Given all that we’ve learned of Obama’s history, I believe the best way to understand the president’s policies is to see them as a series of steps designed to slowly but surely move the country closer to a socialist ideal. Yet precisely because Obama moves gradually, without an announced ideological plan, the ultimate meaning of his policies will always be subject to dispute. The danger, in fact, is that we will be irreversibly down the path toward socialist transformation before we recognize as a nation what’s at stake. The strategy of achieving socialism through a series of “non-reformist reforms,” so popular among America’s community organizing elite, is premised on precisely that deception.
The notion that Obama is a socialist—that he never abandoned his early radicalism but only learned to promote it in piecemeal fashion—makes better sense of his overall record than the claim that he is a pragmatist. Obama’s college socialism, the influence of socialist conferences on his career, his choice of a profession dominated by socialists, and his extensive alliances with the most influential stealth-socialist community organizers in the country give the game away. Obama has adopted the gradualist socialist strategy of his mentors, seeking to combine comprehensive government regulation of private businesses with a steadily enlarging public sector. Eventually, this will transform American capitalism into something resembling a socialist-inspired Scandinavian welfare state. Accumulating differences of degree will add up to a fundamental difference in kind. Wealth will be substantially redirected away from individuals, local communities, and businesses, toward the state and public-employee unions instead. Power will shift decisively toward government and away from the private sector.
So the president is carrying out the ideals of his community-organizer past from a new position. The socialist organizers who taught and inspired Obama favored plans to quietly transform America’s economic system with “non-reformist reforms”—programs that appear as minor adjustments to capitalism but in fact undermine the system itself. This strategy was favored by Obama’s socialist mentors and associates at New York’s Socialist Scholars Conferences, the Midwest Academy, and ACORN. To believe that Obama is a socialist merely assumes his continued commitment to a world he has long described as his lodestar. Now that we understand the hidden socialist underpinnings of community organizing, as well as the fact that organizers in general—and Obama in particular—have done everything in their power to hide that socialist subtext, it’s tough to take the president’s self-representation as a pragmatist at face value.
Yet even if we grant that Obama was once a socialist—and remains one in his heart of hearts today—would that commitment necessarily have policy consequences? Would Obama’s socialism affect the way he governed, or would political necessity force him to act the part of a standard-issue liberal Democrat instead? This is a false choice. It is perfectly possible for socialists to work within the Democratic Party. That was Michael Harrington’s strategy, after all. Here is how Harrington outlined the relationship between his Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the Democratic Party in 1974:
As socialists of the democratic left, we stand for fundamental change, for socialism, and for every immediate gain which can be achieved by the largely non-socialist mass movements in which we loyally and enthusiastically participate: the unions, minority and women’s organizations, the student movement, the liberal wing of the Democratic party among them … It is precisely because we are socialists that we feel we have a unique contribution to make to the democratic left, showing how increments of change must be turned toward structural transformation of the society itself … Perhaps the fullness of [our socialist] vision will never come to pass; perhaps it will. But whether it does or not, we believe that this dream is relevant to the increments of reform we can win in the next few years.1
Harrington understood that full socialism in America would never be achieved in his lifetime. Yet he was convinced that Democratic policy battles could be productively guided by a long-term socialist vision. The key was to focus on those changes most likely to transform the structure of American society—health care being a premiere example. In the statement quoted above, for instance, Harrington endorses Senator Edward Kennedy’s latest health-care reform bill as a transitional step toward a single-payer system.2 In other words, America’s greatest modern socialist was in agreement with those conservatives who see government-controlled health-care reform as one giant step away from capitalism. A willingness to prioritize health-care reform—to risk substantial political capital for its sake—virtually defines Michael Harrington’s incrementalist vision of an effectively socialist strategy for the Democratic Party.
Barack Obama’s insistence on pressing an ambitious program of health-care reform during an economic downturn—in the face of intense opposition by a majority of Americans—has solidified for many the image of a president blinkered by socialist ideology. At a minimum, it’s clear by now that, given the president’s history and the incremental vision of socialist politics held by his associates in community organizing, the notion that Barack Obama is a socialist is anything but a fringe conjecture.
Considering what we know about modern American socialism, it’s possible to offer a more general interpretation of Obama’s plans. Obama’s devotion to health-care reform may have less to do with ideologically driven political suicide than with a risky—but canny and plausible—long-term strategy for the political transformation of the United States. To develop a sense of the president’s strategic goals, we’ll need to review his actions in light of his socialist and organizing past. Let’s return to square one, then. What exactly does a community organizer do, and how might that be related to the president’s policies today?
Community organizers in the tradition of Saul Alinsky keep their political beliefs to themselves.3 They make a point of presenting themselves as pragmatists in search of “commonsense solutions for working families.” Organizers trained by Obama’s mentor Greg Galluzzo have perfected this stance—consciously suppressing radical jargon (which they freely use among themselves), clothing their leftist programs in the language of traditional American democracy, and making sure to present themselves in both dress and demeanor as average citizens, rather than as the sixties-style radicals many of them once were.
Alinskyites work to steer popular dissatisfactions in the direction of their leftist goals. Organizers spend months conducting “one-on-ones,” interviews that reveal the patterns of self-interest in a given community. If the neighborhood is worried about construction of a nearby expressway, for example, an Alinskyite organizer will use a campaign to block that expressway to build and motivate the membership of his group. Eventually, that organizer will work to turn the community’s “populist” wrath against local banks or energy companies, in pursuit of his long-term socialist goals. While some organizers may appeal to the good of the larger community as a rationale for these campaigns, that is mere icing on the cake. Hidden ideological motivations notwithstanding, Alinskyite organizers frame their campaigns as appeals to the self-interest of those they lead.
Though commonsense pragmatism unfettered by ideology is their public theme, Alinskyites use polarization as a tactic. Organizers search for “enemies”—businessmen and political leaders who can either offer the group something valuable or serve as “targets” for anger. Targets are sometimes baited to strike back, thus further enraging the group. So whether a bank gives in and offers mortgages on easy terms or refuses to lower its lending standards, the community organization wins. Either the loans go through, or the group gets mad—and membership grows. Best of all, targeting encourages the public to view the business community—and ultimately capitalism itself—as “the enemy.”
