SHAMING THE OPPRESSOR

Moral authority is essential to any economic or political authority. Why else do petty morals play such a central role in politics? It is because petty morality is the kind of morality most people live daily. The extension of morality to the public sphere is somewhat difficult to understand and so the personal corruption of the individual politician takes on a salience that sins against the public at large often do not.

This is the situation in the United States today. Politics is terribly confused and mystified. There are so many different issues that are supposed to divide us but all this hides the class war which has been
waged against American workers for the last four decades.

We are supposed to be divided over the issues of early term abortions and birth control. We are supposed to somehow be divided over the issue of people having sex even if we never know about it. We are supposed to adhere to a narrow version of doomsday Christianity even though Christianity in the United States is not a state religion and never can be a state religion. But the point here is that we are supposed to be divided over the role of religion in society as well.

I think the Obama election suggests that most Americans don't accept these divisions of the working people. They see a common cause in economic and social justice. Of course if Obama is a corporatist he will undermine economic and social justice. Obama may simply seek to unite the poor and working people under the banner of an ever sacrificing "middle class". Time will tell about Obama, but I think that the people of the United States are more and more able to see across cultural and racial differences and see common economic, moral and social interests.

Will Obama use this political potential to facilitate progressive social change or will he try to coop the growing working class consciousness and kill any real progressive potential? If he does turn right he can be shamed for abandoning progressive values.