American Politics in Paralysis

Redistribution has always been a dirty word in American politics.

When Republicans and the right-wing press accused Barack Obama of advocating it during the last presidential election campaign, the Democrats’ then-candidate was forced to frantically deny this apparently fair interpretation of his otherwise unashamedly liberal policies.

Americans, it is said, traditionally believe that the extreme wealth of an elite band of (mostly) successful businessmen is not something to be envied and combated – as in the case of Britons’ fury at bankers’ bonuses, which has been freshly stoked this week – but to be admired and cherished as the legitimate reward for pursuing the American Dream.

The financial crisis, however, appears to have changed that attitude in at least some quarters of American society.

Not only did Barack Obama employ “fairness” – code for the equalisation of opportunity if not outcome – in his last State of the Union address before the election but, more remarkably, a row about low effective-tax rates may have cost the leading contender for the Republican nomination a victory in the South Carolina primary that hasn’t backed a loser in more than 30 years.

Obama’s speech was about as close to a verbal manifesto as it gets in the US, so numerous were the bases that he covered. But the forceful defence of his record in office and the defiant pledge to fulfil not partisan but American values are what will be remembered (and re-played).

His opponents accused him of class warfare – just as they did four years ago. Back then, the accusation penetrated; this time, it was blunted by a sense of hypocrisy.

Here is a party whose refusal to accept that austerity means tax rises as well as spending cuts, pitted against another that fails to realise the opposite, has brought the federal government to the brink of shutdown more than once since its success at the mid-terms. And yet the same party is now embroiled in a row because one of its candidates is deemed not to pay his fair share in taxes.

This internal wrangling, and inability to unite behind one man and one vision, is made all the more frustrating to neutral observers by the open goal that will be missed if the party does not get its house in order. Despite recent signs of ‘green shoots’, America largely remains trapped in a jobless recovery, with federal budget deficit figures that defy belief.

President Obama came to office on such a wave of optimism and fresh thinking, but his tenure has promised too much and delivered scandalously little… which was inevitable, of course.

On foreign and security policy – the failure to close Guantanamo, the premature departure from Iraq, the war without end in Afghanistan, the complete lack of progress on Israel/Palestine, the absence of a strategy for dealing with Iran, the reluctance to commit to Libya or endorse the Arab Spring… the list of examples of promises broken, values betrayed, is long.

On the domestic front – the fixation with an unpopular, unworkable and unaffordable universal healthcare programme (albeit one that was effectively piloted by a certain Republican governor in Massachusetts) that led to the neglect of policies that could have made the economic downturn shorter and less severe; the absence of leadership in its aftermath as Congressional stalemate allowed growth to stall, unemployment to stick and government spending to balloon.

Surely even Labour would win an election in these circumstances… if they, likewise, could find a leader they can believe in. But when opposition parties fail, the real loser is democracy itself.