An essay of mine that discusses the continued public relevance of research in the social sciences and the humanities was published on January 22 in Inside Higher Ed.
The Relevance of the Humanities
By Gabriel Paquette
The deepening economic crisis has triggered a new wave of budget cuts and hiring freezes at America’s universities. Retrenchment is today’s watchword. For scholars in the humanities, arts and social sciences, the economic downturn will only exacerbate existing funding shortages. Even in more prosperous times, funding for such research has been scaled back and scholars besieged by questions concerning the relevance of their enterprise, whether measured by social impact, economic value or other sometimes misapplied benchmarks of utility.
Public funding gravitates towards scientific and medical research, with its more readily appreciated and easily discerned social benefits. In Britain, the fiscal plight of the arts and humanities is so dire that the Institute of Ideas recently sponsored a debate at King’s College London that directly addressed the question, “Do the arts have to re-brand themselves as useful to justify public money?”
In addition to decrying the rising tide of philistinism, some scholars might also be tempted to agree with Stanley Fish, who infamously asserted that humanities “cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.” Fish rejected the notion that the humanities can be validated by some standard external to them. He dismissed as wrong-headed “measures like increased economic productivity, or the fashioning of an informed citizenry, or the sharpening of moral perception, or the lessening of prejudice and discrimination.”
There is little doubt that the value of the humanities and social sciences far outstrip any simple measurement. As universities and national funding bodies face painful financial decisions and are forced to prioritize the allocation of scarce resources, however, scholars must guard against such complacency. Instead, I argue, scholars in the social sciences, arts, and humanities should consider seriously how the often underestimated value of their teaching and research could be further justified to the wider public through substantive contributions to today’s most pressing policy questions.
This present moment is a propitious one for reconsidering the function of academic scholarship in public life. The election of a new president brings with it an unprecedented opportunity for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. The meltdown of the financial markets has focused public attention on additional challenges of massive proportions, including the fading of American primacy and the swift rise of a polycentric world.
Confronting the palpable prospect of American decline will demand contributions from all sectors of society, including the universities, the nation’s greatest untapped resource. According to the Times Higher Education Supplement’s recently released rankings, the U.S. boasts 13 of the world’s top 20 universities, and 36 U.S. institutions figure in the global top 100. How can scholars in the arts, humanities and social sciences make a difference at this crucial historical juncture? How can they demonstrate the public benefits of their specialist research and accumulated learning?
A report published by the British Academy in September contains some valuable guidance. It argues that the collaboration between government and university researchers in the social sciences and humanities must be bolstered. The report, “Punching Our Weight: the Humanities and Social Sciences in Public Policy Making” emphasizes how expanded contact between government and humanities and social science researchers could improve the effectiveness of public programs. It recommends “incentivizing high quality public policy engagement.” It suggests that universities and public funding bodies should “encourage, assess and reward” scholars who interact with government. The British Academy study further hints that university promotion criteria, funding priorities, and even research agendas should be driven, at least in part, by the major challenges facing government.
The British Academy report acknowledges that “there is a risk that pressure to develop simplistic measures will eventually lead to harmful distortions in the quality of research,” but contends that the potential benefits outweigh the risks.
The report mentions several specific areas where researchers in the social sciences and humanities can improve policy design, implementation, and assessment. These include the social and economic challenges posed by globalization; innovative comprehensive measurements of human well-being; understanding and predicting human behavior; overcoming barriers to cross-cultural communication; and historical perspectives on contemporary policy problems.
The British Academy report offers insights that the U.S. government and American scholars could appropriate. It is not farfetched to imagine government-university collaboration on a wide range of crucial issues, including public transport infrastructure, early childhood education, green design, civil war mediation, food security, ethnic strife, poverty alleviation, city planning, and immigration reform. A broader national conversation to address the underlying causes of the present crisis is sorely needed. By putting their well-honed powers of perception and analysis in the public interest, scholars can demonstrate that learning and research deserve the public funding and esteem which has been waning in recent decades.
