The Crisis of Liberalism

[Valin]

Claremont Review of Books:

 

Charles R. Kesler

8/7/12

 

In the late innings of the health care fight President Barack Obama told a joint session of 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," to do the "great things" that "will meet history's test." He concluded, "This is our calling. This is our character." And that had been his ambition all along. "Let us transform this nation," he implored in 2007 when he announced his candidacy for president. As Election Day 2008 approached, he promised, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

 

Those words mean this will be a different country when he's finished with it. If, Rip Van Winkle-style, one had slept through the Obama Administration, one would awaken, as it were, in a new land. The old word for such a profound change was revolution. As a self-proclaimed progressive, however, he reckons his revolution will be one in a series, an unending series generated by social progress or history itself. His reforms will connect to Woodrow Wilson's, Franklin Roosevelt's, and Lyndon Johnson's before him, and others yet to come, and all these together will constitute a continual upward evolution. That sounds reassuring, insofar as it promises to take the sting and surprise out of change; but such inevitability comes at the expense of liberty, because there is no choice about the whole of liberal-style progress. In the old days, one could choose to make a revolution or not. A revolution could be defeated or reversed. But you cannot deliberate about the inevitable, which is how progressives think of history. As we've been told for generations now, ad nauseam: you can't turn back the clock.

 

 

History's Test

 

 

By the same token, however, you can't turn the clock ahead, either. What Obama invokes as "history's test" is a stern one: success or irrelevance, power or nothingness, to borrow Michael Tomasky's suggestive language. Either you're on the right side of history or the wrong side, where the right side is necessarily understood to mean the winning side, and the wrong side the losing one. Otherwise this would not be a historical test but an abstract moral or philosophical one. The obvious moral difficulty—does the right side always win its wars?—can be finessed for a while by distinguishing between wars and mere battles. It's possible to lose many battles and still win the war, eventually. But "history's test" is of necessity a final examination; it can't be postponed indefinitely without the whole idea of historical validation becoming a laughingstock or an otherworldly stalking horse, neither of which liberalism fancies itself to be. Meeting history's test, as Obama sees it, means recognizing that the "moment" has come for bold, new reforms; but if these prove untimely and unattainable, if the moment comes and goes fruitlessly, then it casts doubt not only on the prophecy and the prophet but on the whole prophecy business. If Obama cannot repeal the George W. Bush-era tax cuts or close the Guantanamo detention facility, those are battles lost. If he cannot get reelected, that's a defeat of an altogether more serious sort. If his heralded new majority for change does not triumph in congressional and state elections in 2012 or 2014 or 2016, then the long-term prospects for a liberal transformation drop still further. If Obamacare is repealed and replaced after 2012 by an energized conservative majority that controls the presidency, Senate, House of Representatives, and most state legislative chambers and governorships, then Obama's legacy and his claim to leadership will lie in ruins.

 

Even so, American liberals would try to overcome their embarrassment by insisting that poor Obama was too far ahead of his time. Desperate as it is, that argument is neither unprecedented nor implausible, and it has the capital advantage of being unfalsifiable. But it would certainly be a stretch, because it would highlight, by trying to ignore, the dispiriting truth that Obama had it won—had Obamacare enacted and written into law, its implementation under way—only to suffer the ignominy of defeat. After the repeal of Prohibition, for example, how many observers concluded that the problem with the 18th Amendment was that it had been ahead of its time? After the dissolution of the USSR, how many Russians, or even Communists, defended the extinct Soviet Union as too good for this world, or tragically in advance of its age? It's one thing to claim grandiloquently to represent the future, to be the future, ever glorious and ever distant. It's quite another to have been the future. The former trades in utopian speculation, however scientific the speculation claims to be. The latter forces one, wearily, to confront a history of failure and disillusionment—to confess "the god that failed," to borrow that ever resonant term from the Cold War.

 

(Snip)

 

Assuming this is true, the question needs to be asked...what will replace it? What will the Left morph into? Just something to think about.