FIRST PRINCIPLES FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS TO GUIDE POLITICS AND POLICY NO. 45 | OCTOBER 15, 2012 Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism Charles R. Kesler, PhD Abstract Liberalism as we know it today in America is on the verge of exhaustion. Facing a fiscal crisis that it has precipitated and no longer sure of its purpose, liberalism will either go out of business or be forced to reinvent itself as something quite different from what it has been. In this careful analysis of Barack Obama’s political thought, Charles R. Kesler shows that the President, though intent on reinvigorating the liberal faith, nonetheless fails to understand its fatal contradictions—a shortsightedness that may prove to be liberalism’s undoing. This essay is adapted from Kesler’s new book, I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism. arack Obama had the distinc- Since then, we have learned a lot He still had to answer, in some Btion of being the most liberal more about his political leanings as a measure, for his ties to William member of the United States Senate young man, which were fashionably Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, but the when he ran for President in 2008. leftist, broadly in keeping with the issue with, say, the good reverend The title had been conferred by climate of opinion on the campuses concerned his sermons about race National Journal, an inside-the-Belt- where he found himself—Occidental and Middle East politics, not his pen- way watchdog that annually assigns College, Columbia University, chant for visiting and honoring Fidel Senators (and Congressmen) an ideo- Harvard Law School. Castro, not to mention the Marxist logical rank based on their votes on As a senior at Columbia, he Sandinistas in Nicaragua.1 Partly by economic, social, and foreign policy attended the 1983 Socialist Scholars avoiding the worst of the old anti- issues. Conference, sponsored by the Communist gauntlet, Obama became Democratic Socialists of America. the most left-wing liberal to be elect- Though a meeting of democratic ed to national executive office since This paper, in its entirety, can be found at socialists and, yes, community Henry Wallace. http://report.heritage.org/fp44 organizers, the conference as well as Still, the President is not a self- Produced by the B. Kenneth Simon Center his long-running friendships with proclaimed socialist—nor, like for Principles and Politics radicals of various sorts would have Wallace, a self-deceived fellow trav- The Heritage Foundation drawn more sustained attention if eler or worse. Obama never went so 214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20002 the Cold War were still raging. But it far, so openly—whether out of inertia, (202) 546-4400 | heritage.org was not, and Obama pleaded youth- political calculation, or good sense— Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily ful indiscretion and drift; and of and therefore never had to make a reflecting the views of The Heritage Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill course his campaign did its best to public apostasy. As a result, we know before Congress. keep the details from coming out. less about his evolving views than FIRST PRINCIPLES | NO. 45 OCTOBER 15, 2012 we might like, though probably more its excesses. Each wave of liberalism The first and most disorient- than he would like. featured a different aspect of it—call ing wave was political liberalism, He calls himself a progressive or them, for short, political liberalism, which began as a critique of the liberal, and we should take him at economic liberalism, and cultural Constitution and the morality under- his word, at least until we encoun- liberalism—and each deposited lying it. That morality, Woodrow ter a fatal contradiction. That’s only on our shores a distinctive type of Wilson charged, the natural rights reasonable and fair; and it avoids the politics—the politics of progress, the doctrine of Thomas Jefferson and desperate shortcut, gratifying as it politics of entitlements, and the poli- Abraham Lincoln, was based on an may be, of unmasking him as—take tics of meaning. outmoded account of human nature, your pick—a Third-World daddy’s an atomistic and egoistic view that boy, Alinskyist agitator, deep-cover MODERN LIBERALISM SPREAD needed to be corrected by a more Muslim, or undocumented alien. ACROSS THE COUNTRY IN THREE well-rounded or social view, made Conservatives, of all people, should plausible by the recent discovery know to beware instant gratification, POWERFUL WAVES—POLITICAL that human nature was necessarily especially when it comes wrapped LIBERALISM, ECONOMIC LIBERALISM, progressive or perfectible. So-called in a conspiracy theory. In any case, AND CULTURAL LIBERALISM—AND natural