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I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism
I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism
I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism
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I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism

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Is Barack Obama the savior of liberalism—or the last liberal president? Charles R. Kesler's spirited analysis of Obama's political thought shows that he represents either a new birth of liberalism—or its demise.

Who is Barack Obama? Though many of his own supporters wonder if he really believes in anything, Charles R. Kesler argues that these disappointed liberals don't appreciate the scope of the president's ambition or the long-term stakes for which he is playing.

Conservatives also misunderstand Obama, according to this leading conservative scholar, educator, and journalist. They dismiss him as a socialist, hopelessly out of touch with the American mainstream. The fringe Right dwells on Obama's foreign upbringing, his missing birth certificate, Bill Ayers's supposed authorship of his books. What mainstream and fringe have in common is a stubborn underestimation of the man and the political movement he embodies.

Reflecting a sophisticated mix of philosophy, psychology, and history, and complemented by a scathing wit, I Am the Change tries to understand Obama as he understands himself, based largely on his own writings, speeches, and interviews. Kesler, the rare conservative who takes Obama seriously as a political thinker, views him as a gifted and highly intelligent progressive who is attempting to become the greatest president in the history of modern liberalism. Intent on reinvigorating the liberal faith, Obama nonetheless fails to understand its fatal contradictions—a shortsightedness that may prove to be liberalism's undoing.

Will Obama save liberalism and become its fourth great incarnation, following Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson? Or will he be derailed by his very successes? These are the questions at the heart of Kesler's thoughtful and illuminating book.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateOct 1, 2013
ISBN9780062325204
I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism
Author

Charles R. Kesler

Charles R. Kesler is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books. He is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, and the coeditor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought.

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    I Am the Change - Charles R. Kesler

    Preface to the Paperback Edition

    When I finished writing I Am the Change, the election of 2012 was nine months away. I made no predictions about the contest, though I made no secret of my preference for Mr. Obama’s conservative opponent, whoever he or she would turn out to be. Whether Obama won or lost, I foresaw problems for liberalism. But a sufficiently convincing reelection victory would, I argued, breathe new life into the liberal movement, create fresh opportunities for its immoderation, and tempt the president into yet loftier expressions of self-regard.

    So, the time is ripe for a little political stock-taking.

    By 2012, hope and change had lost their savor. It was Obama’s opponents who now pleaded for change, and the incumbent, no phrasemaker despite his reputation as a speech-maker, reached back into the Left’s shopworn slogan bag for a fusty rallying cry: Forward. The only surprise was the punctuation mark at the end. To younger voters, the dot signified an internet life-form, a promise of sites and suffixes to come—forward.org, perhaps, or more likely, www.whitehouse.gov/forward. This was not your father’s Forward, in short, or your grandfather’s, or any of those other countless exhortations to rush to the barricades that earned the word its Wikipedia definition as a generic name of socialist publications.

    To everyone else, the period was supposed to signal the administration’s resolute matter-of-factness: it said, simply, there is no alternative to our kind of progress. You can’t turn back the clock, so it’s Forward, period; or as the Clintons, back when they were the new kids in town, might have put it, it’s Forward, stupid. And yet it was no time at all before the campaign had stealthily replaced the attention-getting period with an exclamation point. At the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, exclamation points were everywhere! The return of the old leftist battle cry Forward! seemed to signal either a new candor or a nagging doubt about victory. Maybe the voters thought there was a choice in this election, after all. The times were not particularly favorable to the president. Economic recovery had been slow, though increasingly steady; unemployment had dropped from 10 percent to around 8 percent, and housing prices were rebounding. In his acceptance speech, Obama acknowledged his administration’s mistakes but appealed to We the People for absolution and a renewed faith in his vision for America. Like Lincoln, he noted, he was mindful of his failings and limitations. (When it comes to humility, he’s tops.) The election four years ago wasn’t about me, he contended implausibly. It was about you. My fellow citizens—you were the change. But if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible, he warned, well, change will not happen. . . . Only you have the power to move us forward. Or to put it less delicately: If I lose it will be your fault, you ingrates.

