Jonathan Todd

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were right-wing, obviously. But they were coherent, courageous and possessed of certain irreducible beliefs. And not wrong about everything. Sarah Palin is, in contrast, clearly incoherent and vapid. Andrew Sullivan once described her as the “reductio ad absurdum” of Reagan’s conservatism. Palin, basically, manifestly is nuts. The reluctance of the American right to acknowledge the self-evident contrast between Thatcher and Palin is indicative of their estrangement from reality. If the Republicans select her as their presidential candidate, reality will surely, finally, file for divorce.

“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding.”

What?

That is surely the sound of a President splitting hairs to such an extent as to abdicate leadership. While the Economist’s chronicling of the American left’s despondency with Barack Obama says as much about the lack of backbone and realism on the part of the American left as it does about Obama, this backbone would be significantly fortified by genuine leadership from Obama. 

He seemed to show this leadership when he initially appeared to endorse the plans for the Cordoba Centre in NYC with words which Alex Massie accurately described as his ”best words in god knows how long”. Yet he quickly rowed back from this act of principled leadership with the words I quoted at the start of this blog.

The likes of Harry Reid and Howard Dean may have shamefully betrayed the best American instincts in voicing opposition to the Centre. But Obama should be bigger and better than that.

If ‘yes, we can’ means anything it should mean, at least, ’yes, we can do things in a different way from right-wing Republicans’. I’ve consistently argued that Obama should reach across the aisle to form a radical centre with reform-minded Republicans and these Republicans have consistently proved themselves conspicuous by their non-existence. Obama’s instinct is invariably to seek compromise and to split the difference and such instincts on the part of the President are a precondition of America finding a radical centre. But non-Democrats being willing to play ball with Obama is also a precondition of a radical centre and this precondition has not been satisfied. The right response to this is not equivocation but for the President to draw some lines in the sand.

And a line in the sand should have been drawn over the Cordoba Centre.

Obama should have been clear that the aim of Al-Qaeda is to divide Americans against Americans; to make American Muslims be Muslims first and Americans second. It is astonishing that the likes of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin have opposed the Centre with logic – I use the term loosely – consistent with that of Al-Qaeda. America, obviously, needs to rise above such logic and demonstrate that it embodies and will continue to embody virtues of plurality, tolerance and diversity. This is why the Cordoba Centre matters. If it doesn’t go ahead, America will have compromised on and been seen to have compromised on its most precious values.

America is a beautiful idea as much as it is a wonderful country. Just as Al-Qaeda is an appalling idea as much as it is an organised terrorist network. If Obama can’t spell out and stand his ground on the relevance of the Cordoba Centre to this, he’ll only have himself to blame if the Democrats find themselves lacking in activists in November. Ok, some Republicans will be even less likely to his friend but they don’t want to his friend anyways and Obama should stop pretending that they do. Instead, he should concentrate, like Harvey Milk said, on giving his supporters some hope. This doesn’t mean stopping being pragmatic; stopping cutting deals with Congress where they have to be cut, as they had to be on health care.

But it does mean clearly and unambiguously articulating your most important beliefs, even if these beliefs may not be shared by everyone. In fact, it is even more important when they are not shared by everyone. Obama seemed to promise all things to all people when he became President, which always made his presidency a hostage to fortune, but the very least that we could expect him to be was more sane and humane than the administration that went before him and Republicans of that vintage. This demands that he sees the Cordoba Centre for what it is – everything that is best about America – and says so very loudly and clearly. Everyone who cares about all that is best about America should hope that he is capable of this.

Anthony Painter has recently written about movement politics for Progress. He recounts how “equal voting rights and civil rights”, the fruits of the civil rights movement, ”changed America. But it was the movement that followed it and, in part, was a reaction to it, that was America’s most successful ‘movement for change.’ That was the audacious and many headed conservative movement. If the civil rights movement was driven by a sense of moral injustice, the conservative movement was motivated by a sense of moral outrage.”

