The Gary Null Blog

November 30, 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/30/the-lessons-of-obamamania/

by ANDREW LEVINE

Ten years ago in America, War Party fervor was on the rise, the media was in tow, and many a liberal was on board.  Thus began the Bush-Cheney era, one of the darkest moments in American history.  Those years seem like only yesterday, probably because on matters of substance – keeping the perpetual war machine going, undermining personal freedoms and the rule of law, encouraging environmental indifference while courting ecological disaster, and making the world safe for the corporate “persons” who own our duopoly party system — the Obama administration has been more or less continuous with George W. Bush’s.

What seems unreal was that brief interlude, begun just four winters ago as the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries loomed, and lasting into the summer of 2009, when liberal hearts and minds succumbed to the belief that Barack Obama would put an end to decades of Reaganite (neolibleral) depredations, and that we could then take up where the New Deal and Great Society left off.  That Obamamaniacal moment now seems a lifetime away.

Obamamania was always an illusion in Freud’s sense, an expression of an unconscious wish.  Freud also spoke of delusions, illusions held in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  Before Election Day 2008, Obamamania was only an ordinary illusion to which liberals, trade unionists and, of course, persons of color were especially susceptible.   By Inauguration Day, as the President-elect’s choices for top positions became known, Obamamania took on a more delusional aspect.