    On election day the people came to a fork in the road and, in Yogi Berra’s immortal words, took it. Despite the mood of most postelection commentary, the results were neither a landslide for President Obama nor a wipeout for the GOP. Judging by the numbers alone, the public decided to march not forward but sideways. To be sure, the president’s 332 electoral votes amounted to a comfortable victory. Measured against all the presidential contests since 1896, however, the year which political scientists often regard as the beginning of modern American politics, Obama’s winning percentage (61.71 percent of the electoral vote) was below average, ranking twenty-second out of thirty. His percentage of the popular vote (51.06 percent) put him eighteenth among the thirty victors. More remarkably, he lost ground compared with his election in 2008, when he captured 52.87 percent of the popular vote. The political scientist who calculated these rankings, Jack Pitney of Claremont McKenna College, points out that in races with a serious third-party contender the winner’s percentage of the popular vote will be unusually lowered (as happened to Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996). To compensate, one ought to look in addition at the winner’s margin of victory in the popular vote. By that metric, Obama’s winning margin over Mitt Romney (3.85 percent) was quite ordinary and indeed far below average—only twenty-fourth out of thirty, about half of his 7.3 percent victory over John McCain four years before.

    In short, this was no electoral earthquake. The Republican Party lived to fight another day; and it retained control of the House of Representatives. Divided government, the status quo ante, was the electorate’s decree again. At the state level, Republicans added a governorship and kept control of a majority of state legislatures. The same polls that in the final week or so showed (accurately, it turned out) Obama pulling safely ahead showed Romney with a notable lead two or three weeks prior. It was a more fluid, and more even, race than the final results suggested.

    Yet in politics as in life, numbers don’t tell the whole story. The election was still six weeks away when Newsweek (now defunct as a print publication, though I’m sure there’s no connection) proclaimed on its cover that Obama was The Democrats’ Reagan. In the cover essay, Andrew Sullivan speculated that Obama will emerge as an iconic figure who struggled through a recession and a terrorized world, strafing the ranks of al-Qaeda, presiding over a civil-rights revolution, and then enjoying the fruits of the recovery. Sullivan was on to something, insofar as Obama is indebted for his rhetorical sensibility to two modern presidents above all, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. From Clinton he learned to praise capitalism and pass the collection plate, to distance himself from the excesses of Sixties radicalism, and to obfuscate liberalism’s new programmatic rights as forms of opportunity. From Reagan he learned to speak in optimistic and patriotic tones about the country, without (please note) conceding anything in principle to Reagan’s own principles, or to the Gipper’s conservative agenda. As a self-styled pragmatist, Obama couldn’t help noticing that Clinton’s rhetoric had itself aped Reagan’s, and that Reagan’s rhetorical leadership had over several decades earned the supreme pragmatic compliment: it worked. Obama’s cheeky praise of Reagan early in the 2008 campaign had conceded that, and only that, point: I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

    Other liberal commentators leaped on the Reagan-Obama bandwagon, too. What Sullivan saw, which they didn’t, was that Obama had always been playing a long game, aiming at fundamentally transforming the country. In fact, Sullivan underestimated Obama’s zeal for transformation, which, as this book argues, owes more to the ideological afflatus of his liberal predecessors, Lyndon B. Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, than to any inspiration from Reagan. Time magazine (not defunct . . . so far) had come closer to the truth when after his 2008 triumph it put Obama on its cover as the new Franklin Roosevelt, complete with pince-nez and cigarette holder, accompanied by the headline The New New Deal. Obama’s Second Inaugural Address was, in this respect, such a textbook example of progressivism that it ought to be reprinted as an appendix to I Am the Change. The speech is thoroughly Rooseveltian, steeped in FDR’s 1932 and 1936 campaign appeals, and intended to establish the Democrats as the party of true Americanism and to abominate the Republicans as anti-American oligarchs and bigots. Tactically, the speech was a riposte to the Tea Party, which in its haphazard way had tried to associate the American Revolution with opposition to Obama. On the contrary, Obama insisted, he stood for the tradition of Jefferson and Lincoln. It was his opponents who were the (economic) royalists.