Painter doesn’t, however, draw the more contemporary parallel: the movement that powered Barack Obama into the White House was driven by a sense of moral injustice, while the Tea Party movement, the most visceral counter reaction to this victory, is motivated by a sense of moral outrage. They are outraged with the ‘socialism’ of Obama-care, outraged with the free market perversion that is the bank bailouts, outraged with the extension of the big government leviathan that has been the fiscal stimulus, outraged by illegal immigration, outraged with plans to build a Mosque near Ground Zero and outraged by the indifference of Washington DC to all of this. They want their country back.

But who took their country from them?

Some fusion between socialists and al-Qaeda, which may very well be personified by Obama. His middle name is Hussein, after all. Sarah Palin trades on the same suspicions that the name Hussein arouses when she describes the proposed Cordoba Centre in NYC as the ’9/11 Mosque’. “Of course”, as Alex Massie sarcastically points out, ”it’s planned as a tribute to al-Qaeda and of course it’s perfectly reasonable to suppose that all muslims are really just the same and we know what that means don’t we?”

The main contribution of Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, to the debate on the Cordoba Centre has been to declare, ”there should be no mosque near ground zero so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia”. As the Economist points out, “to Mr Gingrich, it seems, an American Muslim is a Muslim first and an American second. Al-Qaeda would doubtless concur.”

Sarah Palin’s contribution to this debate has been more illiterate, just as offensive and has passed the bumper sticker test: her argument can be condensed into the space available on a bumper sticker. And, as certain as night follows day, the bumper stickers have arrived. And the t-shirts. They are a celebration of a misspelling in that they build on Palin’s infamous ‘refudiate’ tweet to attack Obama and socialism.

It is striking both how easily they conflate a dispute about a Mosque with Obama and socialism and how willing they are to proclaim, literally as a badge of honour, Palin’s spelling error. This proclamation speaks to the anti-intellectual fire in the bellies of many of Palin’s followers; many of whom make up the Tea Party movement. What they want, as Palin puts it, “is a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor lecturing us from a lectern”.

Palin has an ability to tap into a raw nerve that many middle and working class Americans seem to have about being ‘talked down to’ by a liberal, east-coast elite. This raw nerve makes her straight-talking the stuff of authenticity and empathy. Her misspelling, and the condescending response to it, has deepened this emotional connection between her and her followers. “She validates me and she validates my life”, as I recall one of her followers once telling a TV camera. No constitutional law professor could ever provide such validation.

Now, it’s all too easy to look at this and sneer about people clinging to their guns and their bibles. Obama once seemed to do exactly this. However, reading this fantastic reportage from the FT makes me wonder whether something else is going on.

“Mention middle-class America and most foreigners envision something timeless and manicured, from The Brady Bunch, say, or Desperate Housewives in which teenagers drive to school in sports cars and the girls are always cheerleading. This might approximate how some in the top 10 per cent live. The rest live like the Freemans. Or worse.”

The Freemans are a family in Minneapolis that the article very movingly describes.

“Last year the bank tried to repossess the Freemans’ home even though they were only three months in arrears. Their son, Andy, was recently knocked off his mother’s health insurance and only painfully reinstated for a large fee. And, much like the boarded-up houses that signal America’s epidemic of foreclosures, the drug dealings and shootings that were once remote from their neighbourhood are edging ever closer, a block at a time.”

There are some harsh economic realities underlying the position that the Freemans’ find themselves in.

“The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the ­multiple is above 300.”

Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, reflected upon the consequences of this economic position by telling the FT:

“I have this gnawing feeling about the future of America. When people lose the sense of optimism, things tend to get more volatile. The future I most fear for America is Latin American: a grossly unequal society that is prone to wild swings from populism to ­orthodoxy, which makes sensible government increasingly hard to imagine. Look at the Tea Party. People think it came from nowhere. While I don’t agree with their remedies, most Tea Party members are middle-class Americans who have been suffering silently for years … To be pessimistic about the future is so new for Americans and so strikingly un-American.”

