In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wonders if a string of failures for the Obama administration counts as mounting evidence not only against his primary claim to rule, executive competence, but also against the undergirding premises of liberal political philosophy. The debate between liberals and conservatives over the proper role of government tends to occur on an oddly philosophical plane, almost ethereal when you consider the tangible stakes of the contest. We get locked at the horns over the definition of the individual, the precise character of human nature, the conditions for a healthy expression of personal liberty, etc. Of course, these are important questions because they are foundational–any reasonably coherent position will have to offer some answer, however tentative, to each. Still, Noonan’s claim is that the liberal position, if it’s a theory that can boast of any practical attractiveness, has to convincingly advocate one practical premise: the competence of government as a superintendent of our lives.
As Yuval levin has argues over at NRO (I already hit my one link quota), it’s certainly not entirely fair to blame Obama for the BP oil spill catastrophe any more than it’s fair to blame Bush for an act of God. However, both demonstrate the limits of federal government to tame the distasters and dangers that will inevitably visit and revisit us again. I tend to think Obama’s recent rhetoric has been a caricature of the progressive position- he keeps robotically insisting that his response to the spill, whatever that will be and whenever that will occur, will ensure that such a debacle never happens again. In the midst of his own paralysis, and he’s paralyzed because he hasn’t the faintest idea what to do, he stubbornly declares the he will learn to foresee the unforeseeable. He’s been reduced to self-parody, preemptively writing the SNL skits that will surely roast him in the next few weeks.
If big government liberalism is to pass muster then the general competence of American governance has to be demonstrated. We can’t take our bearings by the Swedes or the Finnish–their small scale, demographically homogenous fish bowl republics simply aren’t appropriate models for us. Our own government struggles to function as a well-calibrated machine bacause the public it ministers to is so vast and diverse, its interests so varied and exclusive, its goals so multiple and heterogenous. It has none of the advantages of, say, an American corporation which enjoys the focus that comes with a singularity of purpose and motivation, not to mention the efficiency that is the result of eschewing democratic process. Our government would be much more efficient if it could hire and fire it citizens at will and if its it only inspiration to action was profit. In an unusual way, the proponents of big government liberalism, despite the contempt they often freely show for big business, pine for the same organizational simplicity that makes their success possible.
As goofy as it seemed to many at the time, and any political slogan is a little goofy, the DMV objection to government run universal health care might have some legs. Even if we suddenly conceded the moral argument against big government, that it’s an affont to my dignity as a free individual, there’s still the basic issue of what the government can and cannot do well. I remember angrily insisting when I was a pretty young child to prepare my own lunch for school, precociously assserting my independence from my intrusive parents. I gave that argument up on practical grounds, after I had to eat what I had so freely created. So far Obama’s tenure as president has proven to be unappetizing fare, and as the polls indicate, he’s losing a lot of customers.
June 2nd, 2010 | 7:48 pm
My minimum standard for judging someone’s competence as an expert is whether they are better at something than I am. I grew up pretty much in awe of the people in our national government, but I was cured of that by two years of working in the military in the Washington, DC area and a year of graduate school in DC taking courses from many of those government bureaucrats and interning with some of them in the White House Executive Office and the Pentagon. The folks in the White House and on Capitol Hill are not, on average, any smarter than I am. God help us!
Now, in almost a year and a half of the Obama administration, I can’t think of anything coming out of the White House that makes me feel that I could not have done a better job of making decisions than President Obama. The farce of his months-long hemming and hawing about whether or not to do a “surge” in Afghanistan was a total display of stupidity. Obama could not explain why it was taking him so long to make up his mind, let alone explain why the decision he finally came up with was any better because of the months of dithering that went into it. And in the meantime, his inability to decide was encouraging America’s enemies.
In a number of movies in recent years we have had Morgan Freeman playing a distinguished American president who happens to be black. I am pretty sure that the real Morgan Freeman could do a better job in the White House than Barack Hussein Obama. (I think all that experience on The Electric Company grounded Mr. Freeman in common sense.)
When Obama criticized Sarah Palin during the campaign for “not being ready to be president”, the only thing he could point to in which he had even comparable experience to Palin’s was running his campaign for president! Obama has demonstrated that, if McCain had been elected and then died soon afterward, we could not have been in worse condition than we are now.
The only sadder aspect of the Obama fiasco is that there are no adults in the Democratic Party in Congress who can in any way make up for Obama’s incompetence.
