The American Passion

Huey Long, radical economic populist.

There’s been much speculation as to why President Obama did so poorly in the first presidential debate, why he failed to fight back against Romney.  Compare Obama’s passive performance with Joe Biden’s spirited debate assault on poor Paul Ryan.  Biden took the fight to Ryan and, by extension, to Romney.  He was smiling, dismissive, aggressive; he clearly enjoyed the malarkey out of himself!  Obviously, Biden’s forcefulness was deliberately meant to counteract Obama’s passivity, but it underscored that passivity as well.  So where was Obama’s passion?  Some commentators, such as Jim Fallows, claim it is typical of incumbents to under-prepare, to be rusty debaters, to feel themselves above such flashy political theater.  Some, such as Jonathan Chait, wonder if it was a deliberate (if overdone) tactic; i.e. “the reason for his passivity was that he wanted to avoid appearing angry and unpresidential.”  Some blame Obama’s personal psychology, particularly his aversion to conflict.  Here’s Laurence Tribe, Obama’s mentor at Harvard Law School: “Barack Obama’s instincts and talents have never included going for an opponent’s jugular. That’s just not who he is or ever has been.”  That is, Obama’s response to aggression is to be conciliatory.  He doesn’t fight back, he reaches out.  He doesn’t get angry, he gets reasonable.  Biden smiles while he sticks in the shiv; Obama quotes statistics while he extends the open hand.  He really believes that facts and reason, responsible and moderate policies, will sway his opponents.  He’s not called “no drama Obama” for nothing.

We can wonder what it is about Obama’s experiences and upbringing that drained the drama out of him.  But here’s a better question: Why did the Democratic Party, in 2008, pick such a passionless leader?  Is there something in the nature of the Democratic Party, or contemporary liberalism, that invites someone so bloodless?  Consider John Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis, bloodless technocrats all.  But what about Bill Clinton, didn’t he have passion?   Yes, of course, as he reminded us so powerfully with his speech at last month’s Democratic Convention.  He wasn’t personally bloodless, but he was bloodless in policy.  As a New Democrat he was essentially a moderate Republican (a creature that nowadays one can find only in the Democratic Party).  He balanced the budget and forced welfare recipients to work, and in perfect triangulation he protected Medicare and Medicaid from the Gingrichian onslaught.  Conservative apocalyptic paranoia to the contrary, Obama is just as moderate as Clinton; he pushed Republican-inspired legislation on healthcare and the environment and prosecuted a war started by Republicans.  But unlike Bill Clinton, and like Kerry, Gore and Dukakis, Obama’s moderate personality matches his moderate program.

And there’s the tension between liberalism and the Democratic Party.  The Democratic Party with its (now dwindling) New Democrat faction, its funding from Wall Street, its Congressional moderates who vote conservative, is hardly the perfect vehicle for liberal ideology.  Peel away those institutionally anti-liberal elements and what’s left?  Exactly: what’s left?  What is the soul of modern liberalism?  Now we’ve arrived at the real question.  The program of modern liberalism has two parts: pragmatic intervention in the economy designed to encourage widely shared prosperity, and the protection of identity groups.  The first component is articulated in the modern regulatory-welfare state; think minimum wage and Medicare.  The second is articulated in social policies like homosexual marriage and affirmative action.  The first is designed to help all non-rich Americans, i.e. the middle class and those hoping to rise into the middle class.  The second is designed to protect particular groups – blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, the disabled, etc. – from any oppression directed at them by the affluent, white, male power structure.  For the most part, real liberal passion is found in the second set of issues.  Consider that Democratic presidents have a pro-choice litmus test for Supreme Court nominees, but not a pro-union one.

But it was not always so.  As insightful writers like Thomas Frank and Michael Lind have observed, before the 1960’s the essence of American liberalism was government intervention serving the interests of working people.  Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson supported unions, regulation and social insurance programs, and they bent the economy to human purpose.  They were passionate that capitalism be tamed, that the laissez-faire wilderness be plowed into the social democratic garden.  To them the American dream was about the common people getting a new deal, a fair deal; that is, fair reward for their hard work.  They were willing to use the tools at hand to make the country work for everyone, not just the rich and powerful and the connected.  They were pragmatists in the service of egalitarianism.  Economic justice was their passion and technocracy was their method.

But everything changed in the 1960’s.  And when I say everything I mean race.  The economic liberalism of the mid-20^th century worked quite well for white Americans, but it left a lot of people out.  In the 1960’s liberal passion migrated from making capitalism equitable to protecting oppressed minorities: first blacks, then women, then gays, Hispanics, etc.  This happened partly because back them almost everyone assumed that broadly shared prosperity would continue forever.  But also, much of the white working class rejected liberalism’s attempt to purge the system of bigotry, and the new breed of liberals began to reject the white working class in return.  Conservative politicians – first Goldwater and Wallace, then Nixon and Reagan – learned to appeal to the white working class, stoking and exploiting its resentments on issues like race, religion and sex, making them feel like they were the truly oppressed class.  Since the 60’s, all politics is identity politics.  Forget shared prosperity; what tribe do you belong to?

Liberalism is now mostly just a coalition of the non-straight-white-male tribes.  But there isn’t much to unite those tribes other than their shared oppression.  There is no liberal movement.  Meanwhile the conservatives have nurtured and furthered a powerful, coherent and effective political and cultural movement.  And they have won most of the elections.  Since the late 1960’s and the dominance of identity politics, white populism has moved over to the conservative side of the aisle.  It used to be working men fighting against the bosses for decent pay and working conditions.  Now it’s straight, white, Christian men fighting against high taxes that go to fetus-killing welfare queens.  The white working class had long understood they were being exploited by a capitalist elite; they were receptive to the conservatives notion that they were really being exploited by a statist one – even worse, claimed conservatives, it was a statist elite that coddled non-whites at the expense of whites.  And when conservatives transformed populism they transformed American politics.  Historically, the passion in American politics has resided in populism.  The American passion is populism; there is no real American political passion without it.  We are always the regular people, fighting against powerful elites who ignore our interests, dismiss our values and overlook our strengths.  For most of our history that populist passion resided on what can loosely be called the Left: Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, Truman, LBJ.  Since the 1960’s populist passion is on the Right: Nixon, Reagan, and the two Bush’s. 

