Everyone has an ideology, whether they know it or not. But when
your ideology has you - that's when you're an ideologue. It's not a
matter of "extremism" but of rigidity and blindness - detachment from
reality. Which is why Barack Obama is one of the most ideological
presidents we've ever had. And being imprisoned in his "pragmatist"
ideology is key to his numerous pragmatic train wrecks, as well his
less-noted failures to even take on several really big, really
significant problems.
Obama is what some political theorists would describe as a "preemptive president". (Photo: AFP)
It's not a matter of intelligence. Barack Obama is clearly one of the
smartest men to ever occupy the Oval Office. President of the Harvard
Law Review, four years from state senator to President of the United
States. First black president. These are not the accomplishments of a
stupid, or even just a reasonably competent man.
Unfortunately, however, smart people can often be quite dumb - not
just do dumb things, but do them over and over and over again. And while
Obama's rapid rise to power was a tale that highlighted his
intelligence, his time in office - now at its half-way point - has been a
tale that highlights the limits of that intelligence. Those limits are
deeply implicated in his ideology - a fanatical belief in compromise, no
matter what - that has served him admirably on a personal level in his
rapid climb to power, but that fundamentally cripples him in the
exercise of that power once it is in his hands.
The contrast between Obama's brilliance most of the time and its
utter absence when the chips are down has once again been revivified by
the sharp transition from his crisp, decisive re-election campaign to
his tortured "fiscal cliff" negotiations with Congressional Republicans,
particularly House Speaker Boehner.
Boehner's own incompetence is legendary - he couldn't even get all
his members sworn in on their first day in office - which helps to
distract attention from the fact that Obama has been floundering as
well. Obama's floundering is further obscured by the political
mainstream's inability to diagnose and contextualise its own limited
vision of untapped possibilities and unacknowledged costs and
consequences.
Soros' prophecies
It's not just that Obama was still negotiating with himself,
rewarding Boehner's incompetence with a series of ill-conceived and
fruitless concessions, which only weakened him; it's that the entire
enterprise is supremely idiotic, on at least three counts: First because
it's an invented political problem, not a real world problem. Second,
because the larger goal of the process - budget balancing - is a fool's
errand for Democrats, in light of how quickly (and gleefully)
Republicans undid that very same accomplishment under Bill Clinton, as
soon as they got back into power. Third, because America does have very
serious real-world problems that need dealing with, which are not just
being neglected in the "fiscal cliff" drama, but are being made even
worse.
Obama's root problem is his deep
unwillingness to engage in hegemonic struggle, to face his adversaries'
failures, call them out by name, and show how we can do better.
Two in particular are worth noting. The first is persistent mass
unemployment, still affecting tens of millions of families, which
translates directly into economic underperformance, a primary root cause
of the budget problems, which the "fiscal cliff" drama purports to be
about. The second is global warming. It's also worth noting that these
two seemingly separate problems are really both just halves of a single
solution, as was pointed out by George Soros just weeks after the
financial crisis exploded in 2008.
Eighty years have passed since the last time America and the world
faced such an extreme economic challenge, and the key to ending the
Great Depression was massive government spending, which we did not get
on the scale that was needed until the advent of World War II. Only then
would conservatives get on board for the scale of spending that was
absolutely necessary to get the economy back on track.
This time around, the urgent need to combat global warming represented a similar possibility, as Soros
noted to Bill Moyers on October 10, 2008, just weeks after the crisis hit:
For the last 25 years the world economy, the motor of the world
economy that has been driving it was consumption by the American
consumer who has been spending more than he has been saving, all right?
Than he's been producing. So that motor is now switched off. It's
finished. It's run out of - can't continue. You need a new motor. And we
have a big problem. Global warming. It requires big investment. And
that could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come.
Soros' words have proven prophetic - but only in the counterfactual
sense of a road not taken. The economy as a whole quickly pulled out of
recession (defined as two consecutive quarters of contracting GDP), much
as FDR was able to quickly get GDP growing again upon taking office.
But unemployment and underemployment remain dramatically high, and those
who do have jobs are paying off debts - deleveraging - rather than than
spending freely on new consumer goods, the motor that Soros warned was
switched off. Lack of demand is why corporations are sitting on record
profits, rather than reinvesting them, particularly in hiring more
workers.
Meanwhile, one form of extreme weather after another - topped off by
Hurricane Sandy - underscores how the cost of doing nothing about global
warming is turning out to be higher than expected, and to be coming due
much faster than expected. All of which means that Soros was even more
correct than he seemed to be at the time.
What Soros was pointing to was simple common sense. But common sense
is no match for cultural hegemony, what political theorist Antonio
Gramsci essentially described as ideology in drag as common sense.
Obama's root problem is his deep unwillingness to engage in hegemonic
struggle, to face his adversaries' failures, call them out by name, and
show how we can do better. This ought to be easy. Under George W Bush,
conservatives controlled the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court
for the first time since the 1920s, and just like the 1920s, the result
of their dominance was unmitigated disaster. Yet, instead of
challenging everything they stand for, Obama has repeatedly sought
common ground with them - which they've responded to by becoming even
more extreme.
