President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
(known as AMLO) reacted last week to the news that a corruption investigation
into Mexico’s nationalized petroleum industry, Pemex, had moved on to target
his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto. Though aware of the attorney general’s
investigation into another personality active during the previous regime —
former Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya — AMLO claimed to have no knowledge of a probe
concerning Nieto himself.
Cognizant of the political implications of accusing a former rival, the Mexican president was careful to declare: “We’ve said that we would only present a complaint against former presidents if the citizens ask us to because we think that we should look forward.”
Barack Obama’s Woke Awakening
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AMLO may have borrowed this idea from former US President Barack Obama. Days before taking office in January 2009, the newly elected president addressed the question of prosecuting members of the Bush administration responsible for torture by simply dismissing it. Invoking a new judicial principle that apparently applies to the political elite, Obama proclaimed his “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
AMLO’s position is less hypocritical
than it might appear, especially when compared to Obama’s. The Mexican
president knows that he would be accused of using his office for vengeance
against his former rival if he were the one to take the initiative of
prosecuting Nieto. If in the end Nieto is prosecuted, it will be not because
AMLO wanted to get even or humiliate a former opponent, but because under the
constitution the citizens will have chosen to apply the law. In contrast, Obama
chose simply to ignore the law and to protect the Bush administration officials
from prosecution, potentially as war criminals.
In his endorsement of Joe Biden’s candidacy for president, Obama has returned to the same theme. He insists that “there’s too much unfinished business for us to just look backwards. We have to look to the future.”
Here is today’s 3D definition:
Look backward:
Examine the past to uncover serious errors and eventually prosecute crimes, considered by politicians to be an extremely dangerous route to take because of the precedent it could set that might enable their own future successors to do the same thing
Contextual Note
Obama’s concept of time reflects some
of the basic assumptions at the core of US culture and, at the same time,
reveals aspects of US politics that signal a historic decline. Everyone in the
US seems to agree that the goal of politics and of the nation itself is to
achieve progress and lead humanity as a model of civilization. In his
endorsement, Obama specifically expresses his pride in “the incredible progress
we made together during my presidency.” After doing his damnedest to prevent
Bernie Sanders from getting the Democratic nomination for the November election
and finally provoking his departure from the race, Obama has shifted to
celebrating the senator from Vermont for his contribution that consists of
“moving America in a direction of progress and hope.”
In US culture, time itself is
measured in terms of a kind of informal KPI (key performance indicator) that we
might call UPAs, or units of progress achieved. This is true for President Donald
Trump as well, who simplifies the problem by referring to the Dow Jones stock
index and employment figures as the measure of the value of progress during his
time in the White House. Obama’s flowing rhetoric allows him to be less clear
about how to measure the UPAs he claims to have “made together” with Biden as
vice president. Presumably, they can be found in the “unfinished business” he
refers to, which implies that his progress consisted of various items of
business his administration initiated.
Like Trump’s citing of the Dow Jones,
Obama’s criteria are less about the quality of life than they are about what he
calls “business,” finished or unfinished. In a society that sincerely believes
“time is money,” business is also busyness, the act of being busy and making a pretense
of getting lots of things done. The advantage of unfinished business is that
the concept defines a future in which it is possible to imagine that further
efforts can be made to finish it. This also means it’s important not to finish
it because then there would be nothing more to be busy about.
Finishing any business would require
first defining the finality of that business and then seeking to achieve
coherence in evaluating its progress. It would mean envisioning projects and
preparing them for the long term. But the day the consumer society was born,
over a century ago, the long term ceased to merit anyone’s consideration.
US culture — and especially its
business culture — is aligned on the short term only. It has spawned the
managerial culture of quarterly results. The virus of short-term planning —
driven by just in time, low inventory thinking — has for some time also
infected the “business” of government, which in normal times should be about
duration, continuity and preparedness, connecting looking backward with looking
forward.
The systematic refusal to look
backward, to assess and establish accountability for what has already been
done, a refusal evoked in the name of looking forward, reflects another feature
of US culture: the insistence on reducing every question to a binary choice
with a zero-sum outcome. Why shouldn’t a culture both look backward and forward
at the same time? By definition, governance should be focused on continuity,
linking the past and future rather than ignoring their connection. Refusing one
or the other creates an arbitrary and meaningless rupture.
