Not Your Parents’ Liberalism Ctd.

I would have appended this to the end of my last post as an update, but being as that post is as long as it is I wasn’t convinced anyone would make it that far without taking up too much real estate on the main page. As if on cue to commenter Bruce Smith’s comparison of Blair and Obama, Alex Massie pens this piece comparing the two leaders,

But that’s not how they see themselves. That is, while its true that Obama is a liberal (in the American sense and standard of the term) and an ambitious one to boot, he’s also operating in a different era. Put it this way, you wouldn’t have had so many Goldman Sachs alumni in many senior positions during the Carter or Johnson administrations. Obama is no devotee of Milton Friedman but he is a University of Chicago Democrat which, in this instance, might put him on the right wing of the British labour party: the market is a good and necessary thing but there are limits to what it can be expected to achieve. There are limits to what government can do too, but government’s role is to step in where the market fails and to create the conditions or set the rules by which our society operates, guaranteeing everyone a fair shake and a decent chance. Something like that anyway.

This isn’t triangulation, it’s an attempt to reclad, indeed revitalise, liberalism at the fag end of the Age of Reagan. Like Blair, Obama arrives in office with an impressive manadate and replaces a party that was exhausted, complacent and arrogant. These are propotitious circumstances for a new administration. Unlike Blair, however, Obama believes in the scale of his victory and the opportunity it gives him. Blair couldn’t quite believe that Labour had won and was always conscious that (outside the BBC and the usual left-wing papers) most of the press were reluctant allies who could turn on him at any moment. That meant that Blair – handicapped by his Chancellor of the Exchequer – squandered his first couple of years in office. Obama is trying to avoid the same mistake: hence the push for a trillion dollar healthcare reform.

For obvious reasons I’m inclined to defer to Massie’s analysis on Blair and on the face of it the comparison seems apt. I agree with Massie that what Obama is doing isn’t a matter of triangulation, which by my lights stakes a space for Obama that isn’t merely a ideologically mushy centrist. But I think where the comparison breaks down is around just how bold Obama’s liberal vision is, while still retaining that “University of Chicago Democrat” engine of the free-market.

It’s not so much to my mind that Obama sees government as the appropriate means of tinkering around the edges of what the market is incapable of or unwilling to address, but rather that there is a well defined and broad swath of policy areas that government is best to deal with and that government should go about dealing with those areas with vigor and enthusiasm. Areas that come to mind are precisely those that Obama has sough to stake out in his budget: education, the environment, healthcare, and the like. Free-market zealots abhor the notion that these are the proper area of government because doing so indicates that there is an equal and equally important public sphere that, due to an unspoken zero-sum analysis, must entail a shrinking of the private pie. That means a loss of profit, and it might be true that there are a goodly number of companies who have been happily making money off of, say, the provision of healthcare for the past decades. But healthcare, as Massie notes, is a useful example because it precisely demonstrates why this area of public interest isn’t just poorly served by private management, but, indeed, private interests are poorly served (at least over the long-term) by their own involvement in the area of healthcare.

Those kinds of stakes in the ground don’t seem to me to be as bold as Blair was willing to go in terms of his suggested reforms (healthcare, of course, not being the issue in Britain that it is in the US) and demonstrates how the Obama revitalization of a liberalism that synthesizes without really compromising, or at least not in the way that Bill Clitnon was forced to, is of a different order than Blair’s. Massie rightly notes that Obama and Blair are operating within different circumstances, which accounts for at least some of the differences inherent in their visions. By that measure is Obama merely fulfilling the true embodiment of reformulated liberalism that bot Blair and Clinton sought? Perhaps, but phenomenologically it is a realization of weight that accrues in Obama’s favour and changes the playing field in novel and unqiue ways. Allowing no real difference in kind, the moment facing Obama et al remains equal parts circumstantial and perspirational.

At the end of the day, the question that I think stares Obama in the face is how to make good on the notion that government can play a positive role in enabling individuals’ opportunities to achieve without cultivating a corresponding dependance on government from those same indivisuals. How does a twenty-first century liberalism shift the focus on government from ends to means and drive a stake through the heart of their party of government epithet without giving in to the same kind of hoolowed out centrism that has plauged middle of the road Democrats since Clinton. Fundamentally this is the same question that faces the Labour Party to which Massie alludes (we generally look for our paths forward in the faces of leaders) and insofar as there is no pre-existing exemplar from which to crib notes, it seems to me that Obama is honestly breaking new ground with his efforts.

Tagged as: Alex MAssie, Barak Obama, New Liberalism, Tony Blair