-By Osy Agbo
Speaking recently before a room of wealthy liberal donors, former President Barack Obama made the now famous remark that an average American doesn’t want to ‘Tear Down The System’. It was a subtle warning by the party’s biggest star.
Aware of his place in the mix, he had threaded with caution not to insert himself in a crowded Democratic primary race. But this was not the first time Mr.Obama had to break his silence when he feels strongly about the issues as stake.
He was worried about the elevation to the mainstream, the far left-leaning activist wing of the party represented by Bernie Sanders,Elizabeth Warren and Alexia Ocasio-Cortez.
He was concerned by such utterances urging voters to embrace “political revolution” and “big, structural change,” as well as those widely considered extreme far left proposal such as court packing and decriminalizing illegal border crossings. Most importantly, he was fighting for moderates like me to still have a place in the Democratic Party.
Many years after the publication of his famous work, Das Kapital, the political and philosophical thought espoused by Karl Max came to inspire the Great October Revolution of 1917 leading to the overthrow of the Czarist monarchy in far away Russia.
It was also called the Bolshevik Revolution and at the core of it was the belief that the working classes would, at some point, liberate themselves from the economic and political control of the ruling classes. It all sounded very good and promising at the time and different version of it were duplicated in many parts of the world.
After so many years of living under extreme economic and political hardship during the Cold War, it became clear that the old Soviet was unsustainable and was ready to move on. Thanks to the American inspired twin policies of Perestroika and Glasnost introduced by the then President Mikhail Gorbachev that opened the door to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and ultimately the birth of modern Russia.
Today, economist are almost unanimous in the belief that the world has witnessed a steady growth in capital. Unfortunately however, these resources are not fairly disribtuted but skewed in favor of the top one percent. A lot has been said about the rapid growth in technology and artificial intelligence causing machine to replace humans in the work place as one reason.
Open border trade policies and outsourcing has particularly hit workers in western nations disprorportionately harder. Whatever the case may be, this has resulted in rising income inequality that sometimes have the super wealthy pitted against the rest of us.
Many nation states today are attempting to address the challenges by appropriating wealth in a manner that is fair and just to all. In such a way that also will not destroy the individual incentive to work hard and grow more wealth.
There are certain things that is uniquely America,namely; the love for gun and free enterprise. Remove those two things and she will just be like Canada or any other country in Western Europe. Whereas it’s hard to argue that guns have served this country well, that cannot be said of America’s free enterprise capitalist system.
For that’s the reason why most disruptive and ground breaking technologies are birthed here. It’s the same system that produced the greatest and most prosperous nation on this planet with all its flaws. It’s very true that every system has to be tweaked in time so as to stay relevant in a changing world.
That said, America is not looking for Democrats to reinvent the wheel. In an attempt to do that, they will be loosing a whole lot of us in droves. Even the current madness in the White House will not stop the exodus.
If their is any silver lining in the election of Donald Trump, for the Democrats it’s the fact that he gave them reason to unite. It doesn’t matter the ideological devide within ,all factions are unanimous in the goal to defeat Trump and send him packing from the White House.
The first fruit of that unity was the so-called Blue Wave that handed them a comfortable majority in the lower house. Then their is also the Independents, totally unamused by all the presidential drama voting alongside. But then, it does seems like the Democratic party has a way of overplaying her hand and causing victory slip through the fingers most times. Hopefully this time they will apply the lesson learnt.
Osmund Agbo,MD,FCCP writes from Houston,Texas