Following Tuesday’s High in Grant Park

Barack Obama’s victory party in Grant Park was the perfect ending for a Hollywood movie. The good guys won and lived happily ever after.

But this was real and the world did change, although not necessarily in the ways most people think.

The American revolutionary heritage, dating back to 1776, demonstrated its continuing potency. From the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” oration, to Barack Obama’s victory celebration in Grant Park, the quest to fulfill the promise that all are created equal has persisted, through retreats that lasted decades, to triumphs, to this week’s vast achievement. Once again, the world’s complex relationship to America has altered. For the United States itself, a great legacy of Obama’s victory will be the new voting alliance he has constructed. It includes much of the traditional working class and professional base of the Democratic Party, and adds to this vast new numbers of African Americans, Latinos, and young people.

The coalition is so broad----a definite problem for the future----that it embraces not only millions of Americans who want permanent jobs that pay a living wage, post-secondary education for their children, secure home ownership, and safe and rebuilt cities, but a large segment of the capitalist class. While business executives desire some of the things millions of wage and salary earners want, they have not abandoned their appetite for cheap labour, if not available at home, then abroad. And they want low taxes for themselves.

Obama’s coalition can be called the “coalition of the sane.” It embraces the broad forces of American democracy. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has become the party of unreason. It is a party in which it is respectable to believe that humans once traveled on saddled dinosaurs, that the American imperium can safely ignore both the economic and military limits to expansion, that Americans don’t really have to pay taxes, and that the exponential expansion of production and consumption poses no threat to the planet. The Christian right continues to grow in the United States, and even though its members were less enthused than usual about the Republicans this time, they will endure. They pose a signal threat to American democracy. If the economic crisis persists for years to come, as is likely, they will knock loudly on the door next time.

As was the case in 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn into office in the depths of the Great Depression, Barack Obama will take office at a time when the prevailing nostrums about how to run the economy have been shown to be barren. It will fall to him to save American capitalism, not only materially, but from its own savagely self-destructive appetites and superstitions. FDR achieved this with a great assist from the Second World War.

He had one immense advantage that Obama does not possess. FDR presided over America when its empire was rising. Obama presides over an empire in decline. To save the United States from utter bankruptcy, the new president will have to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible. He will have to slash military spending. He will need to rely on “soft” power, the power of persuasion to get his way in the wider world. At the moment, he has plenty of soft power, in the form of the immense good will of most of humanity, but soft power has a way of dissolving in the face of stubborn realities.

Barack Obama has shown an immense capacity to confront challenges with equanimity. He’ll need this as he moves from the Hollywood set to the making of the documentary film of the next four years, a different sort of saga.