    Strategically, then, the Second Inaugural confirmed Obama’s effort, chronicled herein, to reverse the Reagan Revolution, to cast the conservative movement into the outer, undemocratic darkness, and to restore the Democrats as the majority party and liberalism as America’s official faith. To begin to justify his own transformations, he had to re-define the whole American political tradition, especially the Founding, just as FDR had done memorably in the early New Deal. Thus Obama began by saluting the enduring strength of our Constitution (not its wisdom or justice) and affirming the promise of our democracy, meaning the country as it might be, the America of our imagination, which to a modern liberal is the only thoroughly justifiable object of patriotic sentiments. If one believes with, say, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright that America began in principle as a criminal conspiracy by rich white men against Indians, blacks, women, the poor, and everyone else, then of course one cannot look backward or even upward for moral guidance. The only way open is Forward.

    Obama then quoted the electric passage from the Declaration of Independence, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . . . A sentence later —one sentence!—and the Declaration was in the rearview mirror and we were off on a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. Only urgent, imperative actions such as approving gay marriage, fighting climate change, and protecting entitlements, he announced, will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared. Like American government, the American creed is broken and desperately in need of a bailout, which liberalism is only too happy to supply. By borrowing the latest liberal priorities, and genuflecting before the latest liberal pieties, we could make the old Declaration and Constitution relevant to the present age.

    Would that be the Age of Obama, as his admirers whispered after the reelection had sunk in? The hardback edition of this book bore the subtitle Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism. With Obama’s victory, is the crisis over? I venture he thinks so. He had diagnosed a kind of near-term crisis of liberalism in his 2008 campaign and in The Audacity of Hope, his precampaign book from 2006. As Obama saw it, the crisis was that liberals had lost confidence in liberalism. Reagan had so dominated the 1980s that his legacy, Reaganism, set the terms of public debate and public policy for two more decades. Bill Clinton’s attempted challenge to the conservative status quo—his signature policy that somehow sported his wife’s signature, Hillarycare—never got out of committee in a Congress dominated by his own party. After that, it was all school uniforms, midnight basketball, triangulation, welfare reform, and most galling of all to Obama, Clinton’s declaration that the era of big government is over. Liberals feared that liberalism had been neutered, or at least tamed. Obama did not. He thought that something like a new New Deal or a new Great Society—breathtaking political change along a wide front—was still possible, if only liberals would rediscover their faith in the future, if progressives would believe once more in progress. That’s what Hope and Change were all about. Obama in 2008 persuaded liberals to hope once more for big political and social change; but it would all have been for naught if he hadn’t delivered, which, unlike Bill Clinton, he did. In the first two years of his presidency, his forces overran the conservative lines and pushed leftward in a series of dramatic, party-line victories on the stimulus bill, Dodd-Frank’s reregulation of the financial sector, and above all health care. Crisis over, he likely concluded.

    Except that his legislative gains were never matched by the kind of broad and deep partisan realignment triggered by the New Deal. As a result, the GOP’s counterattack in 2010 succeeded on almost every front. He regained some ground in 2012, but no one would compare Obama’s political position today with the preeminence enjoyed by Roosevelt and the Democrats from 1932 to 1938. The best that John Judis, Ruy Teixeira, and other supporters can do is to predict an invincible Democratic majority that will emerge . . . sometime in the future, based on extrapolations from the growth rate and voting behavior of key Democratic constituencies—young people, single women, single mothers, gays, Hispanics, and so forth. They may be right, but it’s far from certain. And by continually looking over the next hill for this new majority, they admit backhandedly that even all of Obama’s considerable political skills, a deep and prolonged economic downturn, and the roiling political battles of the past decade have not sufficed to bring it into existence.

    This persistent failure may not lessen Obama’s self-congratulation, but it should. In his second term, count on him to try to nudge the national conversation, and eventually the national agenda, farther to the left, partly out of conviction and partly out of the need to find new wedge issues to spur the political realignment he seeks. The coy evolution of his position on gay marriage will be matched on other issues like taxes, a federal right to child care, and economic redistribution. Though his administration has won many legislative victories, none can be said, at least so far, to be politically decisive, and so the maneuvering goes on. Obama has revived liberalism, but its long-term health is far from assured. Even as defined by him, the crisis of liberalism is not over.