The core precepts of Alinskyite organizing explain a lot about the conduct of Obama’s presidency. Like a good organizer, Obama has carefully avoided ideological labels. He certainly hasn’t offered anything close a broad philosophical rationale for his policies. On the contrary, the president has generally portrayed his stimulus package and health-care reform plans as pragmatic responses to the financial crisis.
Notwithstanding his periodic invocations of the plight of the uninsured, Obama has presented his health-care program chiefly as a way to save consumers money, while also getting entitlement spending under control. For the most part, then, Obama’s health-care campaign has appealed to self-interest, rather than compassion for the poor. In classic Alinskyite fashion, the president has drawn on public dissatisfaction with rising health-insurance costs, as well as public fears of entitlement-driven deficits, to support a policy that is in fact motivated by a vision of redistributive rights. The reason Obama hasn’t articulated the philosophical underpinnings of his policies is that the truth wouldn’t work. Liberal and conservative observers alike have noted Obama’s reluctance to openly sell health-care reform on grounds of compassion and “social justice.” Yet that is why he backs it.
Rahm Emanuel’s infamous quip: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” gave the game away.4 We’ve seen the long tradition among community organizers of using fiscal crises as a lever for incremental socialist change. Having cut his political teeth at the Illinois Public Action Council—the quintessential socialist community organization of its day—Emanuel grasped the principles of Alinskyite crisis management early on. Although sophisticated theorists like Cloward, Piven, and Dreier enlarged on the idea of using crises to encourage socialist change, the principle was built into Alinskyite organizing from the start. Manipulating public fear and anger to create support for incremental socialist ends is what Alinskyite organizers do. Turning a national financial meltdown to socialist purposes simply applies Alinsky’s local technique to the national level. Obviously, you can’t be a merely pragmatic problem-solver if you’re worried about “wasting” a crisis. So from the administration’s point of view, Emanuel’s unguarded remark was a stupid and damaging mistake.
Obama’s deeper problem is that an ambitious national program of health-care reform doesn’t lend itself to manipulation. The level of scrutiny for such a change—with its immense implications for every American—makes rhetorical diversion and fiscal trickery difficult to sustain. It’s no wonder the president originally wanted to pass the massive health-care bill quickly, with virtually no debate.
A reform that increases insurance coverage for tens of millions of people either costs more money, or leads to the rationing of care, or both. For some, the losses in money and quality are worth the gains for the uninsured—and point to a more just set of social arrangements for additional sectors of the economy as well. For others, the financial costs of reform and the inevitable constraints on care are not balanced out by redistributive gains. To these citizens, the reform endangers the very system upon which our freedom and prosperity depend. The choices are fairly clear. The president’s presentation of those choices was not. It would be tough to find a public policy battle better able to benefit from a serious debate about underlying principles than health-care reform. Obama’s reluctance to take the debate in this direction was true to his organizer training, yet rang false to the public’s ear.
Presenting health-care reform as a financial benefit to the vast majority of Americans required some serious fiscal trickery. Six years of benefits had to be balanced against ten years of costs to make the numbers match. Medicare cuts were double-counted as both savings and spending. Payments to doctors were removed from the main health-care bill so as not to undermine the claim that the reforms were fully paid for. And so on. In short, false promises of fiscal responsibility were used to seduce the public into a costly and difficult-to-repeal scheme that would leave them holding the bag for massive costs.
We saw the dress rehearsal for this in attempts by Obama and his Democratic allies in the Illinois state legislature to use the windfall settlement of a tobacco lawsuit to prevent cuts to state programs during a budget crisis.5 At the time, the Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Post-Dispatch excoriated Illinois Democrats for “chickening out,” for making use of “tricked up numbers,” for a “cowardly abdication of responsibility,” and for sacrificing the state’s bond rating to “short term political gains.” The “trick” was balancing the budget with a one-time windfall instead of regular revenues. That kind of thinking led to the fiscal disaster Illinois faces today. Worse, Obama’s original plan was to use the tobacco-settlement money to finance his state-wide single-payer health-care reform scheme. That was a fundamentally dishonest way of seducing voters into a huge regular expenditure, in perpetuity. Obama’s plan didn’t pass … then. But the strategy of deception is clear.
Originally President Obama pushed hard to include a “public option” in the health-care bill. A government-run health-care plan designed to “compete” with private insurers parallels proposals by the Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition to create a government-owned energy corporation.6 The term “competition” in this context is a misnomer, since entities backed by the taxing, law-making, and regulatory power of the federal government can easily drive private companies out of business. That is exactly what the socialist sponsors of the Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition were hoping for. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, the one-time activist for the Democratic Socialists of America who worked at the heart of the C/LEC and Midwest Academy net- work, enthusiastically acknowledges the real purpose of the health- care public option. The public option thus emerges as a pure example of the sort of “non-reformist reform” favored by Midwest Academy organizers—a supposedly modest tweak to the free enterprise system, designed to undermine it.
While the president preferred a public option, he removed it to save the bill. This is sometimes cited as proof that Obama is a pragmatist rather than a socialist. I take it as evidence that the president is a pragmatic socialist. The socialism of President Obama and his organizing associates is incremental. A government-run single-payer health-care system may be best from the socialist point of view, but a public option that could lead to single-payer is second best. Government regulation that could incorporate a public option in time will do in a pinch. Although Congress did not pass a public option “trigger,” future dissatisfactions with private insurance plans are sure to bring calls for a public option. When he thinks he has political room, the president will respond.
After Senate passage of health-care reform, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) addressed the disappointment of the left at the absence of the public option by comparing the bill to a starter home with a good foundation. “We can build additions as we go along in the future… . Think about it that way.”7 The president undoubtedly thinks in these terms. Harkin, by the way, wrote the foreword to Citizen Action and the New Populism.8 That book laid out the Midwest Academy’s populist strategy, without so much as mentioning the socialism of its authors, Harry Boyte, Heather Booth, and Steve Max. In his foreword, Harkin praises the political pragmatism of the authors, and distinguishes their stance from “pie-in-the-sky ideology.” Harkin also credits the Midwest Academy’s Citizen Action coalition with helping to elect him to the Senate in 1984. The Midwest Academy’s brand of progressivism is in the driver’s seat today—with powerful alumni or supporters like Jan Schakowsky in the House, Harkin in the Senate, and Obama in the White House. Midwest Academy strategy is indeed pragmatic and patient. Yet behind the scenes, it’s hard not to suspect that “pie-in-the-sky” Marxist ideology remains a motivating force for its former associates, just as it was for Boyte, Booth, and Max.
