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Why History Matters to Liberalism
If the Tea Party is to be believed, radical individualism has defined American history. But their story is wrong, and progressives must say so.
The same trumpet summoned Obama again in Osawatomie. “[A]s a nation, we have always come together, through our government, to help create the conditions where both workers and businesses can succeed,” Obama declared. “[H]istorically, that hasn’t been a partisan idea. Franklin Roosevelt worked with Democrats and Republicans to give veterans of World War II, including my grandfather…the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, a proud son of Kansas, who started the interstate highway system and doubled-down on science and research to stay ahead of the Soviets.”
Yes, he acknowledges, the country had “grown and changed in many ways since Roosevelt’s time.” But “what hasn’t changed—what can never change—are the values that got us this far.” And then spoke the communitarian Obama: “We still have a stake in each other’s success. We still believe that this should be a place where you can make it if you try. And we still believe, in the words of the man who called for a New Nationalism all those years ago, ‘The fundamental rule in our national life—the rule which underlies all others—is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.’ ”
Over the most recent eight months of his presidency, Obama has clearly decided to move away from a Washington-centered strategy that sought to discover common ground with opponents whose core commitment to break with the Long Consensus made the quest for common ground impossible. Many who broadly sympathized with Obama—including many contributors to this journal—were frustrated when Obama seemed to abandon the task of making a broad argument to the country about what motivated him, how he saw the nation’s history, and where he wanted the nation to move. In the process, he ceded vast ground to his opponents, leaving it to them to interpret the meaning of the American story, to define the American Idea, and to describe the promise of the American tradition. Surprisingly for a candidate who had been so visionary during his presidential campaign, Obama had fallen down on a task that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan did so well: to offer a running and persuasive argument to the American people about what he was doing and why.
As President, Clinton offered an arresting metaphor explaining America’s tradition of balance. “Take a penny from your pocket,” Clinton once said. “On one side, next to Lincoln’s portrait is a single word: ‘Liberty.’ On the other side is our national motto. It says ‘E Pluribus Unum’—‘Out of Many, One.’ It does not say ‘Every man for himself.’”
“That humble penny,” he would continue, “is an explicit declaration—one you can carry around in your pocket—that America is about both individual liberty and community obligation. These two commitments—to protect personal freedom and to seek common ground—are the coin of our realm, the measure of our worth.”
And Reagan spoke to his foes as well as his allies in seeing the United States as “a shining city on a hill,” a special place that would model a new kind of society built on self-rule and freedom. But it’s striking that hidden behind Reagan’s metaphor was also a calling to America’s commitment to community. The original reference to us as a city on a hill came from John Winthrop’s address to the Puritan settlers of New England entitled “A Model of Christian Charity.”
“We must delight in each other,” Winthrop had declared, “make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body.” Winthrop also offered a classic—and counterintuitive—account of how our differences bind us together in community. God created differences, Winthrop argued, so that “every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the Bonds of brotherly affection.” It’s not hard to imagine Rush Limbaugh denouncing Winthrop’s words as “socialistic.”
At Osawatomie and then in his State of the Union address earlier this year, Obama bound himself to this broader American communal tradition. It was a declaration that no longer would he leave American history to the Tea Party.
History’s Calling
To suggest at a time of crisis that Americans need to return to their history flies in the face of the assumptions of those who would define our problems in terms of the global military balance of power, the necessity for new departures in domestic policy, the need for innovation in the marketplace, or the imperative of balancing the federal government’s books. All these things are important. All are subjects this journal takes very seriously. But it is precisely at moments when so much is at stake that we need both inspiration and instruction from those who came before us.
The Tea Party was right in having an intimation about the importance of the past. If progressives read our nation’s history differently, our disagreement rests not on the question of whether our story is a noble one—on this we agree—but on why the United States has, to this point, been successful. Our success arose not from the fact that our institutions were perfect from the outset. They were not. The genius of America, as de Tocqueville noted, has always rested on our capacity for self-correction and renewal. Americans have been saved from the idea that it is possible to create a perfect world. But we have been saved by the idea that we can create a better one.
The Founders of our nation were daring, but they were also balanced, moderate, and temperate. They had confidence that government could be made to work and that it could accomplish great things, but they were always wary of deifying the state and those who ran it. They hugely valued individual freedom but were steeped in principles that saw the preservation of freedom as a common enterprise. They were influenced by the Bible and the Enlightenment, by liberalism and republicanism.
Interesting. I can't help notice that you don't mention HD Croly, author of "The Promise of American Life". Published in 1909 it was said to be the goad that galvanised T Roosevelt to progressive reform. That TR's 1910 speech followed Croly's book was no accident.
His analysis is similar to yours, but significantly different and, I think, more correct. Its not just that there has been a tension between individual liberty and collective purpose, but that it grossly misconstrued power, risk and intent, and so was inadvertently engineered to fail. In many ways, I think, he predicted our current predicament better than any other commentator I've read.
It would be unfortunate if his unique contribution were forgotten and ignored altogether just when its relevance is most apt.
Jun 12, 2012, 4:55 PMIn fact, Croly is mentioned on page 3 of this essay. It's indeed relevant.
