Note: Last weekend, I wrote a diary "George Lakoff's 'Obama Code' As A Partial Model", which largely validated Obama's reading of Obama as a progressive, while noting some problematic aspects to his analysis. This weekend I want to take a sharper, more clearly-defined look at the limits of Obama's progressivism, which this diary begins. Not surprisingly, the dividing line is not pragmatism, but good old-fashioned ideology: "neo"-liberalism vs. the real thing. A key distinction of the real thing is public provision of public goods.
Michael Lind is pretty much an old-fashioned centrist, without being stuck in the past. Like David Brock after him, he started out as conservative foot-soldier rising rapidly through the ranks, then grew appalled by what he saw once he rose high enough to finally grasp the rot within. Yet, as Publishers Weekly noted in the review of his watershed book, Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America:
It is too late to rescue American conservatism from the radical right, he declares, pointing out the surprising sympathy conservatives have for antigovernment hate groups. Lind doesn't dwell on attacking the left; he did that in The Next American Nation. Given that few politicos today espouse the "national liberalism" he propounds a centrist populism that unites moderate social conservatism with economic class warfare.Lind urges his readers to support neoliberals such as President Clinton.
So what's he doing writing a piece in Salon bewailing "Obama's Timid Liberalism"? Setting the record straight, that's what. Like many others, I was pleasantly surprised by his budget proposal the week before last. To be honest, I was relieved after all that dangerous talk about entitlement reform and center-right "fiscal responsibility." But that still left so much uninspired policy muddle draped in Obama's inspiring rhetoric that it was difficult to know where to begin. Lind knows where:
Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...
Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb in a couple of years? He didn't tax kerosene to make it uneconomical and to encourage private investment in atomic power?
Oh. OK. Never mind.
It wasn't just FDR and atomic power, Lind reminds us. It was FDR and Social Security, too. And Eisenhower and the Interstate freeway system. The direct public provision of public goods. And it worked. Hello, President Pragmatism! Over here!
The point of this imaginary monologue is simple. Once upon a time in the United States, public goods -- from retirement security and energy research to public roads -- were provided by the government and paid for by taxes. As late as the Nixon administration, the provision of public goods by government was considered perfectly compatible with a robust market economy by so-called Modern Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon as well as New Deal Democrats like Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. In the intervening 40 years, however, free-market fundamentalists of the Chicago School have managed to change the debate, redefining "socialism" to mean not only public ownership of the means of production, but also public provision of public goods.
There is nothing terribly remarkable in this observation. It's as obvious as the nose on your face. Or at least, it used to be, before the invention of 24/7 spin. What is remarkable is that it's only the elite political class and the dittoheads that have fully swallowed this swill. The vast majority of the American people--the "silent majority," if you will--have not. They still believe in the social contract, an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, and an honest life's work for an honest life's pay. They also, unfortunately, seem to think that this is what Obama believes in as well. And in his heart, I'd like to think he does. But there's a fatal disconnect here between good intention and sound ideas.
The heart of the problem is Obama's full-scale embrace of neoliberalism, as Lind encapsulates it:
Rather than fight back, most Democrats in the last generation adapted to this hostile conservative political climate by jettisoning New Deal "big government" liberalism for "market-friendly" neoliberalism....
Neoliberals are liberals in one sense -- they fret about unequal outcomes. But rather than help middle- and low-income Americans by regulating the prices of privately provided public goods, as the crude and direct New Dealers would have done, neoliberal Democrats have argued for allowing the "market" (translation: the publicly subsidized entities) to set prices and then promised to provide tax subsidies or grants to help middle- and low-income Americans pay for the expensive, privately provided public goods.
This is, not surprisingly, a formula for perpetual government subsidies of the most entrenched special interests--a fundamental fact so obvious that only kool-aid drinkers can ignore it. The conservative/neo-liberal consensus that defines Obama's comfort zone is deftly described thus by Lind:
Neoliberals and conservatives agreed that public goods should be provided by private, for-profit or nonprofit entities, rather than government agencies. If private corporations or universities had no motivation to provide public goods, well, then, they would be bribed with tax credits or other government subsidies.
