The late Carl Sagan published one of my favorite books, a collection of essays The Demon-Haunted World. In the final essay - co-written with Ann Druyan - Real Patriots Ask Questions, Sagan offers an intriguing insight:
Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directive, every change in the Prime Rate is an experiment. Every shift in economic policy, every increase or decrease in funding of Head Start, every toughening of criminal sentences is an experiment. Exchanging needles, making condoms available, or decriminalizing marijuana are all experiments. Doing nothing to help Abyssinia against Italy, or to prevent Nazi Germany from invading the Rhineland, was an experiment. Communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China was an experiment. Privatizing mental health care or prisons is an experiment. Japan and West Germany investing a great deal in science and technology and next to nothing on defense - and finding that their economies boomed - was an experiment. Handguns are available for self-protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. This is also an experiment. In almost all of these cases, adequate control experiments are not performed, or variables are insufficiently separated. Nevertheless, to a certain and often useful degree, policy ideas can be tested. The great waste would be to ignore the results of social experiments because they seem to be ideologically unpalatable. (Kindle, location 7012)
It's a powerful concept and one that can be used to easily and effectively advocate for progressive policies. We tried X - it was an experiment. Here's how it worked. We cut taxes a lot in the last ten years - we have a crappy economy; maybe cutting taxes doesn't help the economy. We tried invading Iraq and here's how it worked; maybe making war was a bad idea. We tried reducing the regulatory structure on banks and finance and here's how it worked; maybe banks and financial institutions need a regulatory regime to function. We tried - we experimented - with conservative social and economic policy and the results have been growing economic and social disparity and a increasingly bad economy. In the 1990s, we raised taxes, we balanced our budget and our economy boomed. Maybe tax rates aren't the ironclad predictor of economic performance that conservatives say.
But making that case, standing behind the notion that every policy is an experiment, would require standing for something and being able to tell the story of that something.
Drew Westen's piecein the NY Times has been widely discussed but in it, he was describing a particular symptom of the crisis in American leadership. Westen's scathing piece is a reminder that American leadership in all its aspects is in deep crisis.
IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far.
Although Westen directed his words at Barack Obama, he could have written them about almost every American politician - Democrats who fearfully offered only the blandest of "reforms" to the system, Republicans who wanted to double down on the policies that cause the crash in the first place. Westen reminds us of the importance of story - great leaders tell stories we can understand, which then become the broad framework through which we understand our world. One of FDR's greatest gifts was his uncanny ability to sense the mood of the nation, articulate it, and connect it to specific policies. He wasn't always successful, but every day Americans knew he was on their side, was fighting for them so his missteps and miscalculations were forgiven. He forged a powerful emotional bond with the American people and it served him throughout his long years as President. Bill Clinton actually did the same - which is why he was so popular when he left office, why he survived the impeachment nonsense, why Republicans lost so many battles against him. The deeper part of Westen's analysis is simply that Barack Obama did not forge that bond with the American people - there is no sense that he's fighting on the side of the common man and woman, no sense that's he will swallow difficult compromises in an effort to improve the lot in life of Americans everywhere.
The truly decisive move that broke the arc of history was his handling of the stimulus. The public was desperate for a leader who would speak with confidence, and they were ready to follow wherever the president led. Yet instead of indicting the economic policies and principles that had just eliminated eight million jobs, in the most damaging of the tic-like gestures of compromise that have become the hallmark of his presidency — and against the advice of multiple Nobel-Prize-winning economists — he backed away from his advisers who proposed a big stimulus, and then diluted it with tax cuts that had already been shown to be inert. The result, as predicted in advance, was a half-stimulus that half-stimulated the economy. That, in turn, led the White House to feel rightly unappreciated for having saved the country from another Great Depression but in the unenviable position of having to argue a counterfactual — that something terrible might have happened had it not half-acted.
James Vega, at The Democratic Strategist, wrote one of the better responses to Westen's piece, arguing that we need to not overstate the power of the bully pulpit:
What is particularly striking about the "the bully pulpit can transform the national debate"notion is the way it is stated as if it were an entirely self-evident truth, one whose validity is so obvious that it does not need any empirical support or confirmation. In virtually every case, it is presented as a proposition whose certainty is simply beyond any serious question.
