NYTimes Ross Douthat January 22, 2013 The Liberal Hour I naturally preferred _my own version_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/opinion/sunday/douthat-a-sneaky-peek-at-obamas-inaugural-speech.html?partner= rssnyt&emc=rss) of President Obama’s second inaugural to the speech he actually delivered yesterday, but the substance of the two was roughly similar. The president clearly feels that his re-election both reflects and ratifies a larger leftward shift in American politics: His address reached backward to ground this new progressive era in the American past, offered explicit nods to the demographic groups and constituencies whose present-day growth has made it possible, and then sketched out an agenda suited to a more left-of-center future — climate change legislation and green industrial policy, a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, the universalization of gay marriage, new gun control laws, etc. It was not a speech designed to co-opt opponents of this agenda, to put it mildly — particularly those opponents whose control of the House of Representatives will make this agenda difficult to implement. But those of us who watched his negative, joyless re-election campaign and assumed that this president would begin his second term as a lame duck were only half-right. While there’s still good reason to think that Obama’s biggest legislative accomplishments are in the rearview mirror, the fact that he could win a clean victory despite the grim economic backdrop seems to have given him more confidence in the staying power of his coalition, and the continuing short-term impediments to his agenda in Washington seem to have liberated him to play for the longer term instead. If his first four years were about the inside game, then — leveraging the Democratic majorities of 2009-2010 to pass major legislation, even when doing so risked voter backlash — his second term seems likely to be more about the bully pulpit, the court of public opinion, and the elections of 2014 and 2016. America may not be quite as liberal as its president, but so long as the Republican Party remains unable to offer a coherent alternative to progressivism there’s an opportunity to continue pushing the American center leftward. And on the evidence of his second inaugural (and, indeed, his entire post-re-election political approach), that’s an opportunity Obama is determined to exploit. For now, there are good reasons to think he will succeed. Liberalism’s _majority is real_ (http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/douthat-the-obama-realignment/) , its demographic base is growing, its opposition is in disarray. The current confidence of liberal pundits is less jaunty than it was after the sweep of 2008, but perhaps more justified. Indeed, it’s quite possible that we’ll look back and see the conservative backlash of 2010 as the new progressive era’s greatest test, a brush with death which it has now successfully survived. But let me briefly play _the auriga_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auriga_(slave)) at a Roman triumph, whispering “memento mori” in the conqueror’s ear. Liberalism’s prospects may indeed be as bright as they look today. But as a counterpoint to the inauguration hoopla, here are three reasons why Obama might not be remembered as the kind of “liberal Reagan” that he seems to be today. 1) Obama’s political victories are clearer than his policy accomplishments. The question of whether Obamacare will be implemented has been answered; the question of whether it can survive its own design flaws has not. The question of whether Obamanomics would be rejected by the public in the short run has been answered; the question of whether it can produce the kind of longer-run growth that previous generations of Americans took for granted has not. (The sluggish economic recovery barely figured into the second inaugural, and the president talked more about green industrial policy than about the plight of the unemployed.) The question of whether Obama’s foreign policy would avoid major disasters and be an asset in his re-election bid has been answered; the question of whether his navigation of the Arab Spring and his attempts to contain Iran will look skillful in hindsight has not. Obama plainly turned the social issues to his party’s advantage last year (with a major assist from Todd Akin). But _a tentative and ambiguous pro-choice trend in public opinion_ (http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/338358/how-not-read-abortion-polls-ramesh-ponnuru) after a long period of pro-life gains does not mean that liberals have won the abortion wars, especially given that the main policy shift of the Obama era has been _an uptick in state-level abortion restriction._ (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2013/01/state-restrictions-4901.gif) And even on gay marriage, where most observers — myself included — assume that the Obama era will be remembered as genuinely transformational, that transformation has only actually been achieved in nine of the fifty states. None of this means that Obama won’t ultimately being remembered for policy triumphs as clear the victory over stagflation or the successful resolution of the Cold War, or