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The Liberal Label

Is Obama a liberal? Is he really liberal? How scary is that?

These are difficult questions because there's some complex stuff going on behind the philosophical scenes for Obama. In my view, based on listening to him speak and reading his books, Barack Obama is not your standard liberal. But how?

Basically, the idea is that political ideologies as presently conceived are fundamentally utopian. That is, social conservatism, communism, libertarianism, and the rest all garner their conceptual and political power by harkening toward some ideal. For evangelical conservatives, it's something we liberals might call a church-state, with many moral restrictions but few economic ones. For libertarians, it's a bare-bones government, ensuring security and enforcing private contracts, but doing little else. Or something along those lines; the precise contours are likely personal and idiosyncratic.

Given that, consider what it means for someone to be "very liberal." I think the phrase calls up in our heads the idea of someone whose idiosyncratic utopia includes all those pernicious bogey-policies decried by those on the right: Single-payer health care, a palatial welfare state, limp-wristed foreign policy, wide-eyed environmentalism. Dennis Kucinich is very liberal in just this way. Ron Paul, for all his wisdom, is conservative but also utopian.

Now why is Kucinich's utopian liberalism so terrifying? It is, I submit, because it is unwilling to compromise. Kucinich is unconcerned with present political, economic, and social circumstances. He would pull all troops from Iraq, pull out of the WTO, and enact single-payer health care (if he could) immediately because it matches his vision of how the world should be.

So you see where I'm going. Obama does not, in my view, have this utopian philosophical bent. Rather, my sense (and most Obamacons it seems) is that he approaches policy from a pragmatic, empirical point of view, though I think with more or less characteristically liberal sympathies. This is critically different from the utopian-type approach because it is deeply sensitive to data, expertise, and implementation.

This, my friends, is where you conservatives can find solace. There are all sorts of ways in which ideology blinds us. The Bush Presidency is plagued with this blindness. From No Child Left Behind, to the execution of war, to torture to diplomacy to intelligence-gathering, George Bush has governed by ideology alone, and has royally screwed things up. A President Obama is at least intellectually and philosophically capable of resisting those screw-ups.

To conclude: Obama is a democrat, and a man of the left. Which means he may not share your horror at expanding the size of government, or find higher taxes an affront to rights or liberty. He may think that government should play a role in solving some problems you'd rather see it leave alone. Conversely, he may prefer not to intervene when you would. So those are differences. But if "very liberal" means a left ideology run amok, then Barack Obama, I think, is a distinctly conservative politician.

Full post as published by Expressio Unius on November 03, 2008 (boomark / email).