Obama as the anti-Reagan. By Greg Sargent. Washington Post, January 24, 2013.
Sargent:
The key
to Obama’s argument, as Ed Kilgore points out, is that he made the “long lost
liberal case that collective action is necessary to the achievement of
individual freedom, instead of implicitly conceding that social goals and individual
interests are inherently at war.” Indeed, Obama himself put it this way:
“Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”
Crucially,
Obama presented this idea as the philosophical underpinning that unified all of
his specific policy proposals, from the vow to combat climate change, to the
push for equal pay for women, to the fight for full equality for gay Americans,
to the need for voting and immigration reform. He cast inequality and the
unfairness of the unfettered free market as threats to freedom, i.e., the
freedom to pursue happiness. And this goes beyond the Inaugural: Remember, in
his speech laying out his proposal for action on guns, he cast gun violence as
a threat to the freedom to pursue happiness within a civil society.
This
overarching philosophical argument was at the center of the 2012 election. The
battles over Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech, and over the GOP
suggestion that the President’s “redistributionist” and “collectivist”
tendencies are fundamentally at odds with the nation’s values, were at bottom
an argument over the true nature of our shared responsibility to one another.
Republicans angrily argue that Obama unfairly caricatured the GOP position as a
“you’re on your own” ethic. But Obama was broadly articulating a legitimate
philosophical difference between the parties, and the election results suggest
Obama’s vision is shared by the American mainstream and the emerging majority
coalition of Obama voters, i.e., nonwhites, college educated women (and to a
lesser degree college educated men) and younger voters. Obama’s catchphrase —
“we’re all in this together” — was widely mocked on the right, but this
emerging coalition appears to understand this argument on Obama’s terms, as a
governing ethic for moving the country forward.
An expansive case for progressivegovernance, grounded in language of Founding Fathers. By Greg Sargent. Washington Post, January 21, 2013.
Sargent:
Today,
Obama quoted extensively from the Declaration, and declared that it is our
challenge to “bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our
time.” He then went on to make the case for robust government activism in the
economy — precisely in order to preserve
individual freedom, i.e., the ability to pursue happiness. He linked this
to the need for more government investment in infrastructure and education. For
rules designed to ensure fair market competition. For maintaining the social
safety net (in the form of Social Security and Medicare, achieved by two great
Democratic presidents). For the need for a greater push for equal pay for women
and full equality for gay Americans (which Obama linked to the struggle for
civil rights for African Americans by invoking Martin Luther King).
Obama
tempered his communitarian language by claiming it is not incompatible with
“skepticism of central authority,” but the clear statement of his governing
philosophy, which he insisted is rooted in our founding principles, was
unequivocal: “Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective
action.”
The
tensions inherent in that juxtaposition are critical. Today Obama was
effectively declaring victory in the great argument that has consumed us for
the last four years. During the campaign Obama argued his vision of a judicious
mix of individual and collective responsibility is more in keeping with our
national identity than the GOP’s “you’re on your own” ethic. Republicans
angrily rejected this characterization, but in truth, the GOP’s platform and
rhetoric did reflect what E. J. Dionne has described as “radical
individualism.” The public’s rejection of the GOP caricature of Obama’s vision
— as wildly radical and out of step with American values — itself confirmed
that the mainstream agrees with Obama’s argument that “collective action” is
not incompatible with American ideals of freedom.
In this
sense, Obama’s speech today was similar to Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address in
1981. Reagan used that speech to articulate the conservative philosophy of
governance and to declare the country’s turn in that direction. Obama today
made the case, implicitly, that the country has now thrown in its lot with
progressive governance as he defined it. Unlike Reagan, who made that
declaration in his first inaugural, Obama needed to get through a tumultuous
first term before having the confidence to do the same. Obama had to deal with
profound domestic crises and was often rendered over-cautious by a radicalized
opposition that was determined to destroy him at all costs. “Sometimes he
didn’t quite get the balance,” presidential historian Stephen Hess told me
today. “It’s as if he is claiming the balance now.”
Today,
Obama all but declared ideological victory. That was the hidden meaning of
Obama’s frequent invocation of “we, the people” — he was effectively rooting
his vision of the proper balance of individual and collective responsibility,
and the need for the sort of collective action the right all-too-cavalierly
denounces as tyranny, in their authority.
