| A couple of articles on Obama appeared this week that deserve to be taken very seriously in terms of gauging the newly visible weakness of his politics. Although I have serious disagreements with some details of both of them, their main thrusts are both accurate, they complement one another, and though they reinforce arguments from the left, they are primarily grounded in the very same tradition of pragmatism that Obama himself tries to lay claim to.
The first, by Michael Lind at Salon, concerns Obama's cult-like faith in neoliberalim, asking, "Can Obama be deprogrammed?". Given the multiple crises we now face that all have substantial economic components-economic recovery, health care reform, global warming-as well as the historical centrality of economic policy in American politics, it's far to consider this the single most important policy fundamental one could focus on. Lind points out tellingly that that neoliberalism hasn't delivered in the past, except in terms of transitory illusions, and can't be expected to deliver now. This contrasts dramatically with the success of New Deal liberalism, Lind point out, which may need updating, but remains much sounder in its fundamentals than neoliberalism ever dreamed of being.
The second, by David Bromwich at Huffington Post, (highlighted by David Mizner in a quick hit) strikes deeply at the question of Obama's process, under the potentially misleading title, "The Character of Barack Obama".For Bromwich is not writing about character so much as he's writing about political process, bringing together matters of temperament, judgment and political philosophy. These are all things that others have raised before-present company included-but Bromwich has fit them together in a way that seems more than the sum of its parts, even as it says almost nothing about the substance of Obama's challenges or policies.
While Versailles might claim that Lind is arguing from the left, two points would dispute that interpretation. First, solid supermajorities of the American people support the welfare state spending that's a prime legacy of the New Deal policies he champions. Second, Lind's argument is empirically driven by looking at realworld performance that ideology-driven neoliberals simply refuse to deal with. Thus, it's much more accurate to situate Lind at what could be called the "deep center". Meanwhile, Bromwhich's criticism is simply far too process-focused to sustain any sort of ideological labeling. Both, in short, could well be embraced by a substantial majority of the American people-as many or more as voted for Obama in the first place.
To be sure, as a leftist, I would take them considerably further. But they are sufficiently free of the narrow-minded ideological fetters of Versailles that I'm quite happy to support them both as a reasonable starting point for actually undoing the damage that Obama was elected to clean up. What stands in the way of this is quite simple: the political establishment culture (aka Versailles) and Obama's bizarrely deferential attitude toward it.
Because Lind's thesis is more fully understandable from the brief description already given, I'll begin my discussion with Bromwhich in this first installment, before returning to Lind for a closer look in part two. |
First Bromwhich captures how a relatively scarce potential strength has masked a hidden weakness that's now coming into focus:
One of the strangest facts we know about Obama is that his colleagues and students at the University of Chicago Law School came away from discussions very impressed with his abilities, but not knowing what he thought about many issues. This was not torts or contracts. Obama's subject was Constitutional Law.
He has always had a reputation for being fair-minded -- a strength only attainable by someone who is (to begin with) minded. But the cautiousness of his first six months as president shows a pattern of accommodation that often lands him on the far side of actual prudence.
The subtext here is that it's much easier to be fair-minded if you don't actually have anything substantive that you believe in. If you don't have any position yourself, then it's much easier to listen to, and accept everyone else's position. Of course there are limits to how far this can go-as seen by Obama's repeated exclusion of the very progressives whose ranks he initially appears to have come from, and who accurately reflect the base of the Democratic Party-as well as many independents and even Republicans when it comes to bank bailouts, health care reform, and sharply reversing course on Bush's mideast wars, to name just three top issues on which Obama's disconnect has been breathtaking. This reflexive rejection reflects the next topic Bromwhich touches on:
His instinct is to have all the establishments on his side
Of course, this instinct is all wrong at a point in time when all the establishments stand more or less discredited, but I'll save what I have to say in this more critical vein till the end of this post. For now, note the plural, which Bromwhich quickly ticks off as
Wall Street, the military, the mainstream media; the most profitable corporations in all but the most signally failing industries; and that movable establishment (which disappears and reconstitutes itself), the quick-take pulse of popular opinion on any given issue.
This is a rather odd list that could well be the subject of an entire post in itself, but it sets up the following simple argument:
to oppose the bankers on the question of bailouts, to oppose the military on drone assassinations, to exhibit non-pliability against the insurance companies and press for a public option in health care, to defy a bare majority of popular opinion on the importance of keeping Guantanamo open -- to have fought at least some of these battles need not have been hazardous for a president who came into office on a wave of revulsion against his opposite.
