5
Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism

At a press conference shortly after the 2008 election, President-elect Obama was asked if he was appointing to his administration too many Washington insiders and veterans of the Clinton administration, including Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Not at all, he replied. The important thing was that the change the American people had voted for would be infused into his administration from the top down. Le changement c’est moi!—I am the Change, he said in effect. “Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost. It comes from me,” he explained. “That’s my job, is to provide the vision in terms of where we are going, and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing.” By change he meant not only the promised departures from George W. Bush’s public policies, the fresh “ten-point programs” any new administration could be counted on to produce, but the changement radical he had promised: “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

He didn’t lack confidence, of course. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speech writers,” he reportedly told an aide earlier that year. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m . . . a better political director than my political director.” Four years before, as he was beginning his epic rise, he assured a Chicago Tribune reporter that “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play at this level. I got game.” LeBron James has plenty of game but, until 2012, no NBA championship rings, so Obama was actually underestimating himself. He’s proved he has more game, politically speaking, than LeBron. Three years into his presidency, he agreed to be interviewed by correspondent Steve Kroft on CBS’s 60 Minutes. The television show excerpted the interview, but the whole thing appeared on the Web in a 60 Minutes Overtime video. Left out of the broadcast interview was the President’s comparison of himself with his predecessors.

The issue here is not going to be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president—with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln—just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do.

He meant to be modest, tried to be modest—that darn economy—but it just wasn’t in him. With the “possible exceptions” of LBJ, FDR, and Lincoln, his first two years stack up against any president’s—certainly against George Washington’s or Harry Truman’s or Ronald Reagan’s, say. It’s hardly news that politicians tend to be egotistical, but this isn’t garden-variety egotism. Many conservatives would call it narcissism or even megalomania, but that’s too glib. What moves Obama is closer to a form of liberal magnanimity, the desire to do, and the ability to do, the great things that history allegedly demands. He sincerely compares himself to LBJ, FDR, and Lincoln, strives to emulate them as he understands them, and seeks to display his greatness of liberal soul in his transformative speeches and actions. The surface is the key to the depths in this case, as in so many others. It may be that he falls short of his own standards, or that his standards are self-contradictory or otherwise flawed—both criticisms are true, the latter more damning. Still, it would be both uncharitable and unwise to pass over his own understanding of himself when one is trying to come to grips with his presidency and with the unhealthy state of liberalism today.1

Obama has a century of modern American liberalism to draw on, and in a strange way his administration has recapitulated that history. He campaigned on Hope and Change, attempting, like Woodrow Wilson (and later JFK), through soaring speechmaking to awaken the idealism of a generation and resume the forward march of progressive politics. Like FDR, Obama exploited an ongoing economic collapse to pass far-reaching regulatory reforms, boost federal stimulus spending, and enact a major new entitlement program that, not incidentally, attempted to fulfill the right to adequate medical care Roosevelt had proclaimed in 1944. And like Lyndon Johnson’s administration, only much sooner, Obama faced an electoral rebellion against his signature policies that threatened to eject him and his party from power and to discredit liberalism itself. All in one term, really just two years. The acceleration and compression of events are remarkable. His administration launched a fourth wave of liberal reform to add to the storied greatness, in liberals’ eyes, of the first three. But the wave crested so abruptly that it raised questions about its very existence, much less its significance. The wave was real enough in legislative and electoral terms, and coming after almost thirty years of domestic politics (and foreign policy, though that’s a more complicated story) conducted in the shadow of Ronald Reagan, it surprised liberals as well as conservatives. Whether it has changed liberalism, and if so, how that change may affect liberal hopes and conservative fears, will soon become pressing questions, regardless of what happens in 2012. President Obama’s tenure thus poses the test of history in concentrated form: is liberalism on its last legs, or about to be reborn?

Sinister Visions

When Wilson injected the leadership bug into American politics, he set off far-reaching changes in the way presidents see their job and their relation to the people. In the nineteenth century, presidents rarely addressed the public except on a ceremonial occasion like Inauguration Day or informally when traveling around the country “on tour.” The latter kind of speeches and even most of the inaugural addresses avoided politics in the sense of policy agendas or partisan appeals; the president talked about the nature of republican government, the genius of the Constitution, and perhaps the general goals of his administration. What we refer to as the State of the Union address, then called simply the president’s Annual Message, was delivered in person by Presidents Washington and Adams, but from Jefferson through Taft was downgraded—upgraded, actually—to a written message austerely sent over to Congress. Wilson broke that tradition, among many others, and resumed the practice of delivering the message in person to a joint session of Congress. Jefferson had given up that grand oratorical occasion because to him it seemed a kingly affectation. One could say that Wilson resurrected it for the same reason, that it focused attention on the “personal force” of the man who was the president-leader. (Similarly, presidential candidates didn’t appear at their party’s nominating convention and so didn’t give highly partisan acceptance speeches until FDR, who broke with that custom in 1932.) The numbers tell the story: Washington gave, on average, 3 informal popular speeches a year (not counting the formal Annual Message), Jefferson 5, Lincoln 16, Grant 3, and McKinley 65—the latter’s verbosity probably due to the railroads’ spread, which allowed for whistle-stop tours. Bear in mind, too, that many of these informal speeches were only a few minutes long. Washington’s Farewell Address, by the way, was printed in the newspapers, not delivered as a speech at all. Presidents in the nineteenth century recommended policies to Congress, of course, but these proposals were conveyed via written presidential messages rather than through public speeches or press conferences. As Jeffrey Tulis writes, these customs guaranteed that “rhetoric to Congress would be public (available to all) but not thereby popular (fashioned for all).”2

How extraordinary the formality and chasteness of presidential rhetoric in those days appears next to the nonstop chatter of today’s presidential blabbermouths. Presidents of old spoke so infrequently and guardedly out of respect for the office and for the character of republican government. They were loath to be seen as intimidating Congress, their coequal branch, by appealing over congressmen’s heads to the people; they refused to compromise the constitutional independence of the executive by directly courting popularity; and fearing majority tyranny as the bane of republics, they hewed to practices and customs that nipped demagoguery in the bud. (They also lacked radio, television, and the Internet, of course, but the change in doctrine preceded the technological upgrades.) Wilson’s call for the president to lead his party and the nation required that he lead public opinion, and there was no way of doing that without speaking to the public directly and passionately. And often: thus was born “the rhetorical presidency,” as political scientists now call it. Teddy Roosevelt pioneered it, but Wilson gave it a theoretical justification and made it a routine part of the modern office. Liberal and conservative presidents alike have used it—Ronald Reagan was a master at appealing to the people to put pressure on their representatives. “If you can’t make them see the light, you can at least make them feel the heat,” he used to say. Calvin Coolidge was perhaps the only modern president to resist its blandishments out of principled taciturnity, as opposed to George H. W. Bush’s temperamental reticence and sheer inarticulateness. As a result of trying to interpret and lead public opinion, presidents today have to spend a lot more time listening, or pretending to listen, to the people in town hall forums and the like, and reading public opinion polls. They also must speak so often that they need a team of speechwriters to share the work.3

Wilson thought the rhetorical presidency would encourage an enlightened and active citizenry, as well as facilitate the march of liberal progress. There is copious evidence of the latter, but only scattered signs of the former. Leaders seeking to move the nation must first get its attention, and the easy way to do that is by inflating every social ill into a “crisis” calling for a “solution” to the social “problem” lately become acute. “Crises give birth and a new growth to statesmanship because they are peculiarly periods of action . . . [and] also of unusual opportunity for gaining leadership and a controlling and guiding influence,” noted Wilson. To overcome the separation of powers and the other constitutional stumbling blocks to precipitate action, to keep their leadership going, politicians must try to keep up “at all times,” he emphasized, an atmosphere of crisis. The leader should exploit that atmosphere, responsibly of course, but constantly keeping in mind that “the arguments which induce popular action must always be broad and obvious arguments; only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses.” After interpreting the majority’s felt needs and still unconscious desires, the leader must gain their confidence “by arguments which they can assimilate,” appealing to “elemental” motives, “large and obvious” morality, and policies “purged of all subtlety.”4

Hence the need for visionary rhetoric, for speeches that deal not with circumstances and constitutional logic and principle—as, say, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union, his July 4, 1861 special message to Congress, and other American masterpieces of deliberative rhetoric so dealt—but with images of a more perfect future. Appealing not so much to reason as to imagination, to dreams and visions rather than premises and conclusions, the visionary address is now a liberal staple, an American staple. William Safire, the Nixon aide turned New York Times columnist, christened it the “I-see” speech, or part of a speech. A few examples will suffice. Here is FDR, from his Second Inaugural.

Have we reached the goal of our vision of that 4th day of March 1933? Have we found our happy valley? I see a great nation, upon a great continent, blessed with a great wealth of natural resources. . . . I see a U.S. which can demonstrate that, under democratic methods of government, national wealth can be translated into a spreading volume of human comforts hitherto unknown, and the lowest standard of living can be raised far above the level of mere subsistence. . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out.

And this is Bill Clinton, from his Second Inaugural.

With a new vision of government, a new sense of responsibility, a new spirit of community, we will sustain America’s journey. The promise we sought in a new land we will find again in a land of new promise. In this new land, education will be every citizen’s most prized possession. Our schools will have the highest standards in the world, igniting the spark of possibility in the eyes of every girl and every boy. And the doors of higher education will be open to all. The knowledge and power of the Information Age will be within reach not just of the few, but of every classroom, every library, every child. Parents and children will have time not only to work, but to read and play together. . . . Our streets will echo again with the laughter of our children, because no one will try to shoot them or sell them drugs anymore.

Finally, here is Senator Obama in his commencement address at Knox College in 2005.

So let’s dream. . . . What if we prepared every child in America with the education and skills they need to compete in the new economy? If we made sure that college was affordable for everyone who wanted to go? . . . What if no matter where you worked or how many times you switched jobs, you had health care and a pension that stayed with you always . . . ?

