PARTISAN IS WRONG, AND BIPARTISAN IS TWICE WRONG. WHEN METAPRINCIPLES GO CHILDISH.
President Obama’s pursuit of bipartisanship, has led to an inadequate, insufficiently effective stimulus bill.
As Paul Krugman puts it: "So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good... rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”"
And our Nobel Laureate to conclude: "No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t."
What is going on? What is going on with Obama's personality? Why, in a time when maximum force should be deployed, and Obama has it at his disposal, why did he try to absorb himself into the seduction of heathens instead? Why does Obama want so much to be "bipartisan", that he puts anything else on hold, even uttering ideas eerily disconnected with reality? (See below for one example.)
When studying psychology, it is natural to find out what are the main motivational drivers. For simpler animals, it's sex, food, and survival (in increasing order of importance). For humans, there are more. There are principles, What one could call metaprinciples, principles so deep that people can kill for them, while violating all the motivations that simpler animals go by. In different individuals, those metaprinciples vary. Metaprinciples can grow totally obsessive (as Nazis and Stalinists demonstrated).
Obama seems dominated by the metaprinciple that if only he could talk to republicans, if he could talk them out of their error, everything would be wonderful in the USA. Why his basic psychology leads him to this seems revealed in his autobiographies. The republican party is full of father figures. Finally the little boy will not feel abandoned anymore. Daddy will be talked to, finally, Daddy will listen, Daddy will turn out to be reasonable, and Daddy will come home at last.
Some will say that such an opinion exhibits contempt for Obama. But not at all. We all have our dark and painful closets, but by writing about them, and pondering them, Obama engaged in a public debate, and asked implicitly everyone to help solve the riddle that was his life. I think this was a useful and noble pursuit, that has made Obama much deeper, and much less of a child than most. I am just pointing out a further consequence of his life's suffering, as he exposed it, and I feel confident Obama will quickly lose his humility relative to the party of those that have understood nothing to the past.
Thinking that the little fathers of the republican party should be brought to reason and care, underestimates the failure of American politics and economics in the last four decades, and the debasing effects they had on society. The problem is much deeper than "partisan" (partisan of what, anyway?). The US problem has become a problem of appreciation of reality, and of the hierarchy of facts and values.
An example: the state of California is now closed for 10% (employees of the State do not show up for work, nor will get paid, two Fridays of the month). Although the governor is a republican, this crisis is not a republican crisis. It's a crisis of the inability to see what is important. An immediate gasoline tax would have solved it, but most people prefer to close essential functions of the State. Stupidity they can believe in.
When Obama says that he will solve the problem of energy dependence of the USA by teaching young people how to weatherize homes, we observe again that discernment crisis. Apparently he spent too much time talking to the people who prefer rebuilding Iraq rather than their own country.
Along this line, Obama will no doubt soon suggest to solve the housing crisis by teaching the youth how to build little grass shacks.
Spending all of one's time with people who have proven mentally unable to cope, is just as howling in the wind. There is no point to it. The republicans' main strategy for 40 years has been to weaken the state, instead of building a better state. That's their metaprinciple. They will not turn around, and say: "Oh, we were idiots". Polls have shown that Hitler was at his most popular in 1945, when Germany was bombed, in ruin, hopeless, attacked by the entire planet, and morally more evil than imaginable.
Why this popularity of Evil? Because humans are made (in part) to be diabolical, and it is a crucial function of a good state to prevent them to exert their (God given, or naturally born) Evil. By weakening the state, and thus education, the very fabric of morality has started to dissolve. People have appeared that do not have enough of a moral vocabulary to imagine right from wrong. People who believe "cool" is the ultimate good. People who, like children, believe that Daddy is the definition of big and bad, and if only Daddy were fixed, so would the world.
Instead, what we need now is confrontational therapy. Both in the economic and the social realms. When Roosevelt started his presidency in 1933, he asked for "broad executive power to wage war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe". Roosevelt did not beg the republicans for advice, and communion. He detested them. And he called the bankers, "banksters", and closed the banks. Roosevelt was not searching for a long lost authority figure, he was that figure, imposing his solutions for the world's problems.
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
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