Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Barack Obama: Authoritarian

Posted on | January 26, 2010 | Comments Off by Aschwin de Wolf

The surprising defeat of the Democrats in the recent Massachusetts elections has unleashed a great number of opinion pieces about the  mistakes of the Obama administration. A common theme in these articles is that the Obama administration fails to recognize that the United States is a right-of-center nation that consistently rejects the far-left / progressive  / labor union-dominated vision that has been shaping its policies. One particularly scathing piece was published in the Canadian National Post by Conrad Black:

The president has three principal problems. He is well to the left of the public and of what he promised the voters in 2008, and it is an old, passe leftism, that is authoritarian, deviously presented and was discredited in this country decades ago; the sort of nostrums that caused Bill Clinton and others to become ‘New Democrats.’ He is increasingly perceived as having credibility problems and of being cold, cocksure, narcissistic and intoxicated by what he modestly called ‘the gift’ of his own articulation. And as president, he has been quite, and quite surprisingly, incompetent.

What is interesting (and rare) about this passage is the use of the phrase “authoritarian.” If there is any common denominator in Barack Obama’s government so far it is the believe in the healing power of coercion. This tendency has culminated in the so called “individual mandate”, one of the most authoritarian and paternalistic policy proposals in the history of the United States. But it is also clear in the “libertarian paternalism” that seems to shape its stimulus and tax policies. As such, the current administration is one of the finest examples of an authoritarian state ruled by “experts ” that was so feared by 19th century anarchists like Michael Bakunin.

This raises an important question. How can such a development be reconciled with the libertarian-socialist and counter-cultural tendencies of the protest generation that shaped the contemporary progressive movement? The most straightforward but cynical answer is that for these people their anti-authoritarianism was  not all that sincere but quite useful for a transition of power in their favor. This may be the case for some people but a more plausible explanation may be the increasing recognition that socialist and progressive politics require political control and mass coercion.

In countries with proportional representation there is no shortage of ex-anarchists and ex-radicals in the Green and Social Democratic parties. This should not be surprising because, as a general rule, whenever a self-identified anarchist is pressed to choose between political alliances, the answer is almost invariably guided by his/her anti-capitalism. Behind every libertarian socialist stands a social democrat.

Category: Anarchism, Politics
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