It's a fascinating paper delivered by one Robert Fitch, here, shortly after Obama's election in 2008.
He paints a history of Obama you've probably never heard, one which doesn't fit the neat little categories of Left and Right because Obama's Third Way politics, going back at least to Bill Clinton's Hope VI program, is really about the partnership between the status quo, especially the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector, and government.
Fitch wrote about the same phenomenon in Democrat-controlled New York, which gives you an idea why he was kind of a man without a constituency, especially since he thought the American labor movement got co-opted for the enterprise.
We used to call that sort of partnering fascism, and unfortunately, Robert Fitch is dead and we can no longer ask him to think about it that way.
But we should call it that, and we should still think about it that way if we're ever going to escape the police state which looms on the horizon and is in many respects already here:
"When the Third Way advocates insist that we share a common good; when they refuse to recognize that the interests of the oppressed and the interests of the oppressors don't exist on the same moral plane; when they counsel us to stop being partisans of those interests -- they're not being non or post partisan; they're siding with the powers that be.
"In the same way, Obama's notion of change claims to transcend the politics of interest while it steers sharply to the right. ...
"What we see is that the Chicago core of the Obama coalition is made up of blacks who've moved up by moving poor blacks out of the community. And very wealthy whites who've advanced their community development agenda by hiring blacks. Will this be the pattern for the future in an Obama administration? I can't read the envelope. But I do believe that if we want to disrupt the pattern of the past we have to make some distinctions: between the change they believe in and the change we believe in; between our interests and theirs; between a notion of community that scapegoats the poor and one that respects their human rights -- one of which is not to be the object of ethnic cleaning. Between Hope VI and genuine human hope."
In the same way, one can't help but think that the broader impoverishment of America's home-owning classes was intentional, that the powers that be saw all that wealth locked-up in decades-long built-up home equity and wanted to unleash it, skim it, and junk it so that they could take it over one day, enrich themselves and their friends, and install themselves in power permanently.