In fact, however, there is actually very little evidence in either the historical record or public opinion research to support this view. Even such famous examples of presidential rhetoric as Lyndon Johnson's "We shall overcome" speech supporting the Civil Rights Bill or Ronald Reagan's often quoted speech asserting that "government is the problem not the solution"did not produce any major epiphany-like transformations of attitudes that opinion polls could detect. Observation suggests that the bully pulpit has a real and to some degree quantifiable but very clearly limited influence on public opinion. It cannot, by itself, produce major attitude change.
Vega tackles many of the key arguments Westen and others have made - pointing out for instance that the President has addressed jobs as an important issue. The problem is the limited ability of the Bully Pulpit to move public opinion. In a follow up, Vega wrote:
In fact, I completely agree with the generally critical view of Obama's communications strategy. Since the spring and fall of 2009, Obama's messaging and rhetoric has repeatedly (and unnecessarily) demoralized the Democratic base while failing to win the support of the moderate voters he hoped to bring to his side.
There is, in fact, an absolutely extraordinary consensus within the Democratic community today - one that stretches from "inside the beltway" tacticians like Jon Chait and Greg Sargent and opinion poll experts like Stan Greenberg to grass-roots leaders like Bob Borosage and progressive stalwarts like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and a host of others. Virtually every major sector of the Democratic coalition has now come to the conclusion that Obama's attempts to communicate with the American people and win their support since spring 2009 have been profoundly inadequate and ineffective.
Vega pointed to LBJ's great speeches arguing simply "Johnson did not create this social hurricane, he responded to it." True enough, but leadership is about responding to social emergencies and Westen argued powerfully if floridly that Barack Obama failed to respond to the moment. The Obama presidency began in a moment of national crisis and demanded clear leadership and clear solutions and Obama and his team badly misjudged the moment. It was a moment for stating - plainly and clearly - what caused the problems we were facing and implementing solutions. It wasn't just Barack Obama and his administration who failed. Democrats in Congress allowed themselves to get wrapped up in politicking, in maneuvering for position, fighting over the wrong issues. At key points in the process, Democratic leaders failed to demonstrate leadership, instead surrendering the most cowardly, least visionary members of their caucuses. Both Vega and Westen are right - the power of the Bully Pulpit is limited but our leaders have done a bad job.
Sagan's insight - that all policy is an experiment - brings me back to one of FDR's maxims - "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." It's time to admit we tried some things and they didn't work and we want to try something else.
In John McGowan's book American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time, he points out that historical liberalism has been pragmatic. The history of religious neutrality by government, for example, was a deliberate strategy to reduce conflict in society. It was a simple, pragmatic solution. Politics, McGowan argues, is the means by which we order public life:
Politics can be defined as the actions through which humans in a particular society establish, maintain, reproduce, and reform/transform the conditions of their living together. Better yet, substitute "interactions" for "actions" in that last sentence.
And:
Liberalism originates as a loose set of responses offered to the problems attending social organization and authority after the demise of a single, unifying religion and as an alternative to arbitrary and absolute power . . .
It's no accident that a sizable minority of Americans are rallying to people such a Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann who offer a vision grounded in a single, unifying religion and absolute albeit arbitrary power; it's less complex, less difficult to manage than the messy pluralism of Democracy. God will punish us for being bad and that's just how it is. The story they are telling is a story of a bad economy because we are insufficiently faithful, bad weather because we are insufficiently faithful, and that if only we will humble ourselves in prayer, if we will be faithful enough things will be set right. Liberalism succeeded but has been under constant assault for decades by a well funded movement dedicated to using the power of the state to enrich corporations and their stockholders at the expense of the general public. They have used the deeply religious to advance their cause because of the respect for authority found in certain strains of American religion. Our leaders have failed our own tradition of pragmatic liberalism.
The Madisonian constitution sought to limit power by dividing it, balancing it:
Madison of Federalist No. 10 does not expect any political order to erase conflict, so he focuses on creating political institutions and arrangements that mitigate conflict, "refine" self-interest, and, crucially, prevent any particular faction from gaining the upper hand, especially from gaining the upper hand permanently.
