Deep and Wide

The job market, which was never very strong under the administration of George Walker Bush, has collapsed completely on President Obama's watch. A recent study, noting that the most recent official period of recession commenced in December 2007, compared job market recovery in this recession to those of previous downturns 35 months out. The chart shows a 5.4 percent job loss up to November 2010; compared to previous downturns, the employment market had gained jobs 35 months after the beginning of a recession in all of the official economic downturns that have occurred after World War II.

President Obama is not to blame for this revolting development, but he can be blamed for his timidity in dealing with it. Far from offering a second New Deal no one wants, as David Brooks has insisted, he has offered piecemeal compromise solutions to a Republican congressional caucus that clearly wants nothing to do with him. The best we can hope for is an extension of the Bush tax cuts in exhcange for meager assistance for the long-term unemployed, and members of the Democratic party's liberal wing will go along with it holding their noses because they have to.

I'm ready to vote against the Democratic administration in 2012, but I won't vote Republican either. I don't think either party can be trusted. Furthermore, I don't believe we can wait for the Democratic Party to implode and for a new progressive party to fill the void it leaves; we ought to organize such parties and vote for them in advance of the 2012 elections. A progressive party competitive with the Democrats and Republicans may not win the White House or the Senate, but under the right circumstances; the result of the odious Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed slavery to extend to the Great Plains, allowed the numerous parties vying to replace the Whigs as the opposition to the Democrats to win the most seats in the House in that year's midterm elections and form a coalition majority. Enough progressive organizations could, in a year fraught with even greater economic dislocation than we have now, repeat history by winning enough seats to force the Democrats into power sharing should the Republicans lose control of the House in such a scenario.

Do not imagine for a moment that this is impossible. The 1850s were marked by economic dislocation, power grabs by wealthy interests (mostly the Southern slaveowners), and a civil war in Kansas. The landscape in America in the 2010s is ripe for similar bouts with anarchy to realign the nation's political composition.