Even without the public option, the health-care bill places a sixth of the American economy under extensive regulatory control. The precedent-setting universal mandate to purchase a commercial product has sparked a series of legal challenges from the states. The novelty and scale of this reform suggests that something other than pragmatic tinkering is at work. When you juxtapose an undertaking this extensive with knowledge of the president’s radical past, it’s reasonable to account for it by something deeper than an effort to cut health-care costs during a fiscal crisis—especially when you consider that costs will actually rise. Would one-time Midwest Academy leaders like Jan Schakowsky and Robert Creamer be fighting for this change with everything they’ve got if it weren’t about advancing socialism? It’s reasonable to see a link between Obama’s extensive ties to the Midwest Academy and his relentless pursuit of its leadership’s highest priority.
What about the stimulus bill of 2009? Obama was criticized even by supporters for allowing congressional leaders to draw up this bill. Congress loaded the stimulus package with spending for projects Democrats had been unable to fund for a decade. Does this mean the president was derelict in his responsibilities? I doubt that’s how he sees it. Under Republican rule in Illinois, Obama himself was a frustrated Democratic legislator with unfunded program ideas. One man’s pork is another man’s social justice. Given Obama’s passionate defense of the use of tobacco-settlement money to evade budget cuts during a fiscal crisis, he undoubtedly saw turning the stimulus bill over to Congress as something more than logrolling. Obama views just about all social welfare spending as a principled good. Laid against his internal socialist template, these expenditures seem like tiny steps toward a more just and comprehensive form of government largesse.
Ostensibly, the huge spending in the stimulus bill was designed to jump-start the economy with “shovel-ready” programs. The relative absence of Franklin Roosevelt–style public works programs from the actual bill has been cited as proof that the president is not a socialist.9 Yet the real focus of stimulus spending does more to move us toward socialism than temporary public works projects ever could. Obama’s public-employee-union allies directed stimulus spending to bailouts for state governments that had gotten themselves into the same fiscal mess as Illinois.10 Was this a one-time affair or a difficult-to-undo precedent for federal bail-outs of profligate states?
For Obama’s critics, the president’s programs and proposals con- stitute an effort to fundamentally alter the contours of America’s free enterprise system. Some of the president’s supporters are more than happy to agree, while others take Obama on his own terms, as a center-left pragmatist merely tinkering with the system to keep it in working order. Whatever your view, it’s critical to keep in mind that we are only at the beginning of this story. Community organizers in the Mid-west Academy tradition are, above all, strategic. They do not lay out comprehensive wish lists, much less the ideological rationale behind their demands. That would scare people away. Whatever a Midwest Academy–style organizer lays on the table is only the partial revelation of a long-term strategic plan.
Organizers are patient. Obama took months to conduct his one- on-ones before beginning his protest campaigns. Obama’s mentors Greg Galluzzo and Jerry Kellman devoted years of effort to increasing attendance and collections at local Catholic churches before moving to co-opt those institutions to their political purposes.11 Obama’s mentors at the Midwest Academy labored for years to shape America’s energy policy, all along intending to form a national network of multi-issue organizations.12 Years down the road, that happened. When Obama was a freshman in the Illinois State Senate, he complained that most legislators were more interested in cutting deals for their district than in developing a comprehensive legislative strategy.13 Obama surely has such a long-term vision for his presidency, and we’ve seen only a part of it.
This strategic patience may be the most important implication of Obama’s socialist organizing background. Whatever we see now is merely the opening gambit of what is sure to be an escalating program of structural economic change. It isn’t just a question of health-care reform, but of the public option after that, and eventually single-payer. Obama’s past statements show that he wants to make these transitions on health care.14 Likewise, Obama’s socialist background strongly suggests the existence of a long-term intention to expand the reach of the government so as to constrain the market and redistribute wealth on other issues as well.
Obama may not be able to turn the United States into Sweden in four, or even eight, years, but he can certainly move us vastly further in that direction than we are now. Whatever the president’s stated tax and regulatory plans are, they are but the beginning. Equally important, how the president will exercise his regulatory authority has everything to do with his ultimate goals and intentions. You’re never going to get a Reaganesque declaration of principles out of Obama. But you don’t have to see into the future to know that having a socialist president is a problem. This president’s past should be enough to sound the warning bell. Electing and re-electing a president is in significant measure a question of trust. By withholding the truth about his radical past, the president has broken that trust.
The left scoffs at the idea that Obama is a socialist, pointing to his escalation in Afghanistan, and his reluctance to push social causes like abortion and same-sex marriage. Even the Congressional Black Caucus complains about Obama’s hesitance to direct benefits to blacks.15 Yet this misses the strategic patience and incrementalism typical of socialist community organizers. Heather Booth made her reputation as a socialist-feminist, yet downplayed hot-button feminist demands for the sake of building her Citizen Action coalition around economic issues. Over time, Booth’s Citizen Action groups experimented with open leftism on foreign policy—with Obama’s mentors Ken Rolling and Alice Palmer leading the charge.16 But Citizen Action never emphasized foreign policy. Economic populism was its focus.
Obama is following this course. The president is focused on health, energy, and banking regulation—classic organizer preoccupations, and the foundation of any successful populist/socialist movement. Obama’s stance toward foreign policy and cultural issues combines quick and easy progressive changes with a still stronger desire to hold political conflict at bay. The point is to keep side issues stable enough to permit Obama to focus on structural changes to the economy.
I take the president’s lengthy decision-making process on the surge in Afghanistan to have been an effort to explore every conceiv- able alternative to escalation. That Obama finally decided to expand that war means that failure to do so would have spelled disaster. If there was a practical way out the war, Obama would have taken it. The last thing Obama needs is blame for a military and national security disaster in the Middle East. In the end, he was more likely to put the issue to rest by escalating than by allowing the Taliban to retake the country.
