Change of Leadership?

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.