. . . Ten or twenty years down the road, that old Maytag plant could re-open its doors as an Ethanol refinery that turned corn into fuel. Down the street, a biotechnology research lab could open up on the cusp of discovering a cure for cancer. And across the way, a new auto company could be busy churning out electric cars.5

Despite a depressing decline in literary quality and ambition over time—so much for progress—the passages confirm the “vision of the future” as a powerful part of liberal rhetoric. The vision is always of the near future, for good Wilsonian reasons as we’ve seen, but all the more tempting because of its very closeness; and it offers the next installment in straight-ahead progress with, invariably, no complications, trade-offs, unintended consequences, or permanent obstacles posed by human nature and politics. So Obama, for instance, can dangle before the citizens of Galesburg, Illinois, home of Knox College, the prospect not merely of a biotech research lab opening up down the street, but one that is on the verge of curing cancer. Bill Clinton can imagine a world in which the drug trade and presumably drug abuse are no more—not mitigated but abolished. Under the pressures of political expediency, visions of the near future elide easily into dreams of a distant future unconstrained by reality. Whatever is desirable becomes possible, to the political imagination at least; and paradoxically, the better life in America gets, the more fantastic the leader’s promises must become. Increasingly, politics becomes a clash between competing visions of the future, one vision trumping another in an upward spiral of blarney. Dueling dreams don’t leave much room for rational argument: you can’t exactly refute a dream or disprove a vision; you’re asked to believe in it as a matter of faith.6

Prophecies may be exploded if they don’t come true, but to avoid this trap liberals try to keep their prophecies as open-ended and unspecific as possible. A prophecy may be impeached as internally inconsistent or as impossible in the real world, but then, the whole point is to transform the world as it is into the world as it should be, which means the definition of the “real world” is up for grabs. After all, progressive liberals argue that the real world is the historical world, which is still in motion, still ascending to its peak. What we have called “reality” and “human nature” in the past is a reflection of an early and inferior stage of development. Wait till you see what history has in store for mankind! FDR, arguing that Americans were still far away from their “happy valley,” quoted in his Second Inaugural a famous line from the poet and musician Arthur O’Shaughnessy: “Shall we pause now and turn our back upon the road that lies ahead?” Roosevelt asked. “Shall we call this the promised land? Or, shall we continue on our way? For ‘each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth.’ ”7 The verse implies that the leader-dreamer interprets or creates the dream, and the dream creates cities, empires, civilizations, a new reality.

The politics of vision is an open invitation to demagogy, and worse. Empowering the passions and the imagination to set the goals of politics, even if merely for the next stage of its advance, was always to ask for trouble, even when the leader’s vision was supposed to be derived from the majority’s own desires and confined by a set of highly rationalist assumptions about history’s overall direction and meaning. As those assumptions began to soften and dissolve over the course of the twentieth century and especially after the Sixties, the democratic leader was left to temper his vision pragmatically, to dream of a future that “worked.” But since what “worked” depended on what his goals were, and his goals depended on his values, and his values depended on his will, the leader soon found himself invited to create his own vision of the future. Even if he limited himself to willing only what the people wanted, the reason for so limiting himself grew increasingly obscure. In the end the leader, if he was philosophically au courant, would find himself willing democracy for no reason at all except that he preferred it, arbitrarily making it part of his own self-creation.

Something like liberal magnanimity was possible on the basis of the Progressive assumptions: a liberal statesman could do great deeds in furtherance of history’s great ends, or end. His soul may have been a tool of history, a sensitive instrument of the Spirit of the Age, but history nonetheless needed his great passions, longings, and abilities in order to accomplish its purposes. There was something great about Wilson and FDR, including their rarefied qualities of vision and compassion, though these were far from the prideful virtues of the great-souled man celebrated in the original sense of magnanimity. Aristotle’s magnanimous man possessed all the virtues, including preeminently the consciousness of his own moral excellence, like Churchill or Washington. The progressive statesman had all the visions. He didn’t need George Washington’s moral splendor, only energetic imaginative faculties, deep-seated sympathy with the people or the majority, and great ambition; combined, as a practical matter or perhaps as an inference from his imaginative grasp of history’s possibilities, with rhetorical cunning. He was more a Caesar than a Cicero. (Adolf Berle, the Brains Truster, in his letters to Franklin Roosevelt liked to address him as “Caesar.”) As a more narrow and scientific pragmatism began to affect the liberal statesman, his opportunity for greatness shriveled pari passu. He learned to treat life as mere “experiment.” Nowadays, a truly with-it statesman who knows himself to be abandoned by nature, history, and science, and left to the creative resources of his will alone, might be obsessed with making himself great or dominant, but his acts of self-creation would have nothing at all to do with soul, much less greatness of soul. They would be eruptions of will to power.

Hanging over American liberalism, then, is the constant and perhaps increasing possibility that something very undemocratic and illiberal will come out of its impatience with constitutional forms and addiction to visionary leadership. From the beginning, liberalism sought to sap and undermine constitutional morality, the habits of mind and heart appropriate to republican government under the Constitution, and to supplant it with a new morality appropriate to a living constitution. The two overlapped, so some important pillars of the old order could be salvaged—elections, majority rule, civil rights—but even these had to be planted in new ground. To the Founders, these were aspects of or inferences from natural right. To the Progressives, these were elements of the rational State that nurtured human freedom, particularly the last and highest freedom for the full development of the human personality. So long as this historical process was thought to have ended, as we’ve seen, there could be final knowledge, a science, of the State and of human fulfillment. By asserting that we were close to the end but not at the end, and that our approach to history’s end would itself be never-ending, the Progressives had to content themselves with faith in progress, not absolute knowledge of it. The shakier the foundations of the Progressive edifice, the tighter they clung to them. They treated faith as if it were knowledge, relying on visions to lead the way to truth. (Rational skepticism of the Socratic sort was out of the question, because it would question the root idea of progressive history, that human knowledge can be permanent and certain.) Faith in the future opened the door to doubt; and doubt of history’s order, the only authority supposedly left to modern man, opened the door to nihilism.

Fortunately for America, our liberals haven’t marched over the edge—even though they are very fond of marching. They haven’t pursued these tendencies of thought and character to their nihilistic conclusions. Overwhelmingly, they’ve remained democrats and believers in Progress, but at the same time they’ve embraced self-expression and self-creation (one of Obama’s favorite concepts), relativist pragmatism, and the multiplicity of viewpoints in our increasingly globalized, pluralistic, and multicultural society, etc., etc. Inconsistency has its advantages. But the danger of a foolish consistency is always there, especially if disenchanted liberals get egged on by the postmodernists in today’s academy—or if conservative victories scare them into thinking that the Right might actually be on the right side of history. An authoritarian streak already runs through American liberalism, connecting Wilson’s extreme policies at home during World War I—the repression of dissenting speech, the socialist regimentation of the economy—with Franklin Roosevelt’s open invitation to Congress in his First Inaugural to give him emergency powers to handle the Depression. It’s worth recalling the latter incident briefly. FDR first established the ground of the invitation:

. . . if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. . . . With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

He then reassured his listeners that such actions were feasible “under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors,” because the Constitution is so simple, practical, and flexible. Then he drew out the implications.

It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.8

He refrained from raising the logical follow-up: and if Congress refuses to grant me the broad executive power required by the national emergency . . . then what? In the normal understanding, Congress could not grant a president extra executive power, anyway, because he already possesses it all.9 He spoke as if ours were a quasi-parliamentary system, in which Parliament can alter the constitution by mere statute law, offering more power to the president at will. A few whiffs of the ancient Roman dictatorship can be detected, too.10 If that seems an overreaction, imagine it were not Roosevelt but, say, Richard Nixon who was uttering the words. At any rate, the liberal frustration with our constitutional system could only be worsened by the postmodern penchant for willful visions.

Obama is neither an old-fashioned Progressive nor a radical postmodernist. Part of what makes him interesting is how he handles the conflicting strains of his own thought. As a decent man, he believes in justice, and identifies with the civil rights movement’s insistence that Jim Crow was manifestly wrong and the cause of black equality manifestly right. As a self-described progressive, he believes in change, that is, he believes that change is almost always synonymous with improvement, that history has a direction and destination, that it’s crucial to be on the right side of history, not the wrong, and that it’s the leader’s job to discern which is the right side and to lead his people to that promised land of social equality and social justice. Yet he’s skeptical of the simple-minded progressive equation of history with the inevitable triumph of justice; he fears that the foreknowledge of success or the optimistic certitude of victory would detract from the honor of standing up against Jim Crow, for example. It would also create a free rider problem: why risk opposing segregation, if its fall is inevitable? He shares the civil rights movement’s sense that you have to make history, not just wait for it to make you. Yet if men can make history, and history makes morality, then don’t human beings create their own morality? As the product of a very liberal education, alas, Obama never discovered that this quandary could be resolved by returning from history to nature as the unchanging ground of our changing experience, as the foundation of morality and politics. Returning, say, to Lincoln’s and the Founders’ own understanding of themselves, reconsidering their argument for the Declaration’s principles, never occurred to him as a serious possibility. The progressivist assumptions, though decadent, were still too strong. He thought the only way was forward, which as the academy defined it meant toward postmodernism or some form of postmodern pragmatism with its denial that rational Progress or Justice exists—a possibility that he could neither fully embrace nor entirely renounce.

In his capacity as a political leader, Obama’s favorite formulation is that he seeks to “shape” history. “What this generation has proved today,” he declared in Iowa in 2010 after his health care victory, “is that we still have the power to shape history. In the United States of America, it is still a necessary faith that our destiny is written by us, not for us.” A “necessary faith” is not necessarily true, of course; it may simply be a useful or indispensable fiction. And shaping history leaves ambiguous just how much freedom or influence human beings actually have—whether we shape history decisively or only marginally. As the victory celebration continued, he repeated, as if for emphasis, “Our future is what we make it. Our future is what we make it.” That’s the deeper meaning of his slogan, “Yes, we can,” which he elsewhere called “a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.” In itself the phrase sounds like a reply to “No, you can’t.” But was the nay-sayer denying us permission to do something, or doubting our ability to do it? If the former, “Yes, we can” is an assertion of moral right or autonomy; if the latter, it’s an assertion of power or competence. For Obama, in Progressive fashion, the two appear to go together. There’s no right without the social competence to realize it. Pragmatically speaking, the right and the conditions of its realization are virtually indistinguishable. Thus it’s an all-purpose phrase of righteous empowerment. Obama says, “Yes, we can” to slaves, abolitionists, immigrants, western pioneers, suffragettes, the space program, healing this nation, and repairing the world—and that’s in one speech.11 In a strange way, “Yes, we can” takes the place in his thought that “all men are created equal” held in Lincoln’s thought. Insofar as it is America’s national creed, it affirms that America is what we make it at any given time: America stands for the ability to change, openness to change, the willingness to constantly remake ourselves—but apparently for no particular purpose. Jon Stewart, the comedian, caught the dilemma perfectly when, joshing the president over his equivocations on the Ground Zero mosque, he said Obama’s slogan, as amended, now read: “Yes, we can. . . . But should we?”

The country’s saving principle, then, is openness to change. “The genius of our founders is that they designed a system of government that can be changed,” Obama said in 2007 when announcing his presidential candidacy. In short, ours is the kind of country that always says, “Yes, we can” to the principle of “Yes, we can.” We affirm our right to change by always changing; we shape history by reshaping ourselves. Certainly Obama reshaped his own history in his autobiographical Dreams from My Father, the only self-portrait by a future president to admit breezily that it would be departing from “precise chronology,” making “composites” out of people he knew, changing the names of most characters, and fashioning dialogues and events to better explore his personal journey to age thirty-three.12 It’s as if Reagan had written Dutch, Edmund Morris’s ironic biography that inserted himself as a fictional contemporary to ponder Reagan’s mysterious rise. All this leaves Obama’s “vision” in some doubt. The Change part is obvious, but where’s the Hope? What is it we should hope for? He didn’t disguise his agenda in 2008 or since, but to a surprising extent he emphasized the need to hope for change itself, a very stripped-down version of progressivism: Dutch had moved the country so far right that the very possibility of liberalism, of a liberal future, had to be revived. Obama’s speeches during 2007 and early 2008 had a peculiarly abstract or formal quality because he was trying to exhort his followers to believe in hope itself, in the possibility of change that could lead to a change in possibilities for America. Ezra Klein got the message. After the Iowa caucuses he described it in the American Prospect:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history had stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.13

Neither Wilson nor LBJ had faced that problem. Their times were hopeful, inordinately so. Like Franklin Roosevelt in his day, however, Obama thought Americans were in a spiritual depression caused by a maldistribution of wealth and power in society, from which he had to liberate them. Economic recession and despair, which hit hard in late 2008, reinforced the people’s sense of hopelessness, and strengthened Obama’s rhetorical prescriptions.

