Obama And Gorbachev

This was written in the spring of 2010.

Have you ever followed the revolution in American politics being led by Barack Obama and felt as if you have seen this before? Or at least something very similar to it? It is now twenty-five years since the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and I would like to describe the Obama Revolution by making comparisons with Gorbachev.

Both set out to reform an unworkable and anachronistic political system, but which had the vested interests of powerful people keeping it in place. Both realized that deep changes were absolutely necessary, both internally and in relations with the outside world.

Both Obama and Gorbachev encountered concentrated resistance to their efforts. Gorbachev was almost overthrown in a 1991 coup. Obama faced a Republican campaign insisting that he had not really been born in America and a furious reaction to passage of his health care bill.

(Note-By the way, Hawaii became a U.S. state in 1959 and Barack Obama was born there two years later in 1961. But I notice that while the Republican idol Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona, he was born there before Arizona became a U.S. state so that technically he was not born in America. He was born in what later became America.)

Gorbachev tried to save Communism from corruption and cronyism within, reforms known to the world as Perestroika, or restructuring. In regard to the outside world, he skillfully put the ball in the U.S. court with the policy of Glasnost, or openness.

America's style of Capitalism in the Nineteenth Century may have been what was called for at that time. Most of the continent was waiting to be developed and people were needed to get out there and start industries and all kinds of other business ventures. Anyone who was put out of a job could just head out to the frontier and start over. There was plenty of land waiting for anyone who wanted to develop it.

One thing that I have long thought that America's Republicans simply do not grasp is that there is no frontier any more. The frontier was declared closed in 1890. All land is now either owned by someone or otherwise accounted for. Someone who finds themselves out of work cannot just head out to the frontier.

This is when America should have started a comprehensive program of social benefits like most of the other western countries. Instead, workers were scraping by on very little money while a few people got very rich. When assembly line manufacturing was perfected, a vast number of goods from radios to cars rolled out of factories.

The trouble was that workers in the factories were not being paid enough money to be able to afford the goods that they were producing. Those goods began piling up in warehouses and factories began cutting back on production, meaning that the average person had even less money. It spiraled into the devastating crash of 1929.

But when the new millennium came along, that old free-wheeling Capitalism came back. Under the administration of George W. Bush, the rich became the super rich. Millionaires became billionaires. The financial industry ran wild with lax regulations.

But the average person was stretched so thin that collection agencies became one of the top growth industries in the country. Finally, millions of Americans were unable to pay their mortages and since mortgages were customarily bundled into securities, the whole system was on the verge of collapse.

America was spending about twice as much money per person on health care as other western countries, yet life expectancy in America was several years below those countries. It stayed this way until Obama came along because of the vested interests of health insurers, who were making a lot of money.

Meanwhile, America was loathed by so much of the outside world. Obama has gone a long way toward a remedy for this, although drawing Republican ire for bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia and the Emperor of Japan. This mirrors Gorbachev's Glastnost policy.

It seems that the U.S. took the fall of the Berlin Wall as victory in the Cold War. But in doing so, and considering Capitalism as superior, it lurched too far to the right. The final result was the economic crash of 2008. Now, in one of those twists of history, America finds itself undergoing the same type of reforms that Gorbachev headed and which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

One thing Obama has going for him that Gorbachev didn't is that he does not have to worry about being taken from the left like Gorbachev was taken from the right. I described in my autobiography the resemblence between the fates of Gorbachev and Martin Luther. Luther always considered himself a Catholic and merely wanted to reform the church. But once he had breached the wall of papal authority, he was followed by men who had no intention of reconciling with the church and who founded completely separate churches.

Likewise, Gorbachev considered himself as a Communist and only sought to reform the system. But once he had checked the power of the old guard, he was supplanted by Boris Yeltsin who publicly destroyed his Communist Party Membership Card. The great success of Gorbachev is that he brought an unworkable but self-perpetuating system to a peaceful end.

Obama, however, is already about as far left as is practical in the U.S. and at this point it appears highly unlikely that he will share a similar fate, pushed aside by the revolution that he began.