The Nation: Obama the Philosopher

[marmar]

Obama the Philosopher
By Linda Hirshman

October 22, 2008



Barack Obama is finally telling Americans why enacting his economic programs is the right thing to do. Not just prudent, not just efficient, but right. For a long time in this country, talk about what's right has been the monopoly of the right. But Obama's election will be little more than Bill Clinton's third term unless it sparks an overall revival of liberalism, and no political movement revives without core beliefs about what's right. After thirty years of conservative, "greed is good" political philosophy, Obama faces the daunting task of explaining to Americans why they should once again care for one another.

"Hotheads" like ex-Senator Gary Hart and columnist E.J. Dionne have been urging Obama to think deeply about this for months. In June, Hart wrote: "Democrats, meanwhile, have yet to produce a coherent ideological framework to replace the New Deal, despite an eight-year experiment in "triangulation" and an undefined "centrism." Once elected, Barack Obama would have a rare opportunity to define a new Democratic Party. He could preside over the beginning of a new political cycle that, if relevant to the times, would dominate American politics for three or four decades to come." Dionne thinks "an ideology, and a way of doing business stand discredited to a large majority of Americans.... Bush's blunders have opened up new possibilities."

For an agonizingly long time, it looked as if Obama was not going to produce a new way of thinking. In the first debate with John McCain, Obama stuck to his centrist script of trying to sound like nothing more than a kinder, gentler tax-cutting conservative, assuring his listeners that "95 percent of you will get a tax cut." It looked as if the economic debate was going to focus at most on whether federal taxing and spending would stimulate the economy, not whether it would make a more just society.

But as the magnitude of the conservative failure has become apparent to all but the densest Americans, Obama the philosopher emerged, with an intriguing combination of new New Deal and old New Deal thinking. The new idea is that people who are now successful should care for the ones left behind, because they were once the left-behind themselves. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081103/hirshman