As the swings from the civil rights to the conservative movements and from the Obama to the Tea Party movements attest, movements are both part of and create the weather of American politics. However, perhaps, one doesn’t have to be a fully signed up Marxist to see these movements as being in some senses superstructures determined by the economic base. The Tea Party seems as much about the economic exasperation of the anxious middle as about guns and bibles. Still, it is testimony to the enduring power of movements and conservatism in America. As the likes of Palin fire fear of the other – be that ‘socialists’, Muslims, illegal immigrants or anything or anyone who isn’t carrying a gun and a bible – and China’s rise heralds an era of contested modernity, it’s hard not to share Spence’s concerns that the Tea Party are a harbinger of more angry and troubled times in America.

Let’s hope that enlightened government from Obama can avert this. But no matter how intelligent Obama’s policies may be, they are unlikely to resonate unless the arguments for them can be summarised on a bumper sticker.

My Father-in-law, Walter Urbanek, has recieved a letter from John Kerry. My Father-in-law isn’t a top level politician. (Though, he was school friends with Peter Welch). It is a letter that asks him to donate to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. 

Kerry begins:

“I have never seen anything like this: as President Obama works to dig us out of a deep hole and build our country back up, the Republicans in Washington at the highest levels have adopted an entirely different goal: force his failure. It disgusts me every time I see it.”

He later argues:

“Since the Democrats lost the super-majority, Republicans have even more power to obstruct every initiative President Obama puts forward, and they’ve shown an unyielding willingness to continue to do just that. Republicans said no to health care reform. They said no to regulating the big banks whose recklessness nearly sank our economy. They said no to the economic stimulus bill that has created or saved over two million jobs and provided immediate tax relief to 95 percent of working Americans.”

Republican senators have been no more co-operative with Democrats on the legislative response to the BP oil spill. “You’ve got a situation where the Democrats control both houses of Congress as well as the White House, and even then, they’re finding it extremely difficult to move forward,” Jerry Taylor, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told the New York Times.

“They figure”, claims Kerry’s letter, “if they can kill a few more bills, it’s smooth sailing in November, Democrats will fall and President Obama will fail.” They expect voters to say to Democrats “you’re fired”, as Sarah Palin encourages a Tea Party audience in the video below. (Incidentally, Palin refers to bumper stickers in this speech, prompting people to approach drivers with Obama bumper stickers and say, “how is that hopey changey thing working out for you?”) 

But will voters do this?

If they do, it will be taken as a rejection of agenda of change that Obama and the Democrats have tried to take forward. However, in the absence of a super-majority, it can be very difficult for a party to achieve what it wants to achieve even when in control of both houses of Congress and the White House, especially if the other party makes a determined and co-ordinated effort to stop them, which is what the Republicans have done.

Their strategy would blow-up in the Republicans’ faces if the American people, instead of saying “you’re fired”, say “the Republicans have failed to act in the constructive and bipartisan spirit that our political system is based upon. As a direct consequence, major issues, such as immigration and climate change, have not been acted upon. We cannot reward such irresponsible behaviour and will, therefore, be voting Democrat.” 

This seems the fundamental question at the heart of November’s mid-terms. The deeper structural questions are how broken and what can be done to fix a politics that is institutionally based upon bipartisanship but whose parties, especially the Republicans, have abandoned bipartisanship. Essentially, as Jonathan Chait has asked, is America ungovernable? This structural question won’t be answered by November but we will know a lot more about whether America still wants to stick with the change agenda that swept Obama into the White House.

James Crabtree has written a fascinating and much commented upon Prospect piece on the role that an apology might play in a quick return to Labour government should the Conservatives win the General Election later this year. This has set me thinking about the role of contrition in politics in general and two sorry Tory stories in particular. These sorry stories are: First, seeing (tacit and non-formal) apologies for being slow to make peace with the 1960s and for the excesses of the 1980s as being integral to the rebranding of the Conservatives sought by David Cameron (a project that is now threatened by a sense that the credit crunch and the scale of public debt have caused the Conservatives to renew their marriage vows to Margaret Thatcher and the 1980s); and, second, conceptualising the Republicans as being split between those who see a need for some kind of apology for the years of George W Bush as necessary to their political renewal and those who do not.

