In this thread, Peter Lawler wonders if maybe Obama’s “progressivism isn’t rhetorical (like Wilson wanted) but stealthy.” Now any attempt to abstract a person is going to be of limited utility, but I let’s try this point of view: maybe Obama is, on domestic policy, a mostly unreconstructed 1970s upper middle-class left-liberal who. after decades of defeat (as he sees it), is more focused on accomplishing his goals than venting his opinions (unless he feels it is advantageous to do so.) I think that many of Obama’s moves to the center are best understood in this context. His long-term policy preferences haven’t changed, but he needs to pretend they have shifted (and he might even need to carry out policies he disagrees with) in order to move policy in his direction at all.
Look at health care. His first choice was a government single-payer system. His second choice was Romneycare plus a public option. His third choice was Romneycare plus expanding Medicare to cover people in their fifties. His fourth choice was the Obamacare we got, but all four strategies are just ways of getting to the same endpoint. He was willing to make short-term compromises and mislead the public (if you like your health insurance you can keep it) in order to move policy in the direction of his long-term goals. He may not get there as president, but he will know that he made a huge contribution to shifting the politics of health care to the left.
Even when Obama makes moves to the actual center, he quietly lays the groundwork for a shift back to the left. Obama says he is in favor of the death penalty, but does anyone doubt that a Supreme Court in which Stephen Breyer is the ideologically median Justice will vote to strike down the death penalty? I think Breyer will find that his views on the constitutionality of the death penalty will rapidly evolve if he has one more liberal colleague and I think Obama thinks that too. Obama says he believes in an individual right to keep and bear arms, but if even one of the non-liberal Justices is replaced by an Obama appointee, you can be sure that we will have an anti-Heller and anti-individual right majority on the Supreme Court.
There is a sense that Peter Lawler is right when he called Obama’s SOTU “reactionary.” There are no new New Deals or Great Societies. There is something really old fashioned about Obama’s whole approach to talking about progress. It was considered notable that Obama mentioned Stonewall as part of the march of freedom during his Second Inaugural Address. Stonewall was forty-three years ago. Nothing more recent to go along with it? Is there nothing that would have been out of place on an episode of Maude? He is a transformational progressive from the perspective of 1973.
But don’t underestimate him. Obama’s reactionary defense of the current structure of entitlement programs + far-higher-taxes + tighter government controls on health care spending + single payer health care + a liberal Supreme Court majority would be more transformational (in a bad way) than I want to imagine.
February 15th, 2013 | 1:46 am
comments like Lawler’s are extremely semantic and i guess i just don’t see the point. i don’t define reactionary vs. radical (or liberal vs. conservative) as having much (or anything) to do with the present vs. the past, other than existing in different forms (with ideological similarities) at different times. stuff like that’s responsible for the ridiculously ambiguous use of the word “conservative” from people who hate conservatism and goofiness like unreconstructed Communists in the Gorbachev era being referred to as conservatives.
February 15th, 2013 | 1:49 am
sort of a rant i know, but i guess my point is, does it matter how old/new Obama’s ideas are. does the fact that there’s no Newer Deal or Greater Society mean all that much? is there much to read into a liberal referring to what’s generally acknowledged as the genesis of the homosexual rights movement? don’t really think so
February 15th, 2013 | 9:18 am
[...] In this thread, Peter Lawler wonders if maybe Obama’s “progressivism isn’t rhetorical (like Wilson wanted) but stealthy.” Now any attempt to abstract a person is going to be of limited utility, but I let’s try this point of view: maybe Obama is, on domestic policy, a mostly unreconstructed 1970s upper Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
February 15th, 2013 | 9:57 am
1. Obama’s obsession with nuclear disarmament treaties with Russia in a world in which Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, etc., are building nukes pretty clearly demonstrate he has no ideas that weren’t drummed into his pretty little head in college.
2. I see no world in which “single payer” ever passes any congress ever, or in which it stands up in any Supreme Court ever, no matter how liberal.
3. Thankfully, the finances of the country are such that the “transformations” that Obama & Co. want to inflict won’t ever be able to take hold. There just isn’t any money left. If they had been imposed 50 years ago, things would have been different.
4. I realize that saying “We’ll manage to avoid being destroyed by Obama & Co. because we’re already completely hosed” doesn’t SOUND like the optimistic spin on current events, but it actually is.
February 17th, 2013 | 5:34 pm
Brian, why, absent the overturning of Helvering, would a single-payer tax-and-transfer single-payer system be struck down by the Supreme Court. Such a system would seem far more constitutionally secure than the one created by Obamacare.
February 18th, 2013 | 9:32 am
Pete: Single payer means no one but the government can pay for medical care (despite lefty internet commenters, pretty much no countries have single payer systems, mostly because they’re self-evidently idiotic and counterproductive). I don’t see how that has anything to do with Social Security–it’s not like the government banned all other pension/retirement plans. It sounds to me like you’re describing a “Medicare for all” system, but that’s not single payer. The government could set up something like that, but it won’t really be single payer as long as doctors and patients can opt out (of using it, if not paying for it), which they of course would immediately in massive numbers, and I can’t imagine any court, no matter how left, saying I couldn’t pay a doctor in cash for services. You’d basically get a hugely expensive gov’t bureaucracy and have a cash-only medical provider system sitting alongside it.
February 18th, 2013 | 10:05 am
Brian, single-payer can coexist with some private purchase of health insurance. Medicare is a single-payer system for the elderly that coexists with private supplemental plans (Canada has something similar in many provinces.) They could even place a surcharge on private health insurance but I doubt they would bother since they would still put the private insurers out of business by making them redundant (you’re paying for the government health insurance anyway.)
I doubt that most liberals want to criminalize the private purchase of health care services as long as you pay into the single-payer system (whether through the general budget or a series of dedicated taxes’premiums collected by the government.) Those with lots of disposable income would be moe or less fine. It is everybody else I’d worry about.
February 18th, 2013 | 11:06 am
Pete: It’s clear our differences here are primarily semantic. I assert that Medicare is not single payer. It’s a government health-payment plan, but that’s not what single payer means.
February 18th, 2013 | 11:28 am
Brian, I okay with using the same word to describe different things (though Canada’s system is usually called single-payer even though it contains – comparatively small – private insurance components.)
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