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Note: The nature of this diary diverges dramatically from what I originally had in mind. But such is life. It does speak to my core concern, which is the desire to expand our perspective on inherent inadequacies of the methods being pursued by President Obama.
If I can summarize my take on Obama's core message, it would be something like this: for a generation now, America has been divided by pointless, backward-looking debates over the 1960s culture wars, and as a result we have a huge backlog of problems to deal with. We need to address them in a pragmatic, non-ideological fashion, taking the best ideas from wherever we can find them, and putting them together into policies that benefit America as a whole.
It is, I think, based on a fundamentally mistaken view of history and politics, positing a neat division between ideology and technocratic pragmatism. And as a direct consequence, it produces a false formula in which (generally center-right) ideological compromise is simultaneously sanctified and denied under the ill-defined veneer of "pragmatism". This is why Obama has embraced:
(1) A continuation of Bush's Middle East war policy that has no rational relationship to fighting terrorism at its roots.
(2) A continuation of Bush's bank bailout strategy that pours tons of money into financial institutions, with no significant controls, and little effective influence on what benefit, if any, this provides for the rest of the economy.
(3) A middling stimulus package, roughly half the size that was needed, overloaded with tax cuts, and about $250 million short on state stabilization funds.
(4) A go-slow/minimal effort approach on mortgage bankruptcy relief, EFCA, universal health care and global warming.
In order to articulate what this diary's title promises, a genuine cross-ideological approach rooted in core liberal values, I must first present the rough outlines of a counter-vision.
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This counter-vision begins with counter-narrative about where we stand and why. It begins thus: for 40 years now, America has been largely paralyzed by divided government, which has given rise to a period of eviscerated political accountability. Appearances have far overshadowed reality, and reality-oriented mechanisms have been systematically eviscerated, so that it is virtually impossible for the people to know what is happening with any degree of certainty.
While much of our long-range decision-making must depend in detail on information systems in need of rebuilding, we can non-the-less begin by taking broad action in several different fundamental areas, subject to fine-tuning as more information becomes available:
(1) A co-ordinated demilitarization of the Middle East, while shifting our counter-terrorism efforts to a counter-terrorist/law enforcement model, combined with a reoriented foreign policy agenda targeted to help relieve conditions that terrorist groups exploit.
(2) A replacement of Bush's bank bailout strategy that aims to save the banking system, not any particular banks, and does so with the aim of restoring full financial services for all as rapidly as possible, with the added assistance of national mortgage write-down program that stabilizes homeownership, real-estate and mortgage security values.
(3) A robust stimulus package, scaled to the size of the World War II spending, which definitively ended the Great Depression, aimed at initiating a rapid transformation of our society to a renewable-energy-based economy.
Anything I might say about health care could readily overwhelm everything else, and for the purpose of this diary, I want to minimize matters of ideological dispute. For that reason only, I will say nothing about it--not because I don't think it's important.
The first thing that should be noted about the proposals above is that--contrary to DC conventional wisdom--they are not ideologically determined. They are however, knoweldge-based and public interest-based determined. The shift in counter-terrorism strategy is supported by all manner of expert information, from both military and outside expert analyses. The alternative bailout strategy is supported by economists of various different ideological persuasions. The same is true of the stimulus package, with the additional input of experts on alternative energy and global warming. The divide here is not an ideological one, it is between knowledgeable experts and advocates for the public interest on one side vs. special interests and their kept "experts" on the other.
It is only within this sort of clear-eyed overview that we can sensibly approach the issue of cross-ideological consensus-building that Obama has quite questionably made central to his agenda. But, of course, once we've reframed the problems we face in this manner, the issue of cross-ideological consensus-building suddenly seems far less compelling of a challenge.
That's really the main point I have to make. Yes, we can turn to each of several specific examples cited in an earlier diary, and develop superior strategies, but the unspoken key to all of them is to reduce the salience of conflict by solving the larger matrix of seemingly insoluble problems that confront us.
Of course, this begs the question of how to magically implement the change agenda I outlined above. This is clearly hypothetical in the extreme, not least because it assumes certain actions the time for which has already passed. But the aim here is not unfortunately to map out a plausible future--rather, it's to shed light on the nature of political decision-making at the most basic levels of problem definition. And here the point is quite simple: For a President with the charisma, popular support, organizational capacity and oratorical skills possessed by President Obama, the fundamental effort should have gone into clearly defining the nature and magnitude of the problems we face in roughly the manner described above, and rallying the necessary public support to overcome special intererst opposition.
The process of doing this would of necessity involve the mobilization, implementation and/or creation of processes that genuinely reflect core liberal values: open consultative processes free from special interest bias, expert guidance based on non-political professional evaluative processes, public input based on the most open, inclusive real-life and online processes, and iterative refinements using the best available bias-free processes.
Within this heady mix, the issue of past torture practices could be resolved by any number of processes, but the overall structure might be something like this. First, a panel of experts, including conservatives such as Bruce Fein, reports on the requirements of US and international law. Following this, an open submission process is opened to generate suggestions about how to proceed. The panel of experts--with or without the aid of the auxiliary members or even full supplementary panels--then screens the suggestions only to eliminate those that fail to meet legal requirements. The remaining proposals are then clustered by key characteristics, and a multi-stage national poll is employed to determine first which cluster of characteristics is preferred, and then which specific plan is preferred. In this fashion, a combination of expert professionals and public opinion generates the procedure with no involvement whatsoever of professional politicians.
As stated in the opening note, the form of this diary is quite different from what I first envisioned, but I believe my original intention has been served, which is to say that I've presented a much broader perspective on the limits of the sorts of processes that Obama has so far limited himself to.
Suffice it to say, I think this diary serves to underscore the rather significant gap between the visionary sense of possibility his campaign generated, and the painful mundane, even backward-looking governance process--or lack thereof--that he has fallen back on.
I will gladly welcome others to add their ideas about reality-based, egalitarian processes that could be used to bridge contentious issue gaps in the comments below. |
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