James Brown once wondered at anti-war protestors who headed for Canada in the 60s – they wanted out of the U.S.; J.B. wanted in. I’m reminded of the distance between him and them, when I try to take the measure of “hard” left disdain for Obama.
Especially in the wake of last month’s momentous Healthcare decision. The Affordable Care Act is, perhaps, the best testament to Obama’s politics of inclusion. It’s not…Canada’s Single Payer system, but (note the state of ACA’s template state, Massachusetts, where 98% of the population now has health insurance) it promises to move American toward something close to universal healthcare.
Obama’s inclusionary instinct, though, shouldn’t be mixed up with Cory Booker’s and Bill Clinton’s gentling of 1 per centers. Or with beamish Democratic Party partisans who embrace the end of the American working class. Tom Smucker talks back to those celebrants of one-dimensional diversity in his post here, “Solidarity in Alabama.” You’ll be moved by Smucker’s melding of traditional working class values – “God ain’t me” – and Gen OWS freshness. Yet there are other sides to class struggle in America, as Bernard Avishai has reminded us:
class warfare in America has not generally been fought between the working class and ‘the ruling class’ but between the working class and the (alleged) underclass. This means between ethnic whites and exasperated blacks, Southie and Roxbury, the docks against the inner city – what Obama saw working the streets of Chicago…
Avishai has argued Obama’s clarity about such residual class resentments informed his strategy in the early days of his administration:
Had he come out of the blocks attacking Republican leaders and free enterprise principles, that is, without first showing how badly he wanted, and embodied, “bipartisanship” (also code for a hybrid of black and white) – had he radicalized his “narrative” and advanced the claim that government action was needed to (how did he put it to “Joe-the Plumber”?) spread the wealth – he would not have spooked Wall Street nearly as much Main Street. He would have been suspected of reverting to form himself, a Jesse Jackson in John Kerry’s clothing.
Avishai rightfully upbraids progressives for failing to grasp the dilemma Obama faced: “White working people respond to a strong leader, yes, but so long as that leader looks like Giuliani or Christie…
If you are black in America, they have to believe you are brave, sincere, a unifier and wicked smart. This is where we especially let Obama down. We made “independents” believe, with unearned superiority, that we could have done better.
Tom Smucker isn’t one of those leftists who “let Obama down.” But (as Avishai recently noted) NYRB’s Garry Wills once belonged to that superior “we”, though Wills has reversed himself lately, posting a critique of this Youtube video by Harvard Law Professor Roberto Unger http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnf4k8EaL7M – former teacher and supporter of Obama who now insists the president “must be defeated.” Wills’ take-down of Unger might have more resonance if he’d copped to his own record of Obama-bashing. And while Wills hints Unger’s tone bespeaks an aristo mind-set, noting this hater “descended from a famous Brazilian family,” his high ironies fail to evoke the full ugly of Professor Unger’s attitudinizing. Perhaps because Wills himself shares too much with the wannabe magisterial mandarin – “If I had to choose between [Unger and Obama] as men of probity, I would prefer Unger as quick as the eye can blink.”
To this choosy beggar, it comes down to ear not eye; the prof’s orotundities are perfectly repellent. From Unger one learns (all over again) “the law is an ass.” He’s one of those lawyers-in-love with the sound of their profession. (Unger is a brother under the skin of an attorney I ran into when I was on jury duty last summer. When our Judge asked my panel what we made of the presumption of innocence, most of us – knowing we needed all the help we could get? – agreed it seemed good. Then that attorney – a former D.A. now specializing in getting drug-dealers off – took center stage, pronouncing: “It is the foundation of our legal system.” I found him guilty!) But Unger is way worse than your ordinary lawyer. He acts like the Grand Inquisitor on hemorrhoids.
Thankfully, though, episodes in his own political career (as per Wikipedia) suggest he’s more feckless than murderous.
In 1990, Unger ran a symbolic campaign for a seat in the national chamber of deputies. He had no money, no structure, and only campaigned for eight weeks. He ran on a platform of reforming the slums, and went around the slum neighborhoods giving lectures. He received 9,000 votes, just 1,000 votes short of winning the seat. None of the votes came from the slums, however. All his votes had come from the middle class, even though he had never campaigned in those neighborhoods or to that constituency.Recalling the experience, Unger says “it was kind of absurd… I had no money, no staff, and I would go into these slums, alone, to hand out pamphlets, often to the local drug pushers.”