Within this consensus, a direct role for government is literally unthinkable. It's in that sense--and that sense alone, that it's "socialistic", since "socialistic" and "unthinkable" have long been synonyms in America's elite political discourse.
Lind notes:
You might have thought that the Crash of 2008 would have led Democrats to reconsider this neoliberal approach to providing public goods by private means. But to judge from President Obama's budget, the White House is still living back in the neoliberal era, when the diminutive Milton Friedman cast a giant shadow.
Consider Obama's education proposals. The problem with higher education is that it costs way too much. Tuition costs at private universities and some state universities have been growing far more rapidly than inflation. A crude, old-fashioned, old-thinking New Deal liberal would see the problem as one of excessive prices demanded by universities, not insufficient funds on the part of the students whom the universities gouge. The hypothetical New Deal liberal would threaten to deny universities their privileged tax-exempt status unless they spend more of their endowments on tuition and keep their prices affordable.
In contrast, Obama's tepid "solution" sounds positively C-minus, "pragmatic" only for the higher education establishment, and politicians firmly in their thrall:
The neoliberal alternative is to avoid impolite and divisive inquiries into the reasons for skyrocketing tuition costs. That would entail the government concluding that prices in a particular industry (in this case, a nonprofit industry) are too high, something that government should not do. Instead, the taxpayer will be forced to cough up money to help students meet the exorbitant fees. Thus Obama's first budget calls for maintaining the $2,500 New American Opportunity Tax Credit for middle-class students, while converting Pell Grants up to $5,550 into a permanent government entitlement. If I were a university, I'd raise my tuition by ... oh ... let's say $5,550 a year. Government subsidies without government price controls would encourage cost inflation, one might think, but this possibility appears not to bother the brilliant economists on Obama's team.
Lind goes on to blast cap-and-trade as well, along with Obama's health care insurance proposal--a proposal quite similar to one Lind offered in The Radical Center, back in the day, before Wall Street blew up, reminding everyone that markets are fallible--"big time," as America's favorite war criminal would say.
But a lot has changed since Wall Street imploded last fall. The great investment banks are gone, the U.S. has nationalized much of the financial system, and appears to be on the way to effectively nationalizing the automobile and housing sectors as well. In this environment, we need to consider some heresies, like the idea that the best way to provide a public good is not necessarily to pour subsidies on middlemen, and then bail them out with more subsidies when they fail at their public function.
Ya think? Which brings us around to the little matter of hegemony, which Lind presents in the form of framing all issues in special interest terms [emphasis added]:
The fundamental barrier today is the way that the issues are framed, by Democrats and Republicans alike. Thus the problem is defined not as making credit available for individuals and businesses, but as saving the banks and the shadow banking system. The goal is not to provide healthcare to all citizens, but to enable all citizens to purchase private health insurance. The objective is not to ensure universal access to higher education; it is to insure universal access to colleges and universities. In these and other cases, the means is confused with the end. The ultimate goal -- providing credit, healthcare or education -- is identified with the interests of non-governmental for-profit or nonprofit providers of that service. If these private institutions fail to provide the public service in a low-cost, effective and equitable way, then they must be subsidized even more. The idea of achieving the same public goals through simpler, more direct and efficient means that would cut out the middleman appears to be heresy to the Obama administration.
It's not necessary to nudge the Obama administration leftward until it arrives at socialism. When it comes to the public provision of public goods, Eisenhower Republicanism would be just fine.
In early 1992, I was wandering around outside a stadium where Nelson Mandella would soon be speaking, when I ran into Harold Meyerson, then the editor of the LA Weekly. Paul Tsongas and Bill Clinton were the Democratic front-runners at the time.
"So," I asked Harold, "What do you think of the Democratic primary, with two Eisenhower Republicans in the lead?"
"Oh no," Harold shot back, "Clinton is an Eisenhower Democrat."
STATE BLOGS