For all his openness to change, there is one to which Obama consistently answers, “No, we can’t.” Any change that would move the country backward, in his view, is anathema. “What I’m not willing to do is go back to the days when . . . ,” is a phrase that begins many a sentence in his repertory. When dealing with conservatives, his confidence in history’s purpose and beneficence is miraculously raised to almost Wilsonian levels. He may not be exactly sure where history is going, but somehow he knows it’s not going there. A certain impatience and irritability creep into his voice. If people reject his vision, he can’t be a leader—and that makes it personal. His tone turns petulant and he begins to issue orders to follow him, damn it!

Though there are plenty of examples, the most egregious is his so-called Jobs Speech to a joint session of Congress in September 2011. He began by demanding that “we,” meaning the Congress, his coequal branch, “stop the political circus” and do something to help the economy. (The Congress applauded, like the trained seals they appear at these occasions.) He proceeded to outline his American Jobs Act, which contained, he stated sternly, “nothing controversial” and was “a plan that you should pass right away.” In case they missed the point, he upbraided them fifteen more times with commands to “pass this jobs bill” and heavy-handed advice to “pass it right away.” “It’s an outrage,” he said, if they take time to deliberate over a piece of legislation that would “help” the people. Why, there are schools “throughout this country that desperately need renovating. . . . Every child deserves a great school—and we can give it to them, if we act now.” And it won’t cost a dime because this bill, he explained, is “paid for.” He asked Congress right then and there to “increase [the] amount” of cuts that it (or its ill-named supercommittee, created as part of the debt ceiling deal) had promised to make to ease the enormous federal budget deficit, so as to cover the full cost of the Jobs Act. “Paid for,” in a manner of speaking, by illusory future cuts, or if you’re more cynical, by future illusory cuts. Did it occur to him to take off his shoe and pound the lectern for even greater effect? Had his speechwriters lately discovered the imperative mood, after years of living in the indicative? At any rate, it was an ugly spectacle, worse than his dressing down of the justices of the Supreme Court in his State of the Union speech the previous year.14

The main target of these scoldings is of course the House Republicans, who tend to obstruct his measures. But in a larger sense Obama displays the progressive impatience with politics itself. It’s not merely the separation of powers, checks and balances, and other constitutional devices that often stalemate change to which liberals object. It’s human nature in its present state, still so inclined to praise God rather than man, to venerate the past, and to be guided by a healthy self-love. The liberal statesman must therefore put up with a lot of “politics,” in the contemptuous sense in which Obama often spits out the word: that cynical pastime of Washington interest groups, children playing jejune partisan games with laws and parliamentary rules, and visionless right-wingers trying to turn back the clock. Eventually man will be worthy of liberalism, assuming it has its way with him and conditions him to love the State as the bee loves the hive. In the meantime, it’s a constant struggle to bear with this unreconstructed individualist who would rather govern his potty little self (in Chesterton’s great phrase) according to his own lights than be well governed by experts for his own (purported) good.

Obama, like most liberal thinkers, dreams of overcoming man’s stubbornly political nature in two ways, either by assimilating politics to the family or to the military. Chastened a little by his party’s defeat in the 2010 elections and by the shootings in Tucson that wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords, he began his 2011 State of the Union address by invoking the first theme: “We are part of the American family,” and together as one we’re going to “win the future,” a slogan with deeply Social Darwinist roots, by the way. After the future business didn’t pan out so well in numerous scrapes with the House GOP, his frustration took a different direction a year later. In his 2012 State of the Union, after celebrating Osama bin Laden’s killing and the withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq, the president focused on the “courage, selflessness, and teamwork of America’s armed forces.” “At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down,” he observed, “they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together.” Hmmm . . . there was no doubt where this was going. In fact, he made it explicit. “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example,” he said. Yes, if politics were rigidly hierarchical, if we had to follow orders from above without question, and if living together as a free people were as unequivocal and straightforward an affair as pumping bullets into bin Laden, then we could accomplish a lot more—or a lot less, depending on how highly you value democratic self-government as an accomplishment. And the truth is that the leadership paradigm values freedom and self-rule much less than it does getting things done, attacking social problems, and making sure that liberal programs survive the struggle for existence on Capitol Hill.

Leadership is a term from the military side of politics, and one of the reasons the Founders resisted it, as we discussed in chapter 2, was their determination to preserve republican politics as a civilian forum, as the activity of a free people ruling itself. A standing army might be necessary for that people’s defense, but citizens had no business longing to exchange political debate and deliberation for military solidarity and discipline. On his better days President Obama knows that, but this wasn’t one of them. He went on: “When you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight.” Nor does it matter, by the way, whether you think the war is just or unjust, prudent or imprudent. It might seem that liberals have come a long way from the protest days of the 1960s when many of them lustily denounced the American war machine; but in fact, they’re still compensating or overcompensating for their contempt of the U.S. military back then. At the same time they are returning to an older Progressive tradition, highly visible in the New Deal, of trying vainly to make politics the moral equivalent of war. In any event, no one has to put on a uniform to be an equal citizen with equal rights under our Constitution.

Obama had one more riff on the Navy SEALs’ killing of bin Laden. “All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves,” though each member of the team knew “there’s someone behind you, watching your back.”15 The president dwelled on the mission’s execution, not its planning or the decision to authorize it—in which generals and officials in the executive branch were very definitely thinking of politics in both grand and petty senses, and rightly so. On this assurance that someone’s always got your back, the military and family metaphors meet up: both compare the State to a band of brothers. Properly understood, there’s some truth in the comparison. The Declaration implies that when individuals join together to make a society, they enter on the basis of one for all, and all for one, insofar as their defense against enemies external and internal is concerned. But defense against those who would deprive citizens of life, liberty, and property is not an excuse for social uniformity or socialist solidarity. In other respects citizens are free to speak, worship, and organize for private and public purposes as they see fit, so long as these are broadly consistent with private rights and the public good. It’s assumed that no party or individual possesses perfect wisdom, and that in deliberation it’s good to hear from many sides and mull action thoughtfully. For Obama, politics stops when a leader’s vision has received the people’s assent, explicit or not; then the experts, whether soldiers or civil servants, take over and implement the popular will. “These are the facts. Nobody disputes them,” he told Congress curtly in the special joint session to hear another of his health care speeches, though of course millions of people disputed those “facts.” Vision isn’t a matter of deliberation; it’s a matter of interpretation, of the leader’s reading of unconscious or latent popular will. By choosing him over John McCain, the voters had decided whose vision is more moving and timely. No wonder he is impatient with Republicans trying to “relitigate” his policies, especially the most important one of all, the health care bill. He confuses legislators with litigators, as though their job were not deliberative at all. The people, through him, have already issued their orders. Members of Congress now have their mission. There should be no more thought of politics or self-interest or even facts. Theirs is not to reason why, theirs is but to do or die.

Obamacare

“I am not the first president to take up this cause,” Obama told Congress in September 2009, referring to national health care reform, “but I am determined to be the last.” As Harvey Mansfield pointed out, a key to Obama’s political success is the way he presents himself as somehow beyond or above ordinary politics, which he disdains as a self-interested scramble. He thinks of himself, and wants us to think of him, as a nonpartisan or postpartisan figure. To the extent he must indulge in partisanship now, it’s for the sake of putting an end to it in the future. “His politics is apolitical,” Mansfield argued. “It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible.”16 In other words, Obama’s postpartisanship is part of the great liberal double standard.17 Liberals cursed by such hubris imagine they have the keys to the kingdom of History; they alone get to bless or condemn forevermore. Once the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed, it instantly joined the ranks of liberal social programs that were here to stay—permanent parts of the modern State. To attempt to repeal it would be not only foolish, unheard-of, and immoral, but downright impious—that is, against the laws of history. Evildoing, in short, by evildoers, if ever there were any.

Obamacare is unpopular now, but the president is wagering that the American people never met an entitlement they didn’t like eventually, whether out of sentiment, self-interest, or simply habit. The more one ponders his electoral, policy, and longer political agenda, the more the health care bill stands out as the centerpiece of the whole political enterprise. Stop it—repeal it, we must now say—and you have a good chance of stopping the transformation he seeks. Fail, or worse don’t even try, and you permit what can be called, without exaggeration, gradual regime change at home. For the health care question involves, in its longest reach, nothing less than the form of government and the habits and character of the American people.

Obama didn’t conceal the special status of the health care issue. In the speech announcing his presidential candidacy in February 2007, he vowed “that we will have universal health care in America by the end of the next president’s first term.” It passed in early 2010, well ahead of schedule. He said repeatedly that our existing health care system not only costs too much, but is unworthy of American ideals. “We are not a nation that lets hardworking families go without the coverage they deserve; or turns its back on those in need,” he told the American Medical Association in 2009. “We are a nation that cares for its citizens. We are a people who look out for one another. That is what makes this the United States of America.” Actually, every nation cares in some degree for its citizens; looking out for one another is not a distinctively American trait but a minimal part of civic friendship in any decent society. But then his point was that America, despite its citizens’ remarkable individual virtues, had far to go to be a decent society. Of the myriad problems Obama wanted to tackle, health care was the biggest and the most emblematic of America’s moral failings. When he addressed a joint session of Congress in September 2009, Obama quoted from Senator Teddy Kennedy’s final letter to him on precisely that point. Health care reform is the “ ‘great unfinished business of our society,’ ” which is “decisive for our future prosperity”; but also, Kennedy said, it “ ‘concerns more than material things.’ ” It is “ ‘above all a moral issue: at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.’ ” Obama seconded Kennedy’s point enthusiastically.

From the Right and Left, critics have questioned the president’s decision to spend so much of his first fourteen months on reforming health care rather than reviving the economy and restoring jobs. It was a fundamental mistake that will haunt the rest of his term, they say. A few interpret it not as a miscalculation but as a case of tunnel vision, like a pilot so obsessed with a sticky compass that he forgets to fly the plane as it heads right into a mountain. On Obama’s own terms, however, the dogged persistence on health care—despite the economy, despite the plummeting polls, despite Scott Brown’s election to Kennedy’s place in the Senate—was progressive statesmanship of the highest order. Reforming health care was the defining issue of our time. And more important, it was the royal road to a less cruel, less selfish, less capitalist, more liberal America, and he would not abandon it or be forced off it. As he told Congress, “we did not come here just to clean up crises,” even one as big as the Great Recession. “We came to build a future.” And the issue “central to that future” is health care. “I understand,” he confessed, “that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road—to defer reform one more year, or one more election. . . . But that’s not what the moment calls for.” After “a century of trying,” he noted, the time was ripe for health care reform. The system was at “a breaking point,” reform was “a necessity we cannot postpone any longer,” and “for the first time, key stakeholders [the drug companies, the American Medical Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, and so on] are aligning not against, but in favor of reform.”