Post-60’s liberalism is still quite pragmatic, still quite willing to intervene as needed in the economy and society.  But it has lost its passion, because it has lost its populism; all it has left is its technocracy.  This is why no one quite knows what Democrats stand for; this is why they’re so vague and uncertain: they’re muddled about who they’re fighting for.  Obama is the perfect expression of modern liberalism: pragmatic, moderate, urbane, prudential, multi-racial and quite bloodless.  Compare Obama to George W. Bush, who perfectly represented modern conservatism; he was impetuous, ideological, pious, sanctimonious, bold, and full of the crusading righteousness and rank foolishness that only moral certainty can confer.  He knew himself to be the vessel of American folkish purity and he acted upon that knowledge.  Obama is the un-Bush.  This is the real meaning behind his much-mocked slogan from 2008: Hope and Change.  The hope was that he would make government work.  The change meant he was nothing like W.

But it also meant change from the entire post-60’s bitter political combat.  Obama thought that he could just propose practical, reasonable, compromise solutions and his opponents would meet him half way.  He thought that moderation could tame ideology.  But he never understood the populist passion that animates his conservative adversaries, and he never understood the power such populism bestows.  Passion beats reason every time, and the passion is still on the right.  In 1980 it was the Moral Majority and in 2010 it was the Tea Party.  The names change but the game remains the same.  We still live in a conservative era, liberal hopes that Obama would be the next FDR notwithstanding.  At the time it seemed that 2008 might be what’s known as a re-aligning election; i.e. an election that changes the game for a generation or more, an election in which large demographic groups change from one coalition to another.  In 1932 the white middle-class, angry at Hoover’s passive response to the Great Depression, switched to the Democratic Party, becoming one of the main pillars of the New Deal Coalition that dominated American politics until the 1960’s.  But Obama’s election was not re-aligning.  He simply expanded the almost-majority that Democrats have enjoyed since the days of Michael Dukakis.  Obama won all the states that Gore and Kerry won plus a few teetering ones: Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado.  He managed that because whites are becoming a smaller and smaller part of the population; also, of course, because George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency had so badly damaged the Republican brand.  Think of Obama as a demographically-strengthened (and much hipper) Dukakis.

Obama has some sense of the utility of populist rhetoric, but his heart – I speak loosely – is not in it.  Nominated and elected because he’s Dukakis-plus, he is not temperamentally capable of full-throated populism.  His instincts are vaguely egalitarian, his temperament is conciliatory, his policies are moderate and his methods are technocratic.  Obama playing Huey Long is like Dukakis playing George Patton: it looks forced, and more to the point, it has little chance for a real constituency.  In a democracy all politics is grassroots and a liberal populist politician without a grassroots liberal movement is just standing upon thin air.  Liberal populist sentiment – anger over the iniquity and brutality of unregulated capitalism – has genuine potential; it’s waiting to be tapped.  As conservatives discovered to their delight in the 60’s and 70’s, conservative populism is really only a step or two away from liberal populism.  Liberals need to learn that those steps can be walked in reverse.  But until that potential is realized, for Democrats to win the presidency they must run as moderates and pray that the demographics keep slowly moving their way.  The only thing that Democrats possess which approximates passion is multicultural tolerance and that is, by definition, both too parochial and too uninspiring to work nationally.  Modern liberalism simply fails to stir the American passion.  That’s why Democrats fail to choose nominees with passion.  And that’s a big part of the reason our Democratic president had no fire and no force in that debate.  Liberals picked him because he has no passion, and liberals picked someone without passion because they have so little of it themselves.

The Inadequacy of Hope

Picture me in a fetal position on the floor, sobbing.  What was that debate?  What the hell happened?  Yes, Romney brazenly lied about his own positions.  Yes, he sounded like a moderate and reasonable man after spending the last year continuously genuflecting to the conservative movement, twisting himself into a right-leaning pretzel to reassure Tea Party types that he really is and always has been “severely conservative.”  Yes, he showed that he is willing to say or do anything to become president.  And, yes, finally, yes, yes, yes! – he has shown that blatant lying can work in the era of fractured media, an era in which people claim not only their own opinions but their own facts.  Yes, let’s grant all those.  But none of that explains why Obama didn’t fight back.  The debate was one of the few opportunities to hold Romney to account, when he might have been exposed as a shape-shifting opportunist, as an empty suit with great hair.  Instead the president stammered, hesitated, sputtered and caved.  Romney didn’t beat Obama in this debate, Obama beat himself.  And in classic Obama style, he beat himself with passivity.  He died with a whimper.

My pre-debate analysis predicted that there was little a Romney debate performance could do to change the widespread media narrative of the election.  And I was right.  But I failed to consider that Obama might change the narrative, and that’s exactly what happened.  More precisely, Obama has damaged himself by highlighting his one widely perceived weakness: his ineffectuality.  Before the debate, even his supporters felt defensive about the weakness of the economic recovery.  But when he failed to adequately answer Romney’s attacks he lent credibility to the notion that he’s just not up to the job of president.  All the reasons given for his policy failures just feel like excuses.  And ineffectuality is a killer.  The conservative media and punditry quickly charged into the opening that Obama had given them.  As Republican operative Mary Matalin put it on This Week, “he didn't bring his game because he doesn't have a game.”  Conservatives are jubilant that all of America now finds some credibility in their perception of Obama as a media-protected amateur; Andrew McCarthy of National Review: “He is actually being vetted this time.”  His policies are failures and so is he, and now no one can deny it.

It’s not true, of course, but does Obama have what it takes to fight back?  Even many of his supporters have begun to wonder.  There have been other moments when liberals were worried he wasn’t fighting hard enough.  When, in January 2010, Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy’s death it looked like the Obama administration might give in on Obamacare.  When, in mid 2011, the Tea-Party-addled Republican Congress threatened to force a US government debt default it looked like Obama might concede massive cuts in social insurance programs.  In both cases, though, he ultimately stood his ground.  There are two more debates scheduled and there’s still a month until Election Day.  Maybe he’ll come through this time, too.

