Obama Seeing the Other Side

I started Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope yesterday. What I like about him so far is that he makes a real effort to see the conservative side, and he is reflective and critical about the pitfalls of liberalism.

Here are some quotes. For the sake of space, I've abridged some of them, and that may give a slightly different impression than he intended. To see the full context, I recommend his book. But here we go!

On His College Liberalism.

"Eventually, my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy and religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized" (31).

So the traditional constraints of monogamy and religion have some value, eh? Maybe that's why they've been passed down from generation to generation. Edmund Burke couldn't have said it better.

Essentially, Obama tries to give us the impression that he has grown up. He no longer uncritically accepts the childish liberal orthodoxy that he embraced in college. No, he's not a conservative, so I guess he hasn't gotten his brain yet (according to that popular cliche about liberals having hearts, and conservatives having brains). But he doesn't see himself as a total liberal, either.

On Ronald Reagan.

"[A]s disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, as unconvinced as I might have been by his John Wayne, Father Knows Best pose, his policy by anecdote, and his gratuitous assaults on the poor, I understood his appeal. It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii had always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper salutes. It was related to the pleasure I still get from watching a well-played baseball game, or my wife gets from watching reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Reagan spoke to America's longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional values of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism, and faith.

"That Reagan's message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his skills as a communicator; it also spoke to the frailty of liberal government, during a period of economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them. For the fact was that government at every level had become too cavalier about spending taxpayer money. Too often, bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates. A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities. [B]y promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of a common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And the more his critics carped, the more those critics played into the role he'd written for them--a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites" (31-32).

There's a lot of important stuff here! First of all, Reagan had a 1950's sort of appeal. Throughout his chapter "Republicans and Democrats," Obama looks with favor on the 1950's. For Obama, the 50's were a time when the political parties got along, when politicians on both sides of the aisle could debate rigorously yet be good friends. And Reagan was like this (although Obama blames him for shattering America's centrist political consensus). He and Tip O'Neill were political opponents who disagreed on virtually everything, but they still liked each other.

Obama traces the origins of bitter partisanship to the 1960's, when the radical left brazenly defaced tradition and demonized all its opponents. Obama doesn't believe that the 50's were perfect. Those were the days of segregation, after all! But he discerns in that time some wholesome values that have become lost.

Second, Obama attempts to empathize with middle-class alienation from liberal elites. He reminds me of George McGovern's attempt to understand George Wallace supporters, which I discuss in my post, Ain't My America. Obama doesn't demonize the Archie Bunker types, for he perceives legitimate reasons for their existence. Some may see him as condescending in this, but at least he's aware that the Left has let a lot of people down with its elitism and hostility to American values.

And, third, he questions the wisdom of a big government bureaucracy. And this seems to be significant in the remainder of his book. (I've not read all of it, but I just finished his chapter on "Opportunity," which covers such issues as education, health care, unions, and the minimum wage.) He wants the government to do more in the domestic sphere, but without the inefficient, bloated, costly bureaucracy that has proven disastrous in the past. He identifies problems in an activist federal government, yet he himself wants such a government. "I can do it differently," he implies. "You can trust me." I'm not so optimistic, but his goal is to bring together the Right and the Left, using each approach to arrive at effective solutions. Or at least that's his image during the campaign!

It Moved Me to Tears!

"They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, yet have found a way--in their own lives at least--to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves. I imagine a white Southerner who growing up heard his dad talk about niggers this and niggers that but who has struck up a friendship with the black guys at the office and is trying to teach his own son different, who thinks discrimination is wrong but doesn't see why the son of a black doctor should get admitted into a law school ahead of his own son. Or the former Black Panther who decided to go into real estate, bought a few buildings in the neighborhood, and is just as tired of the drug dealers in front of his buildings as he is of the bankers who won't give him a loan to expand his business. There's the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her abortion, and the Christian woman who paid for her teenager's abortion, and the millions of waitresses and temp secretaries and nurse's assistants and Wal-Mart associates who hold their breath every single month in that hope that they'll have enough money to support the children that they did bring into the world" (41-42).

This paragraph actually moved me to tears! Why? Probably because I've seen shows in which liberals behave conservatively, or conservatives behave liberally (or, using liberal terminology, "progressively"). I remember a Touched by an Angel episode, in which a husband was urging his wife to abort her baby with Down Syndrome. "What happened to you?" he asked. "You were the one who was always preaching to me about pro-choice!" "I became pregnant!" she responded. And, conversely, I've heard of conservative households in which young people have had abortions, with the permission of their parents.

I don't know if Obama is the answer to this country's political polarization, since he himself is on the left on so many issues. But I like these quotes because he at least tries to understand the other side.