The active collaboration of scholars with government will be anathema to those who conceive of the university as a bulwark against the ever encroaching, nefarious influence of the state. The call for expanded university-government collaboration may provoke distasteful memories of the enlistment of academe in the service of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, a relationship which produced unedifying intellectual output and dreadfully compromised scholarship.
To some degree, then, skepticism toward the sort of government-university collaboration advocated here is fully warranted by the specter of the past. Moreover, the few recent efforts by the federal government to engage with researchers in the social sciences and humanities have not exactly inspired confidence.
The Pentagon’s newly launched Minerva Initiative, to say nothing of the Army’s much-criticized Human Terrain System, has generated a storm of controversy, mainly from those researchers who fear that scholarship will be placed in the service of war and counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and produce ideologically distorted scholarship.
Certainly, the Minerva Initiative’s areas of funded research — “Chinese military and technology studies, Iraqi and Terrorist perspective projects, religious and ideological studies,” according to its Web site — raise red flags for many university-based researchers. Yet I would argue that frustration with the Bush administration and its policies must not preclude a dispassionate analysis of the Minerva Initiative and block recognition of its enormous potential for fostering and deepening links between university research and public policy communities. The baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. The Minerva Initiative, in a much-reformed form, represents a model upon which future university-government interaction might be built.
Cooperation between scholars in the social sciences and humanities and all of the government’s departments should be enhanced by expanding the channels of communication among them. The challenge is to establish a framework for engagement that poses a reduced threat to research ethics, eliminates selection bias in the applicant pool for funding, and maintains high scholarly standards. Were these barriers to effective collaboration overcome, it would be exhilarating to contemplate the proliferation of a series of “Minerva Initiatives” in various departments of the executive branch. Wouldn’t government policies and services — in areas as different as the environmental degradation, foreign aid effectiveness, health care delivery, math and science achievement in secondary schools, and drug policy — improve dramatically were they able to harness the sharpest minds and cutting-edge research that America’s universities have to offer?
What concrete forms could such university-government collaboration take? There are several immediate steps that could be taken. First, it is important to build on existing robust linkages. The State Department and DoD already have policy planning teams that engage with scholars and academic scholarship. Expanding the budgets as well as scope of these offices could produce immediate benefits.
Second, the departments of the executive branch of the federal government, especially Health and Human Services, Education, Interior, Homeland Security, and Labor, should devise ways of harnessing academic research on the Minerva Initiative model. There must be a clear assessment of where research can lead to the production of more effective policies. Special care must be taken to ensure that the scholarly standards are not adversely compromised.
Third, universities, especially public universities, should incentivize academic engagement with pressing federal initiatives. It is reasonable to envision promotion criteria modified to reward such interaction, whether it takes the form of placements in federal agencies or the production of policy relevant, though still rigorous, scholarship. Fourth, university presidents of all institutions need to renew the perennial debate concerning the purpose of higher education in American public life. Curricula and institutional missions may need to align more closely with national priorities than they do today.
The public’s commitment to scholarship, with its robust tradition of analysis and investigation, must extend well beyond the short-term needs of the economy or exigencies imposed by military entanglements. Academic research and teaching in the humanities, arts and social sciences plays a crucial role in sustaining a culture of open, informed debate that buttresses American democracy. The many-stranded national crisis, however, offers a golden opportunity for broad, meaningful civic engagement by America’s scholars and university teachers. The public benefits of engaging in the policy-making process are, potentially, vast.
Greater university-government cooperation could reaffirm and make visible the public importance of research in the humanities, arts and social sciences.
Not all academic disciplines lend themselves to such public engagement. It is hard to imagine scholars in comparative literature or art history participating with great frequency in such initiatives.
