I naturally preferred my
own version 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, 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 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 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.
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 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, 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. 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.
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, with two numbers: 51
and 23. 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.