And come through he must.  His re-election is terribly important.  Conservative hands must be kept from the levers of power lest they take us once again down the paths of inequality, recession and debt.  Despite Romney’s current incarnation as reasonable moderate, he is the standard bearer of a movement which largely (though not entirely) believes that much of the country are moochers “who can never be convinced to take responsibility and care for their lives”.  This is a movement and a campaign which would weaken bank regulations, reduce government spending during a weak economic recovery, lower taxes on the already under-taxed rich, widen the deficit, and underfund and voucher-ize terribly important and popular programs like Medicare and Medicaid.  Obama knows all this and he has vowed to fight against it. On debate night he claimed the populist mantle, saying that he’d “promised that I’d fight every single day on behalf of the American people and the middle class and all those who are striving to get in the middle class.  I’ve kept that promise and if you’ll vote for me, then I promise I’ll fight just as hard in a second term.”  Mitt Romney seems to really believe – if he believes anything – that conservative policies will well serve the American middle class.  But, in reality, his debate avalanche of faux moderation only masks policies that do just the opposite.  On debate night, Obama was standing face to face with the self-proclaimed leader of a movement whose blindness to the downside of modern capitalism brought about our current economic woes.  That night, that debating stage was the most important battleground between those who wish to humanize capitalism and those who are happy to let capitalism have its way with humanity.  That would have been a good time for Obama to fight for the middle class.

Any Way You Look at it, You Lose

Mitt Romney is in trouble.  Contrary to rampant conservative denial (see here, here, here, here and here), he’s down in the polls, particularly in important swing states like Ohio and Florida.  For the longest time he was neck and neck with President Obama, but in recent weeks a significant gap has opened and remains open.  It seems the American people are deciding to stick with Obama and it seems that only something big might change that.  But many Romney supporters eagerly point to something big actually scheduled to happen tonight, Wednesday, October 3^rd: 2012’s first general election presidential debate.  While partisans on both sides have been busy lowering expectations for their respective candidates, some Republicans claim that the debate will change everything.  Last Sunday, New Jersey governor Chris Christie proclaimed that (my ellipsis), “On Wednesday night Mitt Romney is going to be standing on the same stage as the president of the United States. And . . . come Thursday morning the entire narrative of this race is going to change.”  Behind closed doors, many GOP insiders, including those within the Romney campaign itself, admit that this may be Romney’s last chance to change people’s minds.

But can the debates really do that?  Are they the “something big” Romney desperately needs?  Probably not.  As Miranda Green shows in a comprehensive Gallup analysis of presidential debates from 1960 to 2004, “historical data shows the debates are rarely game changers.”  It doesn’t even matter who is seen as “winning” the debates; the study found “no direct correlation between the winner of each debate and the winner of the presidency.”  There are many reasons: most debate viewers are un-persuadable partisans; the debates are not usually particularly decisive, they don’t usually have a dramatically clear winner.  But what really constricts the possible effects of the debates is the pre-existing election narrative.  That is, by the time the debates occur a widespread media consensus has already coalesced around a simple and memorable storyline that purports to explain the election.  Think of Al Gore the wonky stiff vs. George Bush the likeable frat boy.  Or Obama the calm and cool intellect vs. McCain the desperate old man.  Once a narrative becomes widely embraced it becomes almost impossible to dislodge it.  A candidate’s every word or action becomes understood only by reference to the negatives and positives expressed in the narrative.  The 1996 narrative depicted Republican nominee Bob Dole as a curmudgeonly fossil, a noble World War II veteran hopelessly out of touch with the modern world.  When he mistakenly referred to the “Brooklyn Dodgers” it set that narrative in concrete. 

Any change to an election’s dynamics must work either for or against its existing narrative. According to the Gallup study there were only two elections in which the debates made a real difference: 1960 and 2000.  Before the debates John Kennedy was seen by many as a lightweight playboy, but the televised debates showed him to be cool, thoughtful and effortlessly charming.  That is, he managed to undercut his perceived negatives (his inexperience) and boost his positives (his charisma).  Before the 2000 debates Al Gore led George Bush in the polls despite his highly uncharismatic public persona.  (Chris Matthews famously characterized Gore as a “man-like object.”)  But the debate cameras showed Gore rolling his eyes and sighing while Bush was speaking, greatly adding to his personal un-likeability.  The Gallup story doesn’t mention the famous 1980 debates, in which Ronald Reagan presented himself as nothing like the addled, right-wing crank that the media mainstream had thought him to be.  Kennedy and Reagan won by changing the narrative, Gore lost by reinforcing it.  But, fair or not, they all had to wrestle with it.  But a debate can only change the narrative if the narrative can be changed by a debate.  It depends on the content of the narrative.  Kennedy’s perceived weakness, his inexperience, could be undone by a debate performance spotlighting his command of policy detail.  Reagan’s perceived extremism could be undone by moderately and reasonably weighing the issues.  If Kennedy had faltered on policy questions and if Reagan had pounded the table like an ideologue then each would have gone the way of Al Gore.

And here is the narrative for 2012: Obama is a likeable, intelligent, measured, decent man who seems to unable to translate those traits into policy success, particularly on the economy. Romney is a competent, intelligent technocrat, but – because of his great wealth and plutocratic disdain – he’s desperately out-of-touch with the struggles of most Americans, and he’s so utterly bereft of genuine conviction and feeling that he comes across as vague and evasive, or painfully fake and forced.  It’s not clear how well the Romney campaign understands this year’s narrative.  Their debate strategy seems to have three components.  First, pepper Obama with pre-written zingers, shaking his cool and making him look rattled and flustered.  Second, harp on the bad economy, characterize Obama as “in over his head” and Romney as broadly competent.  And third – and this is where things get a little bizarre – use the administration’s fumbling explanation of the Benghazi consulate attacks to paint Obama as the reincarnation of Jimmy Carter, as a weak and irresolute failure.  Even more bizarre, they seem think that Benghazi-gate is the silver bullet that will kill Obama’s inexplicable and persistent lead.

