{"id":2772,"date":"2012-02-01T10:33:05","date_gmt":"2012-02-01T17:33:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/2012\/02\/01\/left-is-going-it-alone\/"},"modified":"2012-02-01T10:33:05","modified_gmt":"2012-02-01T17:33:05","slug":"left-is-going-it-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/2012\/02\/left-is-going-it-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"left is going it alone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin
\nThe New Authoritarianism<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

A firm hand for a \u201cnation of dodos\u201d<\/strong>
\n6 January 2012<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI refuse to take \u2018No\u2019 for an answer,\u201d said President Obama this week as he claimed new powers for himself in making recess appointments while Congress wasn\u2019t legally in recess. The chief executive\u2019s power grab in naming appointees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board has been depicted by administration supporters as one forced upon a reluctant Obama by Republican intransigence. But this isn\u2019t the first example of the president\u2019s increasing tendency to govern with executive-branch powers. He has already explained that \u201cwhere Congress is not willing to act, we\u2019re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.\u201d On a variety of issues, from immigration to the environment to labor law, that\u2019s just what he\u2019s been doing\u2014and he may try it even more boldly should he win reelection. This \u201cgo it alone\u201d philosophy reflects an authoritarian trend emerging on the political left since the conservative triumph in the 2010 elections.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The president and his coterie could have responded to the 2010 elections by conceding the widespread public hostility to excessive government spending and regulation. That\u2019s what the more clued-in Clintonites did after their 1994 midterm defeats. But unlike Clinton, who came from the party\u2019s moderate wing and hailed from the rural South, the highly urban progressive rump that is Obama\u2019s true base of support has little appreciation for suburban or rural Democrats. In fact, some liberals even celebrated the 2010 demise of the Blue Dog and Plains States Democrats, concluding that the purged party could embrace a purer version of the liberal agenda. So instead of appealing to the middle, the White House has pressed ahead with Keynesian spending and a progressive regulatory agenda.<\/p>\n

Much of the administration\u2019s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today\u2019s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic<\/strong> Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives<\/strong>. Many of today\u2019s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. The country\u2019s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what\u2019s good and a presumptively ignorant majority<\/strong>. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a \u201cnation of dodos\u201d that is \u201ctoo dumb to thrive,\u201d as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class.<\/p>\n

The tension between self-government and \u201cgood\u201d government has existed since the origins of modern liberalism. Thinkers such as Herbert Croly and Randolph Bourne staked a claim to a priestly wisdom far greater than that possessed by the ordinary mortal. As Croly explained, \u201cany increase in centralized power and responsibility . . . is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition\u201d and the fact that \u201cthe average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the first two years of the Obama administration, the progressives persuaded themselves that favorable demographics and the consequences of the George W. Bush years would assure the consent of the electorate. They drew parallels with how growing urbanization and Herbert Hoover\u2019s legacy worked for FDR in the 1930s. But FDR enhanced his majority in his first midterm election in 1934; the current progressive agenda, by contrast, was roundly thrashed in 2010. Obama may compare himself to Roosevelt and even to Lincoln, but the electorate does not appear to share this assessment.<\/p>\n

After the 2010 thrashing, progressives seemed uninterested in moderating their agenda. Left-wing standard bearers Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation and Robert Borosage of the Institute for Policy Studies went so far as to argue that Obama should bypass Congress whenever necessary and govern using his executive authority over the government\u2019s regulatory agencies.<\/strong> This autocratic agenda of enhanced executive authority has strong support with people close to White House, such as John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, a left-liberal think tank. \u201cThe U.S. Constitution and the laws of our nation grant the president significant authority to make and implement policy,\u201d Podesta has written. \u201cThese authorities can be used to ensure positive progress <\/strong>on many of the key issues facing the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Podesta has proposed what amounts to a national, more ideological variant of what in Obama\u2019s home state is known as \u201cThe Chicago Way.\u201d Under that system, John Kass of the Chicago Tribune explains, \u201ccitizens, even Republicans, are expected to take what big government gives them<\/strong>. If the political boss suggests that you purchase some expensive wrought-iron fence to decorate your corporate headquarters, and the guy selling insurance to the wrought-iron boys is the boss\u2019 little brother, you write the check.\u201d But the American clerisy isn\u2019t merely a bunch of corrupt politicians and bureaucratic lifers, and the United States isn\u2019t one-party Chicago. The clerisy are more like an ideological vanguard, one based largely in academe and the media as well as part of the high-tech community.<\/p>\n

Their authoritarian progressivism\u2014at odds with the democratic, pluralistic traditions within liberalism\u2014tends to evoke science, however contested, to justify its authority<\/strong>. The progressives themselves are, in Daniel Bell\u2019s telling phrase, \u201cthe priests of the machine.\u201d Their views are fairly uniform and can be seen in \u201cprogressive legal theory,\u201d which displaces the seeming plain meaning of the Constitution with constructions derived from the perceived needs of a changing political environment. Belief in affirmative action, environmental justice, health-care reform, and redistribution from the middle class to the poor all find foundation there. More important still is a radical environmental agenda<\/strong> fervently committed to the idea that climate change has a human origin\u2014a kind of secular notion of original sin<\/strong>. But these ideas are not widely shared by most people. The clerisy may see in Obama \u201creason incarnate,\u201d as George Packer of The New Yorker put it, but the majority of the population remains more concerned about long-term unemployment and a struggling economy than about rising sea levels or the need to maintain racial quotas.<\/p>\n

