So lovers of freedom are all over the president for three reasons. First, his enormous expansion of the reach of the national government will produce the schoolmarmish soft despotism of apathetic dependents feared by Tocqueville. To some extent that’s undeniably the intention of his “regime change,” but I strongly doubt it will succeed. Even if we agree that the American people are in the mood to have government alleviate their economic anxiety in a big way, tough economic and especially demographic realities put limits on what government can really do at this point. The unfortunate thing is that such “Europeanization” right now deprives America of key advantages. When “the crisis of the social democratic welfare state” hits hard, it will turn out that we were–but are no longer–especially well situated to do what is required to exit from unsustainable programs.
Second, the fear is that Obama doesn’t have a realistic view of what we have to do militarily to preserve our liberty. This fear, although supported by some of his rhetoric, is somewhat exaggerated. The new military budget is too small but otherwise fairly sensible and not a disaster overall. The American global “ground game” hasn’t and may not change all that much. And it’s likely the president, as our vice president said, will soon enough be mugged by some very inconvenient reality in foreign affairs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t respond well. There’s reason for concern here, but not fanatical opposition or despair.
Third, some, with good reason, see tyranny in his cultural elitsim. As Ivan explains with eloquence and precision below, the president has clearly moved us from the “conflict model” of Bush’s Council on Bioethics–where policy options are explored in light of our deep national divisions on fundamental moral issues (such as the humanity of the embryo and the unborn baby) to the “consensus model,” where a unified national position emerges through the informed guidance of scientific experts. Clearly the president’s goal is to marginalize those with moral concerns about the human cost of unconstrained scientific and technological progress, and especially to privatize completely the concerns of the pro-lifers (and those, as Ralph explained, with reasonable concerns about same-sex marriage). Bush’s goal was to promote national dialogue and, when appropriate, compromise among reasonable opposing visions. Obama’s goal is to replace dialogue with sophisticated, technocratic enlightenment and to declare opposition positions unreasonable or “fundamentalist.” Obama’s cultural liberalism, in my view, is the creepiest and most extreme feature of his administration–one that poses a fundamental threat to intellectual freedom and means to ostracize some of our best citizens (such as Ivan and Ralph). The tyrannical potential here, of course, explodes with the nationalization of health care (and the inevitable medical rationing) and education.
April 30th, 2009 | 2:57 pm
Peter, there’s nothing I can disagree with here-this is right on! This is a brilliant overview of obamanation…er, the president’s screwed up, socialist policies, especially the line: “Obama’s cultural liberalism, in my view, is the creepiest and most extreme feature of his administration-….The tyrannical potential here, of course, explodes with the nationalization of health care (and the inevitable medical rationing) and education.”
Truly, the pres. is a really, really weird Merckel-like dude.
My guess is your name is on the “List of Undesireables” and scheduled for re-education. You’ll probably be asked to teach at the center once you’ve gone through the course, however.
April 30th, 2009 | 3:55 pm
This is an interesting critique, but I don’t think I understand the claim about “intellectual freedom,” and since you describe it as your most important concern, I’m wondering if you can elaborate. First, given Obama’s position on torture, I don’t think that you can fairly accuse him of simple, expertise-smitten instrumental rationality across the board. Although you and I probably disagree on the stem cell policy, I don’t see any evidence that he is not concerned with promoting genuine dialogue on moral issues, and even allowing moral stances to dictate outcomes.
Second, and more importantly, even if you disagree with me, I don’t understand why the maintenance of intellectual freedom requires effective power on the part of those with a different view, grounded in a broader view of morality on a particular issue, to affect outcomes, as opposed to having space within which to articulate their concerns.
I think you’re mistaking the feeling of a loss of representation that comes with losing elections, with a loss of intellectual freedom. In one sense, I hear you – I’ve been there over the past 8 years. I certainly felt that Bush was narrowing and coarsening the debate on a variety of important issues, like torture, preventive war, diplomacy, climate policy, etc. But it never occurred to me that “intellectual freedom” required me or my policy allies to catch the President’s eye.
April 30th, 2009 | 6:10 pm
Brett, first of all, I’m glad you didn’t inaccurately claim to having your intellectual freedom curtailed by the Bush administration. My serious thanks for that.
Lawler is not worried about the Obama administration taking away his right to say the things he’s said here. The worry is longer-term and deeper than that. Read it again. A certain type of “marginalization” could be adopted by most of the public, the press, the universities, and the corporations, acccompanied by free-speech honoring and fair-and-square election-winning liberal politics, but then gradually become enforced by law, in the name of “science,” “separation of church and state,” and finally, “hate speech.” Indeed, certain definitions of these phrases being offered by just the sorts of credentialed experts Obama has shown he likes would REQUIRE such enforcement. What Lawler fears is that your grandchildren, will blink, and say, “if the experts say that is what liberty is, that is what science is, that is what life is, then it is so.”
I remind you of the salient fact that pro-life Americans like myself are not allowed in any state to VOTE on the fundamentals of abortion. Iowans are no longer allowed to VOTE on whether or not the traditional conception of marriage is to be radically altered. Judge-rulers have decided these things for them. Scientist-rulers who keep “tough decisions” out of the “normal political channels”(those are Obama’s words, see the comments on Ivan Kenneally’s post below)are an obvious possibility for our longer-term, but nearer than we might think, future.
