When President Barack Obama took to the stage this week, reacting to his party’s historic drubbing at the polls, he sounded almost pathologically reasonable.<\/p>\n
Democrats had been kicked to the curb by a Republican movement that described Mr. Obama’s agenda as dangerously anti-American, while portraying the president himself as a racist, a foreign interloper, and a false Messiah.<\/p>\n
Republican leaders made it clear before and after the vote that they had zero interest in compromising with the White House — unless “compromise” meant capitulation.<\/p>\n
Yet here was President Obama promising once again to work toward some kind of bipartisanship, suggesting that he was open to deal-making, and promising to “reinvent” the way Washington DC works.<\/p>\n
Everyone else has taken a stab at trying to understand the thinking that led the Democrats to this moment of fairly abject humiliation.<\/p>\n
For my part, I say it all stems from Francis Fukuyama.\u00a0 Who the heck is Francis Fukuyama?<\/p>\n
He’s an academic philosopher who in 1989 published a highly influential paper called “The End of History.”<\/p>\n
The core of Fukuyama’s argument was that all of human affairs had led us toward the establishment of Western-style liberal democracies.<\/p>\n
In political and cultural terms, we had arrived at a kind of evolutionary end-game.<\/p>\n
From here forward, “history” would amount to very small tweaks and adjustments of the system, designed to make it a little more fair, a little more efficient, and a little more sustainable.<\/p>\n
Fukuyama’s text fit very neatly into the progressive, liberal worldview held by a lot of Democrats.\u00a0 Big vision thinking was passe.\u00a0 Shining-city-on-the-hill style rhetoric was to be distrusted.<\/p>\n
The future would belong to a class of technocratic policy-wonks, who would use a complex system of institutions to mitigate the world’s problems, from racism to global recessions.<\/p>\n
I’m convinced that this is largely the view of the world that Mr. Obama, like a lot of Democrats, clings to.<\/p>\n
He sees the economic recession the way a very smart car mechanic would see an engine that’s running rough.\u00a0 He plans to try various tune-ups and and tweaks until the motor runs smoothly again.<\/p>\n
He sees the deep corruption and villainy on Wall Street not as the objects of a moral crusade, but as a system that is functioning poorly and needs refinement.<\/p>\n
If I’m correct, then Mr. Obama sees his relationship with the Republican “opposition” in much the same light, as a political ecology that needs a bit of pruning, a bit of a trim.<\/p>\n
After all, we’re all reasonable people right?\u00a0 And we all want more or less the same thing.<\/p>\n
The trouble for the Democrats, of course, is that Republicans see the world entirely differently.\u00a0 They don’t think history has ended at all.<\/p>\n
They see the United States in bluntly Biblical and even millenial terms, as a nation that is following a very specific trajectory, one that is divinely inspired.<\/p>\n
Thinkers on the right from Ayn Rand to Rush Limbaugh have outlined a very nearly utopian vision of a world-to-come in which dangerous “enslaving” institutions — from welfare to Social Security — are no longer needed.<\/p>\n
Personal liberty and entrepreneurship will replace the liberal state.<\/p>\n
Ronald Reagan spoke of of this Better America as a “shining city” upon a hill, and in his victory remarks Tuesday, John Boehner – the new House Speaker — echoed that passion.<\/p>\n
Boehner laid out an aspirational vision for our society, one so beautiful (in his eyes, at least) that he wept.<\/p>\n
Put simply, conservatives believe devoutly that the great fight of history is not over.<\/p>\n
They are convinced that existential challenges (communism, socialism, secularism, Islamic facism, etc.) surround them on all sides.<\/p>\n
And given those stakes, losing is not an option.\u00a0 And it is crucial to note that in their estimation the Democratic vision for America represents defeat in no uncertain terms.<\/p>\n
That’s why thinkers such as Limbaugh were so comfortable hoping out loud that Mr. Obama’s efforts to fix the economy would fail.<\/p>\n
“Why is it any different, what\u2019s new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails?,” Limbaugh argued.<\/p>\n
“Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what\u2019s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it?” <\/strong><\/p>\n My guess is that in the short term at least this kind of passion and conviction will win out over Mr. Obama’s more technocratic, tidy-up-the-accounting world view.<\/p>\n After all, Mr. Obama has already made it clear that he doesn’t have any particular principles upon which he is unwilling to compromise.<\/p>\n He appears convinced that global warming (to name one issue) is a threat to our society and our planet, yet he has drawn no lines in the sand in terms of doing anything about it.<\/p>\n He seems to think that economic unfairness is a growing problem, but he hasn’t offered a single visionary plan for reducing the gap between rich and poor.<\/p>\n He seems to think the American middle class is truly imperiled, but where is his great Marshall Plan for restoring it to security and prosperity?<\/p>\n He seems to think that expanding renewable energy is crucial for our economy, our national security, and our environment — so where is his Manhattan Project, his quest for the moon?<\/p>\n Mr. Obama’s fiddle-and-adjust approach might have worked a decade ago, when we were a more prosperous and patient people.<\/p>\n But these days Americans of all political persuasions don’t particularly like the country as it exists.\u00a0 We desperately want the next chapter of our history to deliver us a big step closer to that shining city.<\/p>\n Unless Mr. Obama and his party begin to think very big about their dreams for the Next Great American Century, more and more of us will look elsewhere for leadership.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When President Barack Obama took to the stage this week, reacting to his party’s historic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[886],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3162"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}