Redefining the political narrative...

Comment on the blog Hullabaloo, 1/4/09

Unless President Obama or the activists, writers and political leaders who support him succeed in redefining the narrative of contemporary political history early in his presidency, any programmatic gains are likely to be short-lived. Bill Clinton's biggest failure as president was deliberately to avoid trying to refute Ronald Reagan's inaugural nostrum that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Clinton bragged about outdoing Republicans in trying to make government smaller while making it more effective. He seemed happy to flail about in the ideological strait-jacket with which Reagan had fitted all Democrats: Government was an evil to be minimized -- it was a kind of theft, of money earned by good people (mostly white) but taken by government and given to bad people (mostly not white). This was the toxic brew that helped Reagan -- famous for emblematically attacking one particular black "welfare mother" -- to attract working-class Democrats. Given the flaccid, exhausted state of the intellectual right now, and the freaky guns-and-oil, states-rights hollering of the Palin faction (the only part of the GOP now with any energy, albeit negative), the time is perfect for a new framing narrative.

That narrative has to restore the idea that the people themselves, on whose power the Constitution is based from its very first line ("We the People"), should demand that government actually do what the Constitution says it must do -- "promote the general welfare" -- and if that means reinventing the health care system, regulating polluters as harshly as they poison the environment, and punishing Wall Street titans who use public bail-out money for personal bonuses, then such policies shouldn't merely be defined as pragmatic given the present crisis, they should be explicitly and repeatedly justified as supported by the people in having elected a leader from the other party and also as normal, positive uses of public power. That Obama is trying to transcend partisan rancor actually helps the work of constructing this narrative, since no enduring historical narrative can survive the inevitable vicissitudes of elections every two years unless it transcends party fist-fights on the Sunday talk shows. Let Obama trumpet a new era of tolerance, unity, and a kind of domestic patriotism tied to regenerating our economy and reconstituting our society. The greatest presidents were those who used government vigorously to fight back crises and build national strength by what were considered unprecedented means (Lincoln was the first president to institute an income tax, albeit temporary, and the first to have the federal government invest in universities). National majorities don't rally around minimalism in the face of huge challenges, quite the opposite.

Don't underestimate Obama's ability to summon this kind of spirit and elicit a sense of enthusiasm for a new bow wave of reform. But it won't be sustainable unless there is a new narrative. That narrative should certainly explain why the country has been driven into a ditch, and the predicate of that is simple: If we elect presidents who spend almost 30 years abusing the idea of government, and they appoint incompetent or corrupt people to run the government, we will get wretched government. Yet this shouldn't be a narrative in narrow partisan terms, but rather a narrative that subsumes progressive goals in a new definition of what it means to love and work for our country and of what we should expect our government to do.