No Ruling Class
This is all very well and good, as far as it goes. But there’s a great deal missing from Harris’s account of the Obama phenomenon and presidency. Especially conspicuous in their absence are the predominantly white corporate, financial, and imperial establishment elements that seized on Obama as a perfect vehicle for carrying out their selfish and authoritarian agenda under the guise of progressive change and democratic hope in the wake of the long national Cheney-Bush nightmare. Ruling class members and operatives provided the money, connections, celebrity, and media attention and approval without which Obama’s rise was unimaginable. They did so only after subjecting Obama to a thorough vetting in which they found him highly amenable to the task of serving their narrow, undemocratic interests.i Assured of his deeply conservative, privilege-friendly, and “market”- (really corporate-) friendly essence, they found Obama’s technical blackness, his brief stint as a “community organizer,” and his technically Muslim ethnic nomenclature nicely suited to the project of giving the American System a fake-democratic “brand makeover” at home and abroad. The re-branding was urgently required following George Dubya Bush’s all too transparently plutocratic, racist, and imperialist performance, scarred by the club-footed invasion of Iraq and the Katrina atrocity among other clumsy blunders.ii
“Especially conspicuous in their absence are the predominantly white corporate, financial, and imperial establishment elements that seized on Obama as a perfect vehicle.”
Along the way, the U.S. power elite has certainly derived no small degree of “divide-and-rule” satisfaction from the ways in which the existence of a first technically black president has fed identity-based fissures in majority working class America and fueled racial and related partisan deadlock. The “deep state” financial and corporate elite continues to pillage society and the commons behind the scenes of the big business-financed and highly identity-politicized major party “marionette theater” that passes for democratic politics in Washington and across the nation’s fifty state capitols.iii