thomas friedman on obama

I've never been a fan of Thomas Friedman. His claim to fame is the half-baked idea that the world is now flat. He's since realized that such a claim--which is related to Bill Gates' idea of frictionless-capitalism--is a bit strong, to say the least. Hence, his recent book's title, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, offers two qualifiers to his earlier designation. But "hot," which incorporates an environmental critique of global capitalism, and "crowded," which deflects a proper class analysis to head into Malthusian territory, each fails to offer the kind of analytic framework that globalization requires. And yet, articles like this, convince me that Friedman, like David Brooks on the rare occasion, is not an idiot but a thinker who, if he could only leave his latent class interests behind, would be able to write cogent systemic analyses of our global predicaments. 

In the piece referenced above, "From the Gut," Friedman demonstrates an understanding of how realpolitiks operate. I agree with his general claim that the republicans are better at "shameless" tactics than the democrats, and that Obama seems to be in retreat from his earlier promise to reverse this trend. Yet again, the dems seem to be making the same mistake that they did in 2000 and 2004: buying into the myth of rationalism. As George Lakoff, among others has written, people don't vote on the issues, they vote based on their identities and values. They buy the brand because the brand is the brand, not because product A can do x, y, and z. The dems cannot sell their message by laying out policies x, y, and z. They need to get their hands dirty (God knows they've been dirty for years), and appeal to people's fantasies. If the republicans are going to play fascism-lite--hell, if in the age of the New Media all politics is reduced to idoltary,then the dems need to risk eternal damnation by breaking the second commandment over and over again. 

As I watch this election run its course and witness Obama popping downers, I can't help but contemplate the stranglehold of conservative hegemony. If McCain actually pulls this off and wins despite "a 50-pound ball called 'George W. Bush' wrapped around one ankle and a 50-pound ball called 'The U.S. Economy' wrapped around the other," as Friedman puts it, I won't be able to stop myself from flirting with Spenglerian ideas about the predetermined decline of civilizations. Conservatism feels like a cancer that we may be able to put into remission for a time, but that slowly overtakes us until the last remnant of our existence goes "puff."