Franklin Roosevelt would not be a liberal hero if not for the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt wouldn’t even have tried to be a liberal hero if not for the Great Depression. Or, to put it another way, Roosevelt could not have become a liberal hero if he had not come in in a situation where the opposition party had utterly failed and discredited themselves and in which his party had scored successive crushing electoral victories.
I made arguments of this type all year long to demonstrate that Barack Obama’s degree of progressivism would be much less dependent on the rhetoric he used during a campaign than on the conditions he found himself in once he took office. I knew our economy was rocky and that we were experiencing the popping of the housing bubble, but I didn’t anticipate the sudden meltdown in September. I felt the best hope for progressivism lay in the strongest possible defeat of Republicans in Congress. Our victories were sizable, but not quite as large as I had hoped. They left Obama just short of the kind of electoral mandate he would need to rush through any kind of legislation he wants.
But Obama didn’t just gain an electoral mandate. The economic crisis gave him another mandate. Like Roosevelt, Obama has a mandate to try anything that might work to create jobs and improve people’s economic security. In such a situation, the most important thing for Obama to do is to build a machine that can carry out his agenda, and to disarm any opponents that might still stand in his way. The solutions he will be offering on education, health care, infrastructure, financial regulation, energy, and the environment, are solutions that Democrats either failed to enact or stopped trying to enact in the 1990’s. His urban agenda is like nothing seriously proposed since Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy.
It’s somewhat frustrating to see that many of the people that will be tasked with carrying out this agenda are not the people that kept their faith in these progressive principles during the lean times. But, think about it. A lot of former New Democrats are now on board with a distinctly liberal agenda. Part of this is because conditions changed. The Republicans are no longer riding high…they no longer have a cash advantage. But part of it is that we’re in a crisis and Obama has strong leadership qualities.
The whole country has moved to the left. And a lot of left-leaning legislation is going to pass and pass very quickly. If we’re lucky, we’re entering the early stages of a second New Deal era, with an extended period of liberal consensus. But this isn’t some left-wing paradise. No one is talking seriously about prison reform or the drug war. Our foreign policy is still expensive, risky, and prone to moral error. Greedheads still govern our culture and impoverish our minds. But this is about as good as it was going to get this year. And rhetoric had nothing to do with it.
“Our foreign policy is still expensive, risky, and prone to moral error.“
That is a nice-sounding liberal and entirely America-centric view that does not in any way place the United States as a member of the world community, or American people as fellow humans with the rest of the world’s people.
Your foreign policy is based on a profound disrespect for other countries, other societies, other cultures and the co-humanity of other peoples, utter disregard for their rights welfare and very lives, and the conviction that you have an absolute right to use whatever means necessary to force the rest of the world to service your needs and desires at the expense of their own.
Your foreign policy is the foreign policy of empire, and that did not by any means begin with George W. Bush, and it will not end with George W. Bush intil enough of the American people come to the realization that this is not the correct way for their country to be in the world. Obviously, we have not come even remotely close to that point.
This is your foreign policy as viewed by the rest of the world.
But foreign policy in the US is much more pliable to public pressure than in a lot of other countries.
It is what it is, but we are still working on it. But there is a long legacy of imperialistic arrogance to overcome, one that derives from the origins of America in an earlier European imperial age and has been reinforced by familiar “doctrines” – the Monroe Doctrine, the doctrine of America’s “manifest destiny” to rule from coast to coast in North America, the doctrine that “America’s leadership is required…” for this or that. It is the very stories that are woven into the mythological history that provides unity to a diverse people. It will not change rapidly.
But the expectation of respect among nations and peoples is a recent global cultural invention, maybe less than a century or so old.
It will take time. Not just for the US but for other countries as well.
our leadership is necessary. the goal should be to make this less true, not to renounce American leadership.
Everyone should keep in mind one thing that Harry Truman practiced. He was the servant of the people. The people were not put here to be servants of the President. So, Obama needs to realize that he is where he is to serve us and if he chooses to look at the glass as if we are here for him…. then we have more of the same not change.
He will be inaugurated in 36 days. Can we wait until 24 hours after his inauguration before pronouncing his presidency a fascist dictatorship?
have been amazing.
Obama selected a guy to read a prayer. He is not my pastor. I don’t support his beliefs. I am not a fan of him.
Yet he is a respected spiritual person.
He will be reading a prayer. He will not be sending gays to re-sexualization camps. He will not be in charge of marriage for the Federal government.
In fact, this is the separation of church and state. There is a tradition of getting a spiritual person to read a prayer, and, as an atheist, I am fine with that. What I am not fine with is the complete, hysterical, over-the-top, wackadoodle condemnation of Obama for this minor choice.