Which is why conservatives’ resolve to repeal the health care act induces apoplexy among liberals. Conservatives are supposed to be good losers, resigned to the Left’s control over the steering wheel and accelerator but cheerful about getting to apply the brakes (not too suddenly or firmly, please) in the curves. The notion that the clock could be turned back, that some limit to the State’s growth could be discovered and enforced, that the people would hold in their hands, inspect carefully, but at last reject the Holy Grail of welfare state programs, for which liberalism has been questing, just as Obama said, for a hundred years—why, the liberal mind reels.18 Even more than Reagan’s victories, or Clinton’s ignominious failure to pass nationalized health care, this reversal would raise doubts in the liberal mind about the liberal project. At the least, losing Obamacare after winning it could set a dangerous precedent. More immediately, it would be a serious blow to liberalism’s sense of its own inevitability—the quasi-religious faith in the future so central to all progressivism, and so crucial in disarming liberalism’s opponents. So conservative resistance to Obamacare must begin by confronting the historical voodoo by which liberals will try to frighten the Right into believing that resistance is futile, that repeal is doomed. These gestures are best understood as a kind of war dance, like the haka performed by New Zealand’s rugby team before a match, designed to intimidate the opposing players. Conservatives should laugh at this attempt to get them to cooperate in their own defeat.

Of course, repeal will be difficult. President Obama can be counted on to veto any repeal legislation that reaches his desk. It will take a Republican House, Senate, and president to accomplish repeal, therefore, which means it cannot happen before 2013. Failing that, it may still be possible to choke off funding for the new health care bureaucracies, thus slowing or blocking the law’s implementation. The Supreme Court had a chance to invalidate the law, but struck down only part of it. Amid all these considerations, the crucial factor will be the GOP’s (and perhaps an increasing number of conservative Democrats’) development of the case against Obamacare, which must then be put to the American people proudly and in broad daylight.

All along, Obama knew that selling national health care to the American people would be a delicate operation. In the primary campaign, he positioned himself to Hillary Clinton’s right on the issue (he was against the individual mandate back then, before he was for it as president). Less well remembered is that he tried to sound more conservative than John McCain (“John” was going to tax your insurance benefits; Obama promised to help people afford insurance by cutting their taxes). Once he was president, Obama turned the details over to Congress. In the sixty or so presidential speeches he gave calling for health care reform, no words came more readily to his lips than “If you like your doctor, you’ll be able to keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.” Those words were usually greeted by vigorous applause. Sometimes he was even more emphatic. In July 2009 he said, “If you’ve got a health care plan that you get through your employer or some other private plan, I want you to keep it” (emphasis added). Nothing you like about health care will change, he assured his listeners, implying that since 17 of 20 Americans like their health coverage, hardly anything would change at all—except marginally for the better: he promised to reduce premiums for the satisfied customers. The reason for his caution was obvious. The vast majority of Americans had more to lose than to gain from his plan. Hillarycare had crashed on take-off precisely because the public had come to fear the scheme’s costly, painful changes. Obama could not let that happen again, so he presented his plan in the most conservative or change-averse way possible. His bold promises to fundamentally transform the country still hung in the air, but he did his best to suggest he could change the whole without affecting the majority of the parts.19

Obamacare’s biggest changes, he promised, would be to extend the existing system’s virtues to the roughly 43 million uninsured (now estimated at 50 million, due to the economic downturn), to lower costs for everyone by cutting hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse out of the system, and to prevent insurance companies from acting like insurance companies. None of these changes, he emphasized over and over, would threaten the existing health coverage of most Americans. It was the inherent implausibility of this teetering structure of promises that finally did it in, sinking the plan in the polls but not in Congress. To his Democratic allies there, Obama emphasized, on the contrary, the once-in-a-lifetime significance of the vote: this was their only chance to “meet history’s test” and bring huge, fundamental change to the country.

He assured them it would be good politics, too, in 2012 and even more so in the long run. But the public is not singing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and the Democrats’ latest FDR moment has yet to earn the gratitude they expected or at least hoped for. They might reflect on the differences between, say, Social Security and Obamacare. As the name suggests, the former purported to make Americans secure, or at least feel secure, in an age of economic insecurity and depression. By contrast, Obamacare makes most Americans feel less secure, not more. They fear, and rightly so, that it will erode the quality and accessibility of care they now enjoy, and endanger affordability and medical innovation in the future. Worse, it forces responsible people who pay for their insurance to subsidize irresponsible people who don’t—thus taxing the many for the sake of the few, instead of, as FDR in effect boasted concerning the New Deal, taxing the few for the sake of the many.

Besides, Social Security is a relatively straightforward program, organized like a social insurance plan even if most recipients receive much more than they contribute, even with compound interest. But a Ponzi scheme is at least understandable. The Rube Goldberg mechanism of Obamacare is much harder to comprehend. In the first place, there are large tax increases: the Medicare payroll tax goes up and is joined by a new 3.8 percent levy on “unearned income”—for individuals earning more than $200,000 and families more than $250,000, as well as sellers of homes who earn capital gains of more than $250,000 for an individual and $500,000 for a family. None of these taxes is indexed for inflation. Eventually, so-called Cadillac insurance plans will be hit with a 40 percent excise tax. In addition, medical device makers (for example, manufacturers of wheelchairs, CT scanners, heart stents, artificial knees, and the like), drug companies, tanning salons, and insurance companies have to pay special levies.

These enormous revenues will fund the extension of health insurance or Medicaid to the uninsured (3 out of 4 of them, actually; the rest fall through the cracks) and will subsidize rates for individuals and families whose employers don’t provide health coverage. The eligible policies will be sold through a set of State Exchanges called for by the act, beginning in 2014. But then to prevent insurance companies from growing rich from these new revenues, the insurers are sharply limited in their ability to raise rates or exclude coverage. Their rates will be monitored by state and federal authorities who will enforce “medical loss ratios,” in effect requiring the companies to spend 80 to 85 percent of their revenues on claims regardless of the firms’ administrative expenses and profits. And instead of offering a range of policies including low-cost “catastrophic” coverage, the companies will be strongly encouraged to sell to everyone comprehensive policies that incorporate the “essential benefit plan,” mandating a long list of expensive services like maternity care, drug rehabilitation, and mental health treatment. Finally, insurers will be forced to issue policies to anyone regardless of how sick they are, and will be forbidden to charge sick clients more than healthy ones.

What are the act’s likely consequences? These have been well studied by the clear-sighted critics who’ve written about Obamacare and prescribed free-market remedies for our health care problems.20 Here is a summary of their conclusions.

The new taxes will depress the economy and discourage medical investment and innovation. The subsidies and mandates will sharply increase demand for doctors and medical services. Measures to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse—code words for cutting Medicare and Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals—will, together with higher taxes and regulatory pressures, drive many doctors into early retirement or into another line of work. As demand surges and supply contracts, prices for medical treatment will go up, as will insurance premiums. (The tax increases on drugs, medical devices, and insurance companies will be passed on to consumers.) With government trying desperately to suppress these price spikes, shortages of medical personnel and services will occur, which will lead to long waiting lists, rationed care, and decreasing capital investment. The restrictions on insurance companies will prevent them from earning a reasonable return on investment, which will eventually drive them out of business or into the arms of the federal government. The “public option,” melodramatically sacrificed by the president and the House Democrats to get this “middle-of-the-road” plan, will come back again, only this time not as an option. In short, it’s very unlikely that Obamacare, as designed, will work or will work for very long without triggering a more radical crisis in American health care. As Obama said after its passage, “this isn’t radical reform. . . . But it moves us decisively in the right direction.”21

Among its other effects, the act marks a new stage in the decline of constitutional government in America. One sign of this was then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s remark, “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.” After shepherding the equally massive financial regulation bill into law, Senator Christopher Dodd was moved to say something very similar: “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works.” In late August 2010, Senator Max Baucus, Finance Committee chairman, chimed in: “I don’t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health care bill. . . . We hire experts.”22 These statements make both an epistemological and a political point. The first is that these bills are so long, complicated, and unreadable that no one who isn’t an expert can possibly decipher them. That implies, in turn, that no amount or quality of democratic deliberation can clarify them to citizens, and in most cases to legislators, in advance. Indeed, Pelosi suggests that political debate itself, “controversy,” mostly dims public understanding by generating “fog.” The second point is that neither she nor Dodd nor Baucus is especially troubled by this breakdown in democratic accountability. With this kind of legislation, they imply, there’s no choice but to trust the experts—not merely those who patch the law together, but perhaps more important, those who implement it. For the truth is that this kind of bill, more than 2,500 pages long, will mean what the bureaucrats say it means.

Or if one wants to be generous, this kind of bill will mean what the bureaucrats, in conjunction or conspiracy with their congressional overseers, say it means. In short, these bills are not so much laws as administrative to-do lists. They are contrivances fit only for the modern liberal state, ambitious to regulate all local and state affairs from the center, which means through a bureaucracy of experts. The result, again, is not a government of laws but of men, albeit men who think themselves wise. You might think that high-ranking officials like Pelosi and Baucus and Dodd would rebel at becoming appendages of the administrative machine, that, valuing their duties as lawmakers so highly, they would insist on reading and even writing the bills themselves. In the past, congressmen did rebel against, as one of them put it, becoming part of “a city council that overlooks the running of the store every day.” But once the national government assumed, in political scientist John Adams Wettergreen’s phrase, “responsibility for the socio-economic well-being of every American,” then somebody had to mind that store, and Congress cut its pattern to its cloth.23

Obamacare creates some 159 new bureaucracies—programs, commissions, boards, and other agencies. Many are quite small, but almost every one empowers unelected officials to wield power over the future content and provision of health care. There’s the Pregnancy Assistance Fund, the Elder Justice Coordinating Council, and the Cures Acceleration Network, for example. In most cases the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) is charged with creating these entities—part of the breathtaking power delegated to the secretary under the act’s provisions. In fact, it’s not so much the length of the act as its vagueness, incompleteness, and amorphousness that mark it as a newfangled administrative statute, granting power to a few to rule according to their wisdom and with very little reference to the many’s consent. That is to say, the law’s meaning is deliberately indeterminate, left vague so as to give maximum discretion to the unholy trinity of bureaucrats, congressional staffers, and private-sector “stakeholders” who will flesh out the act with thousands of pages of regulations (12,000 and counting so far), and then amend those as needed later on. When favored interests and constituencies want to appeal a regulatory decision, they will always find a helpful congressman ready to intervene on their behalf with the very bureaucracy he helped create.