On gay issues, Obama has done the minimum necessary to keep that restive constituency relatively quiet. Obama favors race-neutral programs that happen to disproportionately benefit minorities as the most politically viable way to promote racial equality. For Obama, slow-motion economic transformation (in a socialist direction) is the key to every other change.
Rather than disproving the claim that Obama is a socialist, these deviations from leftist orthodoxy reveal a president clever enough to preserve his political capital for the structural changes that matter most. Harrington himself could not have done better. Some claim that Obama’s decision to bring advisors known and trusted by Wall Street into his administration—like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner—is further proof that the socialism charge is nonsense.17 Yet incremental socialists aren’t interested in destroying the system at a blow. Why spook the markets and provoke a national political showdown by appointing a hard-left economic team? That would discredit socialism before it got its foot in the door. Health-care reform is the priority. So that is where the showdown must be. We saw prominent stealth-socialist organizers like Steve Max and Harry Boyte privately confess to justifying their socialist plans in capitalist terms.18 So, too, a clever socialist president would keep the economy productive, even as he slowly reshaped it from within.
Americans expect to read a politician’s plans and convictions from his speeches and decisions. It’s a reasonable expectation, but it doesn’t apply to the stealth-socialist Alinskyite organizers Obama spent a lifetime working with. Recall S. M. Miller’s comment, also quoted in Chapter Three, on community organizing:
The left agenda is more profound and more disturbing than it is usually wise to tell those whom radical activists wish to help organize, at least at the beginning. This situation leads organizers not infrequently to be in the situation of keeping back, if not disguising, some of their ultimate objectives… . This raises issues of manipulation… . Such organizers are not fully representing themselves to others.
Harry Boyte and the leaders of the Midwest Academy favored a blending of communitarian and populist language to whip up a movement controlled by socialists from behind.19 The communitarian language seems harmless—highlighting themes of civic responsibility and public stewardship. Yet it’s a cover for socialism.
Does Obama use the same sort of language? He does. At the height of the 2008 presidential campaign, Mark Schmitt, executive editor of the liberal American Prospect, published a piece describing Obama’s “communitarian populism.”20 Schmitt was talking about Obama’s calls for shared sacrifice. When it comes to national challenges, says Obama, “We’re all in this together.” Schmitt continues:
Forced by Tom Brokaw to define health care as either a right or a responsibility, Obama called it, “a right,” and said his health plan would make it one. But on his own, that’s rarely how he talks about health care or economic fairness—both are wrapped up in a sense of national purpose, not individual rights… . Obama doesn’t talk about “responsibility” in McCain’s sense—you’re responsible for your health and if you get sick and can’t afford it, tough—but a deeper responsibility to engage and build the kind of system or order that achieves these goals.
So Obama’s communitarian language works to disguise and soften his controversial extension of “rights” into the economic realm. At the same time, Obama’s warm and fuzzy communitarian pitch would be suited to building a movement receptive to openly socialist goals at some future time. If it were only a question of Obama’s communitarian-populist language, we couldn’t say much about his underlying ideology. It’s the confluence of Obama’s language with his extensive ties to the Midwest Academy that gives pause.
Obama wants to seize and shape America’s populist impulses. In a July 2009 interview with Business Week, Obama said: “Ordinary Americans right now, they feel at least as cynical about business as they are about government. And part of my motivation here is to channel what is going to be, I think, a lot of populist energy in a constructive way that does not end up preventing us from continuing to be the most dynamic, innovative economy.”21 Obama wants to channel populist anger at Wall Street toward his expansive vision of the regulatory state. A cynic might also see in this remark a warning to America’s businesses: How I choose to “channel” populism depends on how strongly you oppose me.
Communitarian populism adds to Obama’s appeal, but personal charisma was the key to his success. That is a problem for the president, and a complication in the classic community-organizer game plan. As far back as the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference of 1983, Obama encountered the emerging socialist strategy of synergy between grassroots populism and electoral politics—the strategy outlined in Peter Dreier’s 1980 “Socialist Incubators” article.22 In this model, community organizers enter politics, riding on the enthusiasm and shoe leather of their grassroots constituencies. Once in office, these politicians continue to act as organizers: channeling resources to the community groups that supported them and crafting legislation designed to energize populist movements, which they can lead in an ever-more-socialist direction.
This describes Obama’s career. His history of cooperation with ACORN provided a ready source of campaign volunteers. At Project Vote and in Springfield, Obama worked closely with ACORN and the Midwest Academy. So Obama’s career embodied the strategic vision outlined by socialist organizers like Peter Dreier, Harry Boyte, and Heather Booth. When Obama ran for president, however, the charismatic tail started wagging the communitarian-populist dog. Obama’s celebrity status became a force unto itself, and even from Obama’s point of view, that was not an unmixed good.
The problem was that Obama’s charisma was independent of—and even in tension with—his left-wing populist politics. Much of Obama’s appeal rested on the excitement of participating in the election of America’s first black president. In an era of polarization, the election of the first black president seemed to portend a broader unification of opposites. Obama highlighted this theme by promising a post-partisan presidency. To some, the “we’re all in this together” communitarian themes—originally designed as code for progressive politics—sounded instead like a promise of centrist compromise and consensus. Obama encouraged this ambiguity during the campaign, until the breadth of his ambition as president forced the contradiction into the open.
This conflict between pragmatic reconciliation and polarizing partisanship is familiar to community organizers. Obama experienced the shift himself during his early organizing. Recall the fiasco of Obama’s big asbestos meeting, at which Chicago Housing Authority head Zirl Smith refused to be “pinned” into a yes-or-no answer and ended up being chased to his car as a result. This had more to do with intentionally polarizing tactics than Obama was willing to admit in Dreams from My Father. After the meeting, Obama lost some supporters, several of whom questioned his methods and motives. This is a common experience for Gamaliel organizers—the result of the contradiction between their appealing pragmatic veneer, on the one hand, and their radical and intentionally polarizing goals and tactics, on the other.23
The early history of the Obama administration played out the usual conflict between the Alinskyite organizer’s soothing and pragmatic initial self-presentation and his polarizing tactics. Actually, the problem emerged during the 2008 campaign, although not everyone noticed. When the Obama campaign deployed classic Alinskyite “targeting” tactics—attempting to keep critics like myself and David Freddoso off the radio—McCain supporters were up in arms.24 These attempts to block the speech of critics were widely publicized in conservative media outlets, yet were virtually ignored by the mainstream press. They would hardly have been compatible with the image of Obama as a force for fairness and reconciliation.