But for those scholars whose work can shed light on and contribute to the solution of massive public conundrums that the nation faces, the opportunity afforded by the election of a new president should not be squandered. Standing aloof is an unaffordable luxury for universities at the moment. The present conjuncture requires enhanced public engagement; the stakes are too high to stand aside
Friday, January 23, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Obama and the Strange Triumph of Conservatism
Note: A shortened version of this post appeared under the title "Obama the Conservative" in The Guardian [London] on January 26, 2009.
Like millions of Americans, particularly Democrats, my eyes teared as I watched the inauguration of Barack Obama. For the first time in many years, I permitted myself to believe that America might at long last have a genuine political progressive at the helm of government. I hoped that President Obama stood prepared to commit the power and prestige of the nation’s highest office to the agendas of promoting economic equity, deepening civil rights, and preparing America to adjust to a less exalted station in an increasingly multipolar world. I was prepared to understand, somewhat reluctantly, that the pursuit of such goals required compromise and, perhaps, even some “post-partisan” posturing. Radical change often must be couched in ideologically neutral and conciliatory language. But I was ill-prepared for an inaugural address and the first two days of an administration which have revealed that Obama is not only the new face of America, but also the embodiment of conservatism.
This may seem a far-fetched, even ridiculous claim at first glance. How can President Obama, a symbol of the victorious culmination of a centuries’ long struggle against racial discrimination, a community organizer who labored selflessly in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago, and a brilliant, charismatic politician who electrified America’s youth and brought the Democratic party from the political wilderness to the White House represent the triumph of conservatism? How can a man who stands poised to deliver the USA from the macabre years of the Bush administration be considered a conservative? There is no doubt that President Obama’s administration will pursue many policies that we have long associated with American liberalism and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Yet this fact should not conceal Obama’s deep debt to the conservative tradition.
We must recall that the first conservatism in the modern sense originated in the late eighteenth century as a belief in moderation in politics to serve the interests of “social harmony” and the “common good”. The first conservative thinkers, men such as Edmund Burke, were wary of radical change based on infatuation with lofty ideals or abstract Reason. They venerated tradition and preferred to place their faith in institutions which had endured patiently and relatively unperturbed the calamities of the ages—long-established, moderate government, the Church, the University, a society of Orders, and a stable set of mores and manners which developed slowly over several centuries. They were not hostile to change. Burke himself famously stated that “a state without a means of change is without the means of its conservation”. Rather, the first conservatives wanted incremental change, arising from the organic, necessarily slow evolution of society, that would reflect and remain consistent with long-established beliefs and values.
History often portrays these early conservatives as hostile to the revolutionaries, in France and elsewhere, who sought to abruptly and comprehensively reshape society so that ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ could reign. This view is only partly true. Undoubtedly, they appraised revolutionary aims with some skepticism. But the early conservatives were threatened less by the goals of revolutionaries than by their methods, their hasty, reckless, and presumptuous effort to remake the world in their own image.
The Conservatives fought on two fronts. On the first front they battled those who sought to reform society according to abstract, untested philosophical ideas and raze the long-established institutions which propped up the Old Regime. On the second front they combated an even more dangerous group. These were the allies of the “Crown and the Altar”, men and women who opposed social and political change that undermined (or even questioned!) the legitimacy of monarchy and religious doctrine as the preeminent authorities in society. These ‘enemies of the enlightenment’ were perhaps even more dangerous than their progressive counterparts. Their hysterical intolerance, intemperate rejection of innovation, and uncritical allegiance to organs of authority were uncompromising.
