Tag Archives: liberalism

by | February 5, 2012 · 5:49 PM

Study: Obama Most Conservative Democratic President in Recent History

By Luke Brinker

If President Barack Obama truly subscribes to a political philosophy based on “Saul Alinsky radicalism,” as Newt Gingrich alleges, he has a funny way of showing it. Political scientist Keith Poole of the University of Georgia recently plotted the public positions of presidents from Harry Truman to Obama on a liberal-conservative scale. Poole found that, contrary to Tea Party mythology, Obama is far from a hard-core leftist. In fact, he’s to the right of every Democratic president since Truman:

Poole has also examined the phenomenon of party polarization, the topic of endless Beltway punditry. Polarization, Poole has found, is real, but it’s not the result of “both sides” moving toward the extremes. Republicans have moved much further to the right than Democrats have to the left. (Read this post for more, including some nifty charts that illustrate the point.) This is important to bear in mind when considering some of Obama’s purportedly “liberal” policies on issues like health care, the environment, and economic stimulus. Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment – the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 – is grounded in the “individual mandate,” a requirement that individuals buy health insurance or pay a penalty. The intellectual origins of the mandate are on the right; the Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney are among its past backers. (It’s easy to see why: by discouraging free riding,  the mandate upholds conservative notions about personal responsibility, as Romney wrote in a Wall Street journal op-ed in 2006. It also preserves the for-profit, private insurance model at the expense of a more efficient single-payer solution, which many on the left favor.) On climate change, Obama’s proposed solution has been a cap-and-trade scheme, which was also the position of the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008. George H. W. Bush implemented a cap-and-trade program to deal with sulfur dioxide emissions in the early 1990s; that market-based approach has proven remarkably successful, decreasing sulfur dioxide emissions by 40 percent since 1990. As for Obama’s economic stimulus policies, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 drew on many conservative ideas; in fact, one of economists’ chief critiques of the bill was that it was too reliant on inefficient tax cuts (which Democrats inserted in a futile effort to gain substantial GOP backing) and too light on large-scale infrastructure spending. Even where Obama has supposedly governed as a “liberal,” he’s hardly been a bona fide New Deal type.

The Tea Party may characteristically refuse to acknowledge reality on this score, but it’s clear that Bruce Bartlett is right: Obama is essentially a moderate conservative.  The Tea Party Jacobins have so radically redefined conservatism that it’s hard to remember that Burkeans still exist – they’re just Democrats now.

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by | January 15, 2012 · 1:21 PM

Bain Capital and the Intra-GOP Culture Clash

By Luke Brinker

Besides Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry has been the highest-profile GOP critic of Mitt Romney’s tenure as CEO of private equity firm Bain Capital. Employing language that wouldn’t be out of place at an Occupy Wall Street rally, Perry denounced the private equity business model as “vulture capitalism,” as ABC reports:

 Texas Gov. Rick Perry categorized venture capital firms like the one once headed by Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, as “vultures” who prey upon sick companies and “leave the skeleton” behind.

“Allowing these companies to come in and loot the, loot people’s jobs, loot their pensions, loot their ability to take care of their families and I will suggest they’re just vultures,” Perry said during a townhall at a retirement community here. “They’re vultures that sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass. They leave with that and they leave the skeleton.”

Asked by reporters to clarify whether he was directly referencing Bain with that comment, Perry answered, “Sure that’s exactly what I was making. They sit there, and they wait until they see a distressed company, and then they swoop in and you know pick the carcass clean and fly away.”

The Texas governor upped his attacks against Romney, arguing that voters in the Palmetto State will not want to elect a candidate who “gutted” and “looted” companies in South Carolina.

Cynicism and opportunism certainly go some distance toward explaining why a fervent free marketeer like Perry is taking Romney to task for his corporate practices. But the Perry-Romney divide on private equity illuminates a culture clash within the Republican Party. There’s not only a divide between white working class Republicans and the party’s country club set. There are also fissures within the party’s business wing, and those fissures are on display in Perry’s Bain attack.