Indeed, (leaving aside for the moment all questions of moral or political right or wrong) quite the opposite-not to have fought any of these battles both disappoints and deflates his base, leaving him with less power than he has now as a result of failing to engage on any of these fronts. Most pointedly, he ought to be flooding congressional town halls with supporters of a robust public option, but instead it's the Birthers/teabaggers who are doing so, while he retreats into an ever-thickening haze.
As Bromwhich puts it:
In dealing with some of these issues, Obama has stepped forward and then back. On some, he has not yet taken a first step away from his predecessor.
Surely such minimalism is not "change we can believe in", except to the extent that faith is the evidence of things not seen. This is how I would frame a point that Bromwhich makes a paragraph later:
Alongside Obama's reticence sits a curiously incompatible trait, a certain grandiosity.
Bromwhich's illustration is one I profoundly disagree about-his speaking out on Henry Louis Gates' arrest. The point is much better made by recalling the sweeping campaign promises of hope and change that have fallen prey to his surprisingly Calvin Coolidge-like reticence. Nonetheless, Bromwhich hits the point on the nose when he concludes:
Doubtless a certain grandiosity is an aspect of the man. But if it is bad, all things being equal, to appear grandiose and worse to appear timid, it is the worst of all to be grandiose and then timid.
He then proceeds to a related quandary, which might be dubbed "the fourth-quarter quarterback syndrome":
Occasionally Obama seems even better in ad lib discussions than one had expected -- with voters and reporters, and with other politicians. But he has turned out to be far less canny than he needs to be in making the sort of major speech that explains an issue from the ground up....
His characteristic way of handling confusion in the audience is to come back and give good answers to questions. That is very well, but no substitute for an early explanation.
The prime problem in politics, as opposed to football, is that even when successful Obama's style of come-from-behind play sacrifices both policy substance and political initiative relative to what can be achieved by game-defining first-quarter dominance.
Illustrating this point, Bromwhich writes:
On July 30 the New York Times ran a story about a woman who owns a small business and has followed the president from place to place to ask him a question. Is there, she wanted to know, a single government program that has ever done anything right? (She got that knock-down challenge from talk radio.) Obama replied with two examples, Medicare and Veterans Hospitals. The business owner who had chased him down with supreme confidence in her mockery was surprised to hear those two sober examples. Nobody had told her. Then there is the citizen at another town-hall meeting who said: "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."
This is all the more galling, given that I still think George Lakoff was right that Obama has a remarkable natural ability when it comes to framing issues. It's just that he seems to be incredibly indifferent about using that ability on the front end, where it naturally has the greatest game-defining potential. Unless, of course, he intentionally doesn't want to define the game for fear of offending someone, or because, like everyone else, he really has no idea precisely what he stands for.
Neatly tying back to the previous point, Bromwhich writes:
Here, Obama's two opposing traits, the caution and the presumption, have joined with results that are deeply unhappy. He arrogates. He does not indicate. And when the argument is well underway, he starts his major explanation as an afterthought.
He then presses on to what I regard as the central problem:
Obama cherishes the ideal of a frictionless transformation of society. It is a wish for aesthetic harmony, which he mistakes for a political goal. Its attainment would be a beautiful thing. But no matter how much he appeals for comity, Obama is certain to give offense to some. Better to choose your times and targets than allow others to force that choice.
His aversion to strife was plain from his conduct in the primaries and the general-election campaign. But the degree of avoidance we have seen could never have been predicted.
Particularly given Obama's training in the methods of Saul Alinsky, as Bromwhich goes on to note. Indeed, I would argue-much more strongly than Bromwhich-that the only reason Obama seems to have studied Alinsky is to avoid anything within a country mile Star Trek lightyear of his confrontational methods. Bromwhich calls it "foreshortened form", but "symbolic" or "cartoon" might be more accurate than "foreshortened":
Obama's training, one recalls, was in the community-reform methods of Saul Alinsky; and yet he seems to have adapted the relevant ideas in foreshortened form. The Alinsky process of reform, as Jeffrey Stout has pointed out, goes from powerlessness to power in several stages. There is, first, the public recognition of powerlessness; then the airing of injustices, by legitimate polarization and active protest; then proposals of concrete reform; and only at last, power-sharing and reconciliation.
