One of the fascinating things about Leon Wieseltier’s impassioned plea for Barack Obama to openly embrace the cause of liberalism is that nowhere in his column does he for a moment question the legitimacy of Obama’s claim to the honor. The first time I read the piece, I did not even notice this feature. Perhaps that is because both Wieseltier and I take it for granted that Obama has embarked on the most aggressively liberal program since at least Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society if not Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. You can see this in how Weiseltier frames the events of the past month, but I initially missed it because I was struck by something else.
The most discouraging surprise of Barack Obama’s early days in office, days of emergency, was the new administration’s shirking of clarity, its reluctance to attach the grandeur of its initiatives to the grandeur of liberalism. Instead the president’s distaste for division, and his Chicago practicality, set the tone. How came it to be that in the aftermath of the greatest liberal victory in our lifetime John Boehner held the stage?
On my first reading, I missed (because I took it for granted) the part about ‘the greatest liberal victory in our lifetime’ and focused, instead, on his curious observation that John Boehner had somehow stolen the limelight. The latter point strikes me as simply fatuous. John Boehner’s role in the stimulus is already forgotten and it mattered little even at the time. Whatever action there was took place in the Senate, not the House.
I was taken aback by Weiseltier’s mode of criticism both because I found it to be faulty and because I’ve grown accustomed to the main line of attack against Obama coming from liberals that question the legitimacy of his liberalism, not those that take it for granted.
Both lines of attack share one common component though, and that is a heartfelt desire to see Obama mouth the words of a proud, partisan, liberal progressive politician. Weiseltier explains his position emphatically:
I want the president to tell the American people that, contrary to what they have been taught for many years, government is a jewel of human association and an heirloom of human reason; that government, though it may do ill, does good; that a lot of the good that government does only it can do; that the size of government must be fitted to the size of its tasks, and so, for a polity such as ours, big government is the only government; that strong government comports well with strong freedom, unless Madison was wrong; that a government based on rights cannot exclude from its concern the adversities of the people who confer upon it its legitimacy, or consign their remediation to the charitable moods of a preferred and decadent few; that Ronald Reagan, when he proclaimed categorically, without exception or complication, that “government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem,” was a fool; and that nobody was ever rescued, or enlarged, by being left alone. For all its grotesqueness, American government is a beautiful thing.
That is a wonderfully articulate expression of liberal beliefs but why is it so necessary for Barack Obama to make that argument? Or, more accurately, why do so many liberals feel that it is disappointing that Obama does not? To my ears, this desire is so strong that it causes people not to hear it when Obama expresses some of these exact points. After all, Obama has said that ‘doing nothing is not an option’ and that the government can and must do big things and do them well. He has made a rather pointed case that Republican ideas have been tried and found wanting, and that they will not be a part of the solution now. Obama explains in language ordinary blokes can understand why monetary policy has reached the limits of its effectiveness and government spending is the only tool left in the box. But rather than claim this giant unprecedented government spending as his own, or as the natural expression of liberal belief, he correctly argues that it is a policy necessitated by circumstances, as economists of all political persuasions readily acknowledge. In other words, we all know that this is what we must do, so why make it into something vindicating and political?
President Obama is a liberal, yes, but we’re all liberals now (as opposed to socialists, as Newsweek would have it). We’re all liberals but the Dittoheads and the dead-enders on the Cable Business shows. The situation we find ourselves in is what settled a thirty-year argument in our favor. How much salesmanship is required from our president to convince the nation that the dead parrot of Reagan Republicanism is indeed discredited and dead? Isn’t that something for opinion makers and historians to discuss?
Obama doesn’t need to feed liberals red meat and he doesn’t need to convince the people of what they can so easily see with their own eyes. We’re a liberal country again. The president should concentrate on explaining why his policies are necessary and will benefit the country, and leave the ‘I-told-you-so’s’ to people like me and Leon.
Working, as I do, amid a sea of Republicans, I do feel you may not be as right as I desperately would like you to be re the imminent demise of the Republican party. But even those who voted for Obama still consider themselves Republicans, and are already complaining about his short stint in office.
I fear a lot of people are counting eggs that haven’t even been fertilized yet, much less hatched.
I know you are fond of the idea of the Overton window…I think that your argument could be framed in those terms.
I think a lot of people have become so sensitive to the nuance and message discipline required to shift the Overton window that, when a full blown Overton Leap occurs, they don’t immediately pick it up.
By this I mean that Obama doesn’t need to say these are liberal policies to get people to begin to accept liberal policies as more mainstream. He just needs to implement the policy and say “This is what needs to happen” and because it makes sense it becomes mainstream…the fact that it is a liberal policy is beside the point.
it would be hard to hit the nail more squarely on the head.
The first and most hackneyed piece of advice given out by “creative writing” instructors throughout this land is, “Show, don’t tell.”