This new kind of statute—one hates to call it law—is not meant to be “a settled, standing rule,” as John Locke defined law. On the contrary, it is meant permanently to be in flux, always developing and subject to renegotiation. It is law constantly suffused with wisdom, albeit constantly changing wisdom. It is what passes for law under a living constitution. In fact, Obamacare is an excellent test case for how the original U.S. Constitution is faring against the living constitution. One implication of the latter is that the difference between constitutional and statute law tends to break down; the capital-C Constitution, the framework and limits of government, dissolves into the small-c constitution, how we govern ourselves nowadays. According to the small-c constitution, Obamacare is automatically constitutional. The only thing definitely unconstitutional would be turning back the clock—in this case, trying to repeal the collectivization of health care.

But conservatives are challenging this one-way liberal ratchet by mounting vigorous attacks on the statute’s constitutionality, by the standards of the genuine Constitution. Twenty-six Republican state attorneys general sued claiming that Obamacare’s individual mandate—requiring everyone to purchase health insurance, under penalty of law—exceeds Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause.24 (The Supreme Court agreed, but then changed the subject.) In addition, the act is rife with unconstitutional delegations of legislative power to executive agencies and, most flagrantly, as noted, to the secretary of HHS. Less well-known but even more ominous is the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), created to rein in Medicare spending. Its fifteen members, appointed by the president, would make recommendations to limit Medicare’s budget by reducing reimbursements to doctors. Unless both houses of Congress overruled it by passing their own equal or greater cuts in Medicare, IPAB’s proposals would automatically become law. What’s worse, the act conspires to make IPAB permanent by mandating that no resolution to repeal it can be introduced in the legislature until January 1, 2017, or after February 1, 2017—the Constitution would be operational for one month only, and even then the repeal must pass by August 15 of that year to be valid, and would not take effect until 2020.25 Congress could presumably unravel these restrictions and undo IPAB anytime it wanted to, unless IPAB’s approval as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was one of those “constitutional moments” that liberals like to think amend the Constitution informally, and for all practical purposes permanently. In any case, this boldface attempt to override the Constitution tells you everything you need to know about Obamacare. In the end, it will be much better for the Republic if the people, acting through their elected representatives, repudiate Obamacare rather than trusting the Court to do it. A popular repudiation would not only have greater and more enduring political impact; it would reassert the people’s right to defend their own Constitution against big government and its stakeholders.

The question is whether the public can assert itself justly and intelligently in this predicament. For President Obama’s efforts to transform the country are only the latest installment in modern liberalism’s long-running project to change America by changing Americans’ relation to their government. For a century, liberalism has argued that the old Constitution was obsolescent, an eighteenth-century artifact needing thorough modernization, which liberals were happy to supply. Key to its reform was changing the scholarly, and eventually the public, interpretation of its purpose: not to limit government, to separate powers, and to keep the national government devoted to national affairs, but to liberate government so it could grow easily, to combine powers so that experts could direct government more efficiently to good purposes, and to expand the universe of good purposes by urging the national government to take responsibility for state and local affairs all the way down to the temperature of your shower. Behind this changed view of government was a new view of rights, as we’ve seen. The American Founders held that human rights come from God and nature, and carried with them a religious and natural obligation to be used for the sake of human safety and happiness. We needed to form government to secure our rights, but we needed to be vigilant lest government endanger those very rights. Freedom never strayed far from the virtues essential to its purpose and to its defense. At the core of the “dependency” problem of big government is the political logic of the new economic rights: there is nothing to fear from big government because the bigger it gets, the more rights the people get. Since our rights are dependent on government, why shouldn’t we be? That attitude ultimately undermines individual character and self-respect, not to mention political independence, and in America this is already a chronic problem in large sectors of the welfare state. Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and similar programs are almost half again as generous per individual recipient as they were in 2007, and the difficulties of weaning oneself from them have grown apace. Obamacare would make these problems universal and acute.

Despite what Obama often says, the alternative to all-provident government is not selfish indifference or “the Social Darwinist idea.” As observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Marvin Olasky have pointed out, America used to have a vibrant civil society that teemed with churches, mutual insurance funds, and other voluntary associations that helped Americans take care of themselves and of one another.26 In some ways we still do, of course, though big government has supplanted more and more of these functions. State and local governments provided another indispensable part of the social safety net. Even the Progressives’ bête noire, the old-fashioned political machines like Tammany Hall, provided important welfare services. This was never a “just downright mean” country. Though it lifted the safety net to the federal level, Social Security rejected the spirit of the dole and tried to avoid the entitlement mentality by masquerading, quite effectively, as an insurance program. Its bureaucracy, devoted to cutting checks on a predictable basis, never aspired to prescribe how recipients could spend their benefits, or to rule one-sixth of the national economy.

On the moral side, the entitlement debate usually concerns the damage done when a people gets hooked on an endless supply of free goodies. Though the president’s health care plan is about turning health care into just such a narcotic, it is also about the unpleasant business of coming down from the entitlement high. From the beginning, he emphasized the need to reduce the share of GDP (currently 17.9 percent) flowing to doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and insurers. His strongest argument for attending to the problem immediately was that the rising cost of health care would bankrupt the government and the country. His chief rhetorical difficulty was precisely to convey both messages—that he was turning the “right” to health care into an entitlement for everyone; and that we had to stop spending so much on health care—without confusing his audience or contradicting himself. He never quite succeeded. The majority couldn’t understand how even Barack Obama could expand access to health care and contract it at the same time.

In this respect, the debate was a harbinger of many more to come about the costs of the welfare state. It exposed the dirty little secret of entitlement rights, that what the government giveth, the government taketh away. Or to put it more mildly, the rights that FDR spoke of as needing redefinition “in terms of a changing and growing social order” must also be redefined in hard times when the social order, or at least the national economy, is not growing or growing too slowly to pay for all the promises the rulers have made to the people. Consequently, the “right” to health care means also the right to limit health care. The right to “adequate medical care” implies that no one may have more than adequate (that is, excellent) care, until the “least advantaged” among us, to use John Rawls’s term, have received what the government deems adequate care. Indeed, the adjustments needed to implement the right to health care may go further than that. To the contemporary liberal, doesn’t the mere coexistence of adequate and excellent care imply that the Americans stuck with the former are somehow second-class citizens?

Obamacare inclines America in the long run to some combination of the following: the sullen acceptance of government-distributed scarcity; envy of people who have more than their fair share of health care; the erosion of the rule of law as politically connected patients seek special favors, and elected and unelected officials line up to grant them; and growing alienation from a system that tries to play God but does so without wisdom, justice, or mercy. These toxic sentiments will be familiar to anyone who has lived under socialism, for they are its concomitants. When added to the caustic effects of dependency on government, they amount to a prescription for an American character increasingly unfit for self-government. As Ronald Reagan once warned, you can’t socialize the doctors without socializing the patients.

Obama’s America

To make possible a governing liberal majority, Obama has to rehabilitate liberalism’s reputation, to separate it as much as possible from the radical politics of the Sixties and the burden of defending big government. President Clinton began this renewal in the 1990s. Learning from the shambles of his own health care initiative, he proclaimed that “the era of big government is over” and preached the Third Way gospel of opportunity, responsibility, and community. In some ways Obama continues and sharpens Clinton’s efforts, wringing all the benefits he can out of the appearance of postpartisanship while making few sacrifices of substance. He far outshines Clinton, however, in telling the story of America in a way that reinforces a resurgent liberalism. More than any Democratic president since FDR, Obama has an impressive interpretation of American history that culminates in him, and that reworks and counters Reagan’s view of our history as the working out of American exceptionalism (including divine favor), individualism, limited government, free market economics, and time-tested morals.

As a writer, Obama’s strength is telling stories, and his account of America is a kind of story, mixing social, intellectual, and political history. It begins with the founding—with the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. (Not for him is Reagan’s emphasis on the Puritans and their “shining city on a hill.” In profound ways, the black church replaces the Puritans in Obama’s chronicle of American spirituality.) He tries to construct a new consensus view of the country that acknowledges, and then contextualizes, traditional views in a way meant to be reassuring, but that points to very untraditional conclusions. For instance, in The Audacity of Hope, in a chapter titled “Values,” he quotes the Declaration’s famous sentence on self-evident truths and then comments:

Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the foundations of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not every American may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the genesis of the Declaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republican thought. But the essential idea behind the Declaration—that we are born into this world free, all of us; that each of us arrives with a bundle of rights that can’t be taken away by any person or any state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, and must, make of our lives what we will—is one that every American understands.27

It sounds almost Lincolnian, until one notices that the rights in this “bundle” are not said to be natural, exactly, nor true, and certainly not self-evident; they are an outgrowth of eighteenth-century political thought, too recondite for most Americans to know or remember. Abraham Lincoln, when explaining the Declaration, traced its central idea to God and nature, not to eighteenth-century ideologies. He called for “all honor to Jefferson” for introducing “into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” When Jefferson was asked about the document’s source and purpose, he looked to common sense as well as to a much older and richer philosophical tradition. The Declaration placed “before mankind,” not merely before Americans or Europeans, “the common sense of the subject,” he wrote, and its authority rested on “the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.” A commonsense argument harmonious with the political principles of Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney, and proceeding from an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, could hardly be a simple distillation of eighteenth-century ideologies—unless, of course, Jefferson and Lincoln didn’t know what they were talking about. If they spoke for their age without knowing so, if they were men of their times but didn’t realize it, then like their twenty-first-century countrymen they too would have been ignorant of their eighteenth-century wellsprings, but precisely because they were living in or at least not long after the eighteenth century! Jefferson’s account of “the rights of man” can be argued into historical relativity only by the most impudent academic sophistry. Although “abstract” in applying to human being qua human being, regardless of race, color, sex, religion, etc., the rights mentioned in the Declaration are based on a very obvious natural distinction. Jefferson wrote of “the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” No human being may rightly treat another human being, in other words, the way any human being may rightly treat a horse or some other brute animal—buying it, selling it, working it for his own purposes. Justice is rooted in our human nature, our equality vis-à-vis one another and our inequality vis-à-vis lower and higher beings. Man is neither beast nor God, and must treat his fellow human beings accordingly. Is the difference between a human being and a horse an eighteenth-century distinction?28

To be sure, nothing prevents natural right from also being a characteristic element of political thinking in a particular age. In speaking of the “liberal and republican” roots of the Declaration, Obama alludes to a scholarly debate over the interpretation of the Founding that was raging when he was at Harvard Law School. Ignited by, among other works, Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, published in 1969, the debate challenged the prevailing view that the Founding was primarily indebted to Locke’s political philosophy of economic and political liberalism (in the older sense), offering as the alternative a republican tradition stretching back from Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters to Algernon Sidney, Harrington, Machiavelli, and ultimately Aristotle. This republicanism supposedly emphasized the common good not self-interest, citizen virtue not commerce, and represented a communitarian, anticapitalist road not taken, or perhaps a public philosophy, junior grade, that alternated or mingled with Lockeanism. The debate eventually subsided, and Wood himself came to see that he had exaggerated the distinction between the two positions. It had a great influence on the law schools, insofar as it supplied them with fresh excuses for regulating private property and a nobler pedigree than legal realism or the sociological approach. Liberals liked it because it relieved them from being so hostile to the country’s beginnings. Here was a version of the Founding they could get behind, even if, as became increasingly clear, the wish for a more socialist past was father to the thought. But neither side in this debate took the question of natural right all that seriously, regarding liberalism and republicanism as contending hemispheres within the eighteenth-century ideological brain. Wood devoted no sustained attention to the Declaration, or to a thorough reading of any document from the period, preferring to assemble multifarious snippets into an encyclopedic interpretation of the era, proving what he’d assumed all along, that the political thought of the Founding was a reflection of its age.29

