America, Where to?

The Republicans won the U.S. midterm elections as polls indicated they would. But their victory is not as clear-cut as expected. They won the majority in the House of Representatives by a historic landslide, but failed to gain control of the Senate. Although they now have the means necessary to create serious problems for the Obama administration, including launching congressional investigations or even beginning the impeachment process, the Republicans are not united by a clear agenda. Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican minority in the Senate, illustrated this very situation when he stated that his priority would be to prevent Barack Obama from being re-elected. The Republicans have no legislative priority, nor do they want to initiate reform. They only want to oppose Obama.

Although comparisons must be made cautiously, there are some similarities with the anti-Băsescu agenda of the Romanian opposition and their discussions on the impeachment of the Romanian president. These similarities serve to prove that politicians are generally incapable of drawing up an agenda during periods of crisis.

The Republicans had already managed to earn a reputation as the “party of no” in 2009, and they seem to have decided to follow the same path for the next two years. This increases the risk that America could slip into political instability, especially if the so-called program of the tea party movement finds its way onto the Republican agenda. The fact that tea party extremists want to wipe out liberal America (in European terms, one could call it left-wing America, but European classifications cannot really apply to the U.S.) is an expression of frustration and a political vision that seems to have stemmed from the 17th century. The two Americas, the white, rural, bigoted, fundamentalist, racist and conservative America on the one hand, and the multicultural, urban, secular, open and liberal America on the other, are on the verge of a confrontation. What will happen in the U.S. will influence the way in which the entire world functions. And the immediate future does not look simple at all!

Although many are tempted to think of the November 2 elections as a vote of blaming Obama, the strong racist undertones of the so-called conservative revolution cannot be overlooked. This was in fact the vengeance of an America that was humiliated when Obama was elected in 2008. And the “conservative revolutions” were claimed during and after the Great Depression in the 1930s by fascist movements.

But why waste time with such details? The bottom line is that the conservatives took advantage of the social background in order to garner votes in their favor. There are 15 million unemployed persons in America, and almost 30 million are employed part-time, while many Americans have lost their homes and a great number of those who invested in pension funds can no longer earn a living. Although these are the effects of the consecutive policies adopted by previous administrations, and especially the Bush administration, Obama was the one who had to absorb the shock. No other American president could have done better in such a short period of time because the president’s ability to influence the economy is very low in the U.S. And in spite of that, Obama managed to achieve some breakthroughs.

The fact that Obama’s opponents managed to denigrate, without much effort, an historic health care reform and a rescue plan that prevented the economy from falling into an even greater recession illustrates the dominant frame of mind in the conservative part of the U.S. The liberal and social America was not mobilized by these elections. Will it be two years from now?