So we understand contemporary American liberalism seeks to:
Liberalism, in short, is a set of political expedients meant to prevent tyranny and to promote peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic society, while fostering individual freedom.
Today elected officials have failed to confront and contain the power of the financial sector of the economy and to constrain the influence of corporations on the political system. Decisions by the Supreme Court over the last few decades culminated in the affront that was Citizens United which has served to open the flood gates of cash to buy the system. It's a decision that deepens the disillusion many Americans feel about the political process. It is corrupt because it has been purchased and yet few politicians have actually decried the decision. Along side the not unjustified perception that politicians have rushed to defend the very institutions and people responsible for crashing the economy, that decision has created a very real anger at the government, which oddly enough despite being entirely funded by corporate money, motivated many of the teabaggers. Government for sale to the highest bidder is a failure of leadership, one that our elected officials have refused to effectively confront.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
FDR - October 1936
In Brad DeLong's book The End of Influence, he argues that the crash of 2008 should have been the death-knell of the neo-liberal economic thinking, the end of the neo-liberal order; it should have demonstrated the market does not know best, that unregulated capitalism is a recipe for disaster, that banking is too important to be left to bankers and instead we've seen too many of our leaders fail to even question their assumptions. We've seen instead a continuing down the path without an apparent pause to even question "How did this happen?"
The crisis in American leadership is, oddly enough, a crisis of too much confidence, of failing to see the need to change assumptions. Facing political opponents who literally refuse to vote for their own ideas, the President and other Democratic leaders have refused to give up their dream of "compromise" and "bipartisanship." Faced with an economy crashed by mind-bogglingly irresponsible and corrupt actions by credit agencies, mortgage companies, banks and financiers, America's leaders have utterly failed to stand up for main street but have fought tooth and nail for Wall Street believing we cannot touch them or things will get worse.
The crisis in American leadership is a crisis of too much confidence in old ideas and a refusal to look ahead to new ideas. For conservatives, it is heresy to even suggest we might learn from other nations who have not seen their economies destroyed by banksters. Yet, right wing populists are furious at Wall Street for wrecking the economy. They want reform of the economy every bit as much as liberals (albeit their reforms might look different). Yet our leaders dither, unable to see that system itself has become badly out of balance.
Too many of our leaders have failed to recognize McGowan's insight:
Liberalism aims to create, foster, encourage, and maintain a public sphere apart from the government, a realm sometimes referred to as "civil society."
The teabaggers screaming at town hall meetings in 2009 were being manipulated, yes, but they were open to manipulation because the economy had crashed and it felt as if no one in government was willing to hold the responsible parties accountable. They were bussed in and they were fed lies and they exploded, attacking the very notion of rational, reasonable public debate. Anger on the left is rooted in the same dynamic - we needed a leader who could point the way forward and we didn't get one. The American public is profoundly discontented right now because our leaders have proven inadequate, unable to break free of their assumptions, apparently unwilling to confront their own deeply cherished beliefs and recognize that they played a role in creating our current problems.
Leadership has become inflexible, trapped in a bizarre endless dance of public positioning, trench warfare over arcane legislative issues disconnected from every day life. As badly needed as real health care reform was and is, the timing was wrong and the debate a disaster of legislative malpractice in which principle was sacrificed again and again. Conservatives in both parties - terrified of successful government - have done nothing positive but have dragged the debate into legislative arcana and horse-trading. The endless debate over deficits and debt ceilings was only the latest nadir in a series of government nadirs. Leadership which fails to address the every day, real concerns of Americans is failed leadership. The World War One metaphor isn't a bad one - we've become a nation defined by a government waging a war of attrition against itself, wasting opportunity after opportunity.
We experimented and the results were bad and our leaders have seemed collectively and individually incapable of recognizing that failure and doing something about it. And so our crisis of leadership continues in a feedback loop, exhausted and exhausting, staggering from real crisis to fake crisis to imagined crisis and back unable to gather anything like its wits and then staggering fecklessly back. Burdened by a president apparently convinced compromise is the highest value and an opposition prepared to sacrifice everything to make that president look bad, Americans are yearning for a new generation of leaders.