Let’s just set aside the Fox-bubble-induced Benghazi pipe-dream, since only adherents to the alternative conservative narrative – Romney the virtuous job-creator must slay Obama the America-hating, government-loving socialist – will find it remotely convincing.  That is, it is so removed from the mainstream narrative (and from reality) that it can’t possibly change anyone’s perceptions.  If the zingers, however, actually do fluster Obama it could undercut perceptions of the president as cool and collected.  They might just backfire, though; if they seem too pre-scripted and forced they would confirm the perception of Romney as a fake, as someone all too concerned about appearances and all too lacking in substance.  And the problem with harping on Obama’s economic policy failures is that we’ve heard all this before and on this issue the American people seem willing to give Obama a pass.  That is, this has already been incorporated into the narrative and Obama is still ahead in the polls.  Those zingers had better be good.

Is there anything Romney could do in the debates that would change the narrative?  He could try to make himself warmer, more human, more accessible.  But this just doesn’t seem possible for someone so disconnected from ordinary people and his own convictions.  We’ve seen the embarrassing results of his forced attempts at human-ness.  Also, debates demand tremendous preparation – Romney has been prepping for these debates for months – and it’s not easy to train yourself to be genuine.  Are there non-Benghazi lines of attack that could make Obama appear foreign, arrogant, radical or socialist?  Could Obama be successfully tarred with the Jeremiah Wright/Bill Ayers/Saul Alinsky brush?  No, all these attacks suffer from the same failure as the Benghazi attack: no one buys them.  Limbaugh et al. have been ranting all day long, every day for the last four years about Obama being a Kenyan-Muslim-Marxist – and no one buys it.  Maybe Romney could undo charges of policy evasion by making detailed proposals; for instance, he could specify which income tax exemptions he would eliminate in order to make his proposed high end tax cuts revenue-neutral.  But he’s running as a movement conservative, if he suddenly became candid about fiscal policy he’d have to confront the mathematical reality that is so unkind to conservatives: you can’t lower taxes, balance the budget and jump-start the economy all at the same time.  If he became specific he’d either have to embrace conservative fiscal and economic fantasies and be laughed off stage or reject them and be burned in effigy at Tea Party rallies.

But this, of course, reveals Romney’s real problem: He’s stuck in the conservative quagmire.  He had to wade into that murky and unpleasant pool of social and cultural resentment to become the Republican nominee and he must remain there to keep conservative votes.  And he reached down deep into the muck to pull up conservative darling – and fellow fiscal math denialist – Paul Ryan to be his running mate.  So now his position amounts to: please don’t look too closely at the muck.  But that strategy is not working – why not?  The answer is simple: 47%.  When a video surfaced showing Romney in a private meeting addressing a group of wealthy donors and maligning 47% of America as worthless tax evaders and welfare queens there was much discussion about whether it represented Romney’s real views or whether he was simply pandering to a rich, conservative audience.  But it doesn’t matter.  The video didn’t reveal the real Romney, it revealed the real conservative disposition.  When Romney picked Ryan he explicitly made the election about the size and role of the federal government.  Indeed, that’s what this election has always really been about.  Romney’s criticism of Obama’s Keynesian attempts to jolt the economy was really criticism of any government intervention in the economy.  In Romney’s worldview all we have to do to fix the economy is to get government out of the way and let the market work its magic.  Choosing Ryan merely made explicit Romney’s insistence that the welfare-regulatory state be substantially scaled back.  But Ryan plus the 47% video is deadly.  We now see the primary (though not the only) instinct behind conservative anti-government policy and that instinct is an ugly one.  It views social welfare as a plot to turn the morally weak into willing wards of the state.  It disparages half the country as people “who can never be convinced to take responsibility and care for their lives.”  When Romney strides out onto the debate stage tonight he’ll be stinking of that ugliness.  And there’s not much that a debate performance can do to remove that stink.

The Myth and its Devotees

“Capital is only formed by self-denial.”

– William Graham Sumner, 19^th century sociologist

President Obama has recently drawn much anger from the right for expressly doubting the conservative folklore of capitalism.  That folklore holds that the rich became so entirely through their own efforts, that is, through the determined and disciplined application of talent.  This is crucially a moral story: one is rich because one is virtuous.  Capitalism is part of nature’s mechanism for enforcing morality.  State interference in the free market can only upset the just distribution of riches that is its natural effect.  This mythology is the principle moral rationale behind laissez-faire policies on economic, fiscal and monetary matters, policies such as lowering higher end tax rates, de-regulation, the privatization of Social Security and Medicare.  That is, you should be on your own, because only then will you receive the compensation your individual moral character merits.  Only then will you receive justice.  Imagine John Calvin reading Milton Friedman.

It’s baloney, of course.  It’s baloney in many ways.  First of all, capitalism is no more natural than powdered wigs.  It’s a human institution, with all the imperfection, corruption and injustice inherent in human institutions.  Secondly, not all the character traits that bring wealth are admirable ones: greed, cunning, ruthlessness.  Is manipulating consumers with advertising a virtuous enterprise?  Many of capitalism’s ablest practitioners are simply good at gaming the system.  Third, no one succeeds entirely on his or her own.  Every business owner relies upon the cultural and moral resources provided by society and the stability, physical infrastructure and educated workforce provided by government.  Fourth, luck often plays a great part in achieving success.  The third and fourth unpleasant truths are the ones that President Obama has been so indelicate as to say out loud.  Have I fairly represented and then dismantled the conservative view of capitalist success?  Or have I merely burned down an easily combustible straw man?   Maybe a look at the conservative responses to Obama’s remarks will help answer that question. 

But first, a look at Obama’s impiety:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me – because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t – look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.  The Internet didn’t get invented on its own.  Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

The president is clearly presenting objections 3 and 4 above.  That is, many successful people, in keeping with the conservative myth, attribute their success entirely to their own smarts and hard work.  But, Obama responds, this overlooks three other important contributions to success: simple luck, a supportive cultural and social background (“a great teacher”), and an enabling state (“roads and bridges”).  He’s even touching upon objection number 1, i.e. that society and government played a role in constructing capitalism (“this unbelievable American system”).

But it is these lines in particular that conservatives have focused upon: “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.”  In particular the four words, “you didn’t build that,” have become in the conservative mind a perfect distillation of all that is foreign, socialist and unholy in Obama’s thought.  Many – either from mendacity or ideological blindness – claim the “that” in “you didn’t build that” refers to the “business” that “you’ve got”.  That is, Obama is denying that business owners built their own businesses, and insisting instead that government did.  For example, Jim Treacher, in a post titled, “Stop claiming Obama said what he said, just because he said it”, renders Obama’s remarks as, “You didn’t build that because of your hard work and intelligence. You depend on the government, not the other way around.”  Republican congressman Paul Ryan (who has since been picked by Mitt Romney to be his Vice-presidential nominee) wrote, “The President recently suggested that a central government – not individuals – deserves the credit for building successful businesses.”  Romney himself, brave truth-teller that he is, threw Obama’s remarks back at him: “I do not give government credit for having built that, I give free people credit for having built that business.”  Romney again: “The idea, to say that Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple, that Henry Ford didn’t build Ford Motor, that Papa John didn’t build Papa John Pizza, that Ray Kroc didn’t build McDonald’s, that Bill Gates didn’t build Microsoft . . .”  But this is just foolish.  It’s quite clear, as for instance Joe Klein has pointed out, the “that” in question means the infrastructure (“roads and bridges”) built by government.  Besides, no socialist claims that entrepreneurs didn’t build their businesses; socialists claim that entrepreneurs shouldn’t build businesses.  Any socialist worth his commissar-rationed salt knows how capitalism works; he just doesn’t want it to do so.  So Obama is not only a socialist but an uneducated one.  Clearly, for many, the lure of scoring cheap election year points is too great a temptation to resist.

Many conservative commentators, even if they avoid the explicit dishonesty and misrepresentation of the tale that Romney so casually spins, seem quite certain we’ve all now seen Obama’s socialist smoking gun.  In a post entitled, “Obama lets the cat out of the bag,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin is stunned by Obama’s “collectivism,” his “rag on individual merit.”  She quotes at length from Obama’s September 2011 jobs speech in which he makes the case for collective effort, a speech she summarizes as “You didn’t earn anything and government is everything.”  But in that same speech – included in that part of Obama’s speech that Rubin herself quotes! – the president also says, “Yes, we are rugged individualists. Yes, we are strong and self-reliant. And it has been the drive and initiative of our workers and entrepreneurs that has made this economy the engine and the envy of the world.”  For a socialist, Obama seems remarkably bad at ragging on individual merit!  Rubin concludes: “Lo and behold he’s revealed himself to be the very caricature of the anti-business, government-is-all liberal Republicans have claimed him to be.”  Caricature, indeed.  Is Rubin simply a propagandist or a blinkered ideologue, unable to make distinctions?  Well, ideologues make the best propagandists, true-believers the best liars.

We see the most salient aspect of the conservative reaction to Obama’s remarks: unbalance, the black-and-white thinking that turns Obama’s thoughtful recognition of collective effort into a thorough renunciation of individual effort.  Lawrence Kudlow claims Obama has “trashed” and “demonized” entrepreneurs, that he “has it out for successful earners, investors and small-business owners.”  Peter Kirasow says that Obama “denigrates individual American spirit, ambition, drive, skill and industriousness.”  J.D. Tuccille laments Obama’s “repulsive, Borg-like philosophy.”  Rich Lowry's characterizes Obama’s viewpoint as, “Everything is ultimately a collective enterprise”, perfectly expressing the inability to see both sides of the equation.  Because Obama sees the value in both government and individual effort, Charles Murray thinks that he is “un-American”, that he doesn’t really get America.  Pat Buchanan sadly wonders the same thing: “Does Obama understand America?”  Stu Varney, Fox Business host, worries Obama’s remarks work “against the essence of the American Dream.”  When one questions conservative mythology one is questioning America itself!  Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal agrees.  To her, Obama’s “dismissive words toward free enterprise . . . raise the far more potent issue of national identity and feed the suspicion that Mr. Obama is actively hostile to American ideals and aspirations.”  She asks us to, “Witness the first president to demean the bedrock American beliefs in industriousness and exceptionalism.”  Rush Limbaugh flops smack down on the sloppy and smelly McCarthyite conclusion: “I think it can now be said, without equivocation – without equivocation – that this man hates this country. He is trying – Barack Obama is trying – to dismantle, brick by brick, the American dream.”  No equivocation is needed when no equivocation is felt.  Obviously, much of the conservative overreaction to Obama’s remarks is simply a cynical attempt to make Obama look as bad as possible.  But much of it seems to express a straightforward inability to see outside the strict confines of the conservative mythology.

Some conservatives seem to think that not only are Obama’s words unforgivably heretical, they actually harm the economy!  Lawrence Kudlow compares Obama’s dark analysis with Reagan’s sunny cheerleading: “When Reagan praised our capitalist system and the businesses inside it, he provided a psychological lift to accompany his fiscal program. That was leadership.”  James Pethokoukis praises and echoes Kudlow: “Maybe Obama doesn’t understand how damaging and corrosive these sorts of statements and speeches, repeated over and over, might potentially be?”  Apparently, we must treat businesses the way overly permissive parents treat their young children: They must be continuously showered with praise lest their fragile self-esteem be tragically undermined.  There was a time when the lure of wealth and power would have been sufficient spurs to success, but now entrepreneurs pout and go on strike if they don’t also receive our blind worship!  Liberal writer Jonathan Chait incisively portrays the unbearably self-pitying sensibilities of the rich and the conservative movement devotees whose jobs it is to keep that worship permanently on high volume.  Chait highlights “the extraordinary hypersensivity surrounding the egos of the rich in our current political culture” and the “genuine outrage of the right” over what is at bottom “Obama’s insensitivity toward the rich.”  If the outrage really is genuine then conservatives must be either true believers in the mythology or terribly afraid that the mythology might lose its power.

