Note: I just stumbled across this diary from May 2009, and thought it fit perfectly in the role of sketching out more precisely how Obama failed to manifest his promise as even a reluctant Solon. It recalls that he did say he would take the path of fundamental structural reform, if that was what proved to be needed. And it shows just how early on it became obvious that he would not. Much has happened since I wrote this diary. But nothing, fundamentally, has changed. Indeed, the reality of "no change" has dramatically deepend.
There are lots of ways people express disappointment with Barack Obama on lots of different subjects. There's a similar diversity of responses defending him, on the one hand, as well as those deriding people for ever having expected anything more. Without denying any of this diversity, I'd like to argue non-exclusively a case for disappointment, and what should be done about it. This case goes back to several statements, and the overall tone conveyed in David's 2006 piece on Obama for The Nation, "Mr. Obama Goes to Washington".
The general outlines of my argument are these:
(1) There many defenders who still insist that Obama is a great progressive leader, and anyone who doesn't see that unrealistic, rigid, and/or an ideologue.
(2) There are many detractors who say that anyone who ever thought Obama was a progressive was delusional.
(3) My position has always been that Obama's conciliatory, risk-averse style was inherently problematic, but not necessarily fatally so, particularly since he showed signs, and gave verbal assurances that he was capable of a much more confrontational approach, if that should prove necessary. Thus both (1) and (2) were plausibly defensible positions at one time, before Obama took office. But that time has now passed.
(4) The case for legitimate disappointment now rests on the fact that Obama has not lived up to the promise of taking a harder line, if necessary--quite the opposite, he has been conciliatory in ways that undermine the prospects for even the sorts of change that he himself still advocates for.
(5) The proper response should not depend on trying to figure out "what Obama really thinks" or "how he feels" or anything else to do with his personal disposition. The response should have to do with changing the overall political situation in which he's acting. (The disposition/situation dichotomy is a major theme this weekend, up to and including the extensive theoretical work of Harvard law professor Jon D. Hanson on the situationist perspective.) This does mean making one judgment about his disposition: he's a whole let less proactive in changing the political landscape than a lot of his supporters took him to be. Which is why I've repeatedly said that he reminds me of JFK. In the long run, JFK's relatively timid disposition was overwhelmed by the changing situation. So may it be again.
There are lots of ways people express disappointment with Barack Obama on lots of different subjects. There's a similar diversity of responses defending him, on the one hand, as well as those deriding people for ever having expected anything more. Without denying any of this diversity, I'd like to argue non-exclusively a case for disappointment, and what should be done about it. This case goes back to several statements, and the overall tone conveyed in David's 2006 piece on Obama for The Nation, "Mr. Obama Goes to Washington".
The general outlines of my argument are these:
(1) There many defenders who still insist that Obama is a great progressive leader, and anyone who doesn't see that unrealistic, rigid, and/or an ideologue.
(2) There are many detractors who say that anyone who ever thought Obama was a progressive was delusional.
(3) My position has always been that Obama's conciliatory, risk-averse style was inherently problematic, but not necessarily fatally so, particularly since he showed signs, and gave verbal assurances that he was capable of a much more confrontational approach, if that should prove necessary. Thus both (1) and (2) were plausibly defensible positions at one time, before Obama took office. But that time has now passed.
(4) The case for legitimate disappointment now rests on the fact that Obama has not lived up to the promise of taking a harder line, if necessary--quite the opposite, he has been conciliatory in ways that undermine the prospects for even the sorts of change that he himself still advocates for.
(5) The proper response should not depend on trying to figure out "what Obama really thinks" or "how he feels" or anything else to do with his personal disposition. The response should have to do with changing the overall political situation in which he's acting. (The disposition/situation dichotomy is a major theme this weekend, up to and including the extensive theoretical work of Harvard law professor Jon D. Hanson on the situationist perspective.) This does mean making one judgment about his disposition: he's a whole let less proactive in changing the political landscape than a lot of his supporters took him to be. Which is why I've repeatedly said that he reminds me of JFK. In the long run, JFK's relatively timid disposition was overwhelmed by the changing situation. So may it be again.
