Obama and Medvedev meetingThere have been many stories about Obama's governing philosophy, which has confounded the left and the right, but this one by George Packer at the New Yorker nails it: Make government run better instead of remaking it or destroying it.
To liberals such as Robert Kuttner, of the American Prospect, and Paul Krugman, of the Times, these self-imposed limitations are unnecessary concessions to a free-market ideology that has been thoroughly discredited. In this reading, Obama lacks the courage of his activist impulses, and his hesitations will play right into the hands of his enemies. The usual reply to such criticism is that Obama is basically a pragmatist, who will do what he thinks can work. But pragmatism is a description of a temperament, not an explanation of a world view.Another excerpt:
What underlies so many of Obama’s decisions is an attachment to the institutions that hold up American society, a desire to make them function better rather than remake them altogether. Allowing the auto industry to die would create social havoc in communities around the country, and anything less than de-facto government control seems inadequate. So the President has risked a good deal of his political capital on the largest federal intervention in a sector of the economy since at least 1952, when President Truman seized the steel industry to avert a strike during wartime. Obama, announcing his plan last week, said, “We cannot, and we must not, and we will not let our auto industry simply vanish. This industry is like no other—it’s an emblem of the American spirit. . . . It’s what helped build the middle class and sustained it throughout the twentieth century.” Obama may not see a similar need to put the government in charge of the big banks, but he has also shown that he has no taste for such a disruption of the system—even if it were politically possible, and perhaps even if it were the most direct route back to financial health.
This is not the rigid mentality of an engineer of human souls; it’s the attitude of a community organizer.Packer reaches a simple yet dead-on conclusion. Check out the whole story--just a one pager--here.
It’s also a pretty good description of what used to pass for conservatism—a sense that social relations and institutions are fragile things, and that, while government can’t create wealth or impose equality, at moments like this it has to establish a new equilibrium between individuals and huge economic forces, so that society doesn’t crumble. But modern conservatism has grown into exactly the opposite of its origins, in Burke’s respect for tradition and Madison’s promotion of countervailing checks on concentrations of power. Instead, like any revolutionary creed, it is abstract, hard-edged, and indifferent to experience and existing conditions.
