Let no one accuse President Obama of a lack of
vision. In broad strokes, the president’s inaugural
speech painted a picture of a modern progressive state,
technocratic and competent, muscular in its efforts and
far-reaching in scope, capable of intricate micromanagement when
necessary but also willing to take big steps to fix the
big problems that liberals deem in need of fixing, whatever they
may be. Obama defended the entitlement system, talked up the value
of public infrastructure and environmental action, and explicitly
tied the nation’s greatness to its ability and willingness to
undertake whatever grand—and presumably public—reform efforts Obama
and his fellow liberals imagine.
The speech seems to have pleased President Obama’s liberal
supporters even more than you might normally expect—in large part
because they saw Obama as openly embracing their own brand of
expansive, self-assured progressivism. The New
Yorker’s David Remnick
describes it as “infinitely better, more self-assured, more
politically precise than his first.” It was “Barack Obama without
apology—a liberal emboldened by political victory and a desire to
enter the history books with a progressive agenda.” The New
Republic’s Noam Scheiber
says the speech marked a departure for the president, and
showed that Obama is prepared to defend liberalism as a worldview.
In today’s Washington Post, columnist E.J. Dionne
lauds the speech as a “case for a progressive view of
government, and a case for the particular things that government
should do in our time.”
I wouldn’t call the speech a case for progressivism so much as
an attempt to assert its victory.
It’s true that Obama offered a vision of a bigger, bolder state.
But what he didn’t offer was much of an argument for how to get
there, or make it affordable and sustainable. There were no
outright policy proposals in the speech, but there was an awful lot
of spending squeezed between its lines. Yet except for a line about
using technology to lower the cost of health care, Obama’s speech
offered no hints about he’d pay for his expanded state; the words
debt, deficit, and budget were notably absent from the text.
Nor did Obama make much attempt to win over his political
opponents—to convince them that the goals he laid out were worthy.
Rather, the speech instead suggested that the argument was over,
that he had won, and that the opposition should simply fall in
line. “There are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who
suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans,” he
said. “Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this
country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when
imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted
beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed
us for so long, no longer apply.”
That’s not an argument for liberalism so much as a statement
that Obama believes the argument is over.
I’m
sure he’d like it to be, but as he knows all too well, it’s
anything but. With a GOP majority in the House now and likely in
2014, the next four years may be as bitter and divisive as the
first, and perhaps more so.
It’s not just Obama who knows this; his liberal supporters are
equally aware. Indeed, that seems to be what frustrates many of
them most: that a popular second term president should encounter
any opposition to his agenda—especially from a disorganized and
rag-tag band of lower chamber Republicans. You can hear it in the
refrains of “Republican obstructionism” and in the constant
urging for President Obama to adopt a more combative stance with
the Republicans in Congress. You can hear in so much of the
commentary surrounding the recent fiscal showdowns, much of which
amounted to little more than grumbling that the GOP should accept
defeat and get out of President Obama's way. And you could hear it,
ever so softly, in the president’s speech.
Indeed, that may tell you why his second inaugural is winning
such plaudits from liberal pundits. What many of them seem to
desire most is a government in which Obama and his fellow Democrats
are unopposed, free to govern and spend as they please, unburdened
of the task of fighting congressional Republicans, or convincing
conservative skeptics. Obama’s speech didn’t just lay out a vision
of a working progressive government, it offered a vision of a
progressive establishment unopposed by argument, politics, or
practical and fiscal constraints. And it let progressive pundits
bask, if only for a brief moment, in the better world of their own
imagination, one in which the government does many
things—but not, apparently, contend with the
opposition.
Peter Suderman is a senior editor at Reason magazine.
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