Let me take another crack at last night’s State of the Union address. We all know these speeches are meaningless in terms of actual policy. The President has little control over what gets legislated. So any grand statements are simply attempts to move the epicenter of discussion and to create political fog in the already foggy Washington battleground.

It is in this light we must look at Obama’s speech. He practically ignored the Republicans and the recent mid-term election and, instead, tried to articulate a moderate leftish agenda that is, or will become, the core of a new Democratic vision for America. He was trying to stamp his personality on the more distant future and not necessarily on the next two years.

Which is a good thing because the Republicans are already deeply into negative mode, posing anything the President says whether they previously agreed with the substance of what he says or not.

From this perspective what is Obama’s message?

I think, simply, he is attempting to draw a close to the Reagan era. Some people like, for comforting ideological reasons, to separate Reagan and Clinton – they are the two defining presidents of the past thirty years – by calling one conservative and the other neoliberal. I don’t do that. I clump them together as one under a more general heading of anti-government elitist anti-worker neoliberalism. I know: that’s a bit quirky, but my goal is to stop the ever finer parsing out of short term differences and to hone in on the bigger issues, the ones that have longer term and socially deeper impact.

Through my lens, therefore, both Reagan and Clinton sought ways either to reduce the role of government or to curtail it. Both aspired to open up the economy, so as to encourage the private sector to innovate, grow, and thus make more space for everyone to prosper.

The problem is that, inevitably in my mind, that focus on private sector free for all which is so exhilarating in the textbooks gets almost immediately bogged down by the rather more unseemly realities of human interaction. People cheat and connive to make a quick buck. They seek to influence and change the rules to protect their patch of gold. They rig the game, they spend fortunes on politics, and they collude to cheat the public. All this we know as normal human behavior. All of this is blithely ignored in those beautiful economic theories that beguile our right wing friends.

It is easy to convince yourself that all we need to do, in order to fix our economy’s ills, is to support more equal opportunity. After all this is ‘the land of opportunity’ and we have all been told that hard work and some smarts is all anyone needs to make it big. Thus getting a more equal starting gate ought to be sufficient to ensure that the best and brightest rise to the top and that society benefits from their talent.

I wish it were so.

But it is not.

Society’s are too complicated for such a simple and idealistic solution to work. We need root and branch reform of our politics, a goodly amount of re-regulation, and a great deal of government intervention to prevent the constant backsliding that a free for all encourages.

Backsliding, that is, into the proto-democratic, less than free, and class riddled sclerosis that we now are living through.

Let me be generous, let me argue that neither Reagan nor Clinton realized the enormous damage they were inflicting on the middle class by opening the economy up to the assault of big business and the 1%. After all the Gilded Age lived on only in literature. The intense arguments between left and right during the 1930’s were consigned to fusty history classes. The post-war age had engendered a complacent view that somehow America was on a permanently rising trajectory. It had cracked the code that eluded all before and each generation was inevitably wealthier than the last. It was destined thus, as long as we stuck rigidly to the capitalist road and avoided the traps others fell into. And when the 1970’s produced the first serious challenge to this destiny the solution was clear: double down on our determination and double down on our capitalist heritage.

It was a peculiarly rosy reading of history, and a great deal of libertarian bunkum, that underpinned the Reagan/Clinton era. The greatest error being to mistake Platonic other-worldly theorizing as something resembling a practical real world policy source.

It wasn’t. It isn’t. It can never be. All it can possibly be is an intellectual cover for a regression away from democracy towards the old style plutocracy of our past.

By crippling the state, by retrenching and abusing it, by pouring scorn on government, and by outsourcing parts of it to the private sector, the Reagan/Clinton era removed the strongest bulwark protecting the middle class from its own regression back to the undifferentiated lower mass from which it emerged post-war. The result was inevitable: slowly, but surely, plank after plank upon which the middle class relied for its hold on prosperity was weakened or removed. The frog was boiled ever so slowly, but it was assuredly boiled.

The crisis of 2007/2008 a the logical outcome of this regression. The twin weakness of too much debt and too little income in the face of cost and lifestyle pressure finally undid the middle class. It caved in. It has yet to recover.

My repeated criticism of Obama, in light of this narrative, has been that he has not aggressively sought to break from the Reagan/Clinton era. He ran with the wrong advisors. He was weak in the face of plutocratic pressure. He failed to see the long arc we were tracing because he was too intently focused on the immediacy of the crisis. He failed to use the crisis to write a new script. Instead he stayed close to the old lines.

Well, apparently, not anymore.

Now he wants to champion the middle class.

But, returning to where I began, he has no power to act. The Republicans are entrenched and will surely act on the plutocrat’s behalf. All Obama can do is veto the worst of what they do, and fudge a little when they move towards the center.

He seems to realize this. Which is why he talked past them last night and spoke to the Democrats and to the public at large. He is asking us to return to a pre-Reagan/Clinton world. That will be difficult whilst our political process is so thoroughly owned by the money of big business and the 1%. But we must try.

We have nothing to lose.