Thus, early on, conservatives began to look upon Obama’s benign self-presentation with suspicion, while the rest of the country remained caught up in his charisma. The lesson the Obama camp drew at the time was that, even at the national level, Alinskyite targeting tactics work. The truth is more complicated. In a compliant media environment, Alinskyite targeting works. Yet once the country as a whole witnessed an avowedly post-partisan president repeatedly resorting to polarizing Alinskyite tactics, Obama paid a political price.
The trouble started at the opening of the health-care campaign. When that video montage showed Obama and Jan Schakowsky confessing plans to use apparently limited health-care reforms as a path to single-payer, the White House struck back with its own videos, dismissing the offending clips as “out of context” and providing a website where “fishy” rumors about the president’s plans could be reported.25 The president’s case was weak. His representatives never explained why the video clips were unfair or inaccurate, and the call to report neighbors with uncongenial political views to a government website provoked a wave of criticism. At the time, the White House explicitly pointed to their aggressive rumor-fighting operations during the 2008 campaign as a model for the health-care push. Now, however, Alinskyite tactics were backfiring.
Targeting operations continued. Rush Limbaugh was singled out and attacked, to polarize the country around a powerful enemy whom the White House believed would emerge from the battle with less support than the president.26 FOX News was the next big target.27 Yet the White House “war on FOX News,” like its campaign against Limbaugh, only undermined the president’s standing as a figure of reconciliation. When the Tea Party movement received similar treatment, the country was well and truly polarized.
A particularly interesting bit of Alinskyite targeting came when the president took the unusual step of denouncing a Supreme Court decision in his State of the Union Address—with the justices present, yet unable to respond. Although Chief Justice Roberts called the setting of the president’s attack “very troubling,” the administration in no way backed off, or even tried to soften what many considered a breach of decorum.28 On the contrary, the justices who ruled that campaign finance laws improperly limited free speech had been targeted to serve as the “enemy” in a populist battle against corporations. In classic community organizer fashion, the administration has tossed aside its facade of pragmatism in favor of populist polarization. If this has had a political cost, community organizers willingly and regularly pay the price.
So it’s no coincidence that a president who won on a promise of post-partisan reconciliation has polarized the country at least as sharply as his predecessors—arguably more so. That is how community organizers operate. The real challenge is to make out the larger plan behind Obama’s targeting operations. For socialist organizers, polarization isn’t just a tactic—it’s a strategy. That a former organizer like Obama is polarizing the country is unsurprising. Yet his goal is not simply to heighten existing divisions, but to reshape the divisions themselves. Before we consider the president’s plans, however, let’s complete our review of the Obama administration’s early moves in light of the president’s past.
During his first run for public office, Obama articulated his community-organizer theory of politics:
What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer … as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? … We must form grassroots structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable.29
Here Obama suggests something more ambitious than either pragmatic problem-solving or brokering compromises among competing groups. Obama hopes to change the way voters think, shifting the frame of public debate into terms he would set. Necessarily, Obama’s voter “education” drive would have to flow from some ideological matrix, and in this 1995 profile—which highlights the future president’s ACORN ties—that ideology is obviously far to the left.
Perhaps to distance Obama from his radical roots, friendly biographers have argued that he eventually abandoned his vision of the politician-as-organizer. In a widely noticed profile, for example, New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza emphasized that the local “issue committees” Obama hoped to form when he first entered the Illinois state legislature never actually got off the ground.30 For Lizza, this shows Obama abandoning the link between grassroots organizing and politics. Yet Obama never abandoned his original vision. Under Obama’s guidance, the Woods Fund encouraged grassroots support for his legislative agenda. ACORN and the Midwest Academy were prominent among the groups Obama funded (with Bill Ayers’s help) while in office.31 Obama worked closely with these radical (actually, socialist) groups throughout his career. If there was any reason Obama took pains not to leave a paper trail during his time in the Illinois State Senate, his continued cooperation with these radical organizers was almost certainly it.
In 2008, Obama captured the nomination through grassroots organizing in the caucus states. Obama’s organizer training camp was run by his buddies from the Gamaliel Foundation and Midwest Academy. Since he became president, Obama’s allies have converted his campaign group, Organizing for Obama, into Organizing for America, with the intention of building a grassroots movement to support his legislative program. Midwest Academy co-founder Robert Creamer, in his continuing commentary on the Obama administration at the Huffington Post, rightly highlights this aspect of the president’s strategy.32 Creamer himself conducted training at Camp Obama, while the president’s grassroots strategy was crafted by the Midwest Academy’s favorite theorist, Harry Boyte. It’s true that the deflation of Obama’s charisma in the aftermath of his polarizing first year or so in office has reduced the effectiveness of Organizing for America. Yet the president still hopes to jump-start a grassroots movement that will support his program from below, while he presses his legislation from above.
As part of that project, the president included an extraordinary $1.4 billion in his 2011 budget to create a massive force of government-funded community organizers. Supposedly, these AmeriCorps recruits would be volunteers. In fact, they are to receive the equivalent of more than ten thousand dollars apiece in benefits.33 Congressional Democrats managed to turn back Republican efforts to prohibit the flow of taxpayer dollars to groups “engaged in political or legislative advocacy.”34 So Obama has been pouring massive government funding into an array of left-wing pressure groups. The aim is to boost his political program while creating an army of young adherents in the process. In the meantime, the Obama administration fired AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin for trying to rein in funding abuses.35 It is as if the leaders of ACORN and the Midwest Academy had again been handed the keys to the VISTA program—but with a guarantee of freedom from charges of politicized abuse, not to mention vastly more funding than even they could have imagined. So the grassroots component of Obama’s strategy remains.