AMLO could have answered the question
of why he chose not to look backward by honestly admitting that he would be
blamed for abusing his authority to attack a rival. But, unlike Obama, he
didn’t exclude looking backward. Instead, he divided the roles. AMLO would look
forward and leave it to the citizens to look backward and initiate any
necessary action. Obama framed it as an either/or choice. He peremptorily
eliminated the one choice many of his electors hoped — having been told to
believe in “hope” — that he would take to punish those who were responsible for
the catastrophic wars that were still going on back then (and even now).
Historical Note
Early in its history, the US believed itself a revolutionary, trendsetting, problem-solving nation. But for the past 50 years, its political leaders seem to have settled on a philosophy of incrementalism. This translates as achieving progress only by baby steps. It also neutralizes the capacity for self-appraisal. It requires its leaders to accept and celebrate the recent past, even a one that includes catastrophic mistakes. It’s government by tweaking. The recent past has a tendency rapidly to become not the rich soil of the present whose organically alive nutrients will feed the growth of the future, but the inert status quo, a kind of concrete slab on which we stand that requires everyone’s respect and comprehension.
The modern Democratic Party in the US
appears committed to a philosophy of incrementalism. Once upon a time,
Democratic presidents promoted a “New Deal” (Franklin D. Roosevelt), a “New
Frontier” (John F. Kennedy) or a “Great Society” (Lyndon Johnson). They looked
at the present as it was modeled by the past and found it wanting.
By the time of Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party had moved on. It appeared to endorse the premise that “there is no such thing as society.” If, as the UK’s Margaret Thatcher said, society doesn’t exist, it must also be true that its past only exists as the sclerotic memory of random events. For Clinton, the society that Johnson wanted to become “great” was replaced by “the economy, stupid!” This also implied the existence of a “stupid economy,” visionless and focused only on the short term. This reduced the vocation of politicians to finding ruses to keep people happy until the next election.
Once President Clinton was in office, Democrats had realized that to achieve the goal of creating and maintaining an illusion of happiness, political vision — bridging the past and present — is no longer necessary. Incrementalism gets the job done. Some called it the Third Way. It fixes conveniently replaced solutions. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair replaced Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Barack Obama governed in exactly the
same way. The only difference was that he had a Prospero-like talent that allowed
him to hide his impoverished incremental program by offering a hyperreal vision
of hope and “change we can believe in.” Unlike Prospero in William Shakespeare’s
“The Tempest,” he never had to step back and point to the “baseless fabric of
this vision” and the fact that it was built from “such stuff as dreams are made
on.” Now that he has retired from the island he once governed within the
Beltway, unlike Prospero, Obama has not abjured his “rough magic” or drowned
his book. He’s still at it, now promoting a future that he has confided to
master an incrementalist magician, Joe Biden.
Alongside the notion of timidly
extending progress into the future, US culture has always promoted a spatial
notion of progress. Obama encapsulates it in his repeated use of the word
“further.” In his endorsement of Biden for the presidency, Obama said: “We have
to go further to give everybody a great education, a lasting career and a
stable retirement. We have to protect the gains we made with the Affordable
Care Act, but it’s also time to go further.” On the issue of pollution, Obama
reminds his audience that “science tells us we have to go much further and it
is time for us to accelerate progress on bold new green initiatives.”
The US was founded on the idea of
expansion of its frontiers. One of the principal motivations behind the war of
independence from Britain stemmed from the opposition of the government in
London to the colonists’ desire to expand westward at the expense of the native
inhabitants. US history is the story of a people pushing the frontier further
and further, mile by mile, state by state, until it controlled and officially
owned the expanse between two oceans. The past, which belongs to the native
tribes of the land, was wiped from the landscape. There was clearly no need to
look backward, partly because it might reveal genocide.
In November,
Americans will have a choice between an incumbent president who rode into the
White House in 2017 offering the baseless fabric of a vision of the nonexistent
past, claiming he would make America Great Again. Deeming that having made it
great over the past three years, he now wants to “keep” it great by staying in
office.
Unlike both AMLO
and Obama, Trump led the attack on his predecessor, Obama. He focused on
erasing the immediate past, rather than simply neglecting it. He did so because
the Republican Party has never pretended to shape the future and only maintains
a nostalgic idea of the past. It believes in the utterly timeless America, an
eternal present, made up of unregulated free market capitalism and consumer
choice. It’s a vision of millions of trees but no forest, individuals but no
society, a people that buys and sells in the present but needs no past or
future. It’s the American version of carpe diem, which, translated into English,
means to take the money and run.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]
The views expressed in this article
are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial
policy.
