Our Divided Political Heart (38 page)

A month later, the Occupy Wall Street protests were launched on a sea of homemade signs. Naturally, one of the earliest placards proclaimed,
“
Corporations are
not
people.” Another declared: “Due to recent budget cuts, the light
at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.”

Barack Obama’s first term in office began with the rise of the Tea Party movement and drew to a close with the protests against the power and influence of America’s richest “1 percent.” The two movements represented bookends of the American political sensibility, one directed at the power of government, the other at the power of high finance. They highlighted two aspects of the American character, reflected in the Tea Party’s focus on liberty, self-reliance, and the unencumbered individual, and Occupy Wall Street’s emphasis on equality, interconnection, and social obligation.

The Tea Party was the more conventionally political of the two movements, at home in Republican caucuses and at the ballot box. The Occupy movement was mistrustful of political power, of leaders, of “the system.” Yet as the
New Yorker
’s Hendrik Hertzberg insisted, it would have to come to terms with them all. “
Ultimately, inevitably, the route to real change has to run through politics
,” Hertzberg wrote, “the politics of America’s broken, god-awful, immutably two-party electoral system, the only one we have.” Then he added: “The Tea Partiers know that. Do the Occupiers?” His observation and his question felt like they carried the weight of history.

Barack Obama’s presidency, which opened with such hope for national concord, was not expected to call forth two battalions of protest. They were the most dramatic evidence of how far we had traveled from the aspirations of Obama’s 2004 address to the Democratic National Convention that made him a political phenomenon. There was a red America and a blue America after all, and they were not coming together.

In better economic times, we might have expected a different outcome. Yet there was a certain inevitability that no matter now hard Obama tried to make it otherwise, his presidency could never avoid becoming the locus of a great national struggle over who we are as a people. The crisis the country faced economically, the crisis of identity created by fears of decline, the crisis of national authority that began taking hold under George W. Bush, and the crisis of contemporary conservatism: all came together to force the country to a decision point. At stake was the Long Consensus that had guided the nation for a century, and it would fall to Obama to re-fashion it and defend it.

It was not inevitable that conservatives would respond to Bush’s failures and their defeat in 2008 by moving to the right. In similar circumstances, other conservative parties and movements had regained power by pursuing moderate paths, proposing to check the excesses of their progressive foes without undoing all their work. This is how the Republican Party had eventually dealt with the New Deal, accepting its achievements as reflecting the popular will. In following this course, the Republicans went with rather than against the grain of American history. The Civil War had decisively settled the question that we were a nation, not a collection of states. The economic developments that followed thoroughly nationalized our commercial life. The federal government grew in tandem with the economy. After the New Deal, Dwight Eisenhower was the quintessential figure in this new settlement.

But many Republicans and conservatives never accepted the path of accommodation. With Barry Goldwater’s nomination, they began pulling the party in a new direction. The shift was gradual, and even Ronald Reagan did not try to unravel the New Deal consensus. But Bush’s failures opened the way for a decisive break, and Tea Party activists became the agents and symbols of a new conservative revolution.

For all his difficulties as a candidate, Perry captured his movement’s new objective with great succinctness in his pledge to make the federal government as “inconsequential” as possible. His statement would have horrified Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln (and of course Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson). And that, was, in a way, his point. With more candor and radicalism than politicians typically muster, Perry was calling into question not only Obama’s decisions, not only the achievements of the Great Society, the New Deal, and the Progressive years, but also a much older American project that envisioned a national government that the country’s citizens would see as both consequential and constructive—just what Hamilton promised long ago in Federalist 27. Perry’s emphasis on states’ rights echoed Calhoun more than Lincoln, his view of the unfettered market the ideas of the Gilded Age, not those of the Long Consensus. Perry’s compact sentence got to the essence of the starkly individualistic new conservatism that has replaced the more community-minded conservatism of old.

There are many grounds on which to fault Obama, but he was not the
driver of the new polarization, even if he found himself at its center. What needs to be recognized is how far Republicanism and conservatism have strayed from their own history and their own past commitments. They have chosen—on principle, it could be said—to make middle-ground politics impossible. They have done so by jettisoning their communitarian commitments, by adopting a highly restrictive view of the federal government’s role, and by advancing (in the Supreme Court no less than on the campaign trail) a view of the Constitution that would prohibit or restrict activities that the federal government has undertaken for a century or more. In the process, they have chosen to rewrite the American story and unsettle the American balance.

There is no shortage of explanations for why Obama encountered so many political problems from almost the moment he took the oath of office. A great deal can be understood simply by looking at what he confronted and how he responded.

When he crossed the threshold of the White House on January 20, 2009, he walked into a nightmare. Assuming power in the aftermath of the financial crisis, he responded, appropriately, with a stimulus program. His stimulus was large enough to make it prey for parody as a big-government escapade (even if a third of it came in tax cuts), but smaller than the staggering economy needed. Obama’s opponents tried to compound the political damage by linking the stimulus to the unpopular Wall Street bailout—and politically, it did not seem not to matter that many of his critics had supported the rescue when it was originally proposed by President Bush. In the meantime, Obama never adequately defended the stimulus—and even though it did help create jobs and begin a recovery—or the idea behind it. He got it passed, and moved quickly on to health care.

Passage of the health care law was a substantial victory, an achievement that had eluded every Democratic president from Harry Truman forward. For all the criticism Obama received, he was right to undertake the fight and to carry it to success. Yet the battle for heath care reform took too long and the process through which the measure passed was ugly, given
the Republicans’ refusal to cooperate and Obama’s insistence that bipartisan cooperation be attempted long after it had any chance of succeeding. The process tainted the bill, and the time needed to pass it allowed a great achievement to turn sour for voters who felt they never heard an adequate explanation of what the intricate law accomplished.