What about other elements of late-twentieth-century strategies for socialization of the economy “from below,” like worker ownership of businesses and the transformation of corporate structures through public representation on boards of directors? This question brings us around to the Obama administration’s auto bailout.
Peter Dreier’s 1980 piece “Socialist Incubators” featured an illustration depicting a socialist utopia in which a “U.S. Motors” corporation would be controlled by a combination of auto workers and representatives from community organizations.36 Obama’s organizing mentor in Dreams from My Father, “Marty Kaufman,” hoped to save a dying steel mill by transferring ownership to workers acting in coalition with community groups. Kaufman yearned for a battle in which he would force reluctant banks to finance the deal.37 President Obama has bailed out two auto companies, General Motors and Chrysler, not only by taking control, but by granting ownership stakes on favorable terms to the United Auto Workers Union (to the great disadvantage of private bondholders). No community organizations were involved in the takeover. Yet through pull with the administration, environmental groups now exercise considerable de facto influence over the auto companies.
Is this socialist nationalization or, as the president’s defenders argue, a temporary measure designed to return two wounded titans of free enterprise to sound footing? I do think the GM and Chrysler bailouts reveal the president’s socialist inclinations. Yet the program of American socialism has changed. In the post-sixties era, America’s democratic socialists de-emphasized nationalization and focused instead on controlling businesses from the ground up. The Corporate Democracy Act, supported by both the Midwest Academy and the Democratic Socialists of America, would have left America’s corporate structure in place, while handing practical control to citizen-representatives charged with taking factors like environmental protection into at least as much account as profit.38 The stealthily socialist New Party favored similar legislation, as well as a “demanding federal code of social responsibility” designed to reward corporations that hew to government guidelines with “most-favored-company” status.39
Without a Corporate Democracy Act, and without a formal cor- porate code of “social responsibility,” the Obama administration is nonetheless well on its way toward modifying America’s capitalist system in the direction outlined by the president’s socialist mentors. Although the federal government will likely surrender direct control of General Motors and Chrysler, all three big auto companies—and many other businesses besides—are increasingly subject to de facto control by unions and environmental groups through a combination of government pressure, federal loans, and implicit promises of future bailouts. Companies willing to toe the administration line are being lured in with what could be described as “most-favored-company” treatment. Commentators on both the right and the left have noticed the systemic shift this represents. What few understand is that, even without formal nationalization, this is the program of modern American socialism.
In fact, the financial reform bill passed by the president in July of 2010 contains a controversial “proxy access” provision that embodies the program of the socialist-inspired Corporate Democracy Act of 1980. That provision grants unions, environmental groups, and other activists added power to place their own representatives on the boards of directors of every corporation in the United States.40 Here President Obama is actively carrying out the incremental, grassroots socialist strategy of his Midwest Academy mentors. The connection is direct. Midwest Academy founder Heather Booth who now leads the leftist group Americans for Financial Reform, has lobbied heavily for the proxy access provision.41
What, exactly, would a “democratic socialist” America look like? You’re never going to get a straight answer to that question. Michael Harrington used to say that his group had vision and strategy, but no “finished blueprint” for society.42 Harrington’s vagueness had multiple sources. As leader of competing socialist factions, defining an end-point would have invited in-fighting. A fully articulated socialist vision might also have alienated moderate sympathizers. Some socialists were more enamored than others of the shift away from nationalization and central planning. Labor leader William Winpisinger allied with Heather Booth of the Midwest Academy to push an organizer-based grass-roots socialist strategy, yet we know that Winpisinger’s ultimate vision was heavily statist. The Midwest Academy’s favorite theorist, Harry Boyte, was more serious about developing a socialism reliant on community organizations as an alternative to the classic model.43
These differences aside, there is a statist dynamic built into even the most grassroots version of socialism. ACORN drove the rise of subprime lending, yet had to combine street-level demonstrations with pressure from Congress and the Clinton administration to get its way.44 For years, banks incorporated ACORN’s local housing arms into their subprime lending programs as a regrettable but necessary cost of doing business. With the subprime collapse, the federal government took Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into “conservatorship.” What began as a series of informal restrictions on capitalism engineered by a grassroots socialist front group ended up as an extraordinarily expensive act of nationalization.
Many of the socialist organizers who supported the Corporate Democracy Act and rigorous “social responsibility” mandates likely conceived of these proposals as “non-reformist reforms.” While purporting to leave the core structures of capitalism in place, changes of this sort carry the seeds of the system’s destruction. Businesses forced to downplay the profit motive in favor of an expansively defined “public interest” will fail, yielding still more government intervention, and eventually formal or de facto state control.
That dynamic is at work in the auto company bailouts. The editors of the conservative National Review magazine have argued that through a combination of bailouts, billions of dollars in “green loans,” implicit threats of further interference, and implicit promises of future bailouts, the Obama administration is exercising effective control of all three big automakers, with or without formal ownership. (I am a contributing editor at National Review Online, but had no role in the writing of this editorial.) The real analogy to the auto bailouts, argues National Review, is the government’s longstanding relationship to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.45 These “government-sponsored enterprises” are privately owned, yet carry out a publicly mandated mission, and enjoy implicit financial guarantees as well. Just as the federal government was able to force Fannie and Freddie to meet subprime lending quotas, even without a formal ownership stake, federal pressure is now forcing Detroit to maintain expensive union benefits, while manufacturing “green cars” of questionable commercial appeal. If these public purposes undercut the automakers’ bottom line, the federal government is implicitly on the hook for more bailouts—continuing the cycle of control. So even apparently temporary bailouts function as nationalization-by-other-means.
Other conservative observers have characterized the Obama administration’s use of rewards and punishments to push corporations toward preferred behavior as a shift in the character of capitalism. Matthew Continetti at the conservative Weekly Standard calls the administration’s affinity for bailouts “the birth of a new social system.”46 Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), says that companies “increasingly compete for government favoritism, not for consumer choice or preference.”47 The president’s cap-and-trade energy plan would increase the effect, by allowing the administration to hand out the vast bulk of emission allowances or credits. That would create huge benefits for politically favored companies and major problems for any corpora- tion foolhardy enough to buck the administration line on unions, the environment, or anything else. What is this if not de facto “most- favored-company” status?48
The shift toward a grassroots socialist strategy in the eighties was largely a response to the loss of traction for leftist ideas at the federal level during the Reagan years. Once community organizing became American leftism’s last redoubt (along with the nation’s colleges and universities, of course), it made sense to work for socialist ends through new means. With a community organizer as president, socialist strategy is free to resume a somewhat more statist character. Even so, the administration prefers to transform the system indirectly, without formal nationalization, when possible. That helps deflect politically explosive charges of socialism, although socialism is emerging by degrees in any case.
