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November 25, 2008

Oreste Foppiani

Mr. Barack (Swahili for Benedict) Hussein Obama is a man on whom almost sixty percent of all US voters (especially young people and new voters) focused their hopes and attention. Will he succeed in his task? – it is too early to foretell it. However, this cultivated and handsome lawyer, and praised university adjunct professor in his late forties, represents the change Americans were looking for. Before being elected by his own citizens, Mr. Obama accepted the “nomination” by Europeans, who love him, as well as that of internauts who recognized him as a new kind of leader.

Will the Illinois Senator represent a real change? Obama’s reference to a new version of FDR’s New Deal to rescue America from the present, scary recession might bring bad luck. In fact, economically speaking, the New Deal can be considered a near failure. According to a recent study by Cato Institute’s researcher Jim Powell (FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, New York: Crown Forum, 2003), and especially according to Professor Keynes (Lord John M. Keynes visited FDR in 1934 during the first phase of his plan, and subsequently wrote a caustic open-ed in the NYT explaining to readers, and implicitly to Roosevelt, the 2-tempo policy: “First the economic recovery, then the social reforms”). This plan delayed the full recovery of the US economy from the Great Depression by approximately 7 years. In fact, the end was only really brought about by WW II, and the war economy’s surpluses. Industrial and economic recovery was reached through bombs, planes, guns and credits.

However, Obama could be a new version, mutatis mutandis, of the diplomat, author, and political and economic analyst, Lawrence Dennis. Dennis, an Exeter and Harvard alumnus was a métisse who passed for white and never revealed his African roots until his mid-sixties. After writing important and revealing books following each FDR’s presidential campaign (Is Capitalism Doomed?, The Coming American Fascism, and The Dynamics of War and Revolution) and facing a trial for sedition in 1944, he relegated himself to a very small periodical publication (the Weekly Foreign Letter and the Appeal to Reason). and a mediocre life. Once a famous commentator and panelist in university conferences and radio programs, because of the 1944 Great Sedition Trial, he was reduced to oblivion, notwithstanding Time’s definition of him as “US fascism’s no. 1 intellectual” (Time Magazine, May 1, 1944).

Nowadays, his ideas on the looming American Fascism might become of interest, because of Obama’s state intervention programs to salvage the national economy, and limit the US interventionism around the world. Obama’s future foreign policy, could, at best, choose the multilateralism option, at worst that of isolationism. The American Third or Lib-Lab Way of a “concerto” of forces among capital, the work force, the middle class, the Federal Government, and citizens, could be the solution. Dennis, inspired by Fascist corporatism, talked and wrote about it seventy years ago. Is Obama taking the baton from this man? No US newspaper dares to make such a comparison because of the “Fascist stigma.” Yet, it might be possible that this man of destiny will revolutionize his country politics and give new hope to his fellow citizens. Yes, he can.