Economies of Despair

Anthony Mansueto

President and Senior Scholar, Seeking Wisdom

During the 2008 General Election campaign, I wrote of the election that it represented, at least at one level, a struggle over soteriology. The Republicans aimed their main blow at what they called the Democrats' “elitism,” and fielded candidates who presented a public face not of conquering virtue but of brokenness and struggle. The Democrats, by contrast, fielded candidates with real intellectual and moral depth and chose as their principal motif hope and their slogan Si, se puede! In the political argot of that electoral cycle, elitism was a substitute for “works righteousness” and brokenness for evangelical piety. This, in turn, reflected a political map which divided the country not so much along lines of class or historic ethnoreligious identity as between metropoles and hinterlands, those who have prospered from the global market --or might with a bit of investment in their development-- and who make up the core constituencies of the Democratic Party, and those who have been “left behind.” By the “left behind” we mean not the structurally impoverished who were never granted or achieved access to the American Dream, but to those historically prosperous sectors of the working class and middle strata who have seen their position erodes as the economy has been opened to global market forces, placing an ever greater premium on scientific/technical knowledge and global cultural competence.

The Democrats won, but not because heroic virtue triumphed over evangelical piety. Rather, Obama was able to re-draw, at least temporarily, the political lines of demarcation. He successfully shifted the terms of the debate so that it focused not on his supposed elitism, but rather on the hope that he offered to the truly dispossessed. And of course he built an extraordinary organization which mobilized those in whom he had, for the first time in decades, ignited authentic political hope.

Two years later the old political map seems to be reasserting itself. The Republicans are once again defining the terms of the political debate. Their serious political analysts like Thomas Sowell, in a rehash of Frederick Hayek's neoliberal critique of socialism, are defining the 2010 General Election as a struggle between Democratic “brilliance” and Republican “experience,” while Sara Palin tours the country trying to rally her “Mama Grizzly Bears” who “just know” what is right.

This is not because Obama has failed to deliver. On the contrary, he has an outstanding diplomatic and legislative record. He has singlehandedly restored America's position as the pre-eminent moral leader of the West, reaching out effectively to Dar-al-Islam while positioning himself, and the US, as the leading defenders of humanistic and democratic values. He has accumulated a series of legislative victories, including a “stimulus” which, because of its investment in infrastructure for the future, would have been good public policy even outside a recession. And he cut the Gordian Knot of healthcare reform, doing what every Democratic President, and a few Republicans, since Truman have tried to do but failed. Even if the resulting policies are imperfect (they are policies, after all, not poems) they represent an achievement which is nothing short of heroic.

The Republicans have seized control of the political agenda, rather, for a cluster of reasons which are largely invisible to the naked eye. First and foremost, the old Red/Blue map reflects real and profound cleavages. And while neither side is clearly hegemonic, the Reds probably outnumber the Blues, as one would expect if the Blues are those who have prospered from the knowledge economy and the global market, and the Blues those who have been left behind. The whole point of globalization, after all, is to intensify market pressures for innovation, understood as doing more with less. This leaves people behind.

The line between those who are prospering, furthermore, and those left behind, is by nature fluid. There are, to be sure, some sectors which are securely Democratic or Republican. Those in the information sector and the academy, whose identities are defined in terms of knowledge and cosmopolitanism, are not likely to shift to the Republican Party, even if they are, objectively, left behind, as is much of the humanistic intelligentsia. Similarly, those in the defense/aerospace and extractive sectors are likely to remain Republican no matter how highly skilled they are and no matter how high the demand for their skills. But the vast majority of the professional middle class and the upper strata of the working class, bringing to market mostly technical skills which can be replicated more cheaply in China or India, and with a weak exposure to liberal education at best, is vulnerable to movement from the ranks of the technogentry to the those of the “left behind.,” and thus from the Democratic to the Republican columns. This leaving behind, furthermore, tends to happen most especially during economic crises.

