a figure who transcends racial divisions and “brings us together”; on the other hand, they exhort us that we should support his candidacy because of the opportunity to “make history” (presumably by nominating and maybe electing a black candidate). Increasingly, Obama supporters have been disposed to cry foul and charge racism at nearly any criticism of him, in steadily more extravagant rhetoric.

The campaign’s accusation that the Clinton team made Obama look darker in a photo or video clip than he actually is—and what exactly are we to make of that as an accusation?—and the hysterically indignant reaction to Geraldine Ferraro’s statement that much of Obama’s success stems from the fact that “the country is caught up in the concept” of a black candidacy are no different from the campaign’s touting its “historic” character. Obama supporters fulsomely attacked even Clinton’s attempts to portray him as inexperienced, which is standard fare in political campaigns. They also charged that she was playing to racism. See most recently Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo’s characterization that she was “disrespecting” black people, a leftover canard from Jesse Jackson’s campaigns (which, lest amnesia overtake us, were also extolled as historic firsts).

The Jackson comparison points to one of Obama’s key contradictions: Like Jackson, he wants to appeal to blacks with the “it’s our time now” line, and to white liberals with that, as well as with the “I’m black in a different way from Jesse” qualifier and the religious conversion rhetoric. A friend said that Obama’s campaign, in stressing his appeal to rapturous children and liberal, glamorous yuppies, offers vicarious identification with these groups, as well as the chance to become sort of black in that ultra-safe and familiar theme park way.

I often tell my students that, even though Paul Wellstone was my good friend from college to his death and an individual for whom I always had great respect, no politician in this system is likely to be a person you’d want for your sister-in-law or brother-in-law. And, as many Progressive readers may know, I’m hardly a Clinton fan. I’m on record in last November’s issue as saying that I’d rather sit out the election entirely than vote for either her or Obama. At this point, though, I’ve decided that she’s the lesser evil in the Democratic race, for the following reasons: 1) Obama’s empty claims to being a candidate of progressive change and to embodying a “movement” that exists only as a brand will dissolve into disillusionment in either a failed campaign against McCain or an Obama Presidency that continues the politics he’s practiced his entire career; 2) his horribly opportunistic approach to the issues bearing on inequality—in which he tosses behaviorist rhetoric to the right and little more than calls to celebrate his success to blacks—stands to pollute debate about racial injustice whether he wins or loses the Presidency; 3) he can’t beat McCain in November.

Frankly, I suspect that Clinton can’t beat him either, but there’s no way that Obama will carry most of the states in November that he’s won in the primaries and caucuses. And, while it makes some liberals feel good to think that a majority of the American electorate could vote for a black Presidential candidate, we should keep in mind that the Republicans haven’t let one dog out of the kennel against him yet. The Jeremiah Wright contretemps is only the first bark.

Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people. And Obama’s belonging to Wright’s church in the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world.

For now, the Jeremiah Wright connection probably won’t hurt him too much, partly because the Republicans at this point mainly may want to keep him and Clinton bleeding each other as long as possible. And his Philadelphia compromise speech—a string of well-crafted and coordinated platitudes and hollow images worthy of an SUV commercial, grounded with the reassuring “acknowledgment” of blacks’ behavioral inadequacies—has gained him breathing room by holding out a vague promise of racial “reconciliation” that has appealed to centrist liberals ever since Booker T. Washington’s comparably eloquent 1895 accommodation to Southern white supremacy. Obama gets credit for “opening a conversation” on race, for “taking the matter on squarely.” But he doesn’t really speak to what we ought to be doing to address the injustices, past and present, that he mentions. Despite all the babble about Obama’s transcendence, Obama persists in portraying black Americans as a stereotypical monolith: blacks feel x; whites feel y. And the trope of black “anger” is a tired chestnut that neither explains nor characterizes political grievances or aspirations. (By the way, Obama’s casting Wright’s alleged “anger” as generational is entirely consistent with his earlier praise of Ronald Reagan for sensing Americans’ desire to undo the “excesses” of the 1960s and 1970s.)

Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.

Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction—built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure.

And then where will we be?

Adolph Reed Jr. is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

‘Indy’ Not So Hot

Following a screening of the long-awaited Indiana Jones movie at the Cannes Film Festival, reviews have been lukewarm at best. What do you think?

Greg Morris,
Bartender
“No worries. George Lucas will fix it 20 years from now.”

Kira Pettibon,
Cabinet-Maker
“Uh-oh. Could this spell the end for Steven Spielberg?”

Chuck Migdol,
Private Detective
“Let’s not jump to conclusions. How are the reviews of the Crystal Skull ancillary merchandising?”

Today’s photo of the day shows Thomas Hagan, formerly known as Talmadge Hayer. For those that don’t know, Hagan was one of the three men who murdered Malcolm X in the Audubon Ballroom in 1965. For that last 19 years, Hagan has been part of a work release program that has him in a Harlem correctional facility for only 12 hours per week. Now he’s requesting full parole. Thoughts?

Today’s video of the day is “Fall Back” by Talib Kweli and Res. The song is directed at Hillary Clinton, who refuses to exit the Democratic primary.