The pattern is easy enough to see. The stimulus was roughly 1/3 tax
cuts, and half the size it needed to be, but still barely got any
support from Senate Republicans, and no support at all from Republicans
in the House. Healthcare reform was based on the blueprint developed by
the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1990s, and implemented on
the state level by Mitt Romney, but it was even more fiercely opposed by
Republicans than the stimulus was.
Even on budget-balancing, Republican Senators withdrew their support
for a deficit-reduction commission once Obama agreed to it, leading him
to create a presidential commission instead of a congressional one. Then
Republicans on that panel - lead by Romney's VP choice, Paul Ryan -
voted against its recommendations, demanding even more extreme
measures.
So, seeing the problem is easy. But how to explain it? For this, we turn to a pair of articles at the
Atlantic by Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin on the eve of the election,
one considering what a Romney election would mean,
the other doing the same for Obama.
The latter was titled, "What It Will Take for Barack Obama to Become
the Next FDR". It was not Balkin's view that Obama was a shoe-in to
become "the next FDR", but that it was at least possible, and he wanted
to clarify what that would mean, and how it could happen. Both articles
drew on the work of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek on
presidential leadership.
Balkin began his Obama article by noting:
Ever since Barack Obama's election in 2008, people have debated
whether he might be for the Democratic Party what Ronald Reagan was for
the Republicans - a transformational president in the mold of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt who changes the basic assumptions of national politics
for a generation or more.
Skowronek's work on presidential leadership distinguishes different
types, based on where they fall within what he calls "political time",
and transformational - or what Skowroneck calls "reconstructive" -
presidents are the ones who take on the biggest tasks, simply by virtue
of their place in time and what that means. He describes US history in
terms of successive governing policy regimes, each with a life-cycle
that determines the sort of presidential possibilities and challenges
that exist. Reconstructive presidents initiate new regimes, when the
previous one falls into decay. Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR are
classic examples.
Regimes continued by affiliate presidents like
Madison, Grant, Truman and Kennedy, and their demise is presided over by
disjunctive presidents like John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Herbert
Hoover and Jimmy Carter. There are also presidents elected by the party
opposed to the dominant regime of an era, whom he calls "pre-emptive
presidents", such as Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, or Richard Nixon.
The preemptive model
"Preemptive presidents are the most interesting type in Skowronek's
theory," Balkin wrote, "In a political age dominated by the other party;
they must continually navigate upstream against fierce political
currents. Their political legitimacy is always in question. The regime's
dominant party continually casts doubt on their right to rule, and
their own party often seems too weak to defend them."
America's political donor class has not
experienced regime failure in any meaningful sense at all. They are
perfectly content to have a preemptive president making minor
adjustments here and there for them - and that's precisely what Obama is
delivering.
Although I find Skowronek's approach clarifying, commonsensical and
compelling, there are a few obvious problems here. For one thing, this
description is much more fitting for Clinton and Obama than it is for
Eisenhower and Nixon. Eisenhower's legitimacy was never questioned
(except, of course, by the Birchers), while Nixon only lost his
legitimacy as a result of his own paranoid scheming blowing up in his
face.
What this says to me is that the New Deal regime was not entirely
typical, but what came afterwards was even less so. Clinton and Obama
both seem like prime exemplars of the preemptive type of president - far
more hounded by their opponents than Eisenhower or Nixon were from the
very beginning, despite the fact that both were elected with solid
majorities in both houses of Congress, while Eisenhower enjoyed just two
short years with the narrowest of congressional majorities, and Nixon
faced solid opposing majorities throughout his term. Moreover, Skowronek
identifies Ronald Reagan as one of his reconstructive presidents, but
Reagan never came close to a Republican majority in the House. All other
reconstructive presidents were elected along with two consecutive House
wave elections, establishing unmistakable majorities supporting them.
I do not see these facts as invalidating Skowronek's basic insight.
But they do point to other factors being involved as well. Three
different books shed light on what's going on. First, as Tom Ferguson
and Joel Rogers argued in
Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics
Reagan's election reflected a shift in elite thinking, which had little
if anything to do with mass public opinion. This shift was reflected in
Jimmy Carter as well as Ronald Reagan.
After all, it was Carter who began the proxy Afghan War against the
Soviet Union, and Carter's projected military build-up was almost as
massive as Reagan's. Second,
as I've argued previously, August Cochrane III's book
Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie
shows how the system of divided government which has dominated since
1968 is tremendously empowering for elite special interests who are
particularly adept at getting their way in "quiet rooms" as Mitt Romney
so eloquently put it, far away from the open contest of public,
democratic debate.
Since Reagan's election, the 1 percent has seen its income share
roughly triple, while the income of the 99 percent has stayed relatively
flat. This basic fact speaks volumes about the nature, priorities, and
power-distribution of the political regime of the past 30 years, which
has been more detached than ever from the fairy-tale version of a
competitive two-party democracy. Two separate empirical studies by
political scientists
Larry Bartels [PDF] and
Martin Gilens [PDF]
show that middle-income voters have only modest political impact on how
Senators vote, and low-income voters have none at all.
