image David Finkel is managing editor of the U.S. socialist journal Against the Current (read it at www.solidarity-us.org). He has written this article for issue 4 of Socialist Resistance magazine.

THE UNITED STATES of America changed forever on November 4, 2008. It will undoubtedly change even more during the next four years – although just how remains to be determined. There has never been such a convergence of yawning crises facing an incoming U.S. government, and it’s an entirely open question whether the sheer scale of the objective emergency might impose serious structural changes on the way capitalism is administered in this country.

Every discussion begins, of course, with Barack Obama. Having a Black person as president of the USA is a bit analogous to women becoming ordained as Catholic priests. The day before, it seems impossible, unimaginable, never in a thousand years…the day after, it will seem as natural as the sun rising in the morning. What took so long?

On a cosmetic level, this correspondent will hazard a guess about the future of U.S. bourgeois politics. We may never again see a national election in which the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of both capitalist parties are all four of them white men. The fact that we owe such a transformation not only to Barack Obama but to Sarah Palin, of all people, suggests both how much and how little this actually means.

Herein lies the paradox. U.S. voters elected a president – a genuinely brilliant individual and exceptionally talented politician — whose parents, the year he was born, might have been arrested in a number of southern states for “miscegenation” (race mixing); the politics of this historic president-elect are those of a thoroughly conventional centrist corporate Democrat. Some of his supporters on the liberal left are stunned by the speed with which he’s incorporating Clinton-era figures into his transition team and Cabinet-in-formation. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins delightfully retorted to such naïve types: “The only people who thought Barack Obama was a radical were you and Joe the Plumber.”

Before going further, it’s important for us on the left at least to salute the most courageous candidacy of 2008: Cynthia McKinney (former Georgia congresswoman) and Rosa Clemente (Puerto Rican hip-hop cultural activist), the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the Green Party.

In an election where the space for independent anti-corporate politics was squeezed to the margins of the margins, McKinney/Clemente’s total vote of around 145,000 looks derisory, but it represents the future hope for the Greens to become an authentic party of social justice rooted in communities of color. Their campaign spent around $185,000. Ralph Nader, the veteran anti-corporate campaigner Ralph Nader running as an independent on the ballot in 50 states, with his greater name recognition picked up some 750,000 votes (his campaign expenditure: about $4 million).

The big result, of course, is the election of Barack Obama (campaign spending between the primaries and the November election: $650 million) and a sweeping Democratic Party victory in both houses of Congress. It is difficult to convey the emotional depth of African Americans’ response to this historic event. In the overwhelmingly Black city of Detroit, fully a third of the voters responded to the Obama campaign’s appeals to vote early or by absentee ballot – in order to ensure a maximum turnout and any possible snafus at polling places (shortages of ballots, or machine breakdowns) – and at 7 am lines were snaking around the block, with people patiently waiting for two hours or more.

By late afternoon, when I returned to vote and hand out Green Party brochures, the lines had vanished – everyone had already voted! In the aftermath, some African-American leaders in the city were dismayed when it turned out that Detroit’s actual voter participation was only around 53%, not the anticipated record-breaking turnout. It seems then that the politically active layers of the community were exceptionally motivated, yet the socially marginalized and poorest strata far less so.

Speaking of “Detroit,” of course, the biggest post-election political issue is the question of a “bailout” for the U.S. auto industry in the brief “lame-duck” session of Congress under way as this article is written. For readers not familiar with some peculiarities of the U.S. political order, this requires some explanation. More important, it’s also a window onto the enormity of the crisis waiting the new administration – a crisis which (forgive the hack phrase, because it’s actually true) is unlike anything since the Great Depression.

In most parliamentary democracies, an election follows the dissolution of the old legislature and is directly followed by the convening of the new one. Not so in America: The new president and Congress are elected at the beginning of November, but Obama won’t be installed till January 20 and the incoming Congress will begin work thereafter. The pre-Christmas post-election Congressional session is the old legislature, including those who are retiring or have been voted out, and any legislation is still subject to the veto of George W. Bush, notwithstanding that his approval ratings hover just above those of Osama bin Laden..

This matters, because the outgoing Senate has no secure Democratic majority (Obama having formally resigned his seat) and certainly not the votes needed to cut off a Republican “filibuster” (endless debate to stall legislation). The outgoing Bush administration and the Republican Senate faction are obstructing emergency “bailout” aid to the used-to-be-Big Three U.S. auto corporations, on a variety of grounds.

