Obama and the Left

By Eli Zaretsky Tikkun Daily

Hendrik Hertzberg, in the New Yorker, has described left criticisms of Obama as “pathetic.” According to Hertzberg, quoting Obama, we are about to pass “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act … and the most important reform of our health-care system since Medicare passed in the nineteen-sixties.” But the left just doesn’t get it. Spoiled children, nothing is ever good enough for them. They didn’t get the public option so they want to sink the whole thing. As usual, they don’t understand the “limits” that are so apparent to wiser minds.

These sentiments are so familiar as to be dreary, but they are accompanied by a new and original explanation of the left’s blindness, “the pathetic fallacy.” “All violent feelings have the same effect,” John Ruskin wrote. “They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things.” The left, in other words, is blinded by anger. Aside from the fact that Ruskin’s term “pathetic fallacy” has nothing to do with anger (it concerns the confusion between nature and human emotion), I will respond to this argument under three rubrics: 1) the relevance of anger, 2) the left’s critique of Obama and 3) the left’s critique of the health plan. I will then return to the heart of the matter: the “limits” on what Obama can do.

Anger: Hertzberg’s concept of being blinded by anger makes no sense. It was Aristotle who first argued that anger was the emotion closest to public reason, i.e., justice. Without anger the Civil Rights movement would have remained at the level of “racial uplift” and white “philanthropy.” Without anger feminism would have women still curtseying for their rights. Of course, anger is no guarantee of correctness, but neither is it a sign that one is immersed in falseness. Hertzberg’s use of Ruskin is simply irrelevant.

The Left: The left’s critique of Obama does not rest on the health plan. Afghanistan, the irresponsible handing over of the US checkbook to the banks, the choice of right wing economic advisors when so many left-liberal economists were available (e.g., Stiglitz, Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs), the refusal to investigate torture, as the US is required to do, the emphasis on cutting entitlements rather than advancing justice, the cultivation of figures like David Brooks and other centrist-rightists, the insistence that passing legislation requires 60 votes (it requires 51 plus defeating a filibuster, i.e., allowing a vote), the fig leaf dishonesty on climate change, the kowtowing to Netanyahu, the increased militarization, and so many other things are at stake, none of which Hertzberg discusses. Most importantly, Hertzberg never clarifies what he means by the left, but I will leave that for another discussion.

Health Care: No one would deny that the health care bill will have some good consequences. I also believe that it opens the way for an enormous danger, namely cutting the government-supported part of the health budget under the guise of “efficiency” and “cost-cutting,” which will lead to even more of a two-tier system than we have today. I would only ask, if the health care was a piece of “social legislation” in the tradition of Social Security and Medicare why didn’t Obama present it that way? Why did he present it as a cost-cutting measure? The predictable answer brings us to the critical issue, that of the limits under which Obama has operated.

Limits: There are real, objective limits as to what any President can do, but no one can seriously claim that Obama has tested and come up against those limits. On the contrary, he has not used the Presidency as a bully pulpit; he has not capitalized on his extraordinary victory, one of the greatest Democratic Party victories of the twentieth century, he has not mobilized the mandate he received and the energized movement he inspired, he has not built on the widespread perception that the outgoing system (aggressive neo-liberal markets; aggressive militarization) was completely discredited and that a genuinely new direction was needed. On the contrary, he breathed new life into the right by adopting their language and cultivating their representatives. He has turned off all the young people and the idealists who followed him seeking a change in the “mindset” of American politics. He would have people out in the street risking their lives for him if he spoke for principle, but he does not; he speaks for realism, costs, limits, and practicality, and leaves principles for the tea partiers. I am a leftist, and I am no fool. I know full well the necessity and the meaning of compromise; I have compromised my whole life. But when one compromises, even when one fails, one keeps one’s goals and values alive. Obama has failed to keep alive the values which led so many of us to support him, and the reason I criticize him now is that I do not want those values to fall victim to the same dispiriting lack of inspiration and vision that characterizes his Presidency.