God Bless America

America is the land of big municipal government, of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, of very high levels of co-operative membership, of housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, of small farmers who own their own land, and of the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice. That America long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs both against the exportation of that labour to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. Until very recently, that America led the world in “not seeking for monsters to destroy”.

That is the America of those who, on the same day as Obama received their states’ Electoral College votes, voted in California and Florida to re-affirm traditional marriage. Voted in Missouri and Ohio not to liberalise gambling. Voted in Colorado to end legal discrimination against white men. And voted for Obama from coast to coast while also keeping the black and Catholic churches (especially) going. The America of Obama supporters such as Bob Casey, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Bart Stupak and others of like mind. The America of Obama supporters such as Jim Jones, Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, Christopher Buckley, the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec, and Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp. The America of Obama supporters such as the recently deceased Squire Lance, Saul Alinsky’s chosen successor and a stalwart of Opus Dei. The attraction of Obama has always been his supporters rather than the man himself. That, and the sheer ghastliness of the alternatives.

Obama has signed healthcare into law after having promised not to do so if there were any provision for federally funded abortion, which there is not; would that there were a public option or a single-payer system alongside that ban, so as to make abortion practically impossible, but one thing at a time. Nor is their coverage for illegal immigrants, still less the amnesty being promoted by Senate Republicans. Traditional marriage is Obama’s own stated view. He has kicked the Freedom of Choice Act into the long grass, and instead endorsed Casey’s Pregnant Women Support Act as well as concentrating on the Employee Free Choice Act supported by pro-life stalwarts such as Stupak and Marcy Kaptur, which latter declined to endorse either him or Clinton because neither was offering enough to the victims of the “free” trade agreements that she and Stupak are now prominent in seeking to repeal.