Some Senators have faced a constituency backlash for supporting the previous controversial “Wall Street bailout,” which is now looking like a failure; some are urging General Motors and Chrysler to go into “Chapter 11 bankruptcy,” leading to the cancellation of union contracts of the once powerful, now pathetic United Auto Workers; some rule-or-ruin rightwingers are probably hoping to sabotage the incoming Obama administration at the beginning by confronting it with a collapsed auto industry.

The next Congress and White House, securely controlled by Democrats, would presumably have a more streamlined process for legislating emergency aid, but by some accounts (who knows how reliable?) GM may be belly-up before then, creating a chain-reaction crash of suppliers, auxiliary businesses and municipalities and potentially turning a nasty recession into a full Depression.

To be sure no one really knows, but that’s exactly the problem: Not only for auto but for the “real economy” as a whole, the actual scale of the crisis remains unknown, as well as what kind of government measures might be necessary or effective to address it. The fate of the immediate U.S. auto rescue legislation will probably be known when this magazine goes to press, but beyond partisan political maneuvering lies a tangle of deeper problems. What measures, if any, will “work”?

The tragedy for the U.S. working class and social movements is that for practical purposes, there is no “pressure from below” on the powers-that-be for the moment or near future. People who are facing massive insecurity in their employment and their families’ survival right now are generally paralyzed by fear, or by for some kind of salvation from Obama, or both. The potential for all kinds of social explosions exists, but will take time to develop.

Naturally, then, the current debates over “rescue” take place within strictly capitalist bounds. The initial “Wall Street bailout” was promoted as a program to purchase “toxic assets” from the subprime mortgage debacle, alleviate home foreclosures and re-start the frozen credit markets. It rapidly devolved under the leadership of Henry Paulson, Secretary of Treasury (“Treachery” might be more accurate), to simply stuffing money into failing or even not-failing banks to buy up each other. No surprise: that’s how capitalism bails out capital, “free-market” religion be damned.

The ongoing fight over auto is not about saving jobs and communities, or converting the industry to sustainable mass transit. It’s about whether the bankruptcy of the Big Three would be one of those moments of “creative destruction” so dearly beloved by free-market ideologues, whose own lives of course aren’t at stake. It’s about whether the companies will go bankrupt anyway – so why postpone the inevitable? – or whether the impact of their precipitous collapse on the system as a whole is too enormous to risk.

Perhaps the one issue on which there’s a glimmer of grassroots mobilization right now is for government national health insurance – what we in the backward USA call “single payer,” and is already taken for granted in civilized countries. The rationality and necessity of such a program is overwhelming. It is even possible that the new Democratic administration and Congress might take some serious – even if only partial – steps toward guaranteeing some kind of insurance for 45 million U.S. citizens who don’t have any.

But once again, any measures of this kind – let alone a New Deal-type massive jobs program which is also desperately required as the recession hits with full force – would be a response to the magnitude of the crisis, as opposed to concessions to a militant labor or social upsurge. The role of the left in this situation is not to position as supplicant “Progressives (or beggars) for Obama,” but to engage in building movements that could change the social equation and the terms of political debate.

A separate discussion would be needed to take up the other side of the crisis: the dramatic relative weakening of U.S. imperialism brought on both by objective factors — the rise of new or revived powers in Russia, China and Iran and the resistance to neoliberalism – and by the subjective element, i.e. the ruinous and mad adventures pursued post-9/11 by the Bush-Cheney regime. Let’s just say for example that poking Russia in the eye with a sharp stick, over bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO and placing “anti-missile” systems in Poland and the Czech Republic regardless of whether the populations of those countries want them – in short, behaving as if Russia were still a crumbling economic ruin presided over by half-senile leftover Communist bureaucrats – wasn’t necessarily the smartest piece of global statecraft.

President Barack Obama, to whom literally billions of people around the world look to provide “U.S. leadership” with a human face, inherits an empire that the United States economy in its current condition can’t afford to maintain. He has no intention, however, of downsizing American imperial reach. He’s promised to send more troops into Afghanistan. His foreign policy team are the same Clinton-era figures who promoted “free trade” agreements, happily enabled Israel’s strangulation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories under the cover of the never-ending “peace process,” and proclaimed that the deaths of Iraqi children under sanctions were “worth it.”

The continuation of empire, while the domestic economy slides downward, poses just another set of contradictions getting ready to explode, with unforeseeable consequences, if the polar icecaps don’t melt first.

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