Jun 13, 2012, 12:33 PMOne reason liberals have trouble embracing history in the way that you suggest is that opposition to American greatness -- which you ascribe to liberal policy -- has been at the center of their ideology. Another is that the successive liberal love affairs with Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism in turn have proved so disastrously in error that a reminder of this past can be nothing except damning. Finally, the Long Consensus, as you term it -- the strengthening of central government at the expense of individualism -- was forged as a response to the Great Depression. However, its singular failure to prevent its recurrence in the current Great Recession, is hardly an endorsement of liberal historical credentials.
American liberal and conservative traditions, as we currently understand the terms, have their roots in the disparate religious cultures that were part of the American foundation and rise to prominence. The judeo-catholic, communitarian, altruistic, guilt-driven ethic has always stood in opposition to the protestant, individualist, self-reliant, pragmatic one. The key reason for the conservative narrative's ascendance is the decline of the traditionally communicatian media establishment's monopoly on communication. Because all now can speak and be equally-well heard, polarization can only continue no matter how hard the factions try to rewrite history in their own favor.
http://mythdesisyphus.wordpress.com/
Jun 19, 2012, 2:03 PMOne reason liberals have trouble embracing history in the way that you suggest is that opposition to American greatness -- which you ascribe to liberal policy -- has been at the center of their ideology. Another is that the successive liberal love affairs with Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism in turn have proved so disastrously in error that a reminder of this past can be nothing except damning. Finally, the Long Consensus, as you term it -- the strengthening of central government at the expense of individualism -- was forged as a response to the Great Depression. However, its singular failure to prevent its recurrence in the current Great Recession, is hardly an endorsement of liberal historical credentials.
American liberal and conservative traditions, as we currently understand the terms, have their roots in the disparate religious cultures that were part of the American foundation and rise to prominence. The judeo-catholic, communitarian, altruistic, guilt-driven ethic has always stood in opposition to the protestant, individualist, self-reliant, pragmatic one. The key reason for the conservative narrative's ascendance is the decline of the traditionally communicatian media establishment's monopoly on communication. Because all now can speak and be equally-well heard, polarization can only continue no matter how hard the factions try to rewrite history in their own favor.
http://mythdesisyphus.wordpress.com/
Jun 19, 2012, 2:05 PM@Sisyphus:
I think you're distorting history. First of all, a tiny little bit of history would be enough to illustrate that "liberal" has not had a stable, consistent meaning, and some precision of terms is important.
This realization undermines the claims of your first paragraph: it's hard to know who you have in mind with folks left-of-center who "opposed" America's greatness, but easy to counter every example you might adduce with a lefty who loved America and wanted it big, rich and strong.
It's also ridiculous to paint everyone left-of-center with the boogyman-colored brush of Stalinism and Maoism.
To be honest, I didn't make it to your second paragraph.
Jun 19, 2012, 6:08 PM@Sisyphus:
I think you're distorting history. First of all, a tiny little bit of history would be enough to illustrate that "liberal" has not had a stable, consistent meaning, and some precision of terms is important.
This realization undermines the claims of your first paragraph: it's hard to know who you have in mind with folks left-of-center who "opposed" America's greatness, but easy to counter every example you might adduce with a lefty who loved America and wanted it big, rich and strong.
It's also ridiculous to paint everyone left-of-center with the boogyman-colored brush of Stalinism and Maoism.
To be honest, I didn't make it to your second paragraph.
Jun 19, 2012, 6:38 PMOne theme that I think really resonates across the spectrum, and deserves a lot more emphasis by liberal and progressive efforts doesn't fit neatly into Mr. Dionne's liberty vs equality framework:
Fairness.
Just about everything lefties and liberals think is important can be described in terms of fairness, from tax policy to affirmative action to environmental protection.
Taxes and fairness is pretty obvious. Here's an off-the-cuff take on the other two examples:
It's only fair that we not (intentionally or inadvertently) lock some people out of some opportunities.
It's only fair that we not saddle our great-grandchildren with the burden of our selfish and short-sighted decisions now.
And the language of fairness is a much more powerful and effective way to approach these topics than the way we often do.
It's very hard to argue for unfairness - we need to do a better job of painting defenders of selfishness, fear, and divisiveness into a rhetorical corner with carefully crafted appeals to broadly held values like fairness.
Jun 19, 2012, 7:42 PMI like where Dionne is taking us in his analysis, toward historical grounding for the social welfare state - government for the people. Yet the paradigm of individualism vs. community is not what the political battle is about. Individualism has been squeezed out by a combination of population growth, urbanization, corporate capitalism, military nationalism, and social welfare liberalism. Economically, the failure to maintain individual free enterprise can be traced to the fate of anti-trust legislation, which was pursued with some vigor from the 1870s to WWII, then relegated to reigning in only the most egregious of monopolies. The political fight is mainly between two different forms of collectivism, if one can use this word, corporate-financial-industrial capitalism and democratic-social welfare government. The fight is over decision-making power, who calls the shots. Small businesses still thrive, but they are being beaten down by the Walmarts of the world, globalization, and now internet sales, all of which have nothing to do with government regulations or taxes. There are illusions piled on top of illusions in this business. Dionne pierces through a number of them.
Jun 26, 2012, 5:20 PMPost a Comment
E.J. Dionne Jr. is the chair of the Democracy Editorial Committee and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also a professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. This essay is drawn from his new book, Our Divided Political Heart.
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