All of this made it easy for Obama’s enemies to brand him as an advocate of big government—and, given the ongoing sluggishness of the economy into 2011, an ineffectual one at that. His onetime allies on the left, meanwhile, saw him as too compromising, too conciliatory, too reluctant to fight for more progressive options, and too eager to heed the advice of advisors with close Wall Street ties. The combination blew the fuse on what might have been a more gradual cyclical correction toward liberalism, given the country’s negative verdict on the Bush era.

These failures spoke to core contradictions in the promises Obama made to the country in 2008. As a candidate, Obama pledged to change the tone in Washington and restore amicable relations between the parties. But he also promised to accomplish large things, including health care reform, major steps to ease global warming, and a reshaped and more responsible financial system. The first pledge put his fate in the hands of his Republican opponents. If they refused to work with him, there could be no bipartisanship. And this was, in many ways, a predictable outcome: at some point, Obama’s ambitions were destined to collide with the views of a Republican Party fundamentally opposed to the direction he wanted to take. It turned out that he could try to get big things done or he could work easily with Republicans. He could not do both.

The entire context of the nation’s political conversation shifted to the right within months of Obama’s inauguration. Conservative funders were quick to realize that the Tea Party movement that took off after Rick Santelli’s rant was the most efficient way to organize opposition to Obama’s initiatives and rebuild a shattered Republican Party. In the meantime, Obama’s victory partially demobilized the left. With Democrats in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, stepped-up organizing didn’t seem quite so urgent. Yet the absence of a strong, organized left made it easier for conservatives to label Obama a left-winger because actual left-wing positions were largely out of public view—until the anti–Wall
Street demonstrators took to the parks and the streets in the fall of 2011 and began reminding the country of what a left looked like and believed.

It is precisely because the nation’s political agenda had veered so far rightward that the Occupy Wall Street movement had such a large impact so quickly. A significant part of public opinion yearned for a form of populism that directed its rage at the failures and abuses of the financial system, not at government (except to the extent that government had been too influenced by Wall Street and inattentive to its duties to the economy) and not at Obama (except to the extent that he had been too cautious in dealing with the financial sector). The rise of a movement such as Occupy was essential to restoring a sense of balance to the American conversation. This was important, as we’ve seen, not only for the left, but also for political moderates who don’t stand a chance in the absence of a fair fight between the right and the left. The relative silence of the left allowed the entire public conversation to be dominated by the Tea Party and its ideas. And by repeatedly seeking a middle ground with a newly strident conservatism, Obama made himself complicit in this shift. Over many months, he looked for moderation in all the wrong places, trying to find center ground that he already held.

The irony before the rise of Occupy was that so much of what passed for “progressive” or even “left-wing” politics was, by the measure of even the relatively recent past, the politics of moderation. A moderate view could be painted as “left-wing” only because conservatives had been so successful in moving the philosophical boundaries.

Consider that no one on the left denies the importance of American individualism. Today’s left does not seek to overturn the private economic market, enact confiscatory taxation, or nationalize industries for the long term (even if there were progressives who argued, for pragmatic and defensible reasons, in favor of nationalizing certain failing banks early in the financial crisis in order to speed recovery). No one on the left seeks a radical centralization of power in the federal government. Indeed, much of Obama’s original stimulus package and his 2011 jobs bill involved either tax cuts for individuals or aid of various sorts to state and local governments that resembled nothing so much as Richard Nixon’s revenue-sharing program—or Henry Clay’s proposals for distribution of assistance to the
states. And Obama’s health plan faced solid Republican opposition even though it was based on market-oriented ideas that had been pioneered by Republican senators a decade or two earlier—and, once upon a time, by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. Obama’s plan was far more conservative and less government-centered than Nixon’s health proposals of the early 1970s. But Nixon was operating within the Long Consensus. His successors in the Republican Party are not.

To say all these things risks accusations of “partisanship,” and that, too, is part of the problem. If describing developments in American political life candidly is dismissed as a form of partisanship, then honest speech becomes impossible. The etiquette of political discussion prevents a reckoning with the new stakes in politics. Partisanship is indeed destructive when party advantage or personal ambition prevents two sides from solving problems by reaching agreements that they would otherwise be prepared to make. (And Republican resistance to Obama’s moderate proposals to boost the economy did take on this cast as the 2012 elections approached.) But when two sides do not operate within the same framework, identify the same problems, or even share a common understanding of our history, the difficulty of finding accord cannot be ascribed to pettiness, selfishness, or a lack of imagination. It reflects the fact that the country has reached “
a time for choosing
,” to echo the title of Ronald Reagan’s memorable 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. The time for choosing Reagan had in mind was delayed, partly by the relative moderation of Reagan himself when he was president. But it is upon us now.

America has worked well on the whole because we have faced such times for choosing only rarely. Our divided political heart inclines us to resist such moments. The American experiment from the beginning recognized both sides of our character, and successful American politicians understood with Tocqueville that we are a nation of private striving
and
public engagement, of rights
and
responsibilities. Americans understood that individualism needed to be protected from concentrated power in both the private marketplace and the government. They also understood that individuality seeks expression in communal acts as well as individual deeds and that the self longs for autonomy but also freely embraces the encumbrances and responsibilities of family, friendship, community, and
country. These truths have usually been accepted, albeit in different ways, by progressives and conservatives alike. It is this deep American consensus that is now in jeopardy, and its disappearance threatens to block constructive action at the very moment when our position in the world is precarious.