During the primaries, Mark Schmitt wrote a piece in the American Prospect, "The 'Theory of Change' Primary", in which he argued:
Perhaps we are being too literal in believing that "hope" and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure.
A good way of understanding that method, Schmitt argued, was in terms of a "theory of change," a term from the philanthropic/non-profit world, which will be explained on the flip. What's most noteworthy about this argument is that it represents a sophisticated way of interpreting Obama's seemingly centrist tendencies as covertly progressive. Thus, an important question naturally arose: was it simply a way for progressives to deceive themselves--a sophisticated form of wishful thinking?
This week saw the appearance of another installment along the same lines, an article by Andrew Levison at The Democratic Strategist, "Obama the Sociologist". I want to stress that both pieces are thoughtful, and have some useful insights. But I believe that both are deeply colored by wishful thinking, and contain some very flawed analysis as well.
Above all, what I think that both of them miss--as described in yesterday's diary, "Obama The Conservative"-- is a very straight-forward sense in which Obama acts and thinks like a procedural conservative, an orientation that's sometimes compatible with progressive aims, but always vulnerable to the veto power of established, substantively conservative interests--and never moreso than during a time of crisis, such as that we are now experiencing, a time in which confrontation is far more likely to succeed in producing both minimally necessary and maximally achievable change.
My analysis shares in common with these authors the sense that there's a more progressive side to Obama that his procedural conservatism masks. But by fully acknowledging a degree of conservatism--not just centrism--in his procedural approach to politics, it helps explain elements of substantive conservatism as well, which progressives generally have been reluctant to fully acknowledge, and have therefore been ineffective in responding to.
I think Obama is truly a conservative. Not conservative in the pejorative, Republican, class-warfare sense. Conservative in the sense of thinking that making changes slowly and methodically is a virtue. Conservative in the sense of thinking that respectfully acknowledging and listening to all sides in a debate, and trying to strike a balance, is a good thing. Conservative in the sense of avoiding rancor and heated argument.
Those are all important values, and in many scenarios I tend to agree that following those values is the right thing to do.
But in the present case, that style of conservatism doesn't apply.
On one side, the economic crisis we face is so frightening that, as Krugman has argued,
In the comment thread, I responded with a combination of basic agreement, qualified by some more minor disagreement. But I think the point of agreement is far more fundamental. For one thing, it relates to an argument I first advanced right after the 2006 mid-terms, which I republished in a diary here last May, A Golden Oldie From 2006: Liberalism is the "True Conservatism". The basic upshot of combining MadScientist's comment with my earlier diary is that I don't see Obama's conservatism as necessarily problematic. But I do see recognizing his conservatism as key to understanding what is problematic: the specifics of how his conservatism fails to comport with the moment, just as MadScientist claimed.
This diary should also serve as a counterpoint to another diary one I'm working on, a response to an article at The Democratic Strategist, "Obama the Sociologist".
Background from my earlier diary kicks off on the flip.
In my earlier diary, "Obama-Yearning For Dixiecrats?" I pointed out that the lost era of civility and inter-party cooperation that Obama evokes and hopes to return to was markedly less polarized in large part because of the Southern Democrats-Dixiecrats-who were bitterly opposed to Civil Rights, and functioned as a de facto third party, triangulating between Republicans and Northern Democrats. I now what to consider the "So what?" option: So what if Obama is invoking a Rodney King theory of harmony based on cheefully misconstruing our past, so long as it works?
Fortunately, someone else has just beaten me to it. So I can let him do the heavy lifting, and then I can relate this possibility to some themes I've been exploring of late. At The American Prospect, Mark Schmitt has writen an article, "The 'Theory of Change' Primary" with the intro blurb:
Perhaps we are being too literal in believing that "hope" and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure.
This is hardly a new idea, but it is articulated with particular clarity and specificity, which is what sets it apart, and makes it worth a closer look... on the flip.
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