Imagination
At The Current, Reihan lets his run wild:
On the domestic front, one can imagine Wright building bridges to small government conservatives by calling for sweeping decentralization, the better to empower neighborhoods and churches.
I appreciate Reihan’s experiment, and he is right that Wright would be a more “interesting” candidate, since his every public appearance would become the occasion for a new firestorm of controversy. If he ran for office, it would be a good time to be a blogger.
As completely implausible as this alliance of right-wing decentralists and Jeremiah Wright might be, there’s a lot to be said for this kind of thing generally. If I understand it correctly, Wright’s communitarianism, like a lot of left communitarianism, comes from the legacy of not expecting public authority to do much for, and to do a good deal against, your community; rightist decentralism comes out of a similar conviction borne of a similar distrust of concentrated and distant power. Where they differ is that the former has promoted self-reliance (at least to some extent) on the assumption that no one else will provide much of anything, much less the right kind of assistance, and the latter wants to go back towards a world of more or less self-supporting communities on the assumption that there are only too many people willing to offer assistance as a means of acquiring leverage and power over your community. In the end, however, I am skeptical that most minority communities will ever be fully supportive of a decentralist agenda, even though in many parts of the country it would empower them more than any arrangement under the current system would.
Reihan is making another very important point elsewhere in this short item, which is that to have a truly vigorous and serious debate there needs to be many more stark clashes of differing perspectives. This again goes to the heart of the problem with the Obama campaign: it is premised on the idea that there is too much division, when every major calamity or failure of policy has been a product of bipartisan consensus, and that we need more unity and collaboration, when we actually need more frequent and more pointed disagreement about fundamental assumptions concerning the role of government, America’s role in the world, the distribution of power and wealth, and the desirability of channeling or blocking cultural change. In the last eight years, we have had a unified government, and it has done a great deal of damage. Even when the opposition party acquires some power, it is cowed and intimidated out of using it because it is simply not permitted in “serious” circles to advance in a meaningful way policies consistent with views diametically opposed to those of the administration. The trouble is that we have not been divided enough. The variety of political views in America does not receive its proper representation, and even when we are discussing actual policy (rather than “hope”) we are instead treated to the spectacle of quibbling over the minutiae of how best to run the empire and expand the government.
I always get the feeling when I read your criticisms of Obama’s “unity talk” that you just don’t get it. He’s not really talking about bi-partisanship in the classic sense. He’s talking about building a consensus coalition of people who recognize common interests. In some ways this is actually a very partisan agenda of his, in that he wants to unify people who have a common agenda, but who are kept apart by what he sees as fake and manipulative, symbolic-based partisanship, rather than reality-based political compromise. So he wants to build a coalition out of both liberal and conservative camps, giving each something of what they’ve been trying to achieve, but have not been able to because of the current dynamics of politics.
This isn’t comprehensive “unity” by any stretch of the imagination. It’s coalition building. It’s actually a way of wrecking the current coalitions, and creating new ones that will work better. So Obama’s agenda isn’t trying to unify everyone under a comprehensive non-partisan agenda. He’s only trying to unify enough people to create a working coalition who see the world similarly enough to work together. In practice, this is actually a formula for even more bickering than before. It’s just a healthier kind of bickering, not stuck in the old symbolisms of the 60′s, but striving to create working, realistic coalitions to get some things done that have been impossible to do under the old system.
This doesn’t mean peace and love and kumbaya. It means actually uprooting the very issues that have kept people from recognizing common interests and dealing with them realistically. That’s actually a bit ugly, which this current uproar over both Wright and the “bitter” comments show. The bitter comments were themselves indicative of Obama’s thinking about politics (not about religion and guns, etc, but about the political usage of those issues). He feels that these symbolic issues are being used to keep the kind of coaltiion he’s talking about from coming into being, and that people are bitter abot that. It probably didn’t come out very clearly in those comments, because they were just off the cuff remarks at a private fundraiser, but the overall message of his campaign makes their context clear. And the attacks on Obama of late are attacks by the very people and mindset that he is seeking to destroy.