This leads us to the “banality” response, in which a conservative writer readily accepts Obama’s points as obviously true – indeed, so obvious as to be uncontroversial – but rails against Obama for using those points to advance his insidious liberal agenda.  Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. of the Wall Street Journal writes, “He only meant to say we need government as well as private initiative, and who could disagree? This argument is anodyne, dispositive of nothing that is in dispute.  Of course, it also comes as a defense of policies that all run in one direction: bigger government, higher taxes.”   So Obama’s words defend bigger government but don’t address anything in dispute?  Rich Lowry finds Obama’s argument to be little more than “a warrant for socialization of the proceeds of success.”  He concludes: “Behind its smiley we’re-all-in-it-together façade is a frank demand: You owe us.”  How dare Obama make a convincing argument for raising taxes on the rich!  Jim Geraghty quotes Obama: “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.” and quite reasonably concedes, “Which successful person claims that?”  But he anguishes that Obama’s thinking leads to policies that are “changing and eroding” America.  (Geraghty may be a bad example of the banality response, since his concession of Obama’s points can’t withstand his disdain for capitalism’s losers, especially those whose envy makes them forget their proper station: “And there are a lot of not-so-hard-working people out there who expect to be successful anyway.”  But that merely helps prove my point: even some of those who intellectually concede Obama’s arguments find it impossible to really believe them.)  These writers want to have it both ways: Yes, they are reasonable people who know the mythology is baloney and no, they won’t stand idly by while smarty-pants socialists call it baloney.  But if Obama’s words are so undeniably and uncontroversially true, then why is it so terrible to utter them?  Is the conservative argument that policy should not be based upon truth?  Or do they believe it’s a misleading truth?  It’s not clear.  But here is their real – and quite remarkable – concession: widespread acknowledgment of Obama’s truth would inevitably lead to more liberal economic policies.  The truth is on the side of the liberals so conservatives must fight against the truth.  The conservative folklore of capitalism is a lie, but it’s an indispensible lie.

But maybe the truth makes a better basis for policy than myth does.  Economic policy based on Puritan mythology can be just as irrational and destructive as science based upon Genesis.  The “banality” writers are quite right about one thing: popular acceptance of the conservative mythology leads to greater acceptance for laissez-faire economic policies.  If the rich righteously deserve their wealth then raising their taxes is a terrible injustice.  If capitalism rewards the good and punishes the bad then interference in the market can only thwart the workings of justice.  Of course, conservatives and libertarians don’t just make moral arguments in favor of freer markets, they present practical arguments as well.  They claim that lower tax rates, reduced regulation and fewer government services help the economy grow faster, creating more wealth for everyone.  These practical arguments, unlike the mythology, have some plausibility and liberals generally try to rebut them with practical arguments of their own.  For example, liberals concede that unfettered capitalism does indeed generate great wealth but they believe that wealth tends to become concentrated in only a few hands.  Both sides produce facts, charts, statistics, etc. to make their respective cases and the debate grinds empirically on.  But typically liberals surrender the moral ground; in effect they concede that of course the rich deserve their wealth, of course private property is sacrosanct, government merely needs a little of it for its practical humanitarian purposes.  But Obama’s remarks don’t make those concessions; they constitute a genuine moral argument against an excessively free market.  They weaken the moral argument for the inviolability of private property, and to conservatives that inviolability is the material basis for freedom itself.  What for liberals is a simple, reasonable and irrefutable point about the nature of capitalism is for conservatives a dagger aimed at the heart of the free society.  In effect, conservatives are claiming that not only is their capitalist folklore necessary for economic health but it stands as a powerful bulwark against the collectivist nightmare.  That’s some powerful lie.

Moderate conservative Josh Barro makes all this explicit.  He starts with the obligatory concession to the trivial falsehood of the conservative myth: “Obviously, every successful outcome in life – and every failed one – arises from a combination of internal and external factors.”  But he abhors the uses to which such trivial concession can be put:

People are rightly unnerved by an argument that amounts to “we can tax you because you didn’t deserve this anyway.” Faced with such an argument, defending your own contribution to your success isn’t just a point of pride – it’s an argument you must make to defend the principle that you are entitled to your own private property.

Here Barro is trying to force a liberal concession.  He is making a point that any honest liberal should admit: that once one abandons the conservative myth one must also abandon the notion that individuals have an undiluted right to their own property.  But most liberals don’t want to go that far; they just want to tame capitalism and make it better fulfill humanitarian ends.  They just want to raise taxes on the rich a little and provide working people with a slightly better safety net.  They never set out to undermine private property.  But here we are and the logic seems inescapable.  If you didn’t earn your wealth without help, then morally it is not entirely yours.  There are, of course, prudential reasons for treating private property as inviolable, but there is no sound moral basis for doing so.

But it would be wrong to conclude – as many conservatives, even Barro, seem to – that Obama believes that individuals have no moral claim at all on their own property.  The president is merely proposing a more balanced view of the subject.  His position amounts to: individuals have a right to their private property, but it is not an absolute right.  It’s a terribly important right and it should be respected as much as is practically possible, but it should also be balanced against other important considerations, such as the economic health of the nation and the fiscal health of the federal government.  There are competing legitimate claims upon that wealth and all those claims must be respected.  He’s expressing a realistic and pragmatic viewpoint, and one with a solid moral and intellectual foundation.  Is that un-American?  Or is the American dream predicated upon false folklore?  Can we both accept the conclusions of our own logic and believe in America?  But these are not questions in a vacuum.  As Obama himself said in the speech Jennifer Rubin references (my italics): “But there’s always been another thread running throughout our history — a belief that we’re all connected, and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.”  That is, the notion of collective responsibility has been there from the beginning, as important as the notion of individual responsibility.  Obama acknowledges and honors both notions.  Above, I referred to the conservative mythology of wealth accumulation as baloney.  That was unfair: it’s not entirely baloney, though it does contain obvious falsehoods in the ways I described above.  There is much truth to the notion that in a free economy those who work hard tend to do better than those who don’t and those with brains and talent tend to do better than those without, etc.  But that’s the point: the myth contains much truth and many lies and if we hope to address our profound national problems in a realistic way then we must let ourselves see both.  That’s what we’ve done through most of our history.  That’s what Obama’s speech asks us to do.  And that’s what conservatives refuse to do.

