"The
two 'interventions' by the president which made the most sense [financial and
health reform] are starting to get blown up. Or, looking at things the other
way around: the electoral anomaly wasn't the Republicans' victory in 2010, but
Obama's in 2008."
Still recovering from a vacation,
my first two reactions to the U.S. election results came from the gut. They were:
1 - These people don't know
how to vote (the people of the United States, to be clear).
2 - Man, the North American
equivalent of the rabid Brazilian who campaigns so dirtily, with boiling hatred
and other such nonsense, won.
Later, after being cured of my
vacation hangover, Ed Pilkington from The Guardian convinced me of what he
put in
his column on the front page of the Thursday edition: "The Tea Party
movement, which 21 months ago did not exist, and which has been widely derided
and ridiculed by those who thought they knew best, can no longer be ignored."
Bingo - not that the
ultraconservative movement was the winner of the election. The story is a bit
more complicated than that. But it was the "Tea Party" that imposed
their electoral agenda, pulled the Republican Party even more to the right, and
therefore, offered savage aid (in both senses of the word) to defeat Barack
Obama.
Those of us who think "we
know more" and ridicule the Tea Party didn't realize that, actually, the
North American agenda, or at least the agenda of half of America, is the agenda
of the Tea Party.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
Or, as Eduardo Lago, a writer
and the director of the Cervantes Institute in New York, preferred in an
article for El País, "the Tea Party is the crystallization of the entrenched
fear of half of America that things have stopped being as they've always
been."
The average American is so
conservative that the U.S. left isn't called the "left," but is
called "liberal," a word that carries with it the rejection of state
intervention - which is precisely the clearest sign of the left in the rest of
the world.
[The author is talking about economic liberalism,
as opposed to political liberalism.
Economic liberalism is an economic philosophy of
laissez-faire economics and private property. The main focus of modern U.S. political
liberalism includes voting rights for all adults, equal rights, protection of
the environment, and the provision by the government of social services, such
as education, health care, transportation infrastructure, food for the hungry
and shelter for the homeless.]
That there was a vote against
interventionism as adopted by Obama makes sense, but it is also a great cruelty:
most of the president's interventionism was critically necessary to contain the
crisis brought on largely by the excessive "non-intervention" of his
Republican predecessor, George Walker Bush.
On Thursday, the first signs
of the swinging of the pendulum back to the conservative side was already on display:
Spencer Bachus, the
Republican who will in theory preside over the House Financial Services
Committee, wrote a
letter published in the Financial Times warning that certain kinds
of financial regulation [the
Volcker Rule] that were included in the Obama package would cause
tremendous damage to North American banks.
John Boehner, who will be the
new House Speaker under the Republican majority, has already called the health
care reform, Obama's greatest victory of his two years in office, a
"monstrosity," even though it was watered down by the opposition,
which wasn't only Republican, but Democratic as well.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
Put another way: the two
"interventions" by the president which made the most sense are
starting to get blown up. Or, looking at things the other way around: the
electoral anomaly wasn't the Republicans' victory in 2010, but Obama's in 2008.
Clovis Rossi is a special correspondent and member of the Folha
editorial board, is a winner of the Maria Moors Cabot award (USA) and
is a member of the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism. His column
appears on Thursdays and Sundays on page 2 and on Saturdays in the World
Notebook section. He is the author, among other works, of Special Envoy:
25 Years Around the World and What is Journalism?