It is one of the quirks of history that both conservatives and the radical reactionaries they loathed have been lumped together as a single, united force bent on destroying the new world which progressives aspired to bring into existence. The failure to make such a distinction prevents us from grasping a simple truth of our own time. George W. Bush was not a conservative, but rather a curious hybrid of reactionary and progressive. He was a reactionary by temperament and conviction whose methods were borrowed from the most radical progressives. He and his enablers, the much-touted ‘neo-conservatives’ steeped in Trotskyist traditions of ‘permanent revolution’, turned democracy into a creed for evangelization and forced conversion around the world. They defiled long-cherished American principles in the name of national security and, they claimed, to safeguard those same principles. Government spending ballooned and fiscal restraint was discarded. In his denigration of government’s usefulness on ideological grounds and unsophisticated worship of the abstract ideal of an unfettered market, Bush betrayed the conservatives in his own party, scorning them when they dared complain. He allowed reactionaries, yahoos, and loyalist hacks to sack government programs and run roughshod over the constitution. In a parting shot, he besmirched the conservatism that he had long-ago forsaken and led it, along with his accomplices, from the corridors of power into the political wilderness.
Into the breach steps Obama. Progressives rightly await this moment with anticipation. How can someone with his background—racial, intellectual, professional—fail to pursue a progressive agenda? There is little doubt that the Obama administration will put an end to the profligacy of the Bush years. But progressives should not hold their breath for anything more. President Obama’s words and deeds underscore his significant sympathy with the conservative tradition. In contrast to the radical, reckless Bush, who misleadingly assumed the mantle of ‘compassionate conservatism’, the failure of the American commentariat to recognize Obama’s conservative streak is understandable. After all, who wants to spoil the festivities for the newly ascendant Democratic Party and cast a cloud over Obama’s presidential honeymoon?
Since progressives persist in depicting Bush as an arch-conservative, instead of the curious amalgam of reactionary and radical revolutionary that he actually was, they are blind to Obama’s conservatism. His senior appointments, the tenor of his inaugural address, and his agenda during his first days in office bear the familiar imprimatur of conservatism. The Cabinet is stocked with a bevy of Clinton administration veterans, many of whom lucratively wiled away the Bush nightmare in the bosom of the same financial institutions whose greed and mismanagement precipitated the present crisis. These selections could be justified as the need for battle-tested, “old hands” to navigate the ship of state through rough waters if the political ideas espoused in the inauguration address, too, did not smack of conservatism.
On Tuesday, President Obama brushed aside debates about the optimal size of government or whether “the market is a force for good or ill”. Instead, he substituted a simple criterion for judging government action, “whether it works”. Such an emphasis on utility and efficiency is almost textbook conservatism. It is the negation of ideology in politics.
The Obama presidency is not a “revolution”, but instead a “restoration”. The “values upon which our success depends”, Obama reassures America, “these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout history”. He asks for a “return to these truths”. Nothing new is needed, neither fresh ideas about the human condition’s betterment nor utopias; merely a return to and vindication of the past. Obama has inserted conservative language of “responsibility” and “duty” in place of the progressive language of “rights”. He also offers a full-throated endorsement of the restoration of America’s global power, dismissing the “nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable”. The return to core tried-and-true values as the only reliable basis for political action, the consignment of ideology—whether concerning the virtues of unregulated markets or government’s scope—to irrelevance in developing policy, the celebration of “responsibilities” and “duties”, and commitment to America’s global leadership: It is hard to imagine inaugural address more steeped in the classical conservative tradition than the one delivered by President Obama on Tuesday.
The first few days in office have confirmed that the Obama administration is a restoration not a revolution. There is much to cheer one up after eight years during which the inmates ran the asylum. Swiftly-issued executive orders closing secret overseas prisons, banning torture, and putting Gitmo on the fast-track for closure are all laudable acts. Removing restrictions on federal documents to increase transparency and a salary freeze on senior staff are likewise welcome, long-overdue gestures.
But these initial acts of the Obama presidency merely turn back the revolution in government over which the radical reactionary-in-chief Bush presided and seek to restore the status quo ex ante. Where are the ambitious plans for programs which will transform the place of government in American life? Where are the plans to overhaul, instead of simply bail out, the financial system, to tackle child poverty head on, change the way that public schools are funded, and address the long-neglected working poor, to say nothing of health care? Or plans to confront the stark reality of national decline and prepare the American people for the inevitable adjustment to a polycentric world, in which the dollar’s status as a reserve currency is not assumed and America’s leadership in international organizations is shared?