    When the publisher suggested that the paperback edition carry a new, postelection subtitle, Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism, I assented readily because whatever else the future of liberalism may have in store, it will include the crisis of liberalism, though in a different and larger sense than the president envisions. Soon modern American liberalism will come to a crossroads. Today’s welfare state and, a fortiori, tomorrow’s, cannot be sustained on the present tax base. Taxes on everyone, especially on the middle class, which is where the money is, will have to rise dramatically, and additional forms of taxation will have to be imposed. Nearly half, or perhaps more than half, of the national economy will have to be conscripted by government at all levels in order to keep the welfare state afloat, effectively socializing the economy. Or . . . the welfare state will have to be pared back and rededicated to helping the truly needy in ways consistent with natural rights, limited government, and the consent of the governed. It’s far from clear that liberalism has the moral and political resources to reform, much less to ax, programs that it has defended for generations now as unbreakable civic promises, essential to securing ever evolving kinds of human dignity.

    Complicating the dilemma will be the growing suspicion, already visible among the professoriate and other avant-garde thinkers, and glimpsed even in President Obama’s glib dismissal of absolute truth, that liberalism itself is nothing but liberals’ will-to-power dressed up in its Sunday-go-to-meeting best. That sentiment, if shared by their political leaders, would exacerbate the dangers along either path liberals might take. And the American people can hardly be expected to keep believing in the justice of liberalism if liberals can’t or won’t. On both fiscal and philosophical grounds, then, I think the crisis of liberalism, far from being over, is only beginning.

    Introduction

    Barack Obama had the distinction of being the most liberal member of the United States Senate when he ran for president in 2008. The title had been conferred by National Journal, an inside-the-beltway watchdog that annually assigns senators (and congressmen) an ideological rank based on their votes on economic, social, and foreign policy issues. Obama was more liberal than the Senate’s independent socialist, Bernie Sanders, considerably more liberal than Barbara Boxer or Harry Reid, and dramatically to the left of his opponent in the primaries, Hillary Clinton. It was only one ranking, but it captured something important. He was much more liberal than his presidential campaign let on.

    Since then, we have learned a lot more about his political leanings as a young man, which were fashionably leftist, broadly in keeping with the climate of opinion on the campuses where he found himself—Occidental College, Columbia University, Harvard Law School. As a senior at Columbia, he attended the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference, sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America. It met in Manhattan at the Cooper Union, site of one of Abraham Lincoln’s major speeches, but this conference commemorated not the Great Emancipator but Karl Marx, on the centenary of his death. Though a meeting of democratic socialists and, yes, community organizers, the conference as well as his long-running friendships with radicals of various sorts would have drawn more sustained attention if the Cold War were still raging. But it was not, and Obama pleaded youthful indiscretion and drift; and of course his campaign did its best to keep the details from coming out. He still had to answer, in some measure, for his ties to William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, but the issue with, say, the good Reverend concerned his sermons about race and Middle East politics, not his penchant for visiting and honoring Fidel Castro, not to mention the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua.¹ Partly by avoiding the worst of the old anti-Communist gantlet, Obama became the most left-wing liberal to be elected to national executive office since Henry Wallace.

    Still, the President is not a self-proclaimed socialist—nor like Wallace, a self-deceived fellow traveler or worse. Obama never went so far, so openly—whether out of inertia, political calculation, or good sense—and therefore never had to make a public apostasy. As a result, we know less about his evolving views than we might like, though probably more than he would like. He calls himself a progressive or liberal, and we should take him at his word, at least until we encounter a fatal contradiction. That’s only reasonable and fair; and it avoids the desperate shortcut, gratifying as it may be, of unmasking him as—take your pick—a third-world daddy’s boy, Alinskyist agitator, deep-cover Muslim, or undocumented alien. Conservatives, of all people, should know to beware instant gratification, especially when it comes wrapped in a conspiracy theory. In any case, hypocrisy, as Rochefoucauld wrote, is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, and Obama seems to think it would be a virtuous thing to have been a lifelong liberal, even if he wasn’t. And so the question arises: what does it mean anymore to be a liberal?