The liberal-republican debate survives in Obama’s thought in his account of the American story as a blend of two themes: individualism (symbolized in the Declaration) and “unity” (symbolized in the Constitution’s commitment to “a more perfect Union”). The latter phrase, plucked from the Preamble, has long been a favorite of liberals from Wilson to Bill Clinton. For Obama, unity means being your brother’s and sister’s keeper; it means coming together “as one American family.” “If fate causes us to stumble or fall, our larger American family will be there to lift us up,” he explains. In real life, he hasn’t exactly been there to lift up his aunt in Boston or his hut-dwelling half brother in Kenya, but then families in real life often disappoint. Even so, the family’s failings only leave more work for the State. Membership in it confers or protects our “dignity,” Obama argues, in the sense of guaranteeing “a basic standard of living” and effectively sharing “life’s risks and rewards for the benefit of each and the good of all.” And no one can enjoy “dignity and respect” without a society that guarantees both “social justice” and “economic justice.” These ramify widely, demanding, in Obama’s words, that “if you work in America you should not be poor”; that a college education should be every child’s “birthright”; and that every American should have broadband access. Lately, he’s feeling even more generous. The “basic American promise,” he said in his 2012 State of the Union address, was, and should be again, that “if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.”30

That sounds more like winning life’s lottery than a promise that anyone could justly demand be fulfilled. Notice how craftily, however, Obama shifts his examples of social duty from picking up the fallen to sending someone else’s kids to college. How easily liberal magicians transform needs into desires, and desires into rights. They do it right before our eyes, and never explain the secret of the trick. Still, it’s revealing that he doesn’t go whole hog, turning such socioeconomic goods explicitly into rights and cataloging them for our wonderment. Chastened by the right-wing and middle-class backlash against welfare rights, he follows Bill Clinton in silently recasting, say, the right to go to college on someone else’s money as an “investment” in “opportunity.” As Obama presents it:

. . . opportunity is yours if you’re willing to reach for it and work for it. It’s the idea that while there are few guarantees in life, you should be able to count on a job that pays the bills; health care for when you need it; a pension for when you retire; an education for your children that will allow them to fulfill their God-given potential.

Actually, there are quite a few “guarantees” in a life lived in Obama’s America. Even as he’s wary of rights talk after the Sixties’ implosion, he also denies any fondness for “big government.” Newfangled rights would imply a big government to provide them. He’s not in favor of that; he supports “active government.” And these aren’t blank-check rights because the recipient has some reciprocal responsibilities—filling out the enrollment forms, showing up at class, making passing grades, and the like. But the obligations are usually minimal, and besides, don’t responsibilities and rights usually keep house together? So these are rights of a sort, and Obama said so explicitly a month before the 2008 election in a CNN debate with John McCain. Asked whether health care was a privilege, a responsibility, or a right, he replied, “Well, I think it should be a right for every American.”31 But he had avoided saying so up to that point.

Obama leaves the relationship between individualism and “a more perfect union” up in the air, to be settled pragmatically. Every society has a similar tension between “autonomy and solidarity,” he writes, and “it has been one of the blessings of America that the circumstances of our nation’s birth allowed us to negotiate these tensions better than most.” The circumstances, not the principles, of our nation were key, because the wide-open continent allowed individuals to head west and form new communities to their liking whenever they wanted to. But the continent filled up, big corporations gradually took over from the family farm, just as Wilson and FDR had explained generations before, and soon our “values” were in a more serious conflict that required a bigger government to help reconcile. Unfortunately, that government proved enduringly unpopular with conservatives, who refused to adjust to the new times; and so finding the proper balance between the individual and the community continues to stoke our increasingly polarized, and polarizing, political debates. Though he hails the Constitution as a mechanism of “deliberative democracy,” Obama doesn’t mean by that a back-and-forth on public policy conducted by the executive and legislative branches with input from the people. Deliberation of that kind, endorsed by The Federalist and consistent with natural rights, would seek means to the ends of constitutional government. That’s too narrow for Obama, who seeks deliberation about the ends, or at least about what our rights will be and what the Constitution should mean in the age that is dawning. He wants to turn all of the Constitution’s mechanisms—separation of powers, federalism, checks and balances—into ways of forcing a “conversation” about our identity. In such a conversation, “all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent.”32 Required? An external reality? And who judges whether the resulting conversation meets the requirements of democracy or not? Obama deplores the bile in our contemporary politics, and it must puzzle him that he causes so much of it. But he’s asking for it. As Bill Buckley used to say, liberals always talk about their tolerance and eagerness to engage with other views, but they’re always surprised to find that there are other views.

Obama expects twenty-first-century people to have, roughly speaking, twenty-first-century views, as he does. What then of Jefferson and his eighteenth-century compeers? Obama soon makes clear that despite their fine words, Jefferson and the other Founders were less than faithful to the liberal and republican inferences of the principles they proclaimed. Like a good law school professor, in The Audacity of Hope Obama lines up evidence and argument on both sides before concluding that, in fact, the Founders probably did not understand their principles as natural and universal, despite their language, but rather as confined to the white race. The Declaration of Independence “may have been,” he says, a transformative moment in world history, a great breakthrough for freedom, but “that spirit of liberty didn’t extend, in the minds of the Founders, to the slaves who worked their fields, made their beds, and nursed their children.” As a result, the Constitution “provided no protection to those outside the constitutional circle,” to those who were not “deemed members of America’s political community”: “the Native American whose treaties proved worthless before the court of the conqueror, or the black man Dred Scott, who would walk into the Supreme Court a free man and leave a slave.” Obama doesn’t argue, as Lincoln did, that the Supreme Court majority was in error, that Dred Scott was wrongly and unjustly returned to slavery, and that Chief Justice Roger Taney’s dictum—that in the Founders’ view the black man had no rights that the white man was bound to respect—was a profound solecism. On the contrary, Obama accepts Dred Scott as rightly decided according to the standards of the time. He agrees, in effect, with Taney’s reading of the Declaration and the Constitution, and with Stephen Douglas’s as well. Despite his admiration for Lincoln, Obama sides with Lincoln’s opponents in their interpretation of Jefferson and the Declaration as proslavery.33

Consider Obama’s renowned speech on race, the one devoted to starting a national conversation on the subject and to putting the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s notorious comments in their proper context. Wright had become an issue in the campaign when videos and recordings of his sermons surfaced, showing him vigorously swearing “God damn America!” for its sins against blacks and other minorities, and arguing that the atrocities of 9/11 were a case of America’s “chickens coming home to roost,” payback for our imperialist and racist foreign policy in the Middle East. The dog that didn’t bark on March 18, 2008, was that the crucial words “all men are created equal” do not appear in Obama’s carefully composed speech. And so that “already classic address,” as James Kloppenberg calls it, on a topic that Obama declared he’d been thinking about for twenty years, constitutes a very different kind of argument, with a very different view of America, than one finds in, say, Martin Luther King’s great speech in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial. Obama invokes neither Jefferson nor Lincoln. He refers to the Constitution briefly, noting its “ideal of equal citizenship” and that it “promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.” But he doesn’t mention the conclusion that he had announced in his book, namely, that the Declaration’s and the Constitution’s “people” did not include blacks, and especially not black slaves.

In short, Obama regards the original intention of both the Declaration and the Constitution to be racist and even pro-slavery. But he refrains from making the point explicit because it would confirm the Reverend Wright’s fundamental charge, that the United States is a racist country. And the point of the speech in Philadelphia, at the National Constitution Center, close by Independence Hall, the scene of the great events of 1776 and 1787, was not merely to repeat his condemnation of Wright’s remarks “in unequivocal terms” but to put the whole controversy behind him, without dwelling on his fundamental agreement with Wright’s interpretation of American principles.

In truth, Obama’s evaluation of Wright’s statements was very equivocal. He calls the reverend’s charges “not only wrong but divisive,” that is, untimely, because the American people are “hungry” for a “message of unity” right now, as delivered by the junior senator from Illinois. Wright expressed “a profoundly distorted view of this country,” Obama says, “a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America. . . .” What that means becomes clearer a little later, when Obama declares that “the profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is . . . that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made.” Yet Obama’s own candidacy confirms “that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.” In blunt terms, Wright wasn’t wrong that America was a racist nation, with racist principles; he was wrong, however, to speak as though the country is as racist as it used to be. “America can change,” not in the sense of living up to its first principles but in the opposite sense of moving away from them. Except, that is, from the deepest principle of all, which expresses “the true genius of this nation”—our belief in change, or in the deliberative process that produces such change. Only the “narrative” of America, the movement away from her first principles, deserves liberals’ allegiance.34

Wright’s eruptions were dangerous to Obama not merely because they raised questions about his judgment in having Wright as his pastor, and because they raised doubts about the candidate’s ability to be a unifying, postracial figure. They were dangerous above all because they represented a particularly virulent strain of the spirit of Sixties radicalism, and shook Obama’s claim to have left all that behind him and behind his new movement for change. As he said in his second, more decisive repudiation of his old friend on April 29, 2008, “the reason our campaign has been so successful is because we had moved beyond these old arguments.” Because he did not actually disagree with his pastor’s fundamental charge but could not say so openly, Obama’s reasons for denouncing Wright became oddly personal. “I don’t think that he showed much concern for me,” Obama told reporters. Indeed, Wright’s performance at the National Press Club was “a show of disrespect to me. It’s . . . also, I think, an insult to what we’ve been trying to do in this campaign.”35

Obama does disagree emphatically with the Reverend Wright on the question of change. He thinks Wright is trapped in the past, even as conservatives are—two very different pasts, doubtless, but equally out of touch with the country and its future. A proper understanding of America’s past—centered on change and the country’s openness to it—will make sense of the present and liberate us to make a brighter, more unified future, claims Obama. His understanding of the past thus pays lip service to such things as self-evident truths, original intent, and first principles, but quickly changes the subject to values, visions, dreams, ideals, myths, and narratives. This is a postmodern “move.” We can’t know or share truth, postmodernists assert, because there is no truth “out there,” but we can share stories, and thus construct a community of shared meaning. It’s these ideas that mark his furthest departure from old-fashioned liberalism. “Usually designated by a bundle of multisyllabic terms that signal their complexity, these ideas—antifoundationalism, particularism, perspectivalism, and historicism—also decisively shaped Obama’s sensibility,” writes his shrewdest liberal interpreter, James Kloppenberg, who teaches American intellectual history at Harvard. He provides helpful definitions.

By antifoundationalism and particularism I mean the denial of universal principles. According to this way of thinking, human cultures are human constructions; different people exhibit different forms of behavior because they cherish different values. By perspectivalism I mean the belief that everything we see is conditioned by where we stand. There is no privileged, objective vantage point free from the perspective of particular cultural values. By historicism I mean the conviction that all human values and practices are products of historical processes and must be interpreted within historical frameworks. All principles and social patterns change; none stands outside the flow of history. These ideas come in different flavors, more and less radical and more and less nihilist.

