Today’s America and the Great Amnesia

Voice hoarse from the cold and the humidity, temples increasingly grayer, from one city to another in U.S., Barack Obama has challenged the ghost of the Great Amnesia until the last. The amnesia of a country — today called to vote — which has forgotten what was reduced to two years ago: The middle class had been demolished by two decades of an extremely unfair distribution of income and been weighted by an unsustainable debt. An unprecedented financial crisis that was going to generate a real apocalypse of saving and that could collapse the payment system itself. And this could bring the economy back to the Stone Age.

The tale which the president has chosen to try to shake his disillusioned electorate was that of the car which has been dropped into the ditch by the Republicans. “And so even though we got no help from them, even though they didn’t lift a finger, we kept on pushing. And finally we got this car on level ground. It’s a little banged up. You know, it needs some body work. It needs a tune-up. But it’s ready to move forward. And suddenly we get this tap on our shoulder. And we look back and, lo and behold, who is it? It’s the Republicans. And they say, excuse me, can we have the keys back?” This tale, repeated by the president in all the squares, is effective. Nevertheless it is only partly well-founded. It is true that if the U.S. have plunged into a ditch, this is due to the mistakes made during Bush’s era. It is not true that now the country is back on level ground, ready to restart, closing the parenthesis of an ill-fated crisis. Surveying among the young who had come to listen to the president, it is not hard to find those who notice that: “he has done the health care reform, OK, but I need work, not medicine.” Unemployment devours welfare and trust, and everything suggests that it will remain high for years yet. However it is difficult to tell the hard truth to a people whose history, unlike Europe which has experienced tumbles and dark centuries too, is a ride to greatness, a growth almost uninterrupted. Like the Republicans, two years ago Obama sold to the Americans the tale of a country ready to start a new, amazing adventure. No decline or irreversible crisis of the middle classes, nor shift of wealth from the West to the new Asian powers. An America that has yet to live her best years. Perhaps he could not do otherwise: To shatter the epic history of a country that cannot conceive anything different from the absolute primacy would have risked to be politically suicide.

However, today, the America that has believed his promise of a radical change, that has got the Obamian mark of hope and has waved it on his house-door, has stuck it on the bumper of his car, has dressed it, now submits the bill. Prematurely, claims Barack. This one, pressed by Republican propaganda — in turn imbued with American “exceptionalism” — rejects the charges to “transform the leader country into an ordinary nation, as a plain European social welfare state.” He relaunched the 21st century’s challenge as a new era of American supremacy: “the United States doesn’t play for second place.”

The reality is a little bit different; after today’s vote, given the predictable defeat of the Democrats, who will lose control of the House and will keep the Senate majority, but only by a whisker, there will arrive the moment of the hard decisions. The arm-wrestling with China, an aggressive giant to be contained on the political and commercial level. The plan of gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan, even without winning over the Taliban. And above all, the need for action, with massive and unpopular measures, on a long-period deficit that all the experts, Republican or Democrat, consider almost unsustainable.

For the president, ceding control of the Congress to the Republicans may not be the worst evil. The people will consider them as jointly responsible for the government; they will have to help put the car on level ground. Of course, their main aim remains to throw Obama out of the White House in 2012, after his first term. Working together would allow him to break the isolation. The temptation to leave him alone to manage a very strict austerity will be very strong. Many conservatives, determined not to be overwhelmed by the radicalism of the “tea party,” are realizing that, continuing at this rate, they risk inheriting too much rubble and a seriously compromised position for the U.S.