The oil and gas industry has been Perry’s most generous supporter throughout his political career. Big Oil has funded Perry’s Texas campaigns to the tune of over $11 million, and among the 2012 presidential candidates, Perry was the top recipient of energy industry donations in 2011. That the conservative Perry would receive substantial energy industry backing is not surprising. The industry is headquartered primarily in conservative states like Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Perry’s Texas, and of its campaign contributions, an average of 77 percent go to Republicans.

The financial industry, on the other hand, is nowhere near as uniformly Republican as the oil and gas industry. Since 1990, finance has given 55 percent of its donations to the Republicans and 45 percent to Democrats. While Romney, as a former industry titan himself, is the top recipient of financial industry cash for the 2012 cycle, Barack Obama bested John McCain in industry donations in 2008. What’s behind finance’s friendliness toward Democrats? While the deregulatory, Wall Street-friendly policies of the Clinton administration proved pivotal in convincing many masters of the universe to back the Democratic Party, the industry’s support for Democrats isn’t entirely a matter of Democrats adopting big finance’s policies. (President Obama signed the toughest financial regulation since the Great Depression, for instance.) Financial executives themselves are remarkably liberal in many of their political views. They may express skepticism toward Dodd-Frank, the Occupy movement, and Obama’s alleged stigmatization of “fat cats,” but many are financially secure enough not to have to worry about a return to the Clinton era’s top income tax rate of 39.6 percent. Wall Street types tend to be pro-choice, environmentally conscious (unlike conservative oil and gas executives), and cosmopolitan in outlook. When New York legalized same-sex marriage this summer, Wall Street figures were crucial in securing support for marriage equality. The increasingly socially conservative, anti-climate science, anti-evolution, and anti-intellectual bent of the GOP means that many Republican candidates no longer pass the cocktail party test – that is, it would simply be too embarrassing for a Wall Streeter at an Upper East Side cocktail party to admit he supported, say, Sarah Palin.

In a New York Times story today on the styles of life among the top one percent, Shaila Dewan and Robert Gebeloff noted a Columbia University study that found that wealthy people in poorer states overwhelmingly support Republicans. In more affluent states, wealthy people are less likely to skew Republican. Delaware, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York – which respectively rank first, second, third, fourth, and eighth in per-capita income – have significant financial industry presence, and all supported Obama in 2008. (You have to go down to number 14 Alaska before you find a red state.) Texas rank 32nd, Oklahoma 43rd, and Louisiana 47th in per-capita income. All were McCain states in 2008. In short, cultural liberalism correlates with both affluence and financial industry strength, while states dominated by the oil industry are both more socially conservative and poorer. Romney’s probable nomination, then, is at odds with the prevailing trends in his party. A coastal elite from the financial industry is poised to stand for president as the candidate of a party concentrated in the Plains, South, and non-financial businesses. That helps explain why much of the GOP base continues to view Romney with suspicion.

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by | January 8, 2012 · 2:48 PM

Santorum, the Catholic Church, and Child Sex Abuse

By Luke Brinker

As a follow-up to John’s post on Rick Santorum’s conservative brand of Catholicism, I thought it would be appropriate to examine how Santorum handled one of the gravest scandals to confront his religion. The sexual abuse of children by priests and the hierarchy’s decades-long cover-up of the crimes prompted this 2002 response from Santorum:

“Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture,” Santorum wrote. “When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”

Boston was indeed the “center of the storm” when the scandal erupted ten years ago. It’s worth noting that Cardinal Bernard Law, the top Catholic cleric in Boston who aided and abetted the Church’s cover-up, was a staunch conservative, unaffected by his city’s “academic, political, and cultural liberalism.” Moreover, it soon became apparent that child rape by priests was not confined to any one region of the country, or even to the United States alone. The problem was particularly widespread in Ireland, whose culture would hardly meet Santorum’s definition of libertine liberalism. The country prohibits abortion and did not even allow divorce (and even then only under limited circumstances) until 1997. That such a devout nation as Ireland was rocked by priestly pedophilia must confuse a committed theocrat like Santorum.