Whose political instincts would you trust – Unger’s or that community organizer’s?
Unger sees defeating Obama as the first chapter in the “reorientation of the Democratic Party as the vehicle of the progressive alternative” in America. He’s selling a “narrative” about the upside of heightened contradictions that certain leftists have been locked on for years and that a certain liberal-minded politician summed up in 2005 at Daily Kos website:
According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists – a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog…to beat a [radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican Party] it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in “appeasing” the right-wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.
That politician was Barack Obama who challenged this storyline in a Daily Kos “diary” titled “Tone, Truth and the Democratic Party” which he posted after John Roberts’ confirmation to the Supreme Court[!]. Back in that day, many “Kosacks” and other “activists” on the left were enraged at liberal senators like Pat Leahy and Russ Feinstein who’d voted for Roberts. While Obama voted against confirmation, he acknowledged Roberts was neither incompetent nor corrupt and he spoke out against trashing Leahy and Feinstein as “apostates.” Refusing to cultivate the narcissism of small differences or “vilify good allies,” he spelled out an inclusionary imperative that put him at odds with the basic rhetoric of many Kosacks. To Senator Obama, the feel-my-anger storyline of leftist fantasts was a sure loser – p.c. b.s. Or as he put it more decorously: “this perspective misreads the American people” who tended to be un-enthralled by ideologues. Obama, though, wasn’t talking up “the end of history” or giving up on …hope and change:
Let me be clear: I am not arguing that the Democrats should trim their sails and be more “centrist.” In fact, I think the “centrist” versus “liberal” labels that continue to characterize the debate within the Democratic Party miss the mark. Too often, the “centrist” label seems to mean compromise for compromise sake, whereas…I don’t think Democrats have been bold enough.
But Obama rejected the notion big changes would come through “fealty to the one ‘true’ progressive vision” or “new framing.” What was required was genuine openness to new thinking (“including market- or faith-based ideas that originate from Republicans”). Without such openness, he underscored: “we certainly won’t have a mandate to overhaul a healthcare policy that overcomes all the entrenched interests that are the legacy of a jerry-rigged healthcare system.”[1]
Obama’s willingness to lift ideas from the right didn’t mean he conflated those “fighting on behalf of the poor and vulnerable” with “right-wing lobbyists fighting for homophobia and Haliburton.” But he wasn’t trying to hear seductive calls for polarization:
My dear friend Paul Simon used to consistently win the votes of much more conservative voters in Southern Illinois because he had mastered the art of “disagreeing without being disagreeable,” and they trusted him to tell the truth. Similarly, one of Paul Wellstone’s greatest strengths was his ability to deliver a scathing rebuke of the Republicans without ever losing his sense of humor and affability. In fact, I would argue that the most powerful voices of change in the country, from Lincoln to King, have been those who can speak with the utmost conviction about the great issues of the day without ever belittling those who opposed them, and without denying the limits of their own perspectives.
“Progressives” who suspect Obama is a cipher need to know there’s a core there. Those who assume he’s always on the verge of betraying the party of hope should consider that Obama has never dissembled about his desire to change the game radically (and modestly). If they recall his 2005 Kos post they may realize the Affordable Care Act wasn’t a one-off (or a sell-out). It was rooted in a useable past Obama willed into being. Any grand bargains in his (and America’s) future will surely grow out of that honorable construct too. “Man’s character is his fate” said Heraclitus. Or as J.B. and Bobby Byrd had it: “I know you got soul, if you didn’t you wouldn’t be in here.”
Note
1 Contrary to assumptions of ACA’s critics on the left, insurance and pharma companies weren’t the only entrenched powers that complicated efforts to enact universal healthcare in America, as Paul Star points out in his historical account, Remedy and Reaction. Healthcare reformers also had to overcome the inertia associated with sectors of the population – veterans, elders, remnants of the “labor aristocracy” et al. who felt entitled under the extant “jerry-rigged” healthcare system.
From July, 2012