Kloppenberg should be praised for his candor. “Obama’s sensibility, his ways of thinking about culture and politics, rests on the hidden strata of these ideas,” he admits.36

More and less radical, more and less nihilist—Obama comes in on the “less” side, but then a little bit of nihilism goes a long way. “Implicit . . . in the very idea of ordered liberty,” he writes in The Audacity of Hope, is “a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism,’ any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.” There is no absolute truth—and that’s the absolute truth, he argues. Such feeble, self-contradictory reasoning is at the heart of Obama’s very private and yet very public struggle with himself to determine whether there is anything anywhere that can truly be known, or even that is rational to have faith in. Anyone who believes, really believes in absolute truth, he asserts, is a fanatic or in imminent danger of becoming a fanatic; absolute truth is the mother of extremism everywhere. Although it’s certainly a good thing that America avoided religious and political tyranny, no previous president has ever credited this achievement to the Founders’ rejection of absolute truth, previously known as “truth.” Is the idea that human freedom is right, slavery wrong, thus to be rejected lest we embrace an “absolute truth”? What becomes of the “universal truths” Obama himself celebrates on occasion? Surely the problem is not with the degree of belief, but with the falseness of the causes for which the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, and the jihad stood. A fervent belief in religious liberty is not equivalent to a fervent belief in religious tyranny, any more than a passionate belief in democracy is equivalent to a passionate longing for dictatorship. Has he forgotten Martin Luther King’s own reflections on this question in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”? After drawing on Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to distinguish between just and unjust laws—a distinction postmodernism makes impossible to uphold except ironically—King proceeded to offer a defense against exactly the kind of charge of extremism that underlies Obama’s renunciation of absolute truth.

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” . . . And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . . .” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or for the extension of justice?37

Nothing like the moral clarity and moral reasoning of this passage will be found in Obama’s speech on race. It was hailed for its comprehensive empathy with black Americans who’ve long suffered racial scorn and discrimination, as well as with working-class whites who resent affirmative action and immigration. Predictably, it called for a national conversation on the issue, with a view to mutual understanding and to all factions discovering their need for a sympathetic State to recognize their grievances. His predilection for such conversations is the reverse side of his rejection of absolute truth. In The Audacity of Hope, within two pages of his criticism of the Founders for allegedly excluding black Americans from constitutional protection as equal human beings and citizens, he warns against all such sweeping truth claims, and indeed praises the Founders for being “suspicious of abstraction.” On every major question in America’s early history, he writes, “theory yielded to fact and necessity. . . . It may be the vision of the Founders that inspires us, but it was their realism, their practicality and flexibility and curiosity, that ensured the Union’s survival.” Obama cannot decide whether to blame the Founders as racists, or to celebrate them as relativists; to assail them for not applying their truths absolutely to blacks and Indians along with whites, or to praise them for compromising their too absolute principles for the sake of something concrete.38

His attempt to resolve this contradiction carries him into still deeper and murkier waters.

The best I can do in the face of our history is remind myself that it has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty. The hard, cold facts remind me that it was unbending idealists like William Lloyd Garrison who first sounded the clarion call for justice; that it was slaves and former slaves, men like . . . Frederick Douglass and women like Harriet Tubman, who recognized power would concede nothing without a fight. It was the wild-eyed prophecies of John Brown, his willingness to spill blood and not just words on behalf of his visions, that helped force the issue of a nation half slave and half free. I’m reminded that deliberation and the constitutional order may sometimes be the luxury of the powerful, and that it has been the cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable—in other words, the absolutists—that have fought for a new order.

Obama turns for inspiration to the abolitionists, drawing no distinction between a superb publicist and reasoner like Frederick Douglass and a butcher like John Brown, who was happy “to spill blood and not just words on behalf of his visions.” Both were “absolutists,” which by Obama’s definition means they were “unreasonable,” but willing to fight for “a new order.” He goes on to confess he has a soft spot for “those possessed of similar certainty today,” for example, the “antiabortion activist” or the “animal rights activist” who’s willing to break the law. He seems to suffer from certainty envy. He respects passionate, even fanatic commitment as such. Though he may “disagree with their views,” he admits that “I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty—for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute.” Not true, necessarily, but absolute. It’s hard to know what he means exactly. That the “truths” are fit for the times, are destined to win out and forge a “new order”? That they are willed absolutely, not pragmatically or contingently? Even his rejection of absolute truth is now uncertain.

So, finally, in his perplexity, he turns again to Lincoln. Like “no man before or since,” Lincoln “understood both the deliberative function of our democracy and the limits of such deliberation.” His presidency combined firm convictions with practicality or expediency. Obama seems never to have heard of prudence, the way a statesman (and a reasonable and decent person) moves from universal principles to particular conclusions in particular circumstances. The sixteenth president, he ventures, was humble and self-aware, “maintaining within himself the balance between two contradictory ideas,” that we are all imperfect and thus must reach for “common understandings,” and that at times “we must act nonetheless, as if we are certain, protected from error only by providence.” For a man like Lincoln there is no such thing, he says in effect, as acting with moral certainty, only acting “as if we are certain,” God help us. Unlike John Brown, Lincoln was an absolutist who realized the limitations of absolutism, yet still brought forth a new order. “Lincoln, and those buried at Gettysburg,” Obama concludes, “remind us that we should pursue our own absolute truths only if we acknowledge that there may be a terrible price to pay.”39 Our own absolute truths? Those words ought to send a shudder down Americans’ constitutional spine, assuming we still have one.

The Liberal Crisis

Liberals like crises, and one shouldn’t spoil them by handing them another on a silver salver. The kind of crisis that is approaching, however, is probably not their favorite kind, an emergency that presents an opportunity to enlarge government, but one that will find liberalism at a crossroads, a turning point. Liberalism can’t go on as it is, not for very long. It faces difficulties both philosophical and fiscal that will compel it either to go out of business or to become something quite different from what it has been.

For most of the past century, liberalism was happy to use relativism as an argument against conservatism. Those self-evident truths that the old American constitutional order rested on were neither logically self-evident nor true, Woodrow Wilson and his followers argued, but merely rationalizations for an immature, subjective form of right that enshrined selfishness as national morality. What was truly evident was the relativity of all past views of morality, each a reflection of its society’s stage of development. But there was a final stage of development, when true morality would be actualized and its inevitability made abundantly clear, that is, self-evident. Disillusionment came, as we’ve seen, when the purported end or near end of history coincided not with idealism justified and realized, but with what many liberals in the 1960s, especially the young, despaired of as the infinite immorality of poverty, racial injustice, Vietnam, the System, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Relativism rounded on liberalism. Having promised so much, liberalism was peculiarly vulnerable to the charge that the complete spiritual fulfillment it once promised was neither complete nor fulfilling. As Obama’s grappling shows, intelligent and morally sensitive liberals may try to suppress or internalize the problem of relativism but it cannot be forgotten or ignored. Despite his investment in deliberative democracy, communitarianism, and pragmatic decision making, he’s willing to throw it all aside at the moment of decision because it doesn’t satisfy his love of justice or rather his love of a certain kind of courage or resolute action. “The blood of slaves reminds us that our pragmatism can sometimes be moral cowardice,” he writes.40 In a moment like that, a great man must follow his own absolute truth, and the rest of us are left hoping it is Lincoln and not John Brown, much less Jefferson Davis, whose will is triumphant. The great man doesn’t anticipate or follow or approximate history’s course; he creates it, wills it according to his own absolute will, not absolute knowledge.

When combined with liberalism’s lust for strong leaders, this openness to Nietzschean creativity looms dangerously over the liberal future. If we are lucky, if liberalism is lucky, no one will ever apply for the position of liberal “superhero,” in Michael Tomasky’s term, and the role will remain vacant. But as Lincoln asked in the Lyceum speech, “Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us?”

And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.

Distinction will be his paramount object; and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

More worrisome even than the danger of a superman able to promise that everything desirable will soon be possible is a people unattached to its constitution and laws; and for that liberalism has much to answer.

In one crucial respect, our situation would seem more perilous than the future danger Lincoln sketched, insofar as the very definitions of political “good” and “harm” are now uncertain. Richard Rorty, the late postmodern philosopher, specialized in trying to think through the liberal dilemma, which could not be resolved but could be expressed in sharp terms. He called himself a “liberal ironist.” Liberals, he said, following the political theorist Judith Shklar, are “people who think cruelty is the worst thing we do”; and an “ironist” faces up to “the contingency of his or her most central beliefs and desires,” including the “belief that cruelty is horrible.” Unflinching liberals understand that liberalism consists in the revulsion to human cruelty or humiliation, combined with the knowledge that hatred of cruelty is no more moral or rational than love of cruelty. (Conservatives are lovers of cruelty, he implies.) In short, thoughtful liberals recognize that liberalism is a value judgment, with no ground in truth or science or Being or anything else supposedly “out there.” Its central value judgment is not even a view of justice or of nobility, exactly, or an affirmation of something good; it stands merely for the negation of cruelty. Real liberalism is relativism, colored by a Rousseauian pity for the suffering animal who is sensitive to humiliation. To Rorty’s disappointment, most actual liberals are not relativists, of course, but he thought they may eventually fall in line and at any rate could not refute postmodernism. They cannot even change the subject, though as a practical matter he recommends this, urging them to resume fighting for continual political reforms as in the glory days, rather than listening to the siren calls of the academic and cultural Left with its endless criticisms of America and of futile efforts to reform her.41

Avant-garde liberalism used to be about progress; now it’s about nothingness. You call that progress? Perhaps, paradoxically, that’s why Obama prefers to be called a progressive rather than a liberal. It’s better to believe in something than in nothing, even if the something, Progress, is not as believable as it used to be. His residual progressivism helps insure him against his instinctual postmodernism. Still, liberalism is in a bad way when it has lost confidence in its own truth, and it’s an odd sort of “progress” to go back to a name it surrendered eighty years ago.

Adding to liberal self-doubt is that its monopoly on the social sciences, long since broken, has been supplanted by a multiple-front argument with conservative scholars in economics, political science, and other fields. In the beginning Progressivism commanded all the social sciences because it had invented, or imported, them all. Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson could be confident in the inevitability of progress, despite temporary setbacks, because the social sciences backed them up. An expertise in administering progress existed, and experts in public administration, Keynesian economics, national planning, urban affairs, modernization theory, development studies, and a half-dozen other specialties beavered away at bringing the future to life. What a difference a half century makes. The vogue for national planning disappeared under the pressure of ideas and events. Friedrich Hayek demonstrated why socialist economic planning, lacking free-market pricing information, could not succeed. In a side-by-side experiment, West Germany far outpaced East Germany in economic development, and all the people escaping across the Wall traveled from east to west, leaving their workers’ paradise behind. Keynesianism flunked the test of the 1970s’ stagflation. The Reagan boom, with its repeated tax cuts, flew in the face of the orthodoxy at the Harvard Department of Economics, but was cheered by the Chicago School. Milton Friedman’s advice to Chile proved far sounder than Jeffrey Sachs’s to Russia. Monetarism, rational choice economics, supply-side, “government failure,” “regulatory capture,” “incentive effects”—the intellectual discoveries were predominantly on the right. Conservative and libertarian think tanks multiplied, carrying the new insights directly into the fray.