The strange thing about Obama is that he seems to suppose a community can pass directly from the sense of real injustice to a full reconciliation between the powerful and the powerless, without any of the unpleasant intervening collisions. This is a choice of emphasis that suits his temperament.
Instead of "emphasis", I would simply call it what is: denial.
Finally, Bromwhich goes on to argue, Obama has so far failed to recognize the need to define policy and thereby set the agenda:
And, good as Obama is in person, a resonant speaker, an impressive master of details once the details are in, he has not yet explained a single major policy in advance with the accessible clarity Paul Krugman brought to health care simply by listing its four elements: regulation, mandate, subsidy, public option. Such explanations should not have to wait for the intervention of a sympathetic columnist.
Somewhere at the bottom of the missteps of the last few months is a failure to recognize the depth of the popular ignorance a president of the United States confronts on any issue.
From a more realist/leftist perspective, one might also add "a failure to recognize the depth of hegemonic indoctrination a president confronts" when he wants to make change that's opposed by masters of hegemony. More on this below.
The reason Bromwhich gives is what might be called Obama's desire for symbolic national leadership, of a sort exercised by Israel's President or Britain's Queen, as opposed to their prime ministers:
The party, for years, wanted a leader to assure their unity; they thought Obama was the one. Yet he has made it felt in many ways since becoming president that he would be disappointed to identify himself as leader of his party.
His political fortune will now depend on his readiness to reverse that posture. To take control of his presidency, he must give up the ambition to serve as the national moderator, the pronouncer on everything, the man with the largest portfolio.
Here is where I depart from Bromwhich to the left, and can no longer do so parenthetically. What's really needed, I would argue, is for Obama to do what Roosevelt did, once it was clear that he would have no partners from the GOP side: He must both lead the party and the nation, and shift the center decisively to the left. And if he still wants to be bipartisan, then just recall that Lincoln did the exact same thing.
This connects back to two previous points at which I raised a more left/progressive perspective. First, that this is a time to stand against political establishments, not with them, given their justly earned states of disrepute. Second, that Obama faces not just ignorance among the citizenry, but hegemonic mythologizing, disinformation and narrative misdirection to the point of demonization.
The first point should be obvious with respect to the financial sector, but it's also true of the military, despite the absurdly high faith-based confidence the public places in it. The reason is two-fold: First, the military has been doing things that people really don't like: fighting Bush's wars, kicking out gays, abusing the troops (stop loss, refusing or delaying needed medical treatment for veterans, etc.) Second, it's quite possible to make major changes in military policy and practice within the framework of repairing deep damage done to it by the Bush Administration. Not only is this true, it would be relatively easy to sell.
The problem is not that such a confrontation would be difficult to pull off-it wouldn't be, particularly if one were to start with dramatic actions to benefit the common grunt. The problem is, Obama really has no interest in such confrontation, not just because he's averse to confrontation, but because he appears to genuinely believe-ala Burkean conservative ideology-that those who have substantial institutional power in society ipso facto have a fundamentally legitimate claim to it, and should only be questioned in the most unusual circumstances, and even then most respectfully.
The role of hegemony is much more difficult to get across. It's like trying to teach fish about water. They can't for the life of them figure out what you're talking about. But that's precisely why it's so fundamental, so important. Obama is nothing if not a cerebral wonk. Sure he can give a passionate speech, but when he does, he does it with a wonkish purpose in mind. And thus, despite his instinctual abilities to connect with people emotionally and narratively, he remains firmly grounded in the tradition of Enlightenment rationalism that divorces reason not just from emotion, but from the reasoner, and everything that goes with them-not just their emotions, but their life experience, their bodily existence, their place in history and society...everything that makes them specifically who and what they are in their own particularity.
Enlightenment rationalism is the foundation of 18th and 19th Century liberalism-as well as today's neo-liberalism, the subject of part two in this diary set. The "New Liberalism" born in Britain in the 1870s, which lies at the heart of New Deal Liberalism, is a different creature altogether because it realizes the irreducible importance of material pre-conditions, and thus takes genuine and serious account of the material world, instead of remaining content with clever models of it. Because it attends to the material world in a way that 18th and 19th Century liberalism does not, New Deal Liberalism-aka social democracy-is much better prepared to grasp the reality of hegemonic struggle. And this is, in the end, perhaps the most fundamental reason why Obama has lost his way. Quite simply put, old-style liberalism is simply incapable of recognizing its ideological enemies, even as they stare it right in the face. |