As a directive for good fiction-writing, it has its limits. As advice for somebody in Obama’s position — somebody who is trying to falsify long-calcified beliefs as well as overturn deeply-engrained skepticism toward articulate speech as such — it is very likely irreproachable. (I think, Boo, this is just a condensation of what you said, not a contradiction or modification of it.)
Let others tell what government can do. Obama has higher ambitions: to show it.
It is, of course, a gamble, as Obama made clear when he said, simply: If what I propose doesn’t work, there’ll be a new president in four years.
To modify a trope of Arthur Gilroy’s, we find ourselves in electric times.
Ain’t it grand? –Scary, too, but … a new kind of scary, I find.
To be fair, the Reagan quote is incomplete.
OK, there. I will never defend Reagan again. Or maybe Obama’s triangulating rhetoric is slowly turning me into a conservatard. Aww man. See, Boo, this is what we mean!
Or maybe, just maybe, the times we are in and Obama’s Unique abilities will result in quite a new paradigm that is altogether more radically different from either the conservatism or liberalism that went before.
We will certainly NOT be returning to classic liberalism after 30 years of conservatism, and although framed in the language of pragmatism, the circumstances themselves may require a revolutionary change.
I doubt the USA of 2016 can be predicted on the basis of liberal ideology today. Indeed perhaps the arch conservatives, in their darkest nightmares, may get closer to the truth.
Those fundamentalist crazies who depict Obama as the anti-Christ may be onto something – he will overthrow their self serving creationist, supremacist, imperialist, fantasies.
Welcome to the real world…
“necessary and will benefit the country“:
I’m fearing nightmares in which Obama clears brush on a Texas ranch.
after reading these, reported around the world I join you. Only the tone changed.
coming close after the UK court case/US secrey flap;
U.S. sticks with Bush position on Bagram detainees
Renegotiating NAFTA on hold, Obama says
so much for campaign promises.
I started an ‘explanation” and it grew.
Now a stand-alone post:
Obama’s Real Challenge: America’s Survival
Read it and weep.
AG
Summed it up with one gif. brilliant!
great post – thanks!
There is great anxiety out there for several reasons:
— Employee Free Choice Act
— Healthcare Reform (and their has been much anxiety about Obama’s plan even when he was a candidate.
— Preservation of Social Security
— Actually getting out of Iraq
— Finding a realistic way instead of a military way to deal with Afghanistan
— Continuing the stimulus instead of cutting it off early to deal with the deficit
— Actually cutting the military budget to what we really need instead of using it as disguised Congressional pork for Republicans
My sense is that calling Obama a centrist is an unconscious admission that the center has moved dramatically to the left of Joe Lieberman.
And in this case, the direction of movement at this point is more important than the distance of movement.
Very well said. I like your comment especially on the scorched earth policy of the GOP. Do they ever put country ahead of party? I doubt it.
Plus, we are living way beyond our means on the imperial-military front. No way can we afford the seven hundred and thirty-seven military bases plus all the secret ones. Come on Mr. President, is it going to be listening to the military/defense/pharmaceutical/
insurance complex or to the American people of all social classes and of all genders and generations.
And, then, there is the matter of the Constitution and basic rights including protection from torture and rendition not to mention past violations of these basic rights by various members of the Bush administration. Will there be an investigation of their misdeeds?
Guess we are in a war and it is good to know who your friends and supporters are in this situation. They certainly don’t seat in the Republican sections of Congress.
I’ll just say that Boehner held the stage because the stage managers allowed him on: the networks and cable yak-yaks and the DC crowd. Their language and perspective is still stuck in 1995–by design.
One thing that drives me crazy is when I read/hear reporters/talking heads talk about Republicans “returning to fiscal conservatism/holding the line against spending” or some such. Bullshit–on many levels:
-On what basis? How is funding a war for seven years by just not counting it in the budget fiscally conservative?
-Spending on social programs = spending. Spending on anything repubs want = not spending.
-“Deficits don’t matter.” Anyone remember that? After YEARS of carping on the deficit; after years of yelling how “scary/bad/our future is DOOOOOMED!!!!” if we didn’t get a hold of deficits, these folks just a few years ago talked about how deficits don’t matter, because it’s a check on “spending.” But if you went from a surplus to a deficit, then by fucking definition, there was “spending.” But alas, it wasn’t on people who needed the help and so doesn’t count.
When you break it down, you see the partisan nature of all of this that’s infected our language–and this is only one of example of many. And yet, our “objective” media are still afraid to break out the Lysol and spray.
I agree with what you’ve written, but the media’s insistence to cling to wingnut worldview and words is a huge part of this.
I invested nearly an hour of meticulous effort replying to your misanalysis here, all to lose the whole thing in an instant’s faulty keystroke.
