Saturday, January 26, 2013

Obama as the anti-Reagan. By Greg Sargent.

Obama as the anti-Reagan. By Greg Sargent. Washington Post, January 24, 2013.

Sargent:

The key to Obama’s argument, as Ed Kilgore points out, is that he made the “long lost liberal case that collective action is necessary to the achievement of individual freedom, instead of implicitly conceding that social goals and individual interests are inherently at war.” Indeed, Obama himself put it this way: “Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”

Crucially, Obama presented this idea as the philosophical underpinning that unified all of his specific policy proposals, from the vow to combat climate change, to the push for equal pay for women, to the fight for full equality for gay Americans, to the need for voting and immigration reform. He cast inequality and the unfairness of the unfettered free market as threats to freedom, i.e., the freedom to pursue happiness. And this goes beyond the Inaugural: Remember, in his speech laying out his proposal for action on guns, he cast gun violence as a threat to the freedom to pursue happiness within a civil society.

This overarching philosophical argument was at the center of the 2012 election. The battles over Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech, and over the GOP suggestion that the President’s “redistributionist” and “collectivist” tendencies are fundamentally at odds with the nation’s values, were at bottom an argument over the true nature of our shared responsibility to one another. Republicans angrily argue that Obama unfairly caricatured the GOP position as a “you’re on your own” ethic. But Obama was broadly articulating a legitimate philosophical difference between the parties, and the election results suggest Obama’s vision is shared by the American mainstream and the emerging majority coalition of Obama voters, i.e., nonwhites, college educated women (and to a lesser degree college educated men) and younger voters. Obama’s catchphrase — “we’re all in this together” — was widely mocked on the right, but this emerging coalition appears to understand this argument on Obama’s terms, as a governing ethic for moving the country forward.


An expansive case for progressivegovernance, grounded in language of Founding Fathers. By Greg Sargent. Washington Post, January 21, 2013.

Sargent:

Today, Obama quoted extensively from the Declaration, and declared that it is our challenge to “bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.” He then went on to make the case for robust government activism in the economy — precisely in order to preserve individual freedom, i.e., the ability to pursue happiness. He linked this to the need for more government investment in infrastructure and education. For rules designed to ensure fair market competition. For maintaining the social safety net (in the form of Social Security and Medicare, achieved by two great Democratic presidents). For the need for a greater push for equal pay for women and full equality for gay Americans (which Obama linked to the struggle for civil rights for African Americans by invoking Martin Luther King).

Obama tempered his communitarian language by claiming it is not incompatible with “skepticism of central authority,” but the clear statement of his governing philosophy, which he insisted is rooted in our founding principles, was unequivocal: “Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”

The tensions inherent in that juxtaposition are critical. Today Obama was effectively declaring victory in the great argument that has consumed us for the last four years. During the campaign Obama argued his vision of a judicious mix of individual and collective responsibility is more in keeping with our national identity than the GOP’s “you’re on your own” ethic. Republicans angrily rejected this characterization, but in truth, the GOP’s platform and rhetoric did reflect what E. J. Dionne has described as “radical individualism.” The public’s rejection of the GOP caricature of Obama’s vision — as wildly radical and out of step with American values — itself confirmed that the mainstream agrees with Obama’s argument that “collective action” is not incompatible with American ideals of freedom.

In this sense, Obama’s speech today was similar to Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address in 1981. Reagan used that speech to articulate the conservative philosophy of governance and to declare the country’s turn in that direction. Obama today made the case, implicitly, that the country has now thrown in its lot with progressive governance as he defined it. Unlike Reagan, who made that declaration in his first inaugural, Obama needed to get through a tumultuous first term before having the confidence to do the same. Obama had to deal with profound domestic crises and was often rendered over-cautious by a radicalized opposition that was determined to destroy him at all costs. “Sometimes he didn’t quite get the balance,” presidential historian Stephen Hess told me today. “It’s as if he is claiming the balance now.”

Today, Obama all but declared ideological victory. That was the hidden meaning of Obama’s frequent invocation of “we, the people” — he was effectively rooting his vision of the proper balance of individual and collective responsibility, and the need for the sort of collective action the right all-too-cavalierly denounces as tyranny, in their authority.