…if voters who agree with Obama are inclined to vote for Republicans because Republicans are blocking Obama’s ideas, then not only is 2012 lost, but the descent of American politics into hysterical irrationality is complete.
I think the idea is that, in a minimally rational process, one in which inputs had some positive logical relationship to outputs, a voter who favored policy X would vote for the politician A committed to attempting to realize policy X. If the result was not-X, and the voter still wanted to achieve X, then he wouldn’t vote for politician B promising not-X, except for reasons that would imply the non-rationality of the system, or a negative logical relationship between inputs and outputs.
There actually is a politics of vote for not-X to achieve X, but it implies some version of worse-the-better-ism. So, the cunning of history might be that, in order actually to achieve X, the only option is to “intensify the contradictions” – enhance not-X to such a point that a pro-X counter-counter-move overwhelms, re-engineers, bypasses or replaces the system. So, in concrete terms, the failure of the Obama Administration would presumably give the radicalized Rs a chance to run things, and only a reaction against whatever they do would set the predicate for the kind of revolutionary movement that Obamamania may have foreshadowed, but that the real Obama and his real existing coalition, including you and Cornell West, were unprepared actually to effectuate.
But history moves slowly and haphazardly. The Republican unity government of 2013 might luck out from the gradual lifting of the economic haze, for which natural restoration of economic good health they will unstintingly claim credit, meaning that everything else you and the left hate about the right will be boosted, totally unfairly. So the intensification of not-X might turn into a generational process rather than a mere electoral-cyclical one. I think that would be the nightmare of the left (broadly speaking), a happenstantial boosting of rightwing credibility that we just don’t have time for…
The descent of American politics into hysterical irrationality is already complete. It was complete when Obama’s administration first started framing things according to a false debate with the supposed centrists who were actually radical so-called conservatives. So the debate appeared rational but was actually hysterically irrational from any rational perspective.