You’ve missed Wieseltier’s main points–despite having apparently read them—misunderstood what he took pains to set out.
It’s now far, far, far too late for “I-told-you-so”. Bush’s-and-Cheney’s Congressionally pre-approved war fiasco in Iraq was and remains a fatal error of statecraft, one from which there is no turning back, no “fixing things up,” no, “we’re a liberal country again”. It was an irrevocable mistake, the equivalent of driving the nation as a whole off a cliff. The people and government of the U.S. are still in what amounts to that mistake’s “free fall” stage. Everything now going so catastrophically wrong (economically, socially, politically) and the many consequences yet to come are merely a portion of that continuing free fall.
When “the vehicle” finally hits the bottom there will be no going back, no “taking it in for repairs”–since, indeed, there is already no such possibility.
The United States are already (as should be clearly evident by now) effectively finished as a democracy. That, and not some alleged thirty year long argument, is the only thing which events since G.W. Bush’s “elections” have “settled”.
The actual point in Wieseltier’s essay is, in reality, not for the sake of Americans, who, in any event, whether they give or gave a damn or not about democracy, have lost that precious heritage (a key aspect in which Wieseltier analysis is most seriously mistaken) but, rather, for other people, other nations, to learn and to profit by. It is now too late for Americans to perform life-saving surgery on their once-perhaps-a-chance-for-genuine-democratic government. What remains possible at this point is an autopsy which could prove extremely useful to other succeeding peoples; but it won’t and cannot restore or recover what has now been lost and what, by all indications from your critique of Wieseltier, remains unappreciated as a loss.
Virtually every assertion of yours in the following,
is not only false but ludicrously false.
I’m sorry you lost your post.
Perhaps in the lost portion you did more than argue by assertion.
Oh, I did! I offered a lot more in support of my points than you do of your “points” here, making mainly, just as you charge me with having done, “arguments by assertion”. Your commentary is heavy on them and very, very light on supporting detail.
In brief, we have nothing better than your word for the “facts” that
“we all know that this is what we must do”,
“Obama is a liberal”,
“we’re all liberals now”,
“We’re all liberals but the Dittoheads and the dead-enders on the Cable Business shows.”
[Those would be, I suppose, the just-under-sixty-million people–that is, or 45,7% of the counted votes cast in the 2009 presidential race—who voted for McCain and Palin.]
“The situation we find ourselves in is what settled a thirty-year argument in our favor.”
“the dead parrot of Reagan Republicanism is indeed discredited and dead…”
“Obama doesn’t need to feed liberals red meat and he doesn’t need to convince the people of what they can so easily see with their own eyes.”
“We’re a liberal country again.”
“The president should concentrate on explaining why his policies are necessary and will benefit the country, and leave the ‘I-told-you-so’s’ to people like me and Leon.”
Your comment completely left aside any mention or recognition of this essential part of Wieseltier’s essay:
Though I happen to disagree with Wieseltier’s view that “the intellectual duty of the citizen to search for the warrant for his views, to raise opinions into beliefs by means of reasons, right reasons, reasons conceived in the bravery of arguments” constitutes “…the only way to resist the regimentations of demagogues and entertainers,” but I do admit that surely it accounts for an essential element among them.
About that key insight of Wieseltier’s you had nothing to say. It’s not possible, therefore, to know whether that is because you implicitly accept his view but also at the same time consider such a intellectual challenge simply far beyond the realistic capacities of contemporary Americans or, on the other hand, you somehow deny that the premise is valid at all.
To the extent that it’s a valid claim, even if not “…the only way to resist the regimentations of demagogues and entertainers,”, then it neatly sets out why your comment completely missed the point.
While I’m a critic of Lakoffians that don’t understand Lakoff, I do find Lakoff interesting. His piece this morning dovetails with many of the things I have been saying about Obama’s progressivism for over a year. It also dovetails with what I’ve been saying about his strategy and effectiveness since election day. So, read it to get an idea of why I think Leon is out of his tree.
To address one part of your argument, the idea that ‘we are all liberals now’ is not meant to be taken literally. Think of it like this:
If you have a debating society (Congress) and you make the question: abolish the Department of Education or not? Then, you’re living in a conservative country. If the question is, instead: increase education spending to the states by 20 billion or 35 billion, then you are living in a liberal country.
At its simplest (and this is a simplistic example) that is what I mean when I say that we’re all liberals now. It’s the same on tax cuts, the same on banking, the same on regulation, and beginning to take baby steps that way on foreign policy.
If I’ve understood you (and Lakoff) here, we’re to suppose that a public which failed miserably to “decode” (the patently obvious in) George W. Bush’s public pronouncements are ready and able to handle this same task concerning Barack Obama’s political rhetoric.