It could be argued with some justice that the economic tailspin precludes new government initiatives. It is necessary to “clean up” the mess left behind by the Bush administration before any new policies can be pursued. Such reasoning is prudent and somewhat persuasive. Yet I would argue that what made Obama elect-able in the first place, besides his formidable political gifts, was precisely his conservatism, a faith in his capacity and intention to restore and renew, but not to revolutionize America. Bush was a reactionary who exploited conservative symbols to disguise a radical, even revolutionary political project. I fear that Obama will end up as a conservative adorned by the trappings of progressivism who fails to pursue a radical program.
“Change” will happen on Obama’s watch, of course. But if universal health care becomes a reality, it will come about because America cannot remain economically competitive without it, not because it is the right thing to do. If American adventurism in the Middle East is halted and its gunboat diplomacy elsewhere is curbed, it will be because the American taxpayer refuses to sustain the burdens entailed by endless intervention around the globe, and not because such routine violations of sovereignty are unbecoming in a nation which long-ago anointed itself as the leader of the free world. Change will come in some areas, as it does under all conservative regimes, organically and slowly. Adjustments, many of them beneficent, must be granted so that the entire edifice is not torn down. But the old progressive dream of transforming society through the power of new, vigorous ideas will have been consigned to History’s dustbin. Who would have imagined that an historical moment so unprecedented, so notable for its novelty, and so emblematic of the hard-fought victory of progressive politics might instead usher in an age of rejuvenated conservatism?
I certainly hope that the analysis offered in the paragraphs above is misguided and wrong. I want Obama to be a progressive who deftly wields the political languages of conservatism and restoration in order to make radical programs possible in a nation traumatized by the Bush years. Such changes could truly make America into a “city on hill”, admired and emulated around the globe. I do still believe that such an outcome is possible. But we who are outside of government must vigilantly monitor the sources and influences that inform the thinking of our political leadership. The conservative streak in Obama’s thought must be recognized and subjected to scrutiny. As Americans learned so painfully during the past eight years, ideas do have consequences.
Like millions of Americans, particularly Democrats, my eyes teared as I watched the inauguration of Barack Obama. For the first time in many years, I permitted myself to believe that America might at long last have a genuine political progressive at the helm of government. I hoped that President Obama stood prepared to commit the power and prestige of the nation’s highest office to the agendas of promoting economic equity, deepening civil rights, and preparing America to adjust to a less exalted station in an increasingly multipolar world. I was prepared to understand, somewhat reluctantly, that the pursuit of such goals required compromise and, perhaps, even some “post-partisan” posturing. Radical change often must be couched in ideologically neutral and conciliatory language. But I was ill-prepared for an inaugural address and the first two days of an administration which have revealed that Obama is not only the new face of America, but also the embodiment of conservatism.
This may seem a far-fetched, even ridiculous claim at first glance. How can President Obama, a symbol of the victorious culmination of a centuries’ long struggle against racial discrimination, a community organizer who labored selflessly in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago, and a brilliant, charismatic politician who electrified America’s youth and brought the Democratic party from the political wilderness to the White House represent the triumph of conservatism? How can a man who stands poised to deliver the USA from the macabre years of the Bush administration be considered a conservative? There is no doubt that President Obama’s administration will pursue many policies that we have long associated with American liberalism and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Yet this fact should not conceal Obama’s deep debt to the conservative tradition.
We must recall that the first conservatism in the modern sense originated in the late eighteenth century as a belief in moderation in politics to serve the interests of “social harmony” and the “common good”. The first conservative thinkers, men such as Edmund Burke, were wary of radical change based on infatuation with lofty ideals or abstract Reason. They venerated tradition and preferred to place their faith in institutions which had endured patiently and relatively unperturbed the calamities of the ages—long-established, moderate government, the Church, the University, a society of Orders, and a stable set of mores and manners which developed slowly over several centuries. They were not hostile to change. Burke himself famously stated that “a state without a means of change is without the means of its conservation”. Rather, the first conservatives wanted incremental change, arising from the organic, necessarily slow evolution of society, that would reflect and remain consistent with long-established beliefs and values.