    This book is about Barack Obama and his place in modern American liberalism. It approaches liberalism as he sees it, as a form of progressivism, which is more or less how its greatest twentieth-century champions understood it, too. (Capital-P Progressivism hereafter refers to the movement that arose in the first two decades of the past century; small-p progressivism to the more general belief in an inevitably glorious, man-made future. Progressivism was progressivist; but not every form of progressivism, e.g., Marxism, was compatible with Progressivism.) Neither a biography of Obama nor a history of liberalism, this volume focuses on liberalism’s essence—what it is, where it came from, where it’s going—and how the president sees himself in that picture. Foreign policy, as such, figures very little here, not because liberals don’t have interesting and highly untraditional views on the subject but because their views of domestic policy, and particularly of the grounds and purposes of political life, are more fundamental. For similar reasons, we don’t consider the broader American Left, spanning labor unions, social reform movements, the Socialist and Communist parties, and the like, but confine ourselves to the main political and intellectual developments and the most prominent and ambitious political leaders—the great men of the age, as Woodrow Wilson might put it.² Most liberals would recognize Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson as the most eminent, certainly the most consequential of elected liberal statesmen, even though they are lamentably dead, white, and male. Teddy Roosevelt has admirers, including, lately, Obama; but though he managed to be many things, often at the same time, TR was never a Democrat nor a sentimental egalitarian.³ Doubtless John F. Kennedy is more beloved than LBJ, but he doesn’t hold a candle to the uncouth Texan in terms of building the modern welfare state and fulfilling the civil rights agenda. Truman’s achievements are mostly in foreign policy, and many of them, like launching American participation in the Cold War, reek too much of the Vietnam War for contemporary liberal tastes. Bill Clinton, well, has his own problems. Ditto Jimmy Carter, though not the same ones.

    When liberals tell their own story, they emphasize the unplanned, improvisational character of what came to be called liberalism. As Eric Alterman, a professor of English and journalism who likes to write books defending liberalism, declares, liberalism arose as a matter of pure pragmatism with next to no theory in the first place and was led by a politician [FDR] who prided himself on his willingness to try almost anything. . . . This argument, repeated in countless mainstream histories, presupposes that socioeconomic change is the driving force, and that politics, at least good, liberal politics, is a kind of reaction—an adjustment of governing institutions and policies to the changing realities of society. Liberalism comes across as defensive and modest, in fact downright conservative, but also inevitable. Political change can’t lag behind social change for long, and what liberals do is simply mind the gap: they prescribe the minimal adjustments necessary to keep the social organism healthy and whole. The story has the advantage of de-radicalizing liberalism, and of distracting attention from its actual ideas and from their role in its real genesis and growth. It’s the equivalent of the policeman saying, Move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here. Keep moving. . . . The same liberals who push this pragmatic account invariably speak at the same time of their movement’s ideals or vision, revealing that liberalism as conservative adjustment cannot be the whole truth. In fact, both arguments, for liberalism as slow change and for liberalism as the hope of idealistic or radical transformation, were originally made by the same man, Woodrow Wilson, when he helped to found modern American liberalism. Franklin Roosevelt was a young man then, a Wilsonian progressive serving in his leader’s administration.

    Wilson thought the modest story about liberalism partly true, but partly a noble lie to cover the remarkably thorough break he intended to make from the original, and still more or less prevailing, interpretation of the principles of American politics. The cover-up was thus coeval with the crime, you might say. Without dismissing the liberal gift for moderation and capacity for compromise, this book will shine a light on the peculiar radicalism inherent in American liberalism ever since its origins in the Progressive movement. Liberalism was a choice, not a destiny, and in its rise to power ideas, not material conditions, were in the forefront. Its foundational ideas, as we say today (alas), when seen in broad daylight, point up the connections between the several installments of liberal reform, as envisioned and explained by the leading liberal reformers themselves. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, commands the Wizard of Oz. In this case, however, the famous liberal statesmen are well in front of the curtain, exposed as only presidents can be, and their ideas and their reasoning are open to anyone who knows how to read. Our method, accordingly, is to let these renowned liberals speak for themselves as much as possible. We stick as closely as we can to their own words from their speeches, books, and letters. We try to understand them as they understood themselves, before criticizing or evaluating them—though this book, written by a conservative, doesn’t hesitate to criticize, taking as its touchstone the very precepts the liberals were gently but firmly trying to supplant, the principles of Abraham Lincoln and the American Founders.