It’s hardly surprising that conservatives see the administration’s aggressive regulatory stance as a disturbing shift in the character of the free enterprise system. What about liberals? While the verdict is mixed, there is a surprising willingness on the part of some to acknowledge that the Obama administration is transforming the capitalist system in fundamental ways—perhaps into something resembling Scandinavian-style socialism or “social democracy.”
In a May 2009 article entitled, “Nudge-ocracy: Barack Obama’s new theory of the state,” Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber, editors of the liberal New Republic, make the case that Obama’s economic policy is nothing more than a gentle shift leftward.49 “Obama has no intention of changing the nature of American capitalism,” Foer and Scheiber assure us. The authors highlight Obama’s avoidance of ideological labels, as well as his campaign stance as a budget-balancing “green-eye-shade pragmatist.” Rather than controlling the economy through heavy-handed regulation, Foer and Scheiber say, Obama plans to “inculcate desirable habits like saving and philanthropy through a series of gentle “nudges.” If, for example, seniors are too confused to enroll in one of many available prescription drug plans, the federal government will automatically enroll them in the plan that seems right for them, based on their drug-buying histories. Seniors will still be free to switch plans, but the government will step in to make sure that confusion doesn’t keep seniors from taking advantage of any plan at all.
Seemingly harmless as described, the “nudge” theory is more intrusive than advertised. The trouble begins when Foer and Scheiber try to explain Obama’s most ambitious economic plans as a “massively” scaled-up version of the relatively unintrusive incentives they use as examples. So according to Foer and Scheiber, the health-care public option merely gives private insurance companies a gentle, competitive “nudge.” Similarly, say Foer and Scheiber, cap and trade non-intrusively arranges corporate incentives in such a way as to reflect unacknowledged “social costs” of fossil fuels. There is, however, an uncomfortable resemblance between the “social cost” calculations of cap and trade and the New Party’s “demanding federal code of social responsibility” enforced through “most-favored-company” status. Similarly, if one-time socialist activist, Midwest Academy associate, and current Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky is to be believed, the health-care public option is a device designed, not to gently “nudge” private insurance companies, but to put them out of business.50 And already, the seemingly modest nudge principle is giving way to sweeping and intrusive changes. In April of 2010, a New York assemblyman proposed a law presuming consent for organ donation from all New Yorkers unless they explicitly opt out.
One begins to suspect that even Foer and Scheiber don’t quite believe their own gauzy portrait of the Obama administration’s moderation. This is how they conclude:
The political point is, in the end, difficult to overstate. Obama has groped toward a form of liberal activism that is eminently saleable in this country—both with the average voter, easily spooked by charges of creeping statism, and the constellation of political interests in Washington.
Foer and Scheiber’s article is sufficiently filled with insightful qualifications that they barely seem to convince even themselves that Obama’s ambitious economic policies are nothing but a series of gentle, capitalist- friendly nudges. Yet the political importance of Obama’s preference for undermining the market by indirect means is indeed “difficult to overstate.” The nudge-ocracy theory is really about political cover for an ambitious statist program.
In a courteous rejoinder to his colleagues Foer and Scheiber, New Republic senior editor John B. Judis does an excellent job of unveiling the real import of Obama’s economic policies.51 Recall that Judis is a character in our story, a former editor of Socialist Revolution who helped lead a faction out of the revolutionary New American Movement to produce a periodical, In These Times, designed to build support for an explicitly socialist electoral movement in the United States.52 Judis argues that, whatever Obama’s intention, the actual effect of his policies will be to “change American capitalism in fundamental ways.” As for Obama’s supposed “nudges,” says Judis:
They are an effort at national planning. And it doesn’t matter, incidentally, whether the administration tries to get its way through manipulating the market or through outright control of investment; what matters is that it is using its government power to change the American economy in basic ways.
Judis goes on to highlight the growth of the public sector under Obama’s budgets, arguing: “The American relationship of state to economy will begin to look more like that of France and Sweden, whose non-crisis budgets total over 45 percent of GDP.”
In an August 2009 follow-up piece, Judis goes on to analyze Obama’s health-care-reform proposals, his limits on executive compensation, and financial regulations as policies designed to fundamentally alter the capitalist system.53 For Judis, all of these policies are implicitly driven by a politics of “class struggle.” Without venturing a guess as to how much Judis’s early socialist convictions have changed over the years, his analytical framework clearly borrows heavily from his past Marxism. Judis, who emerges from the same post-sixties socialist setting that shaped Obama, readily identifies the president’s economic policies as transformational and, implicitly, incrementally socialist in character.
The most important clue of all to what the Obama administration may be up to comes from a fascinating analysis by Huffington Post political editor Thomas B. Edsall. Published in April 2010 by The Atlantic, Edsall’s article, “The Obama Coalition,” argues that the electorate is shifting toward a form of class-based political conflict unseen in America for decades.54 As a rule, says Edsall, economic growth reduces competition between America’s “haves” and “have-nots.” Yet, as the economic downturn lingers, spending battles have increasingly turned into zero-sum struggles between taxpayers and tax beneficiaries. Edsall adds that the rapid rise in the proportion of relatively less-well-off blacks and Hispanics in the voting population accentuates this class division, by increasing the electoral power of the have-nots.
Edsall argues that as a result of these changes, a substantial political constituency for a European-style socialism, or “social democracy,” is now developing in the United States. He points to the recent Gallup poll in which surprisingly large proportions of Democrats, liberals, and minorities took a positive view of socialism. These socialist-friendly voters, says Edsall, will transform the Democratic Party of the future—and already constitute the core of Obama’s coalition. Edsall adds that the huge expansion of public-sector unions means that for the first time, a majority of the American labor movement is now directly dependent on taxpayer dollars. Ideologically motivated and relatively well-to-do college-educated professionals, Edsall says, make up the last critical segment of the Obama coalition. (Although Edsall doesn’t make the point himself, it’s worth noting that this last group emerges from America socialist-friendly elite universities.)
