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Hail to the Chief
Jan. 19th, 2009 10:31 pmWarning -- rambling political comment ahoy.
So George Bush is finally heading out the White House door -- to the considerable relief of most people -- and Barack Obama is heading in. This is good, and worth at least one and a quarter hearty cheers. It's always better to have an adult in charge there. I wish it were great and worth three, but ...I'm not convinced.
There was a British right-wing trope of the 1970s, one that seems laughable when looked at from a 2009 perspective, called the Ratchet. The idea was that when a Labour government got in, it would introduce Socialist Policies, and they would be so damn popular that a Tory government would find it hard to reverse them, poor dears. The ratchet would stick and prevent you going back the other way. Doubtless it was merely a talking point tactic to 'work the refs', because ever since Thatcher and Reagan the ratcheting in the Anglo-American world has been very much in the other direction. Left-wing or even vaguely liberal governments always have to justify themselves to Serious Elite Opinion, you see, at least in the eyes of those who consider themselves serious elites, but right-wing ones are assumed (with much justification) to be good sorts and on their side. And since said elites tend to have very big megaphones available to them, any incoming leftie is almost automatically swimming against a strong current both before and after taking office.
Opinions vary on how to approach this. However, Obama, like Blair before him, is coming into office after long years of screwups from 'conservative' administrations based on 'conservative' dogma. (I use that term and stick quotes around 'conservative' because too many of those laying claim to that name since 1980 are far from the old relatively pragmatic style of a Macmillan or an Eisenhower, indeed way more radical and insurgent than most left-wing parties ever dare to be these days.) As in 1997, that means the time is ripe for sweeping changes that actually might do the country a power of good -- and in the case of Obama in the US, give the rest of us in the world in general a boost as a handy side effect.
Unfortunately, Blair and New Labour seemed to suffer from a couple of common but related ailments that lefties often come down with as a result of losing elections. Brown never fully convalesced, and the modern Democrats seem to have contracted a particularly virulent case. The first is a sort of cowed reluctance to swim against that current by arguing their case. The second is a desire to come in out of the cold ... er, water (analogies, eh?) and be treated as respectable by the people with those big megaphones. The main symptom is a tendency to trim or triangulate towards the right, regardless of what the people who elect you might have in mind -- even if they give you a clear victory when consulted. In office, this manifests as a penchant for bashing your own supporters to show how tough and undogmatic you are, all while trying to be more royalist than the King on your opponent's dogma. It's as if sufferers almost daren't try anything they supposedly stand for in case they lose acceptability in the eyes of those who disapprove of them.
There's only one problem with this approach.
It is totally freaking stupid.
A policy consisting merely of being 'not quite as bad as the other lot' is not inspiring. It can work electorally when the other lot have been particularly bad, as long as people remember what they were like and things improve somewhat. It doesn't get much done, and every time you buy into a policy for the sake of respectability with you opponent's supporters (e.g. free-market dogma where a dose of good old pragmatic mixed-economy theory would be just what the doctor ordered), you end up getting the worst of both worlds.
Most of what I've seen so far (appointments, Warren at the inauguration, hemming and hawing about Guantanamo) suggests that despite Obama's 'audacity of hope', he's trying to triangulate and steer a course between 'right' and 'left' -- except that since the US congressional Republican right are pretty much on the bank already and the Democrat left hardly dare to leave the middle of the river, that's going to end up in a course that's not that much different from the one that's been causing shipwrecks in world politics for the last eight years. In short, he seems as if he may well be following the Blair model.
This is not a great idea.
I'm hoping for some real audacity from him once he actually gets his feet behind the desk in the Oval Office, the kind of audacity that tells the right-wing and their fans wirh the big megaphones to go take a running jump when they insist that policy must continue along the same lines as before if it's to be serious. Because the situation is as favourable for that as it's ever likely to be.
Yes, you can, Barack.
Try it and see?
So George Bush is finally heading out the White House door -- to the considerable relief of most people -- and Barack Obama is heading in. This is good, and worth at least one and a quarter hearty cheers. It's always better to have an adult in charge there. I wish it were great and worth three, but ...I'm not convinced.
There was a British right-wing trope of the 1970s, one that seems laughable when looked at from a 2009 perspective, called the Ratchet. The idea was that when a Labour government got in, it would introduce Socialist Policies, and they would be so damn popular that a Tory government would find it hard to reverse them, poor dears. The ratchet would stick and prevent you going back the other way. Doubtless it was merely a talking point tactic to 'work the refs', because ever since Thatcher and Reagan the ratcheting in the Anglo-American world has been very much in the other direction. Left-wing or even vaguely liberal governments always have to justify themselves to Serious Elite Opinion, you see, at least in the eyes of those who consider themselves serious elites, but right-wing ones are assumed (with much justification) to be good sorts and on their side. And since said elites tend to have very big megaphones available to them, any incoming leftie is almost automatically swimming against a strong current both before and after taking office.
Opinions vary on how to approach this. However, Obama, like Blair before him, is coming into office after long years of screwups from 'conservative' administrations based on 'conservative' dogma. (I use that term and stick quotes around 'conservative' because too many of those laying claim to that name since 1980 are far from the old relatively pragmatic style of a Macmillan or an Eisenhower, indeed way more radical and insurgent than most left-wing parties ever dare to be these days.) As in 1997, that means the time is ripe for sweeping changes that actually might do the country a power of good -- and in the case of Obama in the US, give the rest of us in the world in general a boost as a handy side effect.
Unfortunately, Blair and New Labour seemed to suffer from a couple of common but related ailments that lefties often come down with as a result of losing elections. Brown never fully convalesced, and the modern Democrats seem to have contracted a particularly virulent case. The first is a sort of cowed reluctance to swim against that current by arguing their case. The second is a desire to come in out of the cold ... er, water (analogies, eh?) and be treated as respectable by the people with those big megaphones. The main symptom is a tendency to trim or triangulate towards the right, regardless of what the people who elect you might have in mind -- even if they give you a clear victory when consulted. In office, this manifests as a penchant for bashing your own supporters to show how tough and undogmatic you are, all while trying to be more royalist than the King on your opponent's dogma. It's as if sufferers almost daren't try anything they supposedly stand for in case they lose acceptability in the eyes of those who disapprove of them.
There's only one problem with this approach.
It is totally freaking stupid.
A policy consisting merely of being 'not quite as bad as the other lot' is not inspiring. It can work electorally when the other lot have been particularly bad, as long as people remember what they were like and things improve somewhat. It doesn't get much done, and every time you buy into a policy for the sake of respectability with you opponent's supporters (e.g. free-market dogma where a dose of good old pragmatic mixed-economy theory would be just what the doctor ordered), you end up getting the worst of both worlds.
Most of what I've seen so far (appointments, Warren at the inauguration, hemming and hawing about Guantanamo) suggests that despite Obama's 'audacity of hope', he's trying to triangulate and steer a course between 'right' and 'left' -- except that since the US congressional Republican right are pretty much on the bank already and the Democrat left hardly dare to leave the middle of the river, that's going to end up in a course that's not that much different from the one that's been causing shipwrecks in world politics for the last eight years. In short, he seems as if he may well be following the Blair model.
This is not a great idea.
I'm hoping for some real audacity from him once he actually gets his feet behind the desk in the Oval Office, the kind of audacity that tells the right-wing and their fans wirh the big megaphones to go take a running jump when they insist that policy must continue along the same lines as before if it's to be serious. Because the situation is as favourable for that as it's ever likely to be.
Yes, you can, Barack.
Try it and see?