Some recent events – the reaction to the attempted Christmas day terrorist bombing in the US; the election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts; the tea party protests; the spike in retirements from Democratic Congressmen; and President Obama’s approval rating - would seem to strengthen the position of those who are unapologetic for the Dubya years. But my default sense – which I am increasingly having cause to question - is that in the long-term more contrition than that which the likes of Karl Rove are presently prepared to offer will be required for the Republicans to fully recover. That said; there are signs, which are worrying to a European and (in the American sense of the word) liberal, that an unreconstructed Republican party might return to the White House in 2012. An example of such a sign is that when I departed Dulles airport, just outside DC, 48 hours ago I noted lots of t-shirts on sale like the one below.

Dulles may be in Virginia, but it is hardly in the heart of red state territory; Massachusetts is even less so. I can only fear what they are now thinking in such territory. But let’s return to American politics via a review of the role of an apology (of sorts) in the fortunes of the Conservative Party in recent years.

“There is no such thing as society.” This was one of the most outrageous and defining claims of the Thatcher years. So, for Cameron to repudiate this by saying that ”there is such a thing as society” was for him to grasp towards an apology for the excesses of Thatcherism in the form of a Clause 4-esque moment. In actuality, he failed to fully seize this moment by following this line up with words (“it’s just not the same thing as the state”) that amounted to a Burkian little platoons view of society that is little removed from Thatcher’s notion that “there are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”

Notwithstanding this I am with James Crabtree – pace Luke Akehurst – in conceding that lines such as these from Cameron, as well as a focus upon such non-traditional Tory themes as poverty and the environment, amount in tone, at least, to a sustained Tory apology and repositioning.

But that is soo 2005/7. You know, PCC (pre-credit crunch). We are now in a very different era. Philip Stephens has captured well what this meant for the Cameron project:

“The cuddly, environmentally friendly prospectus he offered during his early years as leader has collided with grim economic reality. The Tory leader used to promise to share the proceeds of economic growth between public services and lower taxes. There is nothing left to share. The choice is between what services to cut and what taxes to raise.”

David Goodhart touches upon another aspect of the Cameron project, “after Labour embraced the 1980s (the turn to the free market) the Tories have recently made their peace with the 1960s (race and gender equality, environmentalism and so on).” Part of the ”friendly prospectus” involves an apology for not previously being at ease with the 1960s. While Labour had to adapt to the 1980s to reinvent itself under Tony Blair, the 1997 election constituted, in part, a rejection of the dogmatic firmness of the Tory faith in the free market. Consequently, as well as finally reconciling themselves to the 1960s, Cameron has sought to apologise for the 1980s Thatcherite dogma that lead to 1997. He’s the “heir to Blair”, remember.

This strand of Cameron’s apology – the 1980s strand, if you will – has gone flaky since the need to control public debt (and the implied requirement for restraint in public spending) has become more apparent. This is because the Conservatives have seemed more keen than Labour to address this need. Peter Mandelson tried to increase this flakiness by speaking of the “barely disguised glee” of the Tories at the prospect of spending cuts.

The 1960s strand is also undermined by a Conservative Home survey that reports that reducing Britain’s carbon footprint is the lowest priority of Tory PPCs. Their second highest priority is “cutting red tape”. How 1980s and John Redwood-like is that?!? It’s like the regulatory failures of the credit crunch never happened. Perhaps, only Boy George and “reducing the public deficit” (aka cutting public spending), which was their top priority, could be more 1980s.

All of which supports Mandelson’s argument and gives the suggestion that Cameron may be a somewhat reformed character who wants to rebrand the Conservatives, but the Conservatives themselves do not wish to be so changed and the public are unconvinced that such a change has been completed. Jack Scott, a Labour PPC, has picked up strong evidence on the doorstep for this view being held amongst the public.

Cameron’s attempt to change the Conservatives has certainly been buffeted, most spectacularly by the credit crunch. However, he remains keen that the perception of change, at least, holds; whether he can make this perception stick in the hearts of his party and the minds of voters are different questions, however.