that his presidency won’t cast a long, Reagan-like shadow over subsequent policy debates. But we don’t know that yet: The current recovery is no Reagan boom, it will be years before we can tell if the Affordable Care Act lives up its name, and plenty of surprises may await in the next four years. And remember — if passing major legislation, building a stable-seeming coalition, presiding over okay-but-not-great growth and winning a hard-fought re-election were enough to earn a spot on Rushmore, George W. Bush’s face would be being chiseled there right now. 2) Liberalism, no less than conservatism, is riven by internal contradictions. The Obama majority does indeed reflect the diversity of twenty-first America, just as its enthusiastic boosters claim: It’s the party of _Silicon Valley billionaires_ (http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047017711X.html) and immigrants who work at Wal-Mart, of public sector employees and affluent dual-earner professionals, of the secular academy and the black church, of the multiracial Southwest and white New England. But for political parties _as well as human societies_ (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/?page=full) , diversity is as often a weakness as a strength, and it’s easy enough to imagine scenarios where the Democratic Party of the near-future fractures along lines of race or geography, class or culture. These crack-ups could happen over issues where the party seems superficially united at the moment, like guns and immigration and environmentalism, or they could happen over issues where the divisions are already there for everyone to see, _like Medicare and Social Security_ (http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=E0A28AA4-2FA8-46A8-933D-BADA0AD98D7A) . They could divide the party’s shrinking-but-still-large pool of white voters from its minority constituents, or they could divide minority voters from each other on one or more of the many issues where the interests of all Hispanics, all African-Americans or all Asians do not obviously align. Above all, they could force Democrats to choose, decisively and disruptively, between their traditional identity as the party of middle-class entitlements and their current identity as the party of low taxes on everyone except the richest of the rich — a choice that the Obama administration has thus far _deliberately postponed_ (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/liberalisms-400000-problem/) . 3) The Republican Party is, in fact, capable of change. These potential fissures within liberalism won’t matter if the G.O.P. remains as hapless as it is today. And there’s a increasingly popular strain of opinion on the left that holds that Republicans are now structurally incapable of moderation, reform and self-correction — that the grip of ideology is too strong, the demands of the base too intense, the party’s distance of twenty-first America too great. If this view is right, the G.O.P. is almost irrelevant to liberalism’s fortunes, and Obama’s political legacy is really only threatened by “black swan” events like suitcase nukes and 2008-style financial panics. But just because the G.O.P. looks like it could spend a generation in the wilderness doesn’t meant that it actually will. National parties exist to win national elections, and that incentive alone often suffices to drive changes that the party’s interest groups and ideological enforcers dislike. For every case like the Republicans of the 1930s and the 1940s, the Carter-Mondale-Dukakis Democrats, or the British Tories between John Major and David Cameron, there’s another case where a party that seems to have lost its way completely turns out to be one successful campaign, one appealing nominee or one change of circumstances away from a comeback. In modern G.O.P. history alone, the Goldwater rout was swiftly succeeded by the Nixon realignment, and the various Gingrich-era debacles by the rise of George W. Bush’s “ compassionate conservatism.” We are only one presidential term removed from the latter rebranding, and the idea that it cannot happen again (albeit hopefully along somewhat different lines) seems ahistorical and naive. Yes, obviously, the Republican Party might remain a mess for years to come. But liberals who expect that continuing conservative dysfunction will help cement Obama’s legacy are betting on a trend, not counting on a certainty. I’ll end where I ended _one of last week’s posts_ (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/will-gridlock-last/) , with two numbers: _51 and 23_ (http://www.gallup.com/poll/159803/satisfaction-improved-2012-below-average.a spx) . The first is the percentage of Americans who told Gallup they were “ very satisfied” with the country’s direction in the first year of Ronald Reagan’s second term; the second is the average who said the same last month. Liberalism’s current ascendance is undeniable, and the president’s goal of a transformational presidency is plainly within his reach. But until the second number rises closer to the first one, those transformations will remain at least partially reversible, and Obama’s quest to become liberalism’ s Reagan will be incomplete.
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