The basis of such an assumption doesn’t figure anywhere in your comment. Therefore, I’m more than skeptical that, even assuming that your (or Lakoff’s) claim is correct and that Obama communicates in some sort of “code”, the American people can be relied on to grasp the coded message.
To me, what I read of Lakoff’s essay amounts to patent rubbish served up as if it’s to be taken on fait as coming from what I gather Lakoff considers himself to be: some sort of Communications Shaman or Guru.
Here’s a model example:
“Summary
The Obama Code is based on seven deep, insightful, and subtle intellectual moves. What President Obama has been attempting in his speeches is a return to the original frames of the Framers, reconstituting what it means to be an American, to be patriotic, to be a citizen and to share in both the sacrifices and the glories of our country. In seeking “bipartisan” support, he is looking beyond political affiliations to those who share those values on particular issues. In his economic plan, he is attempting to realign our economy with the moral missions of government: protection and empowerment for all.“
Seven subtle intellectual moves! Count them! (Won’t you?)
I note that the (real) “Framers” didn’t write or speak to the public in “code”. They uses plain (and brilliantly clear) ordinary language as that is what they considered their moral responsibilities as political leaders to require of them.
A genuine political genius (such as Obama is supposed to be) would understand that and would similarly respect and observe the same that these earlier Framers, in their genius, understood.
Instead, our boy genius just doesn’t get this (fairly simple yet extremely essential) matter. I constantly hear others repeating in incantatory fashion that Obama is such a marvelous intellectual power but I’m still looking for the solidly grounded evidence to support that claim.
As his glaring gaffes, errors* and failures in the face of the demands of a job—the difficulty of which he too easily assumed himself to be the equal and for which he now, I suspect, has gained a very sobering but wholly unexpected appreciation—mount up, I hope you return often to your published claims and prognostications about the success we’re entitled to expect from this president.
I do not expect that there’ll be a second term for Obama. For similar reasons, I think you and others of your opinion are in for a very rude awakening—the sort of awakening which only too few former-admirers of George W. Bush had coming to them.
* Obama actually (apparently) sent Vice President Biden to meet European heads of state with the message that, in effect and in brief, things are now all different and it’s time for them to get back aboard the U.S.’s program of ideas on how best to manage the world (and, most importantly, make generous contributions of a financial and other kind, to the costs of cleaning up the enormous messes which the U.S. government and its electors made around the world since the advent of George W. Bush’s administrations. Such an attempt indicates to me that in Obama, we have a president who falls very far short of the expectations raised by his starry billings. Europeans are neither a stupid nor as forgetting about what happened “only yesterday” as Americans show themselves to be.
Actually, Lakoff is a cognitive scientist. He studies how messages are received and interpreted by the human brain.
My differences with Lakoffians relate, usually, to the difference between ‘framing messages’ as a verb, a noun, and an adjective.
Lazy Lakoffians tend to embrace tautological reasoning. In other words, since all messages are interpreted by frames in the mind, all messaging is ‘framing’. Yet, it is only the carefully considered message that utilizes knowledge of cognitive science that should be considered framing of the verbal kind.
For example, making a deliberate choice to use the term ‘anti-choice’ rather than ‘pro-life’ takes into account that people see the words ‘choice’ ‘pro’ and ‘life’ to be positive and they take the word ‘anti’ to be negative. The terms mean the same thing but are interpreted differently by the brain.
Proponents of framing believe that all messaging should be done in the most efficacious way and that it is vitally important to never reinforce your opponent’s frames. In one contemporary case, framers will advise us not to point out that the Republicans just voted (by one measure) against the biggest tax cut of all time because that reinforces the frame that tax cuts are a good thing.
What Lakoff is doing with this piece is showing how Obama uses appeals to common sense, human empathy, simple patriotism, and traditional American values to frame traditional liberal policies. In doing so, he avoids allowing the listener to trap those policies in pre-existing and negatively predisposed frames about government programs, government spending, or liberal partisanship.
Take it or leave it, as far as philosophy is concerned, but the more general point is that Obama gains tangible benefits by not casting himself as a progressive champion but, instead, as a common sense leader.
RE: “Actually, Lakoff is a cognitive scientist. He studies how messages are received and interpreted by the human brain.”
Yes, I’m aware of that. I have read portions of his text, Women, Fire & Dangerous Things.
Having now read the entire piece you recommended, I find it reconfirms all my prior impressions of Lakoff’s value as a theorician.
I’d propose his essay to any and all interested readers as constituting a very useful test of one’s critical faculties. If, in reading the essay, you don’t find at practically every turn conceptual confusions, faulty & untenable analogies and erroneously posed premises and conclusions which don’t follow them, then you should be very alarmed about the state of your critical faculties; for not spotting the faults described above is what amounts to sound evidence that those critical faculties are simply not in good working order.