Liberals as reactionaries
Posted on Sunday, June 29, 2008
That contemporary liberalism has
become more reactionary than
progressive is a claim frequently made by conservatives. They point out that liberals have spent far more energy in the past two or so decades defending alleged liberal triumphs of the past—Social Security, racial preferences, Roe vs. Wade—than proposing new ideas. At least some evidence of the truth of such claims can be found in the person of Barack Obama. Despite his talk of change, he has failed to deviate from oldline liberal orthodoxy on a single issue of importance. There is nothing in his world view that wouldn’t have been familiar to and approved of by mainstream liberals circa 1968. That he is actually more the candidate of the past than the future, even in comparison to 71-year-old John McCain, can be grasped by his inflexible dogmatism regarding perhaps our two most pressing campaign issues, the war in Iraq and energy costs. With respect to Iraq, no remotely objective observer denies that “the surge” has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of those who conceived it. Iraq is in every possible area of assessment a dramatically better place than it was before the surge began, to the point where it is now finally possible to talk about victory there. That Obama opposed the war from the beginning has been established; that he criticized the idea of the surge and advocated rapid withdrawal instead is beyond dispute. What is remarkable is that he shows no willingness to admit that he was wrong or to even acknowledge that any progress has been achieved because of it. Perhaps fearful of alienating his radical-left base among the college kids and their egghead professors, he remains incongruously wedded to the same “we’ve already lost” narrative that so many other Democrats embraced before the 2006 congressional elections.
In spectacular disregard of the victories won by Gen. David Petraeus and his troops, Obama continues to demand withdrawal on the verge of victory regardless of the consequences. At the least, one would think that a candidate whose mantra is “change” would be willing to change his policies to fit such obviously changed circumstances, but no.
On energy policy, Obama’s approach is perhaps even more baffling, and apparently even more resistant to modification. He instantly dismissed McCain’s proposals for reducing our dependence upon foreign oil by extracting more oil here at home and building more nuclear power plants as “failed policies of the past” while offering only the usual stock solutions from the liberal catalogue—solar power, windmills, mass transit—as alternatives.
It is unclear how Obama defines words like “failed” and “past,” since it has generally been public policy in recent decades to discourage oil exploration and drilling in the places McCain now proposes to explore and drill, and no new nuclear power plants have been built in 30 years. A reasonable observer might conclude that whatever policies have failed in such a manner as to put us in our present energy predicament, they aren’t any that McCain is proposing or that have been in place since Obama was in high school. On at least one point, his call for a windfall profits tax on the oil companies, Obama has embraced a position so demagogic and potentially counterproductive as to defy belief. The problem, in the end, may lie not so much with Obama’s personal inflexibility as with the broader leftism that he so loyally subscribes to. Liberals simply can’t comprehend that the Bush administration might have done something right, regarding the war in Iraq no less, while their quasi-religious environmental orthodoxy won’t allow for even the possibility of safely drilling for oil in coastal areas and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. An influential school of thought within leftist circles, associated with the linguist George Lakoff, has been arguing for some time now that there is nothing wrong with liberal policies, only that liberalism needs to find a better vocabulary and a more effective spokesman through which to express them. Consider Obama, then, to be a test of Lakoff. There is certainly nothing else that is new here, and no change of any kind regarding anything. To the contrary, it is possible that neither of America’s two major political parties has ever nominated a candidate with such retrograde views as the junior senator from Illinois. But he presents it all so nicely.
—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville.
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