Despite the president\u2019s clear political weaknesses\u2014his job-approval ratings remain below 50 percent\u2014he retains a reasonable shot at reelection. In the coming months, he will likely avoid pushing too hard on such things as overregulating business, particularly on the environmental front, which would undermine the nascent recovery and stir too much opposition from corporate donors. American voters may also be less than enthusiastic about the Republican alternatives topping the ticket. And one should never underestimate the power of even a less-than-popular president. Obama can count on a strong chorus of support from the media and many of the top high-tech firms, which have enjoyed lavish subsidies and government loans for \u201cgreen\u201d projects.<\/p>\n

If Obama does win, 2013 could possibly bring something approaching a constitutional crisis. With the House and perhaps the Senate in Republican hands, Obama\u2019s clerisy may be tempted to use the full range of executive power. The logic for running the country from the executive has been laid out already. Republican control of just the House, argues Chicago congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., has made America ungovernable. Obama, he said during the fight over the debt limit, needed to bypass the Constitution because, as in 1861, the South (in this case, the Southern Republicans) was \u201cin a state of rebellion\u201d against lawful authority. Beverley Perdue, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, concurred: she wanted to have elections suspended for a stretch. (Perdue\u2019s office later insisted this was a joke, but most jokes aren\u2019t told deadpan or punctuated with \u201cI really hope someone can agree with me on that.\u201d Also: Nobody laughed.)<\/p>\n

The Left\u2019s growing support for a soft authoritarianism is reminiscent of the 1930s, when many on both right and left looked favorably at either Stalin\u2019s Soviet experiment or its fascist and National Socialist rivals.<\/strong> Tom Friedman of the New York Times recently praised Chinese-style authoritarianism for advancing the green agenda. The \u201creasonably enlightened group\u201d running China, he asserted, was superior to our messy democracy in such things as subsidizing green industry. Steven Rattner, the investment banker and former Obama car czar, dismisses the problems posed by China\u2019s economic and environmental foibles and declares himself \u201cstaunchly optimistic\u201d about the future of that country\u2019s Communist Party dictatorship. And it\u2019s not just the gentry liberals identifying China as their model: labor leader Andy Stern, formerly the president of the Service Employees International Union and a close ally of the White House, celebrates Chinese authoritarianism <\/strong>and says that our capitalistic pluralism is headed for \u201cthe trash heap of history.\u201d The Chinese, Stern argues, get things done.<\/p>\n

A victorious Obama administration could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model. The mechanisms of control already exist. The bureaucratic apparatus, the array of policy czars and regulatory enforcers commissioned by the executive branch, has grown dramatically under Obama. <\/strong>Their ability to control and prosecute people for violations relating to issues like labor and the environment\u2014once largely the province of states and localities\u2014can be further enhanced. In the post-election environment, the president, using agencies like the EPA, could successfully strangle whole industries\u2014notably the burgeoning oil and natural gas sector\u2014and drag whole regions into recession<\/strong>. The newly announced EPA rules on extremely small levels of mercury and other toxins, for example, will sharply raise electricity rates in much of the country, particularly in the industrial heartland; greenhouse-gas policy, including, perhaps, an administratively imposed \u201ccap and trade,\u201d would greatly impact entrepreneurs and new investors forced to purchase credits from existing polluters. On a host of social issues, the new progressive regime could employ the Justice Department to impose national rulings well out of sync with local sentiments. Expansions of affirmative action, gay rights, and abortion rights could become mandated from Washington even in areas, such as the South, where such views are anathema.<\/p>\n

This future can already been seen in fiscally challenged California. The state should be leading a recovery, not lagging behind the rest of the country. But in a place where Obama-style progressives rule without effective opposition, the clerisy has already enacted a score of regulatory mandates that are chasing businesses, particularly in manufacturing, out of the state. It has also passed land-use policies designed to enforce density, in effect eliminating the dream of single-family homes for all but the very rich in much of the state.<\/p>\n

A nightmare scenario would be a constitutional crisis pitting a relentless executive power against a disgruntled, alienated opposition lacking strong, intelligent leadership. Over time, the new authoritarians would elicit even more opposition from the \u201cdodos\u201d who make up the majority of Americans residing in the great landmass outside the coastal strips and Chicago. The legacy of the Obama years\u2014once so breathlessly associated with hope and reconciliation\u2014may instead be growing pessimism and polarization.<\/p>\n

Fred Siegel, a contributing editor of City Journal, is scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Joel Kotkin is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin The New Authoritarianism A firm hand for a \u201cnation of dodos\u201d 6 January 2012 \u201cI refuse to take \u2018No\u2019 for an answer,\u201d said President Obama this week as he claimed new powers for himself in making recess appointments while Congress wasn\u2019t legally in recess. The chief executive\u2019s power grab in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[82,77,52,45,80],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2772","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-activism","7":"category-alinsky","8":"category-brown-shirt-tactics","9":"category-cult-politics","10":"category-fascism","11":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}