The media seems to be abuzz with the new and revitalized Obama. He is everywhere proposing all sorts of policies that are bright and shiny. More to the point they have a distinctly liberal sheen.

Take his proposed tax changes: raise taxes via a numbers of small changes to the tax code on the rich, and then reduce them and/or bolster a variety of tax credits for the less well off. Terrific in principle. Obama is taking aim at inequality.

Wonderful. I wonder what took so long? And why did he wait until his programs have practically no chance of getting enacted because the Republican snow control the entire legislative process? Why didn’t he go on this kind of offense before the mid-term elections when any political advantage the proposals may produce would have helped staunch the flood towards the right?

Is he just a wimp? Or is he just playing games?

In the past week or so Obama has been on a crusade with a leftish sounding agenda: paid family leave, free community college, bolstering consumer protection laws, finagling finance for infrastructure investment, and now the tax package. This is an aggressive – for the US – set of proposals. They would help a lot of people and might start to undo the thirty years of damage accrued during the Reagan era.

So I ask again: why now?

It isn’t as if he is running to be re-elected, and the Democrats are in disarray with no distinct policy set that isn’t tainted by being merely not as crazy as the Republicans.

Is he attacking a problem?

The problem for the economy is straightforward: we need programs like those Obama is proposing. It would have helped had he had the spine to propose them back when they would have had the greatest impact – let’s say some time in 2009/2010. But we will take what little we can get. No, the issue is much deeper. We need a lot more. We need to deal with risk.

Obama is an inveterate tinkerer. He is not a reformer. Even his signature health care reform was a half hearted copy of a right of center think tank plan. He loves details and getting into the weeds. He is not a great thematic actor or narrative changer. He talks big and does small. The trouble is that we won’t get these programs. We will get something else. Which might be very different. Indeed what we get is highly unlikely to resemble much of what the media is now breathlessly hailing as the ‘bold new Obama approach’.

This is because our political process is designed, from the ground up, to prevent a decisive agenda from ever getting into law. Except under extreme circumstances and especially when the entire process is bought and paid for by a privileged few who happen to be the same few who would be damaged economically by that agenda.

I think the current economic malaise felt by the mass of Americans is the deliberate consequence of thirty years of policy. It isn’t an accident. Nor is it some odd unintended consequence that no one could have predicted. The drive towards inequality and the undermining of democracy was instigated and enabled by the adoption of orthodox economic thinking which just so happened to match perfectly with a desire by big business and others in the elite to secure an ever greater share of our national wealth. It was, as it were, a match made in Chicago, where that university’s economics department acted as a leader for the promulgation of anti-middle class policies wrapped up in a pseudo libertarian banner.

Freedom to choose, as Milton Friedman so passionately wrote about, is generally a good thing. But it counts for naught if your choices are successively constrained and then throttled by your inability to act on the economic stage as a dignified and equal partner. If others can gradually seize more and more power and tilt policy ever more closely to their own interests and away from yours, then all the freedom in the world cannot offset their advantage.

If, for instance, the value of your guaranteed retirement plan is suddenly undone by rules turning it into a simple savings plan where the only surviving guarantee is how much you put in and not at all about what you get out, then your risk in life has risen.

If, for instance, work rules are biased so that employers can fire at will, eliminate collective bargaining, and arbitrarily reduce wages whilst you have no recourse, then your risk in life has risen.

If, for instance, you find social pressure rising to reduce the government safety net that protects you against the uncertainties of the economy, then your risk in life has risen.

If, for instance, you discover that bankruptcy laws have been re-written by the banking industry to make it harder for you to get relief from debts you incurred innocently in some health related emergency, then your risk in life has risen.

And if, for instance, that this accumulative increase in risk piled over years onto your household is not compensated for by your employer because of their relentless pursuit of something called shareholder value, not only has your risk in life risen, but you have no means to displace it and maintain your standard of living.

Not only has median income in America floundered because big business and our elite have secured a greater share of our national wealth, but on a risk adjusted basis – that is if we compare the median income with the various risks that a wage earner faces – then we see that it hasn’t floundered. It has sunk.

Thus the malaise.

We don’t measure household income on a risk adjusted basis. But you can bet that businesses and the wealthy are acutely aware of their own risks and make sure those risks are covered by ample cash. In other words, not only do they scarf up huge chunks of our national wealth, but they make sure that any potential downside is covered too. They make sure they have adequate insurance so their standard of living is protected.

Most people, whether they are aware of it or not, rely on the government to provide that kind of insurance. Not just explicit insurance with things like Social Security, but also implicitly in the myriad of other programs that mitigate the hidden and often totally unknown sources of downside that everyone faces as they chart their way through life.

So, if Obama was really trying to ‘go big’ in his last two years, he would go back and pay attention to all those programs he and his predecessors have put in place that add risk to the daily lives of everyday people. And he would undo the most egregious.

Tinkering and proposing programs that are unlikely ever to get legislated into place, at least as expressed in fancy presidential speeches, is not policy making. It is posturing.

And we don’t need more posturing. It is time to act.