Second, because the core Democratic base of progressive metropolitan/cosmopolitan elites did not win the election for Obama (rather he won it for them), they did not come out of the election especially strong. This is not say they weren't happy. But for Democrats who would just as soon have elected a Clinton or a Kerry or a Kucinich (representing the right, center, and left of the party mainstream) the election represented as clear a repudiation of their political strategy as the two Republican victories which had preceded it. American had not finally returned in awe and gratitude to its “best and brightest.” And so most Democrats have just continued their moaning.

Third, and this is very important, Obama's core constituencies, as opposed to those of the Democratic Party, are largely invisible. Chicago's elites are different from those on the coasts –leaders, certainly in the global market, but much less narrowly tied to finance, information, and technology, than those in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. And they have less leverage over the national media, and thus less ability to shape the national political debate than those on the coasts. But this does not make them insignificant. The millions of nonvoters who Obama brought to the polls for the first time, meanwhile, many of them young or poor, or both, remain largely outside the larger political debate. Obama mobilized them, and created an organization to remobilize them, but he has not organized them in the sense of giving them an autonomous organization with its own ideology, leadership, and voice.

What do the Democrats need to do to win in November? It all depends, of course, on what “winning” means. Obama's Organizing for America is already doing a lot. Getting those first mobilized in 2008 back to the polls will make a much bigger difference in the general election than most pundits, Democratic or Republican, imagine. With them, the Democrats have a majority; without them, they do not. But in the long run, this sector needs more than just mobilization. It needs its own organization with its own vision and its own voice. Such an organization would sometimes function as a “left opposition,” but it could, at least, do so differently than such groups as MoveOn, providing Obama real political cover by showing that just as there are millions of people demanding more change than he has delivered and making his centrism, which is quite authentic, more obvious.

At the same time, the Democrats need to begin to actively compete for those being “left behind.” Obama's policies support this, for the most part. Investing in infrastructure for the future, providing relief for the unemployed and those in danger of losing their houses –all these policies have helped those being left behind in the current wave of economic rationalization. But no one is saying this. This is not because the Democratic Party is too “socialist” and doesn't care about the “middle class.” It is because the Democratic Party is still too dominated by financial, high technology, and information capital to admit that globalization leaves people behind. And Obama has too often given in to efforts to rationalize policies deemed market distorting, such as tax exemptions for employer healthcare contributions, which are important to this sector. This issue is likely to loom large in the upcoming debates around deficit reduction, as tax deductions for mortgage interest and other “middle class” subsidies come under scrutiny.

Finally, the Democrats need to embrace and further articulate the vision which Obama began to develop during the 2008 General Election and which he stated powerfully in his 2009 Inaugural Address, “The Winter in Which Only Hope and Virtue Can Survive.” This is critical for two reasons. First, the party needs such a vision if it is going to hold together a coalition which, precisely because it is potentially quite broad, is also likely to be internally fractious. No sector is going to get everything it wants. Indeed, if any one sector does get everything it wants, and if one does, Obama's coalition is over. Second, the challenge of the “left behind” is not going to go away. While this economic crisis will pass, the economic rationalization set in motion by globalization will put more and more pressure on the United States as on other wealthy countries. There is still, as I have argued elsewhere, a great deal that we can do that is of real civilizational value. In particular our ethnoreligious diversity will make us the global leaders in defining a public arena constituted by deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value. And with the right investments, we can create more value here even as it becomes more difficult for us to capture surplus created elsewhere. But our days of easy prosperity are over. Being American needs to be about something more than consumption. And while defining a new civilizational ideal is the responsibility of philosophers and religious leaders, not the President or his party, the latter must carry that ideal into the public arena and use it to galvanize public support for civilizational progress. That, in fact, and not just managing the economy or defending our civilization, is the responsibility of the President of the United States and what makes him a President and not just a Prime Minister.

Barack Obama is better suited for this job than any president in memory, for the simple reason that he embodies the principles and values he advocates, and can thus advocate them effectively. Since he took office, however, he has acted more like a prime minister than a president, giving policy priority over politics. That needs to change. History is calling. It is time for him to answer.