krebscycle

Obama’s relationship with Geithner became clear to me when I saw the video of Geithner playing basketball (in white shirt and suit pants) in China. The guy can still sink a jump shot and Obama respects that. Same with Duncan, e.g. Who cares about their policies? The guys can ball. (Sadly, I don’t think this is a joke.)

This comment from Brad Delong’s website is obviously racist but it’s also symptomatic of the same weird disrespect for expertise, the same ignorance of degrees of difficulty, that made people demand that the BP oil leak be closed right away, somehow, or believe that climate scientists are making it up and are easily refutable by people with no science background, or that President Obama could just make the recession go away. After the massacre in Aurora, it was not unusual to hear gun owners fantasize out loud about how they would have reacted instantaneously, pulled out their Glocks and “taken out” the shooter (in the dark, through tear gas, in a panicked crowd, against a guy in body armor with an assault rifle)) –  not as a fantasy, but as a reality.  Much of the criticism of the Obama administration over the last 4 years has been the same kind of sports-call-in-show ignorant yelling as if success were easy, just a matter of not being a coward or a slacker. The “left analysis” of labor’s qualified defeat in the Wisconsin recall elections was more of the same -as at least one critic noted:

The notion that the path to victory is clear if only dim-witted union leaders would listen to progressive bloggers reflects not just magical thinking about organizing but also the hubris of being far enough removed from the action to believe you’re the only one to have thought of a new idea. [cite]

That’s the pattern: people who have no experience doing something, who have little concept of how hard it is, but who have simple solutions in mind and a conviction that if only the people actually doing the work would listen, success would be assured. Marx observed that “the ideas of the dominant class are the dominant ideas” – an observation that everyone quotes and ignores. Our society, dominated by managerial bureaucrats, is dominated by their notion of a world that can be commanded if only one is “tough” enough and gets the ears of the “decision makers”. During the BP Macondo oil spill, commentators on right and left interpreted the failure to immediately fix a high pressure leak in a broken pipe 1 mile underwater  as a failure of will. If only President Obama had, you know, tried, or showed leadership or pounded the table in the executive boardroom, or something, then an enormously difficult problem of deep water petroleum engineering would have bent to his will.  Same with the economy. It’s public knowledge that the stimulus bill passed by 1 vote, requiring the defection of three  Republican Senators, yet the President is berated for not passing a stronger bill that lacked votes.  If only he’d sent the right memo or made the right speech or put on the appropriate sputtering macho act – then, like Donald Trump, he would have forced everyone to follow his commands.

So this “baller” gibberish, like much of the “left critique” is racism enabled by delusions of competence. These disgruntled “leftists” and liberals are watching a TV Drama and believe that anyone with a bit of gumption and executive quality could “perp-walk” Wall Street to jail, resolve the housing bubble collapse, and “ram” some tough Keynsian program through the unwilling orifices of Congress. The absence of these dramatic results must be due to incompetence, complicity, idiocy, etc., and then the angry, sputtering, disappointed  audience naturally reached for the dominant racial prejudices. It’s not that Bush left a mile high pile of fuckup, that the Power Elite is dominated by people who want to protect incumbency, that the media is tightly controlled by the far right, that the public is lost in a fantasy world where slick marketing of lies complements a collapse of general education – it’s  that someone is failing to do the obvious thing.  Kind of sad.   All the work of left wing scholars of the 1940s-1970s in trying to understand the structural operation of American power – and what remains of the American left is an unhappy micro-audience for spectacle convinced that Martin Sheen’s commanding style is obvious and easy and bitterly disappointed it’s not there in real life.  Because Americans, right and left, want simple answers and satisfactory dramatic conclusions where the tough executive or cop or robot from the past battles past all obstacles by giving 110% and demanding excellence.