I’ve written that Mitt Romney is virtually guaranteed to win the Republican nomination, but that doesn’t mean that the ideas of his fellow candidates are irrelevant. Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and Santorum’s sizable constituencies in the GOP tell us much about the popular impulses of one of our country’s two main political parties. And Santorum’s rise to prominence, however transient it will prove to be, is particularly troubling for more reasons than his anti-contraception, rabidly anti-gay views. That he would cavalierly dismiss child rape and its systematic concealment as nothing more than a byproduct of one region’s liberalism is demeaning, disgusting, and, in a sane world, disqualifying.

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by | January 1, 2012 · 10:46 AM

Manicheanism and the American Left

By Luke Brinker

Among the most repugnant characteristics of the American right is its self-righteous, nuance-free, Manichean worldview. One is either with “us” or with the ter’rists. One either opposes full legal equality for gays and lesbians or countenances the moral degradation of the United States. One either unquestioningly supports the actions of the right-wing Israeli government or is an anti-Semite who wishes to see the Jewish state wiped off the face of the earth.

In its best, Niebuhrian form, liberalism attunes itself to the complexities of the world. Unlike triumphalist progressivism, liberalism acknowledges human frailties, but liberals, adhering to Enlightenment principles, place more faith in human agency than conservatives.

Of course, Niehbuhrian liberalism does not have a monopoly on the American left. If we needed a reminder of this, the Twitter exchange set off by Dylan Matthews and Glenn Greenwald on New Year’s Eve (about which I blogged) provided one. Calling white liberals to task for lauding the racist demagogue Ron Paul, Matthews elicited a scathing response from Greenwald, who said clearly implied that the impacts of the Obama administration’s wars on terrorism and drugs are far worse than anything Paul may or may not have written 20 years ago. Not only is the drug war “racist,” Greenwald argued, but thanks to the administration’s prolific use of drones, the US is “constantly killing Muslim children.” I responded that while I, like Greenwald, quarrel with both the drug war and the blowback-inducing drone campaign, it is scurrilous to compare the racial animosity displayed in Paul’s newsletters to debatable Obama policies, which are not motivated by personal racism on the part of the president or his administration.

What most disappoints me about Greenwald’s reaction to critiques from Matthews and others like Michael Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong is the way Greenwald impugned their motives. Those of us who think Paul’s racism, homophobia, and conspiracy theorizing are disqualifying must, by Greenwald’s logic, also want to silence critiques of civil liberties violations, foreign wars, and the deaths of innocent Muslims. In fact, we may even be said to relish the deaths of those Muslims. This is black-and-white Manichean thinking of the most reprehensible sort.

Before I’m accused of being a blindly loyal Obama fanboy, I’ll reiterate my opposition to both policies Greenwald mentioned and note that it’s Greenwald and his acolytes who are displaying the most creepy devotion to a personality cult. Apparently the entire criticism of the national security state collapses in the absence of one Texas congressman. But is it not fair for Greenwald and others to point out that it’s all too easy for me to say that Obama’s motives aren’t sinister, even if the consequences of some of his policies are tragic? Commenter Moral Authority made this point in response to my earlier post:

“I find the cavalier use of drones and the continued prosecution of the disastrous drug war to be foolish and immoral, but I do not believe they are motivated by personal racism on the part of Obama and his administration.”

So what are they motivated by, then? Presumably callous indifference to the institutional racism and classism that affect certain groups of people — some American minorities in the one case, and foreign Muslim civilians in the other — and render them invisible, voiceless nonpersons as far as our political system is concerned. In other words, Obama isn’t a racist, he’s just a psychopath. Sounds like a winning campaign slogan.