Prayers are not policy. Policy is what counts. Prayers are just words on a January morning.
it’s just a rude thing to do. it’s not the end of the world.
Obama has Lowry and Warren. Some are offended by Lowry, too.
who is offended by Lowry? Haters? Don’t you see the point?
“this is the separation of church and state.“
Pardon me?! How is praying – and praying to one particular god – into official State business in any way a separation of church and state? It seems to me it is the exact opposite. It seems to me that it is inserting church into state events. And I wonder just how specifically Christian this particular prayer from a Christian fundamentalist preacher will be. So, it might or might not constitute the State showing preference for a particular religion.
“There is a tradition of getting a spiritual person to read a prayer“
Not exactly. Unless I am mistaken, there is a tradition of getting a well-known CHRISTIAN pastor to read a prayer.
uuuuuUUUFF! Another example of trying to do too many things at once in too much of a hurry, and a lousy, inattentive job of proofreading.
How is making praying part of official State events in any way a separation of church and state?
There’s a prayer, there’s a poem, there’s a speech, there’s a parade. The prayer has the same ceremonial function as the speech, the poem, the parade.
It is removing prayer from the center to the same symbolic value as a juggler.
Poem’s, speeches, and parades are not by definition religious items. Prayer by definition is religious. Poems, speeches, and parades may be secular, and in fact usually are. Prayer cannot be secular, and therefore never is.
Is that Arabic?
My daughter has finished her first semester of Arabic at U of I. She is a poli sci student who is interested in the Middle East.
It is a very colloquial expression of frustration or annoyance, so she won’t learn it in her Modern Standard Arabic class, or probably even in most conversation classes.
speaks ONLY of “make no law establishing a religion” or something like that. There is, in point of fact, nothing in that Amendment about ABDJURING religion entirely.
I believe there is also something in the Constitution about the government not showing preference for one religion over another – no time to look it up right now. By having a specifically Christian prayer at a VERY public VERY official government function the government is showing a distinct preference.
We haven’t heard the prayer yet. If it turns out to be specifically Christian, I will agree with you. I believe that a prayer can be offered in a nonsectarian manner.
“Oh most high”
“Oh heavenly one”
and it can close with
“In your name we pray” or
“In the name of the eternal”
those are acceptable.
Will Warren do that? I have no idea.
Oh most high, oh heavenly one, “the eternal”, and “in your name” are all specifically monotheistic, and therefor not nonsectarian.
In addition, “in your name we pray” can be construed as a reference to Jesus.
Further, any prayer excludes non-theists.
of prayers at public functions. We are simply acknowledging that.
You’re wrong. Policy is not what counts. Perception is what counts. It is what allows policy to enter the arena. The blogs, the books, the think tanks are full to the brim with policies. The ones that rise to the top are the ones advocated by “serious people”, “movers and shakers”, the ruling elite. By giving a wingnut a position this prominent, Obama lifts him out of his fundie ghetto and promotes him to legit celebrity status. He gives him the benefit of his own high approval level. Apparently he thinks he’s going to get some reciprocity. He won’t. He isn’t.
That’s what makes Obama’s choice significant. To me and a lot of others who have had high hopes for Obama’s promise of change, Warren, Dobson, Falwell and the rest of that tribe have nothing to offer. Obama let us down by giving them the equivalent of a free Super Bowl ad to market their poisonous bullshit. I had great hopes that when he kept talking about “reaching out” and “bipartisan”, Obama had a high-concept strategic vision in mind. It more and more seems like all he’s going for is Clinton redux. I’m not abandoning hope, and I’m not hysterical. But it is getting harder and harder to keep hope alive. Still, he is very smart, and we’ll see.
FDR had a huge asset that you don’t mention: a strong leftist movement that was threatening to turn the US into a socialist society. That is what gave him the leverage to make the radical changes he did. His reforms were, in fact, designed to co-opt the “threat” of socialism. We have no such movement now. Even the most lefty elected official or media celeb would be very slightly to the left of Thatcher if they were in Europe. Even with the country left in ruin by Republican crooks and incompetents, enabled by the legions of medieval superstition, the Left is barely twitching.
Somewhat the same story goes for LBJ. So we will move somewhat left of the literal neo-fascism that currently rules, but there’s no fuel I can see for a new New Deal or even Great Society.
I agree. Reality is going to pare down the left’s agenda to its practical necessities and boost those very strongly, but will at the same time diminish the left’s ideological wish list qua ideological. And that in itself is a very good thing. Too bad it took the advent of another depression to make it happen, but, given the thirty-year political silly season we have just lived through, total and utter fuckup is the only thing that could do it.