Back in 1983, when Harold Washington swept Chicago’s machine aside, inspired America’s socialists, and drew a young Barack Obama into community organizing, his urban coalition was made up of the same combination of blacks, Hispanics, and leftist whites that Edsall now identifies as a force to be reckoned with nationally.55 America’s socialists were far too optimistic in 1983 about the potential for Harold Washington–style coalitions to draw socialist-friendly candidates into the mainstream of American politics. Yet as the nation’s demography has shifted and its economic circumstances have declined, it has become possible to imagine a Harold Washington–style, socialist-tinged political coalition taking power nationally. This has been Obama’s aim all along.
How can Obama best help push America in the direction outlined by Edsall? Here is where the political strategy outlined by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven comes into play—less their infamous “break the bank” strategy than their plan to polarize and realign the American electorate along class lines.56 Obama has already made a good run at breaking the bank. I don’t believe his aim in enlarging America’s deficit is to provoke an economic crisis, however. Another economic meltdown would only be blamed on him. Yet I do think President Obama is at least flirting with the financial dangers of a huge deficit so as to stampede the country into a value added tax—and the permanently enlarged European-style welfare state that goes with it. There is real risk to this strategy, even though the president surely wants to avoid a full-scale economic crisis on his watch. In any case, this part of Obama’s long-term vision is already understood by many. The accompanying realignment strategy, however, has not been widely remarked upon. Yet a risky but winnable bid for fundamental political realignment would explain the chances Obama has been taking.
A play to polarize and realign the electorate along class lines, thus radicalizing the Democratic Party and pushing it toward “social democracy,” fits nicely with Obama’s entitlement-based strategy. Not coincidentally, this was the ambitious rationale behind Cloward and Piven’s original voter registration drive. Their aim was not simply to register voters. The real hope was that by encouraging openly anti-Reagan efforts by government employees to register voters on welfare lines, the left might provoke an intense Republican reaction. According to the plan, Republicans would be goaded by intentionally politicized tactics into restricting voter registration at welfare offices, thus kicking off an angry movement of the poor. In Cloward and Piven’s mind, this second coming of the civil rights movement would send low-income and minority voter registration through the roof, thus energizing and radicalizing the Democratic Party. The Cloward-Piven registration strategy dovetailed nicely with Michael Harrington’s plan to provoke a class-based realignment of the parties by moving economic policy left, thus driving business interests toward the Republicans, while more than making up for the Democrats’ losses with an inflow of radicalized unionists and the poor. Obama’s funneling of stimulus money toward public employee unions can easily be seen as part of this larger plan.
These are the ideas Obama would have drunk in at those early Socialist Scholars Conferences. They also constitute the strategy behind Project Vote, which maintained a close working relationship with the Cloward and Piven for years. Obama was deeply tied to this socialist network, and devoted himself to an in-depth study of its theoretical underpinnings. In fact, his statements as head of Illinois Project vote came directly out of this framework.
All of this suggests that when President Obama says, “Go for it” to Republicans who hope to repeal his health-care-reform law, he means it. Those who already see Obama as a socialist tend to think of his insistence on backing health-care reform in the face of collapsing political support as the suicidal impulse of a true ideologue. It’s more likely that Obama has a long-term class-based realignment strategy in mind. Obama would love the Republicans to try to take away the health care he’s offered to millions of uninsured. Taking a leaf from the Cloward-Piven handbook, Obama hopes that a Republican campaign for repeal will ignite a political movement of the poor that will energize and radicalize the Democratic Party. If the president loses a segment of the business interests that initially supported him as a moderate pragmatist, so be it. To a degree, the president’s ambitious regulatory projects have already pushed the business community away. In Edsall’s telling, however, Obama has the demographic makings of a class-based strategy that would allow him to ride out that storm.
In short, President Obama’s long-term political plan is a replay of Michael Harrington’s socialist realignment strategy. Obama’s goal is to polarize the country along class lines, with Republicans marked out as the aggressors. Harrington’s bet was that, once the have-nots began to act as a unified class, they would naturally gravitate to socialism. Whatever the short-term political risks of this strategy, the potential long-term gains would be worth it, in Obama’s mind. If the Republicans take power in the mid-term congressional elections, that only sets up the ultimate battle during the presidential race of 2012. With repeal of health-care reform and the rest of the Obama agenda on the line, the president hopes that a newly energized base of public employee unions, minorities, and the poor will overmatch the coalition of “haves” trying to take their new benefits away. At this point, the relatively dormant legions of Organizing for America and the vast new government-funded army of AmeriCorps volunteers would spring into action. America’s budding social-democratic movement would come to life.
Ultimately, the success of this strategy depends upon blue-collar workers voting according to what the left considers to be their economic interests, rather than on cultural issues. The hope is that this can be accomplished in a country increasingly polarized along class lines—with a newly expansive government allied with labor.
Does this mean Republicans ought to abandon their efforts to repeal and roll back the Obama agenda? Not at all. But it does help explain the political thinking behind the risks the president is taking.
Here, Peter Dreier’s transformational strategy based on the irreversible expansion of entitlements converges with the political realignment plans of Harrington, Cloward, and Piven. All of these socialist strategists worked together to refine and coordinate their ideas at the Socialist Scholars Conferences of the eighties.57 (Dreier was an advisor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.) In the end, all the plans in question depend in some way upon riling up the have-nots by provoking the haves into taking something away from them (usually taxes pocketed from the haves to begin with).
On reflection, Greg Galluzzo’s Alinsky-inspired polarizing tactics are a variation on the same strategic theme. Targeted politicians and businessmen are compelled to either fork over expensive goodies, or openly refuse to do so—thus enraging the community group and giving it the force of a movement. So President Obama’s politically “suicidal” push for health care may actually have been crazy like a fox. At any rate, I’d wager that’s how he sees it.