Obama and The End of the American Dream: Essays in Political and Economic Philosophy

118 Pages·2012·4.55 MB·English

by  Michael A. Peters (auth.), Michael A. Peters (eds.)

OBAMA AND THE END OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
Obama and The End of the
American Dream
Essays in Political and Economic Philosophy
By
Michael A. Peters
The University of Waikato, New Zealand
Postscript by Tina Besley
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
American Dream in Images vii
Acknowledgements ix
Prologue 1
1. Renewing the American Dream: Obama’s Political Philosophy 9
2. Automobilism, Americanism and the End of Fordism 17
3. Obama’s Health Reforms and the Limits of Public Reason 25
4. Economics Trumps Politics; Market Trumps Democracy: The U.S.
Supreme Court’s Decision on Campaign Financing 31
5. The Global Failure of Neoliberalism: Privatize Profits; Socialize Losses 41
6. Post-Americanism and the Changing Architecture of Global Science 47
7. Ecopolitics of ‘Green Economy’, Environmentalism and Education
(with Rodrigo Britez) 51
8. Obama’s ‘Postmodernism’, Humanism and History 67
9. ‘Winning the Future’ 77
10. The Egyptian Revolution 2011 83
11. Obama, Education and the End of the American Dream 87
Epilogue 99
Postscript: Education America – ‘Welcome to My Nightmare’ 107
Tina Besley
v
AMERICAN DREAM IN IMAGES
The American Dream that crystallized around James Truslow Adams’ The epic of
America originally formulated in the early 1930s and conditioned by a decade of
complexity and contradiction, of big government projects, intense nationalism, the
definition of the American way, and a distinctive collection of American icons –
Mickey Mouse, Popeye, the rise of the musical comedy of Broadway, the emer-
1
gence of the jukebox – also has a visual and image history. Indeed, Adam’s dream
of opportunity for each according to ability or achievement shaped against the old
class culture of Europe emphasizes a vision of social order in which each person
can succeed despite their social origins.
The history of the American Dream lends itself to being “narrated” through a
sequence of images more so than most histories because America is the home of
the moving image . . . images is everything; it defines a spectacular culture based
on TV, on film – “movies” – and increasingly on the video as it has emerged in the
age of YouTube. Image creation, collection, dissemination and management is at
the heart of American commerce and culture branding products and companies,
ubiquitous advertising that blurs reality and fantasy, and that creates both “the
news” and the home theatre.
In considering a selection of images that should embellish this essay I focused
on a number of clearly defined sets: the national symbols represented in “Old
Glory” (the American flag), the Statue of Liberty, the White House and the US
Treasury building; the civil rights movements with historic photos of the march
on Washington in 1963, photos on Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Lyndon
Baines Johnson, “I have a dream” speech, and a sequence of photos documenting
the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine motel in Memphis where
he was shot and later was turned into a civil rights museum; a series of photos that
focus on housing and home-life and later the sub-prime housing crisis triggering
the massive recession in 2007, and the automobile so much a part of America;
there are also a deliberate linking of Adam’s The epic of America and Obama’s
The audacity of hope, as well as photos of Obama remarkable ascendancy to
power; finally there are some pictures that indicate the fact that the dream has been
shattered.
These image sets are treated largely but not exclusively in consecutive
sequence. Had this been a larger book I would have included other sets from
Hollywood, the “dream factory,” the comic book culture, the architecture, galleries
vii
AMERICAN DREAM IN IMAGES
and museums, city-scapes and motorway systems, the massive grand plains and
agro-businesses that dominate the uninhabited rural areas, the landmarks and
beauty of so much natural landscape.
Michael A. Peters
The University of Waikato, August 28, 2011
NOTES
1
See “America in the 1930s” at http://xroads.virginia.edu/∼1930s/front.html.
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Most of these essays appeared in one form or other in my “column” in the journal
Policy Futures in Education under the banner “Obama’s America” during his
first term of office and while I was employed as a professor at the University of
Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). These essays were essentially short pieces that made
observations on the contemporary political context and use an event to inquire
more deeply into the basis of Obama’s presidency and the crises he faced. They
are also largely now my parting comment on the six years that I was domiciled
in the town of Urbana-Champaign while working at the University of Illinois. I
was encouraged by my colleagues and students to make these pieces more widely
available. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my colleagues and students
at Illinois for their encouragement and comments. I would also like to thank Ruth
Fearnley at the University of Waikato for reading and proofing the manuscript and
Paul Cowan for help with mastering the images. I would also like to acknowledge
and thank Tina Besley for the Postscript and Peter de Liefde and Bernice Kelly for
the opportunity to publish this work and for the preparation of the book.
Michael A. Peters
University of Waikato
25 April 2012
ix
PROLOGUE
I came to the U.S. at the invitation of the Dean of the Faculty of Education as an
excellence hire in 2005 to take up the position of professor in the Department of
Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois, located in the twin cities
of Urbana-Champaign, about an hour and a half south of Chicago. The University
of Illinois is a land grant institution, the flagship of the Illinois system and one
of the ‘big ten’ public universities. The University had a great reputation and I
accepted the position in part so that I could study at close hand the Chicago School
of economics and U.S. neoconservatism. I had been active in the struggle against
neoliberalism in New Zealand over the decade of the 1990s and had studied and
written about the sources of neoliberalism and its deleterious effects on education
and social policy (Peters, 2011).
I had spent the previous five years (2000-2005) at the University of Glasgow
helping to establish a new Faculty of Education that had merged the University
Educational Studies department with the St Andrews Catholic Teachers’ College,
a merger that had many difficulties. I was fortunate to hold a personal chair at the
University of Auckland, New Zealand and a position as research professor in the
new faculty at Glasgow, enabling us to travel between Scotland and New Zealand,
spending the winter months of the northern hemisphere in the sunny climes of
the Auckland gulf. Glasgow is a great postindustrial city that has reinvented itself
from its industrial past that was based on Clyde shipbuilding and other engineer-
ing industries, transforming itself into European city of culture in 1990 with its
restored Edwardian architecture, its parks, gardens, museums, art galleries (includ-
ing the Burrell Collection) and retail shopping center second only to London. In
1999 Glasgow was named as the UK’s City of Design and Architecture and the
Glasgow Science Center was opened in 2001. In 2014 Glasgow is to host the
Commonwealth Games. Glasgow is also a working class city that suffered from
de-industrialization, urban poverty, depopulation and gentrification of the city that
took place within the neoliberal environment of open, competitive and unregulated
markets that characterized Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s.
Many of our friends outside the university had grown up in the poor parts of
Glasgow like the Gorbals and had strong ties to teaching and to unions. Big Frank
Docherty, now a well know and exceptional painter strongly influenced by Magritte
and the French surrealists had been the leader of the Scottish teachers’ union for
many years. The Ubiquitous Chip, our favorite pub, was the gathering place for
1