Here we have left-wing Manicheanism at its finest. In Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, the historian identified such moralistic condemnation as a key element of the paranoid style. One never simply differs with one’s political adversaries on questions of means and/or ends. The paranoiac considers his adversary to be malicious, unscrupulous, or, in this case “a psychopath.” Call me a Kantian, but I can’t escape the conviction that intent matters. While it cannot be proved or disproved, I believe Obama pursues the policies he does out of sincere good intent. That doesn’t make me an Obamabot; as I must constantly repeat, I don’t agree with all Obama policies. I simply happen to believe that it’s intellectually lazy to condemn those with whom I disagree as amoral and deranged.

To conclude, I will note the words of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in his 1949 manifesto for anti-Communist liberalism, The Vital Center. It is easy for the armchair critic to deride the actions of those with responsibility, he asserted:

The weakness of impotence is related to a fear of responsibility – a fear, that is, of making concrete decisions and being held to account for concrete consequences. Problems are much simpler when viewed from the office of a liberal weekly than when viewed in terms of what will actually happen when certain ideologically attractive steps are taken.

Too often the Doughface really does not want power or responsibility. For him the more subtle sensations of the perfect syllogism, the lost cause, the permanent minority, where lie can be safe from the exacting job of trying to work out wise policies in an imperfect world.

Politics becomes, not a means of getting things done, but an outlet for private grievances and frustrations. The progressive once disciplined by the responsibilities of power is often the most useful of all public servants; but he, alas, ceases to be a progressive and is regarded by all true Doughfaces as a cynical New Dealer or a tired Social Democrat.

Having renounced power, the Doughface seeks compensation in emotion. The pretext for progressive rhetoric is, of course, the idea that man, the creature of reason and benevolence, has only to understand the truth in order to act upon it.

But the function of progressive rhetoric is another matter; it is, in Dwight MacDonald’s phrase, to accomplish “in fantasy what cannot be accomplished in reality.” Because politics is for the Doughface a means of accommodating himself to a world he does not like but does not really want to change, he can find ample gratification in words. They appease his twinges of guilt without committing him to very drastic action.

Thus the expiatory role of resolutions in progressive meetings. A telegram of protest to a foreign chancellery gives the satisfaction of a job well done and a night’s rest well earned. The Doughfaces differ from Mr. Churchill: dreams, they find, are better than facts.

Progressive dreams are tinged with a brave purity, a rich sentiment and a noble defiance. But, like most dreams, they are notable for the distortion of facts by desire.

From the comfort of my own corner of the world, I can readily take the Obama administration on for continuing far too many Bush-era terrorism policies. I fully expect to continue opposing such policies, and to support efforts to push the administration in a new direction. I also don’t deny the invaluable contributions of legislators who stand up to the increased concentration of power in the executive branch. But I don’t think it’s irrelevant that Obama’s arguable policies are being planned and executed in the context of a struggle with foreign forces who have done far more to kill “Muslim children,” deny girls education, violate human rights, and wreak havoc on their societies than the US has ever done or set out to do.

Update: I will no longer respond to comments along the lines of, “What does it matter if the intentions of the administration officials urging murderous drone strikes are pure?” If it isn’t clear that a) this post is about the terms of political discourse and the need to be cautious about making sweeping moral condemnations and b) I actually question the efficacy of the drone strikes myself, then I see no point engaging commenters in further dialogue.

Update 2: For an eloquent elucidation on Reinhold Niebuhr and the simplistic worldview of Glenn Greenwald, read Smartypants.

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by | November 11, 2011 · 5:30 PM

Conservative Philosophers, Liberal Wonks?

By Luke Brinker

Ezra Klein flags a National Review piece by Carl Bogus, a liberal law professor with a forthcoming biography of conservative intellectual icon and National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. Here’s the part of  Bogus’s self-interview that Klein deems noteworthy:

Q. What is different between conservative and liberal literature?

A. One striking difference is that the iconic conservative works are about ideology. By contrast, the most influential liberal books of the era are about policy issues. Those works are Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962), The Other America by Michael Harrington (1962), The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963), and Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader (1965), which helped launch the environmental, anti-poverty, feminist, and consumer movements, respectively. Some prominent liberal books of the time were about ideology — such as The Vital Center by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1949) and The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958) — but these are exceptions to the rule.