The Politics of Intransigence

William Buckley, in the first issue of National Review in 1955, famously distilled conservative instincts down to the desire to “stand athwart history yelling stop,” and ever since that’s just what conservatives have been doing.  They haven’t stopped history, but that hasn’t kept them from yelling, even when history has long since passed them by.  And particularly in the age of Tea Party purity, to be a conservative is to be forever fighting wars long lost.  Tea Partiers throw themselves into the debt limit breach like Spartans at Thermopylae, though the fiscal Persians passed through long ago.  They denounce the progressivism of Franklin Roosevelt and even Woodrow Wilson.  They call Social Security a Ponzi scheme.  They wish to eliminate Progressive Era reforms like the Federal Reserve, the income tax and the popular election of senators.  They rail against radical cultural developments like the widespread use of contraception.  And – the cultural battle du jour – they hope to forestall gay marriage.  But now President Obama, canny leader from behind that he is, has publically joined the fight for marriage equality just as conservatives are losing that war, too.

And make no mistake, that war is lost.  First there were civil unions.  Then there were state supreme court decisions.  Then there were democratically elected state legislatures (such as New York and Washington).  Last year the Obama administration announced it would not defend DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act, the Clinton era law preventing the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages).  Now federal courts are striking down key provisions of DOMA.  It looks like some states, such as Maryland, are about to legalize gay marriage by popular referendum.  Sure, there are states which will never accept it (North Carolina comes to mind), but that won’t matter if the US Supreme Court rules that marriage is a civil right that cannot constitutionally be confined to heterosexuals.

And this is a big loss.  It might just be the last big loss for cultural conservatives, only because they have little left to lose.  Since the days of Bill Buckley’s exhortation to intransigence, conservatives have resisted racial inclusion, gender equality, drug usage, secularization, and the entire sexual revolution, including the acceptance of contraception, pornography, experimentation, abortion, homosexuality, and blatant sexual expression in the popular media.  How many of those battles have conservatives won?  Drug use may be the only one.  (And thank God they did win that one, though not without some terrible repercussions; for example, the war on drugs remains blindingly irrational.)  A generation from now, the vast majority of Americans will think about gay marriage the way we now think about inter-racial marriage.  That is, we won’t understand why anyone was ever against it.  (Presumably, though, even then some small stubborn conservative contingent will still be struggling to reverse it.)

Why do conservatives keep losing?  What is it about the cultural evolutions mentioned above that have proven so irresistible to standing athwart?  What do those developments have in common? Some commentators sense the unifying theme: Andrew Sullivan explicitly draws out the connection between acceptance of homosexuality and acceptance of recreational marijuana use; Rod Dreher sees parallels, as well.  Daniel McCarthy casts his net much wider, claiming that these recent developments are “a consequence of a shift in the foundations of Western civilization that has been taking place over centuries—a shift from Christian to liberal foundations.”  Could any conservative disagree?  That is, all the cultural developments listed above are about individuals defining their own meaning and controlling their own lives.  They’re about liberating individuals from cultural constraint.  In the good old conservative days, each person was expected to fulfill well-defined social roles – father, employee, countryman – each with powers and duties that could not be ignored or questioned.  And each role fit neatly into its spot in the social hierarchy.  That is, each role dictated who owed deference to whom: women to men, children to parents, non-whites to whites, etc.  And it was the job of social institutions – family, church, community – to define and enforce those roles and that hierarchy.  But individuals and groups that were exploited or oppressed by that hierarchy began to rebel against it; first blacks, then women, then gays, and so on.  That’s the problem: and so on.  The engine of individual liberation, once set in motion, is exceedingly hard to stop.  In 1955, the notion that black Americans could control their own lives, unconstrained by white supremacy, was radical.  But once you accept it, how can you demand women stay in their place?  What about other races?  What about gays?  What about the sexual impulses of white suburban kids, previously constrained by Puritan repressiveness, but now urged to liberation by the irresistible physicality of rock-n-roll?  The cultural scolds of the 1950’s were right: Elvis’ dancing was revolutionary!

And, as Noah Berlatsky nicely explains, present-day conservatives are just as right when they claim that allowing gays into the institution of marriage fundamentally changes that institution.  More precisely, it caps marriage’s evolution into an instrument of personal development, all as part of the liberal cultural movement described above.  Conservatives are dead right when they stress the centrality of marriage as a social institution.  They know that when marriage has completely succumbed to the philosophy of personal liberation they will have lost one of their most important battles.  But once again, they’re fighting a battle already lost.  The meaning of marriage has been changing for a very long time, and the changes started long before anyone considered that gays might marry each other.  (Conservative historian Garry Wills explains that marriage was not even a Catholic sacrament until the 12^th century!)  Stephanie Coontz provides an excellent summary of the fundamental changes in the understanding of marriage over the last couple of centuries.  “For millennia, marriage was about property and power rather than mutual attraction. It was a way of forging political alliances, sealing business deals, and expanding the family labor force. For many people, marriage was an unavoidable duty.”  But then it became permissible to marry for love.  Then the need for parental approval was dropped.  In the 60’s the Supreme Court struck down state bans on contraception within marriage and on interracial marriage.  And, most relevant to our discussion, in the 60’s and 70’s marriage lost its patriarchal strictures and became thoroughly liberalized.  Coontz writes, “The collapse of rigid gender expectations and norms has fostered the expectation that marriage should be an individually negotiated relationship between equals, replacing the older notion of marriage as a prefabricated institution where traditional roles and rules must be obeyed.”  Marriage is no longer about the political or economic merging of families.  It is no longer even primarily about fostering the proper setting for child-rearing.  The arrival of no-fault divorce in the 1960’s made legally explicit the notion that marriage is about individual choice and individual happiness.  Contemplating this history makes clear that the conservative fight against gay marriage is essentially symbolic. Liberal individualism has already changed marriage immeasurably; allowing gays to marry merely completes that change and makes it undeniable.