rights were actually histori- hypocrisy, as Rochefoucauld wrote, EACH DEPOSITED ON OUR SHORES cal or prescriptive, evolving with the is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, times toward a final and rational A DISTINCTIVE TYPE OF POLITICS— and Obama seems to think it would truth. The 18th century Constitution, be a virtuous thing to have been a THE POLITICS OF PROGRESS, THE based on the 18th century notion of a lifelong liberal, even if he wasn’t. POLITICS OF ENTITLEMENTS, AND fixed human nature with static rights, And so the question arises: What THE POLITICS OF MEANING. had in turn to be transcended by a does it mean anymore to be a liberal? modern or living constitution based To answer it, we must first retrace on the evolutionary view. Drawing the history of liberalism over the These terms are conceptual on a curious and unstable mixture of course of the past century. rather than, strictly speaking, his- Social Darwinism, German ideal- torical. They help to organize our ism, and English historicism, Wilson The Four Waves of Liberalism thinking more so than our record- outlined the new State that liberals The 20th century was, as the late keeping, inasmuch as elements of all would ever after be building, the goal Tom Silver used to say, “the liberal three were mixed up in each stage. of which would be nothing less than century.” Conservatism was a late Although it wasn’t inevitable that man’s complete spiritual fulfillment. arrival, debuting as a self-conscious one wave should follow the next, a The second wave explic- intellectual movement only in the certain logic connected the New itly adopted the name of liberal- 1950s and lacking significant politi- Freedom, the New Deal, and the ism, laying aside the old banner cal success until the 1980s. By con- Great Society. Each attempted to of Progressivism. It championed trast, the liberal storm was already transform America, as their names liberality or generosity in the form gathering in the 1880s and broke suggest, and the second and third of a new doctrine of socioeconomic upon the land in the new century’s waves worked out themes implicit in rights and tried to connect the new second decade. It had made deep, the first. But the special flavor of each rights to the old, the Second Bill of decisive changes in American poli- period owed much to the issues and Rights (as FDR called it) to the First. tics long before conservatism as we forces involved, the legacy of previ- Instead of rights springing from know it came on the scene. ous reform, the character of the polit- the individual, the New Deal recon- It didn’t, however, win these vic- ical leaders, and the disagreements ceived individualism as springing tories all at once. Modern liberalism within and between the generations from a new kind of rights created by spread across the country in three of reformers. The third wave, cen- the State. The new entitlement-style powerful waves, interrupted by wars tered on the Sixties, showed just how rights posed as personal rights, even and by rather haphazard reactions to fratricidal liberalism could become. though they effectually attached to 1. Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010), pp. 1–11, 21–60, 71–77, 86. 2 FIRST PRINCIPLES | NO. 45 OCTOBER 15, 2012 groups; but due to the slight family Obama inherited that frayed lib- by his profession, in Berlin, that he resemblance, they allowed Roosevelt eralism. Against long odds, he’s tried is a citizen of the world as well. He to present himself and the New Deal to reunite its dissonant parts and seems to lack both the citizen’s pride as the loyal servants and successors restore its political élan. He brought and the immigrant’s gratitude. of the American Revolution, of the America to the verge of a fourth wave Tempting as it might be to write old social compact suitably updated. of political and social transformation, off the President, it would be a big Liberalism’s third wave, cultural something that neither Democrats mistake. Whatever else he may or lifestyle liberalism, hit in the nor Republicans thought possible. accomplish, his staggering victory on 1960s. It was only when this wave But as the latest embodiment of the health care reform has earned him a crashed around them that the radi- visionary prophet-statesmen he future place on the Mount Rushmore cal character of liberalism became hasn’t been able to sustain the deep of liberalism, alongside those other clear to the American people; only connection to the American people supreme hero-statesmen of the then that conservatism became, at that his election in 2008 seemed to creed, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. least temporarily, a majority move- promise and that his desire to restore Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson.