Zombies and Vampires

It was 2008, and I knew this day would come.

Not the day of reckoning, but the day of realization. The day when the apparatus of rule created by the US plutocracy -- the ideology of empire, the culture of consumerism,  the economics of bubble-wealth for the few and debt-slavery for the many, and a rickety system of governance created by slave-holders and unchanged since the 18th century -- would become its own worst enemy.

But for that day to come, there was an essential prologue -- an unskippable cut-scene, if you will. So I walked into an Illinois polling booth and voted for Obama.

I had no love for the Wall Street neoliberalism he and his party represented. But someone as damaged as McCain would have triggered a global catastrophe. Back in 2008, the BRICs were just beginning to realize how powerful they'd truly become, and how weak Wall Street neoliberalism and its junior partner in global financial crime, euroliberalism, really were. I figured the BRICs would need five or six years to figure things out, so why not give them the time.

Happily, they figured it all out by 2011, the moment when the tectonic plates of the age of multipolarity finally snapped into place. One small tremor of that moment was enough to trigger what we call the Arab Spring. Even bigger tremors are on their way.

It remains one of the crowning ironies of our day that the political history of the post-imperial US is looking more and more like that of the former USSR. Obama was America's Gorbachev, the fresh-faced son of the heartland who was going to magically rescue the Empire's superstructures while changing none of its infrastructures. Just as Gorbachev's eloquence melted away into Yeltsin's oligarchic looting and mass immiseration, so too has Obama's hazy call for national renewal vanished like the neo-imperial wish-fulfillment it indeed was, leaving nothing but the vicious austerity incarnated by Romney.

Romney is a pure vampire, and if he squeaks out an election win, he will burn this country to the ground, but Obama has done nothing for four years but throw taxpayer money at Wall Street, support neoliberal privatization schemes to trash public education, and make the too-big-to-fail banksters even bigger and more full of fail. Romneyism, in short, is the monster which has been gestating inside Obamaism all along.

And in fairness to ordinary Americans, Obama's campaign has been dreadful -- lifeless, directionless, and messageless. Obama's passionless conviction on behalf of zombie neoliberalism is precisely what allowed Romney to counter with the vindictive passion of hedge fund vampirism. Obama could still have won this election handily by resorting to populism, but one suspects he and his corporate backers are in mortal fear of the Occupy movement. They are afraid of sounding even the smallest note of populism, because they're smart enough to know that in the post-Occupy world, the tinder is there for a full-scale political firestorm. Obama would literally rather lose the election than give the slightest space to a post-imperial America.

This is not a counsel of despair: there are plenty of good candidates at the state and local level worth voting for. If you live in a swing state, consider the fact that it's easier to survive the zombie apocalypse than the vampire apocalypse. But the moment the elections are over, the real battle begins.