    Good-natured liberals may be surprised by this frank account of their own creed. Contrary to what they’ve probably read, liberalism was all about theory, and a kind of theory much more hostile to American premises than they’ve been told. But what is this pure pragmatism they are supposed to be celebrating instead? Pragmatism was a new development in American philosophy, a late-nineteenth-century school that modestly disclaimed ultimate truths, abstract theories, and final ends in favor of a method that seeks and finds truth in what works. At the time, this meant what works according to the methods of the natural sciences, particularly Darwinian biology, and the new social sciences modeled on the natural. To the Pragmatists themselves, like John Dewey and William James, their approach was revolutionary, or to be precise, a revolution against the old ways of philosophy and politics that had discovered supposedly permanent truths like natural rights, the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and unchanging species. In other words, Pragmatism was itself a theory; and to be a Pragmatist was already to incline against some of the main ideas of American constitutionalism. This isn’t the blancmange that the term suggests to most people today. As for philosophers, few would adhere nowadays to old-style Pragmatism anyway, having long since exchanged it (see Chapter Five) for a more radical formulation. What works now implies not Dewey’s method of intelligence, but rather what works for you—for your favorite values, self-created lifestyle, or will to power. Have liberals noticed that they are in danger of becoming confidence men, selling belief in what Obama sometimes calls universal truths that they know are not universal and suspect strongly are not true?

    The sense of liberalism as something novel, audacious, and comprehensive has faded, lost in the enduring authority of its innovations, the familiarity of its claims, and its temporary taming by the Reagan Revolution. Whatever else he has accomplished, Obama has reminded conservatives and liberals alike that liberalism can be an aggressive doctrine unashamedly pursuing the transformation of the country. Its robustness shouldn’t surprise. Its transformations are relatively recent. The twentieth century was, as the late Thomas B. Silver used to say, the liberal century. Conservatism was a late arrival, debuting as a self-conscious intellectual movement only in the 1950s, and lacking significant political success until the 1980s. By contrast, the liberal storm was already gathering in the 1880s, and broke upon the land in the new century’s second decade. It had made deep, decisive changes in American politics long before conservatism as we know it came on the scene. Those who would like to limit or reverse liberalism’s damage must face the fact that already, over several generations, it has pervasively reshaped Americans’ expectations of government and of life. Nonetheless, it didn’t win these victories all at once. Modern liberalism spread across the country in three powerful waves, interrupted by wars and by rather haphazard reactions to its excesses. This fact is encouraging, because it shows that it can be stopped, and discouraging, because it hints it cannot be stopped for long. But then conservatives and moderates—even liberals—haven’t had a commanding view of the movement in a long time, and so the past is not necessarily prologue.

    Each wave of liberalism featured a different aspect of it—call them, for short, political liberalism, economic liberalism, and cultural liberalism—and each deposited on our shores a distinctive type of politics—the politics of progress, the politics of entitlements, and the politics of meaning. These terms are conceptual rather than, strictly speaking, historical. They help to organize our thinking more so than our record-keeping, inasmuch as elements of all three were mixed up in each stage. Although it wasn’t inevitable that one wave should follow the next, a certain logic connected the New Freedom, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Each attempted to transform America, as their names suggest, and the second and third waves worked out themes implicit in the first, which is why the book devotes so much attention to Progressivism in Chapter Two. But the special flavor of each period owed much to the issues and forces involved, the legacy of previous reform, the character of the political leaders, and the disagreements within and between the generations of reformers. The third wave, centered on the Sixties, showed just how fratricidal liberalism could become.

    The first and most disorienting wave was political liberalism, which began as a critique of the Constitution and the morality underlying it. That morality, Wilson charged, the natural rights doctrine of Thomas Jefferson and Lincoln, was based on an outmoded account of human nature, an atomistic and egoistic view that needed to be corrected by a more well-rounded or social view, made plausible by the recent discovery that human nature was necessarily progressive or perfectible. So-called natural rights were actually historical or prescriptive, evolving with the times toward a final and rational truth. The eighteenth-century Constitution, based on the eighteenth-century notion of a fixed human nature with static rights, had in turn to be transcended by a modern or living constitution based on the evolutionary view. Drawing on a curious and unstable mixture of Social Darwinism, German idealism, and English historicism, Wilson outlined the new State that liberals would ever after be building, the goal of which would be nothing less than man’s complete spiritual fulfillment. Though he insisted that the process of change was seamless, he was candid enough, especially in his political science but also in his popular speeches, to explain the metamorphosis he intended.

    The second wave explicitly

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