The Crisis of Liberalism... ("If his heralded new majority for change does not triumph in congressional and state elections in 2012 or ...")

 

In the late innings of the health care fight President Barack Obama told a joint session of Congress, “we did not come here just to clean up crises,” even one as big as the Great Recession.

 

obamadash (Photo credit: GunnyG1345)

 

“We came to build a future,” to do the “great things” that “will meet history’s test.” He concluded, “This is our calling. This is our character.”

 

And that had been his ambition all along. “Let us transform this nation,” he implored in 2007 when he announced his candidacy for president. As Election Day 2008 approached, he promised, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”Those words mean this will be a different country when he’s finished with it. If, Rip Van Winkle-style, one had slept through the Obama Administration, one would awaken, as it were, in a new land.

 

 

The old word for such a profound change was revolution. As a

 

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self-proclaimed progressive, however, he reckons his revolution will be one in a series, an unending series generated by social progress or history itself. His reforms will connect to Woodrow Wilson’s, Franklin Roosevelt’s, and Lyndon Johnson‘s before him, and others yet to come, and all these together will constitute a continual upward evolution. That sounds reassuring, insofar as it promises to take the sting and surprise out of change; but such inevitability comes at the expense of liberty, because there is no choice about the whole of liberal-style progress. In the old days, one could choose to make a revolution or not. A revolution could be defeated or reversed. But you cannot deliberate about the inevitable, which is how progressives think of history. As we’ve been told for generations now, ad nauseam: you can’t turn back the clock.History’s TestBy the same token, however, you can’t turn the clock ahead, either. What Obama invokes as “history’s test” is a stern one: success or irrelevance, power or nothingness, to borrow Michael Tomasky‘s suggestive language. Either you’re on the right side of history or the wrong side, where the right side is necessarily understood to mean the winning side, and the wrong side the losing one. Otherwise this would not be a historical test but an abstract moral or philosophical one. The obvious moral difficulty—does the right side always win its wars?—can be finessed for a while by distinguishing between wars and mere battles. It’s possible to lose many battles and still win the war, eventually. But “history’s test” is of necessity a final examination; it can’t be postponed indefinitely without the whole idea of historical validation becoming a laughingstock or an otherworldly stalking horse, neither of which liberalism fancies itself to be. Meeting history’s test, as Obama sees it, means recognizing that the “moment” has come for bold, new reforms; but if these prove untimely and unattainable, if the moment comes and goes fruitlessly, then it casts doubt not only on the prophecy and the prophet but on the whole prophecy business. If Obama cannot repeal the George W. Bush-era tax cuts or close the Guantanamo detention facility, those are battles lost. If he cannot get reelected, that’s a defeat of an altogether more serious sort. If his heralded new majority for change does not triumph in congressional and state elections in 2012 or 2014 or 2016, then the long-term prospects for a liberal transformation drop still further. If Obamacare is repealed and replaced after 2012….

 

EXCERPT

 

via The Crisis of Liberalism.

 

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