Obama The Postmodern Coup

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CIA People Power Coup in the USA, 2008

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telling his readers that he is in love with Obama. Not only is he smitten — for the first time in many, many years, he is considering taking part in a militant protest action. He wants to go to the Democratic National Convention to force the party to accept Obama as its nominee. At the same time, he is well aware that Obama is a hollow candidate when it comes to his concrete program of campaign promises. He evidently feels attracted to Obama by psychological forces which have little to do with the kinds of reforms Obama might actually introduce if he ever took office. Bader, in other words, is a radical subjectivist who has started to be politically active to obtain certain emotional satisfactions which he cannot find any longer in his alienated (or petty bourgeois) everyday life. The movement, the experience and the process are everything; how Obama might govern is a matter of indifference. Bader tells us: I love Barack Obama. I love to listen to him talk. His victory speeches after Iowa and South Carolina gave me chills. I haven’t felt that way about a politician since I worked for Bobby Kennedy in 1968. I haven’t felt that way about someone’s oratory since hearing Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I found myself thinking: “If they try to steal his nomination at the convention, I’m flying to Denver to demonstrate.” I haven’t felt that way in decades either. I should have felt that way when they stole the election from Gore in 2000, but I didn’t. And I don’t even think Obama’s positions are that great. He’s weak on health care, panders on Israel, and usually sounds like the type of mainstream liberal that I hate. I don’t care, though. He speaks to my heart and I feel inspired and moved by his emphasis on community, meaning, and responsibility. Here we can clearly see the longing for community and camaraderie which so many contemporary observers detected among the disgruntled veterans of World War I in Central Europe, albeit decked out with modern jargon and in a modern frame of reference. Bader also looks to Obama to fill the void of meaning in his life; this recalls Nietzsche’s approach of arbitrarily choosing any myth to believe in rather than facing the void of a universe without absolute values. At the same time, Bader is aware of journalistic accounts which have criticized and ridiculed Obama’s supporters as lemmings, zombies, Hare Krishna, cultists, Charles Manson freaks, groupies, and the like. Exhibiting the well-known weakness of the American


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