Behind all this lies the arc of decline of American power, which
erstwhile Republican policy guru Kevin Phillips described in his 2002
book,
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich,
where he drew parallels to similar patterns of declining power in
Spain, Holland and Great Britain - the three sea-faring dominant world
powers that preceded the US. Phillips argued that in each of these cases
prosperity was broadly shared in the period of ascendance, until power
peaked unexpectedly, marked by a sharp defeat, much as the US
experienced in Vietnam.
What followed was a period of roughly two generations of reactionary
politics, during which elites did better than ever, while the broad mass
of people suffered stagnant incomes, and withered hopes, until a
turning point signaling a renewal of broadly communal values. Those
former world powers never regained their stature in the world, but their
citizens lives did improve remarkably - enough so that it no longer
seemed important where their nation stood in terms of global power.
However, Phillips' schema is only half the story. It explains the
anomaly of the Reagan era, by bringing into play larger historical
forces operating on a larger time-scale than Skowroneck's regimes, and
explaining the salience of bipartisan reactionary elite politics. But it
does not explain Obama's failure to perform according to the pattern
Phillips describes. After all, Obama's election in 2008 seemed to
promise renewal and a reaffirmation of shared values and equal
participation. But it's precisely Obama's failure to deliver that we're
challenged to understand.
The reason why the US doesn't fit the pattern Phillips' described
appears to be based - at least in part - on the exhaustion of
capitalism. This is not to say that "Communist" China won't have a good
go at reinventing the basic framework and keeping it alive in some new
form. But it is to say that the ideological constraints of capitalist
ideology are just too stifling for America - and possibly for the rest
of the Western developed world. The "exhaustion of capitalism" thesis is
not the sort of thing one can expect to get rationally considered
amongst America's elites - but that's just the problem: Only problems
that can be formulated and analysed can be solved.
And this brings us back to the subject of Obama's brilliance and its
limitations, and his place in Skowronek's schema. Obama has done well at
solving certain sorts of problems, but they almost entirely
"housekeeping" sorts of problems, matters of "tidying up" the messes
created by the existing political regime. Even his adoption of
conservative healthcare reform - using a template first developed by the
Heritage Foundation, and applied at state level by Mitt Romney - fits
under this description. This is precisely the sort of thing that
preemptive presidents do best. As Balkin goes on to describe them, they
respond to the adverse political environment around them strategically:
This predicament drives preemptive presidents to be pragmatic,
compromising, non-ideological, and unorthodox. They triangulate in order
to survive. As a result, preemptive presidents often deeply disappoint
their own party faithful, who crave greater ideological purity and
stronger principled stands. To members of their own party, it sometimes
seems as if preemptive presidents never stand up for their principles;
instead, they are always temporizing, compromising, and letting their
political opponents push them around.
As I said before, these descriptions are much better fits for Clinton
and Obama than for Eisenhower and Nixon in the previous era. But
contrast them with what Skowronek himself said about reconstructive
presidents:
The president as regime builder grapples with the fundamentals of
political regeneration - institutional reconstruction and party
building... destroying residual institutional support for opposition
interests, restructuring institutional relations between state and
society and securing the dominant position of a new political coalition.
None of this sounds remotely like Barack Obama. Rather, he acts as
one completely engulfed in the mindset of the old order, doing
everything possible not to disturb it, constantly reminding folks of
just how incremental his sought-for changes are. Remember, his criticism
of the Clintons was that they erred by fighting against that old order,
rather than seeking accommodation. The repeated failure of his own
efforts at accommodation has done nothing to alter his fundamental
orientation. He may be relatively young as national politicians (much
less presidents) go, but his mindset is profoundly ossified, firmly
locked into the reignite past.
One explanation for why Obama remains so thoroughly stuck in the
preemptive presidential mode, is that the system has not failed for
America's elites. Rather, it has worked like a charm. Thousands of them
could have and should have gone to jail, much like what happened
following the S&L scandal of the 1980s. Instead, they kept getting
their massive bonuses, paid for by US taxpayers. In 2010, according to
IRS data compiled by Emmanuel Saez,
the top 1 percent captured 93 percent of the income gain
in the recovery. More specifically, the bottom 90 percent lost $127 on
average, the bottom 99 percent gained $80 on average, and the top 1
percent gained an average of $105,637. Thus, America's political donor
class has not experienced regime failure in any meaningful sense at all.
They are perfectly content to have a preemptive president making minor
adjustments here and there for them - and that's precisely what Obama is
delivering.
And thus, the republic slips ever more deeply into darkness.
© 2012 Al-Jazeera
Paul Rosenberg was a frontpage blogger for OpenLeft.org and is
now Senior Editor for Random Lengths News, an alternative bi-weekly in
the Los Angeles Harbor Area, where he specializes in labor, community
and environmental justice issues.