But marriage is a special case; it’s different from the other cultural developments listed above: it is not a merely an individual choice.  The point of marriage is to employ the weight of society to buttress a personal relationship, for social and individual good.  It used to be that there were three parties to marriage: the bride, the groom and the rest of society.  (Check out Roderick Long’s excellent depiction of the understanding of marriage in 19^th century America; it showcases wonderful historical expressions of the view that society has much to say about the particulars of individual marriages.)  And as a social institution with a pragmatic social purpose, its particulars could be defined collectively through the democratic legislative process.  But it’s not just that the purpose of marriage has changed from economics and child-rearing to personal fulfillment.  That change effects a much more radical transformation: marriage is no longer a social institution.  If it’s just about personal fulfillment then it’s simply a contract between individuals.  Society is no longer a party.  Society no longer has any justifiable claim upon marriage or one’s duties as a spouse and parent.  I decide if I marry or divorce in the same way that I decide if I eat chocolate or vanilla.  And my spouse and I define our roles within our marriage.  No one has any right to tell me what to do.  And it follows inexorably that neither can anyone tell a gay person whom to marry.  The triumph of liberal individualism simply and starkly prohibits society from constraining personal choices.  And it makes marriage into merely another such choice.  For good or ill – actually, for good and ill – all social relations are now choices.

But consider the question: Could conservatives have allowed gays to marry each other while maintaining the general framework of well-defined, hierarchical social roles?  Could there have been room for gays in the old conservative vision of marriage?  Theoretically, yes; but realistically, no freakin way!  You’d have to put aside the fact that acceptance of gays and gay marriage came much later than the transformation of heterosexual marriage, and put aside the tenacious Old Testament revulsion of homosexuality (and of sexual expression in general), and put aside centuries of irrational prejudice and oppression.  Even putting aside all those stumbling blocks you’d still be stopped short by the deepest of conservative fears: the fear of mixing categories and blurring boundaries.  Hierarchies demand discreet roles.  Men must be men and women must be women.  The God of Genesis made each animal distinct and separate; one never gives rise to another.  If a man marries a man it confuses those separate categories, it blurs the distinctions between the sexes.  To conservatives, gay marriage is a moral monstrosity, like the miscegenated giants of Genesis 6, born of the daughters of men, fathered by the sons of God.  And hierarchies, particularly ones based on social categories like gender, race or sexual orientation, cannot help but oppress.  The logic of conservatism seems to require a subject class.  It’s no longer acceptable to advocate subordinate status for non-whites or women.  Once gays are safely on that no-oppression list, conservatives may have no one left to bully.  (Thank God for Muslims!)

Liberalism taught subject classes that their subjection was unjust.  The rest is merely the inevitability of that idea.  But there’s more: there’s conservative complicity in the overthrow of their own worldview.  Conservatives hold that freedom and equality are enemies, that more of one means less of the other, but the broader debate surrounding gay marriage nicely demonstrates how closely bound freedom and equality can be.  As we’ve seen, the goal of the liberal cultural project is the complete liberation of the individual from cultural constraint.  But this dauntingly vacant freedom implies an equally daunting and radical egalitarianism.  For each person to be free no one can claim power over another.  No person or institution has any justified authority over anyone’s meaning, goals or standards.  Thus, as conservatives have argued for almost perfect freedom in economic affairs – sounding like anarchists – they have inadvertently undercut their own arguments about cultural and moral truth.  But not just in the obvious way that conservative embrace of market freedom contradicts their defense of cultural control.  When they argue for freedom they unknowingly argue for equality as well, and that equality is a dagger aimed at the heart of cultural authority.  Modern conservatives thought they could be cafeteria liberals, simultaneously champions of freedom and warriors against equality.  But they were wrong: hierarchy and freedom are as much enemies as allies.

When gay marriage becomes widely accepted, it will have become so through liberal process and in liberal form.  It will be seen as the culmination of the liberal cultural revolution whereby all social institutions have been relieved of their authority to shape individual judgments.  It will not be an accommodation of gays into the conservative notion of marriage, though some conservatives – most notably Andrew Sullivan – have long urged such accommodation.  Sixty years ago, American social conservatism was about hierarchy composed of well-defined social roles that themselves expressed received moral truth.  But all the standing athwart in the world could not withstand the righteous power of those demanding liberation from that hierarchy.  Rhetorically at least, conservatives have repudiated that old-fashioned hierarchy; now all they have left are the well-defined social roles and the received moral truth.  But those roles and that truth are quickly succumbing as well. And it could not have been otherwise.  As an important conservative theorist once said, ideas have consequences.  More to the point, they have momentum.  Conservatives, being conservatives, waited too long to lose the hierarchy.  They defended it so long that the notions of well-defined roles and moral truth have become conflated in the public mind with that hierarchy, and they have all been rejected as a whole.  Thus the new non-hierarchical conservatism is punished for the injustices of its hierarchical progenitor.  The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.  By forcing impulses of liberation into liberal channels, conservative resistance against social developments like gay marriage has only added to the triumph of the new individualism.  What started as emancipation from arbitrary and unjust power became emancipation from every possible external constraint.  In the new liberal vision, persons are not the roles they play, but unique, growing, complicated, uncertain creatures; each one a project, a growing, an ongoing liberation.  Modern freedom is self-actualization defended with relativism.  My life is entirely mine and entirely not yours.  Granted, conservatives have much to say against that disposition and they are furiously standing athwart it and yelling stop.  The history of the last 60 years promises that there will indeed be much yelling, but no stopping.