And may I note in passing that as one aspiring to an academic career, the words I’ve posted here would today be sufficient to defacto disqualify me from a job in the area of my expertise, in probably 85% of the public institutions out there, and maybe 65% of the private ones. I’m guesstimating of course, but the potential to marginalize the likes of myself is a very real one. In the future, my opposition to, say, stem-cell destroying research could be officially classified as “religious,” and thus be protected for all blog-comment and private purposes, but nonetheless barred from my professional life, perhaps from my political speeches were I to run for office, (by means of legislatively or jurispruentially governing campaign speech by the “public reason test”), and so on. I speak really of a “Me,” i.e., a professor like myself, projected twenty years or so in a post-Obama-and-his-equally-cultural-liberal-technocrat-successor-America, but the point is the same. This “Me” could be free to speak his unemployed and probably uncredentialed mind to whomever would listen, but could be barred from otherwise influencing society.
April 30th, 2009 | 6:35 pm
Carl,
Thanks for the wake up call and I really, really hope you’re guilty of exaggerating!
If it’s any consolation, I do think that the identity and where abouts of all of us who have criticized the Big “O” are being gathered, sorted, and stored for the appropriate time…call me paranoid.
As someone whose spent a few days in jail for “free speech” violations I can assure you that it isn’t pleasant, besides I don’t look that good in orange.
April 30th, 2009 | 7:23 pm
Peter, thank you for your remarks. The “soft despotism of apathetic dependents” is an especially apt description of where we are headed. The last 100 days have already seemed unending and when I think of the agony of the next 7 and 3/4 years, I’m reminded of what my alcoholic late uncle once said about Newell, WV, the next town over from the one I grew up in: “If I had six months left to live, I’d want to spend it in Newell because it would feel like six years.”
April 30th, 2009 | 7:35 pm
Carl, Thanks.
April 30th, 2009 | 8:15 pm
Excellent overview/breakdown, Peter.
Now, as one who is all-but-ostracized already (albeit tenured), let me try to out-bid Carl’s warning. The underlying reality to be reckoned with is that “freedom of speech” in the long run only protects speech considered at least remotely reasonable, speech that might conceivably serve the common good or at least not detract too much from it. Likewise, freedom of religion will never be safe in an environment in which a certain substance of religion does not benefit from a broad, consensual respect. To paraphrase Machiavelli, once it is conclusively determined that “the appearance and result” (a.k.a. security and comfort) are the only legitimate public concerns, then the reduction of reason to “satisfaction and stupefaction” (a.k.a. “progress”) is not far away. The aggressive relegation of very civil participation in favor of Prop 8 in California to the unprotected classification of “hate speech” deserving of intimidation, boycotting, etc. should be a wake-up call to anyone inclined to withhold any reservations about “progress” so understood.
Now, to attempt another kind of answer to Brett’s very reasonable inquiry, I think there is a very consequential assymetry between the marginalization of liberals under a conservative regime and the marginalization of conservatives under a liberal regime. Conservatives can of course be immoderate and domineering, but at bottom all halfway thoughtful conservatives know that there is not and cannot be any universal consensus (rational or religious) concerning their fundamental principles. What makes a conservative conservative is his awareness of both the indispensibility of reason and its problematic, unfinished character (thus openness to revelation, tradition, etc). [So all true conservatives are Pomocons!] But a certain kind of liberal, an ever-more-influential kind, believes his position is grounded on simply reason (science, expertise, etc.) and that all reasonable people must, by definition, agree with him. The ground of his position (and this is the Obamite elitism Peter and others are worried about) is an immoderate and finally crazy confidence in the omnicompetence of reason. From this point of view, religious and other unreasonable speech is to be tolerated, but not more, and only provisionally.
April 30th, 2009 | 11:40 pm
I still think Carl is conflating intellectual freedom with the capacity to influence society. The last line of his complaint makes that point rather well. I suppose if one really believes that “most of the public, the press, the universities, and the corporations,” as well as most politicians, are going to “marginalize” you, then alienation is a sensible reaction. But just last week, almost the entire Senate Republican caucus threw aside their previously announced respect for the President’s right to pick his cabinet and voted against Sebelius for HHS secretary purely on the abortion issue, so I wouldn’t feel that lonely just yet. Plus, on stem cells, the locally preferred position was law until a mere handful of weeks ago. The pendulum will swing back, I’m sure. And Prop 8 passed and is now law! Take yes for an answer! Some will raise charges of hate speech, just like some will call me a “liberal fascist” for supporting gay marriage. That’s democratic politics for you.
More fundamentally, I agree with the general sense here that there must be some kind of mutually enriching dialogue between those who dwell in religious traditions and secular liberal democrats. But unlike Ralph, I think, I take a Habermasian view on it: the dialogue can and should go both ways. At the extreme, if you really don’t believe that, and you only believe that liberal secularists lead to the last man and the religiously grounded can’t stop him from coming (they can only delay his arrival by helping elect the GOP on occasion), then the dialogue isn’t going to be that productive, unfortunately.
May 1st, 2009 | 4:06 pm
I like Brett’s style, seriously. He’re hoping for centuries more of pendulum-swings in the U.S.A, and maybe even Europe, with the likes of Brett. Perhaps, as Paul Seaton once joked about his own virtue, we can all “wave to the golden mean” each time we rapidly swing past it.
But Brett ain’t the only kind, nor probably the dominant kind, of secularist liberal. Surely he knows this. Brett, if you support gay marriage ONLY through democratic votes, then I won’t be calling you any names, but I’ll be calling you up to thank you (while still arguing you’re very mistaken) as a fellow citizen. Ditto if your voice is heard vigorously opposing the type of mob-action and simplistic moralism that occurred in the wake of Prop 8′s (narrow) passage that Ralph is referring to.
BTW, I reserve the word “fascist” for the real thing. Jonah Goldberg has played with rhetorical fire on this, somewhat irresponsibly, but we all know which sides’ populists are more likely to drop that particular F-bomb.
Finally, one of the best things Peter Lawler taught me to see was that, even if I have to admit that we conservatives cannot realistically expect or responsibly assume the continuance of pendulum-swing democracy in our contemporary situation, but must confess that the European trends probably will eventually be ours as democracy worldwide drifts toward soft despotism, it remains the case that the real last men, the totally dehumanized ones, are not really possible. So contrary to what you might think, we pomocons do not think it’s ALL on the line right now. Or ever. We rather think that even after an Emperor Obama the Sixteenth (just run with my joke), the push-back could still come. Our descendents will never be fully immersed in their entertainment-pods, or ruled by a government with an equally world-wide reach. I even think many underestimate the possibility of a Christian revival in the Europe of this century, and on that one, ol’ Habermas is sort of with me!
May 1st, 2009 | 4:27 pm
And just to clarify one thing, Brett, I think the U.S.A. can likely survive a mixed democratic adoption of and judicially imposed regime of state-by-state patchwork gay marriage, followed eventually by a democratic adoption nationwide. Not a good idea at all, for all the reasons the likes of Stanley Kurtz and others have pointed out, but culturally and politically survivable. Ralph and others here may disagree with this.
As for a judicially-imposed regime of gay-marriage at the national level, I have serious doubts about whether we can handle that, because of the unstoppable jurisprudential logic such decisions will put in place, and the real cornering of religious liberty that logic will create.
I do know that if liberals do not find a way of drawing SOME plausible line in the sand against “living constitution” interpretation on the part of the Supreme Court justices they appoint, and they continue to win more elections than not, the U.S.A. will proceed into a long agonized death-spiral. Note my use of the words “know” and “will.”
May 2nd, 2009 | 12:13 am
I too appreciate Brett’s reasonable points reasonably made. But of course I am less optimistic about “democracy” flourishing or even, eventually, muddling through within a “Habermasian” framework. Either a people is, on balance, open to some good or meaning beyond scientific reason (beyond what is subject to human power), or it isn’t. (I don’t think Habermas — whom I consider a kind of continental version of Rawls — helps with such openness, though I’m not up on what I take to be a late soft-spot for religion in Habermas.) If it isn’t, then it must press forward towards ever more liberation from traditional or religious restraints, a movement that cannot help but overpower “democratic” or “constitutional” habits. “Bigots” are not worthy of respect. So yes, I believe democracy depends finally on some openness to transcendence — and by this I mean not Charles Taylor’s transcendence, ever so eager to differ to secularism, but transcendence conceived as authoritative. Yes, I guess that comes down to old-fashioned religion. So yes, a dialogue between believers and unbelievers who really know how to respect belief (on philosophical or political-philosophical grounds, say. But a dialogue in which the official, authoritative frame of reference is “neutral” (that is, secular-rationalist, Rawlsian-Habermasian) is not a real dialogue. So my humble little prediction: there will be no atheist democracy, or not for long.
to be continued…
May 2nd, 2009 | 12:25 am
And re. Carl’s resignation to the inevitable democratic coming of same sex marriage: if that’s the inevitable direction of progress, then maybe the courts would be right to take the short-cut to the future. If we are nothing but a collection of individuals seeking maximum liberation each to do his/her own thing, then let’s get it done!
You can see ssm marriage is a critical issue for me. If we cannot hold the line against extreme individualism on this point, we cannot hold any significant line. And then I would wish my country help, but I confess I would despair of helping her.
Another, more optimistic (from my point of view) fantasy: The turning of some states to ssm raises consciousness of the fundamental character of the issue in other states, provoking a rethinking of the meaning of liberal-democracy that returns to and reconsiders the roots of the American experiment. If the Founders founded “better than they knew,” we would then have learned what they didn’t need to know: that the moral ecology of any community requires deliberate care by statesmen and citizens, and that the common good cannot be reduced to the aggregate of individual liberations.
I accept that in some sense, in the long run, we are “stuck with virtue.”
May 2nd, 2009 | 12:26 am
… [I seem to have run out of words...] … but how long, and at what cost. OK, I’ll stop.
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