The scholarly counterattack proceeded in political science and the law, too. Rational choice and “law and economics” changed the agenda to some degree. Both politics and the law became increasingly “originalist” in bearing, enriched by a new appreciation for eighteenth-century sources and the original intent of the Founders and the Framers of the Constitution. Above all, the Progressives’ attempt to replace political philosophy with social science foundered. After World War II, an unanticipated and at first unheralded revival of political philosophy began, associated above all with Leo Strauss, questioning historicism and nihilism in the name of a broadly Socratic understanding of nature and natural right. New studies of the tradition yielded some very untraditional results. Though there were left-wing as well as right-wing aspects to this revival, the latter proved more influential and liberating. The unquestionability of both progress and relativism died quietly in classrooms around the country. Economics is an instrumental science, studying means not ends, and so much of the successes of free-market economics could be swallowed, pragmatically, by liberalism’s maw. The developments in political philosophy challenged the ends of progressivism, proving far more damaging to it. In sheer numbers the academy remained safely, overwhelmingly in the hands of the Left, whose members in fact grew more radical, with some notable exceptions, in these years. But they gradually lost the unchallenged intellectual ascendancy, though not the prestige, they once had enjoyed.

Thanks to this intellectual rebirth, the case against Progressivism and in favor of the Constitution is stronger and deeper than it has ever been. Progressivism has never been in a fair fight, an equal fight, until now, because its political opponents had largely been educated in the same ideas, had lost touch, like Antaeus, with the ground of the Constitution in natural right, and so tended to offer only Progressivism Lite as an alternative. The sheer superficiality of Progressive scholarship is now evident. They could never take the ideas of the Declaration and Constitution seriously, for many of the same reasons that Obama cannot ultimately take them seriously. Wilson never demonstrated that the Constitution was inadequate to the problems of his age—he asserted it, or rather assumed it. His references to The Federalist are shallow and general, never betraying a close familiarity with any paper or papers, and willfully ignorant of the separation of powers as an instrument to energize and hone, not merely limit, the national government. Like many of his contemporaries, his criticisms of the national government are based on an exaggeratedly negative reading of constitutional theory and practice, as though John C. Calhoun had been right to see it as a weak compact, devoted above all to inaction lest action harm the propertied interests. Though he thought of himself as picking up where Hamilton, Webster, and Lincoln had left off, Wilson never investigated where they left off and why. Neither he nor his main contemporaries asked how far The Federalist’s or Lincoln’s reading of national powers and duties might take them, because they assumed it would not take them very far, that it reflected the political forces of its age and had to be superseded by new doctrines for a new age. They weren’t interested in Lincoln’s reasons, only in his results. Not right but historical might was the Progressives’ true focus.

Today liberalism looks increasingly, well, elderly. Hard of hearing, irascible, enamored of past glories, forgetful of mistakes and promises, prone to repeat the same stories over and over—it isn’t the youthful voice of tomorrow it once imagined itself to be. Only a rhetorician of Obama’s youth and artfulness could breathe life into the old tropes again. Even he can’t repeat the performance in 2012. With a track record to defend, he will have to speak more prose and less poetry. With a century-old track record, liberalism will find it harder than ever to paint itself as the disinterested champion of the public good. Long ago it became an Establishment, one of the estates of the realm, with its court-party of notoriously self-interested constituencies, the public employee unions, the trial lawyers, the feminists, the environmentalists, and the corporations aching to be public utilities paying private-sector salaries. Not visions of the future, but visions of plunder come to mind. This is one side of what Walter Russell Mead means when he criticizes the “blue state social model” as outmoded and heavy-handed.42 The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is about as sleek and innovative as the several phone books’ worth of paper it takes up in printed form. Can one imagine Steve Jobs’s reaction if he had been tasked with reading, much less implementing, the PPACA? This top-down bureaucratic monstrosity could have been written by the faculty of the Rexford G. Tugwell School of Public Administration in 1933. In fact it resembles Roosevelt’s NIRA (the National Industrial Recovery Act) in its attempt to control a huge swath of the economy through collusive price-fixing, restraints on production, aversion to competition, and corporatist partnerships between industry and government. It is exhibit A in the case for the intellectual obsolescence of liberalism.

Finally, we come to the fiscal embarrassments confronting contemporary liberals. Again, Obamacare is wonderfully emblematic. President Obama’s solution to the problem of two health care entitlement programs quickly going bankrupt—Medicare and Medicaid—is to add a third? Perhaps it is a stratagem, as we discussed before. More likely it is simply the reflexive liberal solution to any social problem: spend more. From Karl Marx to John Rawls, if you’ll excuse the juxtaposition, left-wing critics of capitalism have often paid it the supreme compliment of presuming it so productive an economic system that it has overcome permanently the problem of scarcity in human life. Capitalism has generated a “plenty.” It has distributional problems, which produce intolerable social and economic instability; but eliminate or control those inconveniences and it could produce wealth enough not only to provide for every man’s necessities but also to lift him into the realm of freedom. To some liberals, that premise implied that socioeconomic rights could be paid for without severe damage to the economy, and without oppressive taxation at least of the majority. Obama is the first liberal to suggest that even capitalism cannot pay for all the benefits promised by the American welfare state, particularly regarding health care. Granted, his solution is counterintuitive in the extreme, which makes one wonder if he is sincere. To the extent that liberalism is the welfare state, and the welfare state is entitlement spending, and entitlements are mostly spent effecting the right to health care, the insolvency of the health care entitlement programs is rightly regarded as a major part of the economic, and moral, crisis of liberalism. “Simply put,” Yuval Levin writes, “we cannot afford to preserve our welfare state in anything like its present form.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, by 2025 Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the interest on the federal debt will consume all—all—federal revenues, leaving defense and all other expenditures to be paid for by borrowing; and the debt will be approaching twice the country’s annual GDP.43

If something can’t go on forever, Herbert Stein noted sagely, it won’t. It would be possible to increase federal revenues by raising taxes, but the kind of money that’s needed could only be raised by taxing the middle class (defined, let us say, as all those families making less than $250,000 a year) very heavily. Like every Democratic candidate since Walter Mondale, who made the mistake of confessing to the American people that he was going to raise their taxes, Obama swore not to do that. Even supporters of Obamacare, like Clive Crook, a commentator for the Atlantic and the Financial Times, regretted the decision.

It is right to provide guaranteed health insurance, but wrong to claim this great prize could be had, in effect, for nothing. Broadly based tax increases and fundamental reform to health care delivery will be needed to balance the books. Denying this was a mistake. What was worse—an insult to one’s intelligence, really—was to argue as Obama has . . . that this reform was, first and foremost, a cost-reducing initiative, and a way to drive down premiums.44

If the bankruptcy of the entitlement programs were handled just the right way, with world-class cynicism and opportunism, in an emergency demanding quick, painful action lest grandma descend into an irreversible diabetic coma, then liberalism might succeed in maneuvering America into a Scandinavia-style überwelfare state, fueled by massive and regressive taxes cheerfully accepted by the citizenry. But odds are we stand, instead, at the twilight of the liberal welfare state. As it sinks, a new, more conservative system will likely rise that will feature some combination of more means-testing of benefits, a switch from defined-benefit to defined-contribution programs, greater devolution of authority to the states and localities, a new budget process that will force welfare expenditures to compete with other national priorities, and the redefinition of the welfare function away from fulfilling socioeconomic “rights” and toward charitably taking care of the truly needy as best the community can afford, when private efforts have failed or proved inadequate. Currently, the welfare state operates almost independently alongside the general government. Taken together, these reforms will work to reintegrate the welfare state into the government, curtailing its state-within-a-state status, and even more important, integrating it back into the constitutional system that stands on natural rights and consent.

Is it just wishful thinking to imagine the end of liberalism? Few things in politics are permanent. Conservatism and liberalism didn’t become the central division in our politics until the middle of the twentieth century. Before that American politics revolved around such issues as states’ rights, wars, slavery, the tariff, and suffrage. Parties have come and gone in our history. You won’t find many Federalists, Whigs, or Populists lining up at the polls these days. Britain’s Liberal Party faded from power in the 1920s. The Canadian Liberal Party collapsed in 2011. Recently, within a decade of its maximum empire at home and abroad, a combined intellectual movement, political party, and form of government crumbled away, to be swept up and consigned to the dustbin of history. Communism, which in a very different way from American liberalism traced its roots to Hegel, Social Darwinism, and leadership by a vanguard group of intellectuals, vanished before our eyes, though not without an abortive coup or two. If communism, armed with millions of troops and thousands of megatons of nuclear weapons, could collapse of its own deadweight and implausibility, why not American liberalism? The parallel is imperfect, of course, because liberalism and its vehicle, the Democratic Party, remain profoundly popular, resilient, and changeable. Elections matter to them. What’s more, the egalitarian impulse, centralized government (though not centralized administration), and the Democratic Party have deep roots in the American political tradition—and reflect permanent aspects of modern democracy itself, as Tocqueville testifies.

Some elements of liberalism are inherent to American democracy, then, but the compound, the peculiar combination that is contemporary liberalism, is not. Compounded of the philosophy of history, Social Darwinism, the living constitution, leadership, the cult of the State, the rule of administrative experts, entitlements and group rights, and moral creativity, modern liberalism is something new and distinctive, despite the presence in it, too, of certain American constants like the love of equality and democratic individualism. Under the pressure of ideas and events, that compound could come apart. Liberals’ confidence in being on the right, the winning side of history could crumble, perhaps has already begun to crumble. Trust in government, which really means in the State, is at all-time lows. A majority of Americans opposes a new entitlement program—in part because they want to keep the old programs unimpaired, but also because the economic and moral sustainability of the whole welfare state grows more and more doubtful. The goodwill and even the presumptive expertise of many government experts command less and less respect. Obama’s speeches no longer send the old thrill up the leg, and his leadership, whether for one or two terms, may yet help to discredit the respectability of following the Leader.

The Democratic Party is unlikely to go poof, but it’s possible that modern liberalism will. A series of nasty political defeats and painful repudiations of its impossible dreams might do the trick. At the least, it will have to downsize its ambitions and get back in touch with political, moral, and fiscal reality. It will have to—all together now—turn back the clock. Much will depend, too, on what conservatives say and do in the coming years. Will they have the prudence and guile to elevate the fight to the level of constitutional principle, to expose the Tory credentials of their opponents? President Obama’s decision to double down aggressively on the reach and cost of big government, just as the European model of social democracy is hitting the skids, provides the perfect opportunity for conservatives to exploit. His course makes the problems of liberalism worse and more urgent, as though he is eager for a crisis. Sooner or later, the crisis will come. If the people remain attached to their government and laws, and American statesmen do their part, the country may yet take the path leading up from liberalism.