Note the word “destroy” there. He’s not wanting to build unity with these people, or their vision of the world. He wants to put all that to bed, and build a different kind of political culture, which he thinks is being suppressed and prevented by that old mindset, but which could flourish if freed from those bonds. So the reason I and many other dissatisfied, even bitter, liberals, democrats, and even conservatives find Obama “hopeful” is not some vague longing for bipartisan “change”, but for a very real and specific change in the political landscape which will allow all kinds of new and interesting things to flower. We’re talking about a Prague Spring here, not Disney’s “It’s Small World After All”. The current political climate has been oppressive and inhospitable, and it’s idea of “bipartisanship” is more of the same. Obama at least has the willingness to take the lid off and see what can develop under a very different kind of mindset. This is why Obama ought to be at least somewhat appealing to certain kinds of conservatives, not just liberals, who feel that they have also been marginalized and the issues they care about swept away under the symbolic manipulation of various matters that serve no other real purpose than the suppression of political dissent. I think you know what I’m talking about. That Obama may not share the same conservative viewpoint doesn’t mean he isn’t willing to listen, and even cooperate with various conservative programs that are realistically aimed at changing this landscape. I think he’s realistic enough to know that what he wants to acheive will undoubtedly unleash not just an energized liberal politics, but also an energized conservative politics of a kind I’d expect people such as yourself to approve of. And Obama seems to know this will be a good thing, that many of these kinds of conservatives are people he can both work with and get ideas from. He taught at the University of Chicago, for god’s sake, he knows something about the intelligence of many conservatives, and he differentiates that from the Rove-Bush conservatives who have dominated the political side of the movement for the last couple of decades.
He continually frames it in terms of bipartisan cooperation and “bringing people together.” Maybe I have misunderstood what he’s trying to do when he says this, but his words make it very easy to misunderstand. But I do see that he wants to “bring people together” for the sake of his agenda, and it is the content of that agenda that I think will make it very difficult for him to “bring people together” in support of it.
Also, the Prague Spring was crushed within the year, so that’s probably not an ideal precedent, but I do see what you’re saying.
Mr. Larizon,
Chesterton has a great quote in his work on Thomas Aquinas supporting your position:
“War in the modern sense, is possible, not because more men disagree, but because more men agree. Under the peculiarly modern coercions, such as Compulsory Education and Conscription, there are such very large peaceful areas, that they can all agree upon War. In that age [medieval] men disagreed even about war; and peace might breakout anywhere. Peace was interrupted by feuds and feuds by pardons.â€
Daniel,
I chose Prague Spring for that reason – these kinds of movements are easily crushed, but they still matter, and in the end, they prevail.
And yes, he talks about bi-partisan cooperation, but he frames it in the context of doing away with the old Rove-Bush-Clinton boomer dynamic. He’s looking for conservatives who might differ on some aspects of policy, but share a disgust for the old dynamic. Which is why Ron Paul seems to be leaning towards Obama rather than McCain. And why plenty of Obama supporters, such as myself, would vote for a third party Ron Paul rather than either Clinton or McCain.
Also, be aware that he’s talking about “bringing people together” in the context of a democratic primary. He’s trying to bring democrats together first and foremost. That alone is a tough job. That’s the base of his would-be coalition, the sane republicans and independents are what puts it over the top. He’s not talking about forming a bi-partisan coalition with neocons and the Fox News NRO Bush-Rove hard core evangelicals.
Aren’t you making a false consciousness argument here? In that, the lack of “meaningful political conflict” is really due to a broad consensus on the majority of issues…. You are really arguing that if the regular joe/jane really understood what was good for them…
Again, not at all. There is not a broad consensus on as many issues as our party system would suggest, or rather there may be a broad consensus that is directly at odds with what the majority of elected representatives actualy does. There are reasonably large constituencies on left and right that want us out of not just Iraq, but out of most other places around the world where we have bases, and these people are woefully underrepresented by the two-party system. These voters know what they believe and know what they want, but there are limited options for them to have those views represented in government. Many Americans are very skeptical of NAFTA and other free trade deals, but by and large they are also underrepresented. The establishment consensus on immigration is wildly at odds with the popular consensus. I could go on. For that matter, there are social democrats and left-wingers in this country who want a much larger government and more services, and they also go largely unrepresented in our system. A false consciousness argument would say that people say they believe X, but are really saying that just because of Y, and if Y were addressed X would fade away into the background. That has nothing to do with what I’m talking about.
I see, we just disagree as to the extent and actual passion of the opposition. I take the refusal of the voting public to, you know, actually change the direction of policy as conclusive evidence that when push comes to shove, they are happy with the way things are going…
If both parties are pushing more or less the same line on immigration and trade, for instance, those who take a different view have few practical options for expressing their displeasure with the status quo. Lacking for options, they will usually vote on the basis of something else or stop voting all together. Millions of people voted for the Democrats in 2006 in order to end the war, and the fact that this did not change the policy does not mean that they did not vote for a change in policy.
Lacking for options, they will usually vote on the basis of something else or stop voting all together. Millions of people voted for the Democrats in 2006 in order to end the war, and the fact that this did not change the policy does not mean that they did not vote for a change in policy.
Ah, but the conspicuous (to me) lack of outrage at the Dems failure does…
Some similar thoughts at the Left Conservative here and here.