June 3rd, 2010 | 7:29 pm
I certainly agree that big government liberalism can do far less than its progressive proponents expect, and that, yes, Obama’s humorously unrealistic ideas about prevention show as much. But let’s not forget that these proponents of national power include not only President Obama, but also former Presidents GW Bush and Reagan. The national Republicans are just as guilty of statism as the Democrats.
I’m not particularly sure that running the government on the model of Wal-Mart or McDonald’s or any other massive corporation is a good idea. The efficiency of those corporations has much to do with the federal government’s power and regulations. The efficiency of Wal-Mart relies on the supra-state leveling power of the federal government. These corporations thrive on the artificial reduction of the regionalism and localism that you point to as a handicap for effective national government in the U.S.
As for Mr. Swenson’s comment, I hardly think that the eight years prior to President Obama displayed any more competence than the current president. The Republicans in Congress offer hardly more grounds to hope for competence, limits, or level-headedness than the Democrats. And as for former Governor Palin, her anti-intellectual populism combined with her inability to give an intelligent interview are just as discouraging as Obama’s elitist progressivism.
June 4th, 2010 | 8:50 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Greg R. Lawson, Daily Breaking News . Daily Breaking News said: http://euraeka.com/articles/6346569-Liberalism-and-the-Question-of-Competence #premises #competence #liberal #noonan #undergirding [...]
June 7th, 2010 | 1:21 pm
Ivan, what a joy you must have been to raise!
Please post those recipes…we could make it a lil’ mass-market cookbook: The First Grader’s Guide to Autonomous Individual Brown-Bag Lunches.
June 14th, 2010 | 9:55 pm
Mr. Perkins: You will please note that I referred to Governor Palin as a low standard which Mr. Obama shows no likelihood of exceeding.
Comparing George Bush’s 8 years against the 18 months of Mr. Obama is intersting, because it seems to me that Mr. Obama has demonstrated that one can pack 8 years worth of incompetence and poor judgment into 18 months. Certainly that is so measured purely by the budget deficits run up by the two presidents. The Bush campaign against Al Qaeda and its Taliban sponsor in Afghanistan was a decisive action that sent a real message to Islamic jihadists. While the war against Saddam Hussein was brillinatly executed at first, and then was mired in equivocation for several years before a suvvessful Surge, we now find that Biden is claiming credit for bush’s surge, conducted before Obama’s presidency, soimply because he can;t point to a single military action by obama that is praiseworthy.
The single largest criticism of Bush’s war against Iraq was that it did not locate an extensive Weapons of Mass Destruction capability. But that was because Bush believed the same propaganda that Clinton and the UN also believed, which had been put out by Saddam to intimidate his Iranian neighbors.
Furthermore, the mere fact that Bush invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq prompted Libya to reveal and then turn over to the US its entire, ongoing nuclear weapons development program, which no one in the US intelligence services had any inkling of. It also persuaded Pakistan to rein in the exploits of its own nuclear Johnny Appleseed. So in terms of sheer results, the invasion of Iraq netted the US the termination of 1 and 1/2 national nuclear programs, a pretty fair result when we were shooting for 1 nuclear program ended. One might say this was just dumb luck, but it was luck that came because Bush demonstrated an intolerance of anti-American weapons programs. Who knows what might have happened in Iran if we had surged in Iraq from the beginning and had taken a more threatening posture against Achmadinejad years ago, with US forces poised on both sides of his nation and on the Gulf? One can argue that if bush had come across as a little less reasonable, we might have been carting off the centrifuge parts from Iran as well as those form Libya.
June 16th, 2010 | 10:44 am
[...] Peggy Noonan contends that it’s his own fault he is held responsible. Just as with the sudden spurt of left-wing media criticism, he set himself up for it. In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, Noonan argues that that not only is Obama’s administration in crisis, his political philosophy is in crisis (Ivan Kenneally agrees). [...]
June 21st, 2010 | 3:29 pm
The idea that there is a limitation to the abilities of government to perform tasks, and that it is inseparable from liberal justifications for the administrative state, was made rather forcefully by Hayek in his piece “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Any proposed centralization of information that the state must do to perform its tasks necessitates a lessening of its ability to know the specifics of any given field, something detrimental when the idea of planning comes into play. The extent to which any individual piece of information is relevant, taken in consideration while also mulling over the timeliness of the information, renders the government as a collector of information rather suspect and weak, enfeebling any attempts at acting as a competent actor in any given situation.
August 23rd, 2012 | 4:33 pm
[...] competence, a privileged monopoly on the market of reason, it has never adequately demonstrated. (http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2010/06/02/liberalism-and-the-question-of-co…). For all its self-congratulatory posturing about being the true partisans of science and rational [...]
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