Klein largely agrees:

I’ve noticed this as well. My conservative friends are very motivated by philosophical arguments. My liberal friends are very motivated by policy analysis. This can occasionally cause some confusion for the liberals who will look at past conservative legislation or current conservative proposals and note that they seem to have quite a lot in common with current liberal ideas.

President Obama’s health-care reform law was, of course, based on Mitt Romney’s reforms in Massachusetts which was, in turn, based on proposals developed by conservative think tanks and legislators in the 1990s. Cap-and-trade was, similarly, pioneered by George H.W. Bush as a way to curb sulfur dioxide emissions in the early ’90s and was promoted as a solution to global warming by no less a conservative authority than Newt Gingrich. But as soon as liberals embraced those proposals, conservatives turned on them.

I tend to chalk this up to the incentives of partisanship and the psychological pull ofmotivated skepticism. But a more generous interpretation is that because conservatives are more concerned with philosophy, they see the motivations of the legislators as much more important than liberals do.

So when liberals celebrate a liberal policy proposal coming from a conservative president — note the Democrats who joined with President Bush on No Child Left Behind and, until the conference committee shenanigans, Medicare Part D — it’s because their analysis is focused on the proposal. If the proposal lines up with their ideas, they support it. When conservatives turn on a onetime conservative proposal that’s been embraced by a more liberal president, it’s because they’re looking behind the policy to the philosophies of whoever is championing it. For them to feel comfortable supporting it, the philosophy of whoever is proposing it has to line up with their philosophy, too.

For the record, I still think my more cynical interpretation is right.

Klein is on to something here, although I think he misses a larger point. Setting aside past conservative support for cap-and-trade programs and the individual mandate, it’s worth pointing out that at the heart of conservatism is a fundamental skepticism about human nature. In his 1953 The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (admittedly, not exactly a Tea Party tome), conservative intellectual Russell Kirk distinguished conservatives, with their beliefs about the limitations of progress and human agency, from liberal and progressives, individuals marked by optimistic views about the potential for human endeavor to solve deep-rooted social problems. Conservative philosophy preaches caution about government schemes to regulate the economy, provide welfare, and the like because conservatives see complex cultural forces at work – forces that, despite our sincerest wishes, are often beyond human control. Liberals, confident that government can be a force for positive change, naturally turn their focus toward policies that can solve big problems.

In light of their skeptical attitude toward human nature, it’s unsurprising that conservative thinkers have historically supported cap-and-trade and the individual mandate. Both policies represent reforms that aim to solve pressing problems with the minimum amount of social and economic upheaval; that is to say, both cap-and-trade and the health care mandate are market-based solutions. That’s a lot different from what most liberals would like to see – more assertive measures like a carbon tax to solve climate change, a single-payer system to reform health care. The fact that cap-and-trade and the individual mandate are now Democratic Party policy indicates just how much the political climate has shifted in the right’s favor in the Age of Reagan. Now that a Democratic president is in the White House, though, the conservative roots of those policies don’t matter to the Tea Party crowd. That’s where Klein’s “cynical interpretation” comes in.

Lastly, I’d note that philosophy informs much of the contemporary liberal project. For instance, the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls championed egalitarianism and inveighed against inequality in his groundbreaking A Theory of Justice, sounding themes appropriated by Occupy Wall Street activists. Moreover, the even liberal wonkery has philosophical origins, especially in the utilitarian and pragmatic work of liberal philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Richard Rorty. Overarching philosophical principles – the injustice of systemic inequality, the ability of human agency to solve social problems, and the need to find practical solutions in the here-and-now – are liberalism’s starting point. The outpouring of wonkish books and policy papers are its natural consequence.

 

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