Some Thoughts Post-Election

I'm still on something of a high from Tuesday night. We elected a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. Here are some thoughts that I take away from this, both as an American and a liberal.

We are the Cool Kid of the World Stage Again: I just got an email from a friend of mine in Italy. He told me that he listened to Obama's acceptance speech and cried. In Italy! "You have no idea how much the world loves this man," He wrote. We have all heard this before. Andrew Sullivan has not talked about much else in the last two years. Indeed, if Obama has a mandate with his electoral victory, it seems to me that it is a mandate for a more nuanced, diplomatic approach to foreign relations. This was a candidate emphasized early on was that he would talk to our enemies, and again, whose name was Barack Hussein Obama. Who was raised for part of his life in Indonesia. Whose father a Kenyan. Obama made his internationalism part of his platform in the democratic party, and while de-emphasizing it in the general election, Obama never backed away from his claim that he would talk to our enemies. I am very hopeful about all of this.

Is America a Center-Right Country, or Was Obama's Victory a Mandate for Progressivism?: As Dave Sirota, Bill Scher, Matt Yglesias and a number of others have shown, the Beltway insiders, cable news folks, and the like, are warning Democrats not to over-reach, NO! That is America is a center-right nation and will always, always, always, be a center right nation. It seems pretty clear that this claim is, frankly, retarded. Rick Perlstein titles his book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the Liberal Consensus, for a reason. From 1929 to 1964 there was a liberal consensus in America. It was caused by something called The Great Depression and series of policies known as The New Deal. Following WWII, this country experienced the greatest economic boom of its history until 1964, and indeed of any country's history, and the idea of an active government was so obviously right that when Barry Goldwater ran in 1964 he was called a kook. So we have a precedent in this century, of almost three decades, of America as a nation of the center or center-left.

A lot of the Netroots are chomping at the bit for major progresssive change now, now, now! They see the current election, the democratic congressional majority, and the economic collapse as a temporary window which must be taken advantage of for real progressive change. Otherwise it will close, people will "snap out of it" and just want to keep the Fed out of their lives. They also argue that Obama's win really did constitute a progressive mandate because McCain and Palin called him every epithet for a left-winger in the Republican playbook and lost by seven million votes. "Voters knew exactly what they were getting when they elected Obama," the netroots says, "They knew he was liberal, they knew his voting record, they believed that he would raise their taxes and they still supported him anyway." True. But they also knew that Obama was emphasizing a tax cut for the middle class. That policy advisors were largely members of the Clinton administration and the Washington establishment. His candidacy was, for these very reasons, met with approval from the MSM. And this too, was a reason why voters supported him. The logic of the Netroots is a bit desperate here. They want to push Obama to the left so they are saying that his victory represented a victory for progressive policies. And it did, in certain ways. Obama ran on a platform of Universal Healthcare (although his plan wasn't really universal, his rhetoric was pretty liberal in this area). He ran on a platform of transforming the nation's infrastructure with new, green technology. This too was a bold, liberal idea. But there was a reason why voters didn't think Obama was a "scary liberal." He didn't reach out to the Netroots, for starters. This, perhaps, would have been the best indication that Obama was committed to using his election as a mandate for progressive policies. Yet he did not.

So am I saying that Obama is not really committed to a progressive administration? Not exactly. I think he understands something about his election, and about the current moment in our history, that many of the Netroots would like to ignore. The truth is that for almost the last thirty years, since 1980, we have been a center-right nation. The constant refrain that one hears from the media on this point is not so much out of any ideological bent, as it is based on the effectiveness that conservatives have had controlling the political discourse in this country for the last thirty years. It is a kind of Ministry-of-information-logic: we are currently a center-right nation, therefore we have always been a center-right nation and will always be a center-right nation. But again, there is a reason for this, it is not just a media creation. For the last thirty years the Right has managed to trash the idea of government as a positive agent of social change. The logic was stunning in its tautology. By fucking up government and running huge deficits conservatives then claimed their own ineptitude as a governing party was proof that Government Was the Problem. Part of this was the Democrats fault too. By the late 1970's, they had become bad at governing too. And Bill Clinton, while governing effectively, managed to nevertheless trigger widespread disgust in government from his inability to keep his dick in his pants. And now we have the legacy of the Bush years, possibly the most inept and corrupt administration in American history. It has led to unnecessary war, botched crisis operations of Katrina, and now a global (!) financial collapse, bringing America to the brink of depression.

This has led to a curious paradox, I think, within the American public consciousness, and one that Obama is acutely aware of going forward. On the one hand, people are scared. Big things are happening that threaten to run over them, to leave them unemployed, uninsured and bankrupt. The housing market is tanking, public pensions are tanking, the stock market is tanking, and in the last two months 500,000 American jobs were lost (almost equal all of what we lost in the previous eight months of this year). People are scared, and they don't know who else to turn to at this moment of crisis except government. On the other hand, I think that it is naive of the Netroots to think that this is the equivalent of a vote of confidence in government to socialize healthcare, for example. If anything, I think the last thirty years have left American more distrustful of government than ever, but they are willing to suspend that belief because they have no place else to turn. And so, it is for this reason that I am distrustful of this first-100-day-is-everything meme. At this point it appears that democrats have been given an opportunity to regain public trust by rebuilding the economy. And it can go either way. Democrats have not shown much of an ability to pass legislation, not in the Bush administration or in the Clinton administration. If it turns out that this bailout comes back a year later, and billions of dollars of taxpayer money has been wasted, the tide could easily swing back to the Republicans. But lets assume that an Obama administration does rescue the economy from collapse ushers in a revitalized economy through a series of smart stimulus packages and infrastructure projects. The mid-terms come in 2010, and it seems to me that this is the real mandate for progressive change. Everyone in the media seems to assume that this is a repeat of 1992-94. A democrat comes into the presidency with large congressional majorities, only to completely lose Congress two years later. I think it is pretty clear that this moment is not a repeat of 1992. But continued dominance of Congress by the democrats in 2010 will prove it. And that, in my opinion will be the moment to push for universal healthcare. Its what would be the 'long view.' But I think that it is this long view that Obama is thinking about when he takes office.