Returning to America, we note one of the most basic and fundamental distinctions between British and American politics. The Republicans have no politician in an office akin to Cameron’s. Whether the Republican leadership wants to apologise for George W Bush, as Cameron has sought to apologise for Thatcher et al, is immaterial, because no office exists from which a leader might thrust such an action upon their (welcoming or otherwise) party. Cameron may have fluffed his Clause 4 moment but this structural distinction between the US and the UK means that there is much less chance of a Republican Clause 4.

The nearest the Republicans have got to such a moment came in the form of a recently published book by Michael Steele, Republican Party Chairman, in which he discusses why the GOP has often lost touch with typical Americans since the Ronald Reagan era and concedes: “We screwed up.” (Notice another difference between the UK and the US: The 1980s are something for which the party of the right is to apologise in the UK and are something for the party of the right to seek to recover in the US).

However, as E. J. Dionne Jr notes, some Republicans remain on the offensive about the period for which Steele is apologetic. These are the kind of Republicans who are doubtful about Michael Steele.

“Much of the contention surrounding Barack Obama’s presidency is simply a continuation of our argument over the effects of George W. Bush’s time in office. That is why Obama, despite his fervent wishes, has been unable to usher in a new period of consensus. Bush’s defenders know that Obama’s election represented a popular reaction against the consequences of the Bush presidency. Because Obama is both the anti-Bush and the leader of the post-Bush cleanup squad, his success would complete the rebuke. So the Bush camp — Karl Rove’s regular contributions to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages are emblematic — must stay on the attack.”

The strand of the Cameronista project that is so determined to underline a sense of change within their party, it seems to me, is motivated by a desire to act upon an insight provided by Danny Finkelstein, one of their most sympathetic commentators: the British electorate is never wrong. Change is required, it is thought, to show that the party has moved on from the past mistakes that kept it out of office. However, the Rove strategy seems based on precisely the opposite view: the Dubya years weren’t missteps at all, but coloured by the right actions, and, in time, the American public will come to realise that they made a mistake in evicting the Republicans from the White House. It’s not so much “don’t blame me, I voted McCain” as “sorry, I’ve seen the error of my ways and wish I’d voted McCain.”

As well as on terrorism and foreign policy, the Republicans are unrepentant on their role in the economic situation. This is also noted by E. J. Dionne Jr:

“It’s striking that most conservatives, through a method that might be called the audacity of audacity, have acted as if absolutely nothing went wrong with their economic theories. They speak and act as if they had nothing to do with the large deficits they now bemoan and say we will all be saved if only we return to the very policies that should already be discredited. The few exceptions to this rule — Bruce Bartlett and Richard Posner, the authors of two bravely dissident books, come to mind — find themselves excommunicated from the conservative movement.”

Until very recently – the Massachusetts vote, etc – I’d have dismissed this lack of contrition, this pig-headedness, this wilful “we were right and we’re not sorry”, as the surest way for the Republicans to keep themselves out of high office for a long time. As Finkelstein argues, all of this is about the Republicans choosing to listen to themselves, not the electorate, who they are convinced can be very wrong. But if the Democrats can lose in Massachusetts, may be, an unrepentant Republican Party can return to the White House.

As Mandelson and Cameron both understand, the perception that the Conservatives have not changed is a real threat to their return to government. The credit crunch has complicated this rebranding exercise, though this exercise is still of great political significance. I’ve always tended to assume that the same rules apply to the Republicans: They won’t win without independents and they won’t gain the support of such voters without demonstrating that they have listened to them by showing contrition for the things that are perceived to have gone wrong under Dubya.

Yet now I am starting to wonder and worry whether the same rules do actually apply to the Republicans. America is, famously, different. It is the right nation - there are deep reasons why, for example, as touched upon above, Reagan is revered in the US as Thatcher is reviled in the UK – and, perhaps, its slight turn to the left under Obama (always more a rejection of Dubya than a convinced liberalisation) may prove temporary. It gets frighteningly easier and easier to imagine Gideon Rachman’s dystopian dream of a President Palin – the unapologetic pitbull - becoming real 2012.

Where would the world be then? Wishing that it and President Obama had acted differently? If not now, when?