“Are We There Yet;” Really?
P. Schultz
January 21, 2013
Here is a
link to a column written by a guy named Robert O. Self, professor of history at
Brown University, which is very difficult to respond to. In all honesty, I am
unsure of what to say in response because his argument seems to me to be so
delusional.
The
question as Self presents it is whether Obama’s presidency represents a
fundamental “political realignment,” like the presidencies of FDR and Reagan
where “Their triumphs consolidated political transformations that
had been building for some time and allowed their respective parties to reset
the nation’s political center of gravity.” Leaving aside the question whether
this is an accurate description of FDR or Ronald Reagan, I have to say that I
can find little basis for even suspecting that Obama’s presidency has any of
the characteristics of a fundamental political realignment.
There
are indications in this column that Self is aware of the paucity of evidence
for putting Obama in the Roosevelt/Reagan class of presidents. For example,
Self spends very little time talking about policy or policies and even seems to
understand that Obama represents not so much a break from the politics of the
Shrub administration but a continuation: “Taken together, his health care
reform and his cautious rejection of most of the policies of George W. Bush may
well be judged by future historians as a meaningful adjustment.” Of course, my
interpretation is being kind to Self, as his words here illustrate. But I do so
because Self does not specify which policies of Bush he, Obama, has
“cautious[ly] rejected.” And I would add that this is not surprising insofar as
it is exceedingly difficult to find such rejections. After all, Obama just
agreed to a “deal” that included making the Bush tax cuts permanent for almost
all Americans! And it would be next to impossible to find any rejection,
cautious or otherwise, of Bush’s foreign war making and domestic surveillance
predicated on threats to our national security.
I
suspect that Self’s column and his obvious desire to find that Obama or some
president, someday would represent a fundamental political realignment is the
result of a desire to think that our political system actually functions in a
healthy way by responding to the need for change with change. I think why the
column is weird then is that Self, in trying to make the case that Obama at
least squints in that direction, illustrates just the opposite. As Self wrote:
“A directionless politics prevails instead. At the national level, there is no
political will to address long-term problems like soaring health care costs,
climate change, infrastructure decay and prison overpopulation.”
The
problem I have with this argument is that Self fails to understand the our current
politics is not “directionless.” It is, rather, quite directed, viz., at
preserving the status quo and the rule of the current oligarchs in both the
Republican and Democratic parties. [As an aside, I would argue that one can
make at least a plausible argument that Reagan’s presidency served the same
purpose after the debacles of Vietnam and Watergate threatened to bring down
the rule of the then leading oligarchs in both parties. Just as the status quo
was threatened then, so too it is threatened today after the debacle of the
Bush presidency and the “great recession.”] It is not in fact a lack of
“political will” that leads to the failure to “address long-term problems.”
Rather, it is political will that leads to this phenomenon and it is not, in
the eyes of the current political class, a failure. It represents success
because it keeps them in power.
But
Self’s column also illustrates that there is change afoot – just not in
Washington D.C. but in the states. “Meanwhile, states like Michigan have further
eroded labor and reproductive rights, while others, like California, with its
Democratic supermajority, seem poised to safeguard the same while increasing
spending. As the left-wing political activist Michael Harrington said in 1976,
the country is “moving vigorously left, right and center, all at once.”
Self
might also have mentioned the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and
Washington, which are indications that people are fed up with the national war
on drugs, as well as the legalization of gay and lesbian marriages in some
states which are indications that the people reject the regime of DOMA as
perpetrated by D.C. It will come as a surprise to many liberals perhaps that
real change is now taking place in the states, not in Washington, given that
for decades now it has been taken for granted that the states are “reactionary”
while the government in D.C. is “progressive.” Apparently, sometimes real
change comes vis-à-vis D.C. and sometimes it comes vis-à-vis the states. These
days it would seem that real change is taking place in [some] states and not
D.C.
This,
of course, makes us Anti-Federalists happy as we have argued for a long time
that government is better, safer and freer, when done at the state and local
levels rather than at the national level. Note I did not say that such government is
“more powerful,” because it is not. Note too that I did not say that such
government can reclaim “America’s greatness,” because it won’t. But then power
and greatness were not the goals sought by the Anti-Federalists, but rather
liberty and goodness. So long though as we await “political realignment” from
Washington D.C., just so long will the lessons the Anti-Federalists tried to
teach be lost.
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