History often portrays these early conservatives as hostile to the revolutionaries, in France and elsewhere, who sought to abruptly and comprehensively reshape society so that ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ could reign. This view is only partly true. Undoubtedly, they appraised revolutionary aims with some skepticism. But the early conservatives were threatened less by the goals of revolutionaries than by their methods, their hasty, reckless, and presumptuous effort to remake the world in their own image.
The Conservatives fought on two fronts. On the first front they battled those who sought to reform society according to abstract, untested philosophical ideas and raze the long-established institutions which propped up the Old Regime. On the second front they combated an even more dangerous group. These were the allies of the “Crown and the Altar”, men and women who opposed social and political change that undermined (or even questioned!) the legitimacy of monarchy and religious doctrine as the preeminent authorities in society. These ‘enemies of the enlightenment’ were perhaps even more dangerous than their progressive counterparts. Their hysterical intolerance, intemperate rejection of innovation, and uncritical allegiance to organs of authority were uncompromising.
It is one of the quirks of history that both conservatives and the radical reactionaries they loathed have been lumped together as a single, united force bent on destroying the new world which progressives aspired to bring into existence. The failure to make such a distinction prevents us from grasping a simple truth of our own time. George W. Bush was not a conservative, but rather a curious hybrid of reactionary and progressive. He was a reactionary by temperament and conviction whose methods were borrowed from the most radical progressives. He and his enablers, the much-touted ‘neo-conservatives’ steeped in Trotskyist traditions of ‘permanent revolution’, turned democracy into a creed for evangelization and forced conversion around the world. They defiled long-cherished American principles in the name of national security and, they claimed, to safeguard those same principles. Government spending ballooned and fiscal restraint was discarded. In his denigration of government’s usefulness on ideological grounds and unsophisticated worship of the abstract ideal of an unfettered market, Bush betrayed the conservatives in his own party, scorning them when they dared complain. He allowed reactionaries, yahoos, and loyalist hacks to sack government programs and run roughshod over the constitution. In a parting shot, he besmirched the conservatism that he had long-ago forsaken and led it, along with his accomplices, from the corridors of power into the political wilderness.
Into the breach steps Obama. Progressives rightly await this moment with anticipation. How can someone with his background—racial, intellectual, professional—fail to pursue a progressive agenda? There is little doubt that the Obama administration will put an end to the profligacy of the Bush years. But progressives should not hold their breath for anything more. President Obama’s words and deeds underscore his significant sympathy with the conservative tradition. In contrast to the radical, reckless Bush, who misleadingly assumed the mantle of ‘compassionate conservatism’, the failure of the American commentariat to recognize Obama’s conservative streak is understandable. After all, who wants to spoil the festivities for the newly ascendant Democratic Party and cast a cloud over Obama’s presidential honeymoon?
Since progressives persist in depicting Bush as an arch-conservative, instead of the curious amalgam of reactionary and radical revolutionary that he actually was, they are blind to Obama’s conservatism. His senior appointments, the tenor of his inaugural address, and his agenda during his first days in office bear the familiar imprimatur of conservatism. The Cabinet is stocked with a bevy of Clinton administration veterans, many of whom lucratively wiled away the Bush nightmare in the bosom of the same financial institutions whose greed and mismanagement precipitated the present crisis. These selections could be justified as the need for battle-tested, “old hands” to navigate the ship of state through rough waters if the political ideas espoused in the inauguration address, too, did not smack of conservatism.
On Tuesday, President Obama brushed aside debates about the optimal size of government or whether “the market is a force for good or ill”. Instead, he substituted a simple criterion for judging government action, “whether it works”. Such an emphasis on utility and efficiency is almost textbook conservatism. It is the negation of ideology in politics.
