The great disconnect

Whenever conservatives talk to me about Barack Obama, I feel quite certain that they mean something else. The anger, the suspicion, the freestyle fantasising have no perceptible object in the space-time continuum that centrist Democrats like me inhabit. What are we missing? Seen from our perspective, the country elected a moderate and cautious straight shooter committed to giving the US its self-respect back after the Bush-Cheney years. Unlike the crybabies at MSNBC and Harper’s Magazine, we never bought into the campaign’s hollow “hope and change” rhetoric. At most we hoped for a sensible healthcare programme to end the scandal of America’s uninsured, and were relieved that Mr Obama proposed no other grand schemes of Nixonian scale. We liked him for his political liberalism and instinctual conservatism.

But more than a few of our fellow citizens are loathing themselves blind over Barack Obama. Why? I need a level-headed conservative to explain this to me, and Charles R Kesler seems an excellent candidate. An amiable Harvard-educated disciple of the conservative philosopher Leo Strauss, he teaches at Claremont McKenna College and is the editor of The Claremont Review of Books, one of the better conservative publications. The Claremont Review doesn’t like Mr Obama one bit. But it has usually taken the slightly higher road in criticising him, and when Professor Kesler begins his book by dismissing those who portray the president as “a third-world daddy’s boy, Alinskyist agitator, deep-cover Muslim or undocumented alien” the reader is relieved to know that I Am the Change won’t be another cheap, deflationary takedown.

Instead, it is that rarest of things, a cheap inflationary takedown — a book that so exaggerates the historical significance of this four-year senator from Illinois, who’s been at his new job even less time, that he becomes both Alien and Predator. Professor Kesler outdoes the Nobel Prize committee by raising the Obama presidency to world-historical significance, constructing a fanciful genealogy of modern liberalism that begins just after the French Revolution in the works of the German philosopher G W F Hegel; passes through Karl Marx and Charles Darwin and Oswald Spengler; and culminates in ... The Audacity of Hope and 2,000-plus pages of technical jargon in the Affordable Care Act.

Professor Kesler’s history of Progressivism doesn’t involve real public figures making real choices about real policies under real constraints in real time. It follows the determined historical journey of the Progressive Idea in words, from the New Freedom platform of Wilson’s first campaign, down through the New Deal speeches of Franklin Roosevelt (who spoke German as a child), then to Lyndon Johnson’s announcements of the War on Poverty and the Great Society. Once that rhetorical lineage is established, he tries to show how the Idea spread out into American culture at large, bringing with it existentialist self-absorption, moral relativism and passivity in the face of the new administrative state, so that by the midcentury we nearly became Europeans. That is when “it fell to Ronald Reagan to help restore Americans’ confidence in themselves, which he did in the name not of liberalism but of conservatism.” Reagan did in fact restore (then overinflate) America’s self-confidence, and he did bequeath to Republicans a clear ideological alternative to Progressivism. But he also transformed American liberalism. By delegitimising Great Society liberalism and emphasising growth, he forced the Democratic Party back toward the centre, making the more moderate presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama possible. Reagan won the war of ideas, as everyone knows.

Except conservatives. The most important thing I learned from Professor Kesler’s book is just how large a stake conservatives have in convincing themselves and voters that Reagan failed. The thing is, the conservatives have also spooked themselves. They now really believe the apocalyptic tale they’ve spun, and have placed mild-mannered Barack Obama at the centre of it. Professor Kesler admits that “Obama is at pains to be, and to be seen as, a strong family man, a responsible husband and father urging responsibility on others, a patriot, a model of pre-’60s, subliminally anti-’60s, sobriety”. But that’s just a disguise. In fact, he’s the “latest embodiment of the visionary prophet-statesman” of the Progressives, someone who “sees himself engaged in an epic struggle” whose success will mean “the Swedenisation of America”.

And what is Professor Kesler’s evidence for these extravagant claims? He hasn’t any. Early in the book he writes that Mr Obama came to office planning “bold, systemic changes to energy policy, environmental regulation, taxation, foreign policy” — though he never describes these plans. He carefully avoids Mr Obama’s moderate record, preferring instead to parse The Audacity of Hope for signs of Germanic statism and to cite liberal journalists gushing over the Black Messiah as proof that Mr Obama sees himself that way. By the final chapter, it becomes apparent that Professor Kesler’s whole case against Mr Obama and the liberalism whose “crisis” he quintessences rests on a single piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act of 2010. From Hegel to healthcare: what could be clearer?

I AM THE CHANGE
Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism
Charles R Kesler
Broadside Books; 276 pages; $25.99

©2012 The New York Times News Service