The Obama presidency is not a “revolution”, but instead a “restoration”. The “values upon which our success depends”, Obama reassures America, “these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout history”. He asks for a “return to these truths”. Nothing new is needed, neither fresh ideas about the human condition’s betterment nor utopias; merely a return to and vindication of the past. Obama has inserted conservative language of “responsibility” and “duty” in place of the progressive language of “rights”. He also offers a full-throated endorsement of the restoration of America’s global power, dismissing the “nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable”. The return to core tried-and-true values as the only reliable basis for political action, the consignment of ideology—whether concerning the virtues of unregulated markets or government’s scope—to irrelevance in developing policy, the celebration of “responsibilities” and “duties”, and commitment to America’s global leadership: It is hard to imagine inaugural address more steeped in the classical conservative tradition than the one delivered by President Obama on Tuesday.
The first few days in office have confirmed that the Obama administration is a restoration not a revolution. There is much to cheer one up after eight years during which the inmates ran the asylum. Swiftly-issued executive orders closing secret overseas prisons, banning torture, and putting Gitmo on the fast-track for closure are all laudable acts. Removing restrictions on federal documents to increase transparency and a salary freeze on senior staff are likewise welcome, long-overdue gestures.
But these initial acts of the Obama presidency merely turn back the revolution in government over which the radical reactionary-in-chief Bush presided and seek to restore the status quo ex ante. Where are the ambitious plans for programs which will transform the place of government in American life? Where are the plans to overhaul, instead of simply bail out, the financial system, to tackle child poverty head on, change the way that public schools are funded, and address the long-neglected working poor, to say nothing of health care? Or plans to confront the stark reality of national decline and prepare the American people for the inevitable adjustment to a polycentric world, in which the dollar’s status as a reserve currency is not assumed and America’s leadership in international organizations is shared?
It could be argued with some justice that the economic tailspin precludes new government initiatives. It is necessary to “clean up” the mess left behind by the Bush administration before any new policies can be pursued. Such reasoning is prudent and somewhat persuasive. Yet I would argue that what made Obama elect-able in the first place, besides his formidable political gifts, was precisely his conservatism, a faith in his capacity and intention to restore and renew, but not to revolutionize America. Bush was a reactionary who exploited conservative symbols to disguise a radical, even revolutionary political project. I fear that Obama will end up as a conservative adorned by the trappings of progressivism who fails to pursue a radical program.
“Change” will happen on Obama’s watch, of course. But if universal health care becomes a reality, it will come about because America cannot remain economically competitive without it, not because it is the right thing to do. If American adventurism in the Middle East is halted and its gunboat diplomacy elsewhere is curbed, it will be because the American taxpayer refuses to sustain the burdens entailed by endless intervention around the globe, and not because such routine violations of sovereignty are unbecoming in a nation which long-ago anointed itself as the leader of the free world. Change will come in some areas, as it does under all conservative regimes, organically and slowly. Adjustments, many of them beneficent, must be granted so that the entire edifice is not torn down. But the old progressive dream of transforming society through the power of new, vigorous ideas will have been consigned to History’s dustbin. Who would have imagined that an historical moment so unprecedented, so notable for its novelty, and so emblematic of the hard-fought victory of progressive politics might instead usher in an age of rejuvenated conservatism?
I certainly hope that the analysis offered in the paragraphs above is misguided and wrong. I want Obama to be a progressive who deftly wields the political languages of conservatism and restoration in order to make radical programs possible in a nation traumatized by the Bush years. Such changes could truly make America into a “city on hill”, admired and emulated around the globe. I do still believe that such an outcome is possible. But we who are outside of government must vigilantly monitor the sources and influences that inform the thinking of our political leadership. The conservative streak in Obama’s thought must be recognized and subjected to scrutiny. As Americans learned so painfully during the past eight years, ideas do have consequences.
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