My friend Benjamin Gorman on his blog Unapologetic Conjecture recently sought answers about why conservatives don't like Obama. It began when he was looking at a selection of anti-Obama bumper stickers at Cafe Press, and he became disheartened. It led him to write a piece asking, "Why does right hate Obama so much? In reply, I wrote a rather lengthy response in his comments section, most significantly the following:
Obama… doesn't believe in American exceptionalism. He thinks that Americans loving America is just like Peruvians loving Peru or Jordanians loving Jordan or whatever. He regards it as a particular expression of a global desire. This is contrary to how the average American regards America. When I read Dreams from my Father, the one thing I was looking for above all else was that he loved and respected this country and that he believed in it. I found nothing of the sort, and generally only the opposite…
Next, can you point to anything he has done that doesn't move the country's baseline policy to the left? You seem to be looking at all policies against a standard of Sweden, and if we don't reach a full mark of Swedish policies, it's a policy to the right. You recently linked an article about the "fictional country" that American's want American to be like. What you're missing is this very simple idea:
The country that conservative American's want their country to be more like is the United States.
We're not looking across the ocean for a better model. We look internally to what we're doing right and we value what we're doing right, and our first concern is against new mistakes, especially those at the national level which are hardest to undo. No one in Europe has our commitments to free speech or to the right to bear arms, and given the Swiss minaret debacle or the French niqāb kerfuffle, Europe in general does not share our dedication to the free exercise of religion.
Looking at all of this, I'd turn your question around, but first I'd make one single acknowledgement for Obama: he gave the green light to an operation in Pakistan that brought about the death of Osama bin Laden. Credit where it's due, and it is due to both operations started by Bush but finished by Obama. That granted, tell me, what specific legislative accomplishments or executive initiatives has Obama pursued that make the country more like a conservative country than the one he inherited?
Others gave their own responses, and from the bulk of the replies, Gorman chose to follow up to the primary theme put forth by us (namely, that Obama denies American Exceptionalism) with this new entry on his blog.
The larger issue of what American Exceptionalism is or is not is a very important question, and I've decided to address that matter more extensively in a later blog entry. But there are a number of arguments he puts forward that I find to be flawed, and I'd like to address those here.
In asking what American Exceptionalism actually comprises, Benjamin Gorman goes through a series of aspects of the US and examines them by parts. The first follows my statement that Europe lacks our commitment to free speech and the right to bear arms. Let me make clear here that something widely appreciated by many on the right is that these two are virtually inseparable, as they stand together to establish above all else in the Bill of Rights that the individual is the sovereign and the Constitution derives its authority from We the People; this is in stark contrast to the idea—an idea held all-too-frequently these days—that the Constitution grants rights to the people. This is incorrect, and this understanding is easily clarified by reading the Declaration of Independence. The Bill of Rights merely acknowledges the existence of inalienable rights and makes explicit that it lacks the authority to grant the Federal government any power that would impinge upon these rights.
It is unfortunate that I need to make an explicit caveat: I'm not advocating arming against the state to any extent. This isn't about forming armed gangs modeled after the Montana Militia or the Minutemen. It's about the acceptance that the right to bear arms belongs as much to the average law-abiding citizen as it does to the state and its agents, as the state comprises such citizens. I do not suggest that a ban on handguns today will result in jackbooted thugs and concentration camps tomorrow any more than First Amendment advocates think banning Penthouse will result in state-run media requiring songs of praise to the Commander in Chief and re-education camps. Simply put, it doesn't matter how slippery the slope is; we have rights as citizens, and no governing body has any right to usurp such liberties.
For Obama, it's clear he's simply two-faced about the matter. Gorman writes:
On these grounds, I think Obama fares very well. Though he talked about closing background check loopholes to prevent the mentally ill from getting guns in the wake of the Gabrielle Gifford's shooting (any talk about guns from a Democrat raises red flags with some), he is also the first modern Democratic President, to my knowledge, to acknowledge the second amendment is an individual rather than a corporate right. That is huge, coming from a legal scholar who could tell you every argument from those who say it's a corporate right based on the placement of a comma, and who often avoids politically impossible questions by laying out both sides, slowly, methodically, until the questioner gives up. Obama went out on a limb to say that, angering some gun control folks on his left, and has expanded the right to carry guns into national parks (a particularly big deal in Alaska, where much of the state is National Parks and where you really want to be armed).
I find it quite amusing that Obama is assigned credit for allowing guns in National Parks. Among the matters of opposition to Obama, I directed him to an Op-Ed from George Will pointing to the problems of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare); in response, he asks, "Is it Obama's fault that Congress choose to pass a law that essentially gives law-making power to the Executive branch?" This is trying to have it both ways, crediting Obama with legislation he signs on the one hand while assigning blame to Congress on the other. If I were to put forward a simple litmus for the degree to which an executive bears credit/blame for a piece of legislation they signed, the simplest way would be to look at three things: 1) Did they campaign on the initiative being a priority? 2) Did they expend political capital in seeing the legislation passed? 3) Are they putting the legislation on their list of accomplishments and using it as a résumé item in subsequent campaigns? In the case of guns in National Parks, the decision came down from a lame-duck President Bush in December of 2008 that in January of 2009, guns would be allowed in parks. A Federal judge blocked the move, and a few months later Tom Coburn attached the law in as an amendment to a bill Democrats put forward to place restrictions on credit card companies, and it was the same bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had blocked Coburn from bringing to the floor a year earlier. Obama neither seeks nor deserves any credit for loaded guns being allowed in National Parks.
But getting beyond that, it's a lie to say that Obama believes in an individual right to bear arms (as opposed to a corporate right to bear arms). That doctrine came out of the combined rulings of Heller and McDonald. Obama is clearly on the record with support for both of those laws prior to the rulings. Obama's philosophy is very simple: say whatever you like, with no regard to how internally inconsistent it is. If someone wants a two-second sound bite, then make your sound bite match the status quo/most popular view. Then speak any number of platitudes that run entirely contrary to that ideal. Seeing as how the incorporation of the second amendment is the basis upon which the Heller and McDonald rulings shot down handgun bans in DC and Chicago, I cannot see how one can hold that he truly believed that the second amendment was an individual right while still supporting those bans.
I saw a similar manner regarding Obama's economic policies during the 2008 cycle. His campaign page opened by saying, "America's free market has been the engine of America's great progress," and then added in his details. The details included tax increases, wealth redistribution, more complicated additions to the tax code, opposition to WTO, NAFTA, and CAFTA, government intervention in worker transition and re-education, direct federal intervention into increased R&D, energy development, manufacturing expansion, agriculture, labor relations (siding with labor over management rather than acting as a neutral arbiter of disagreements), minimum wage increases, interjection into the housing market to further inflate prices and keep the bubble going, direct interjection into credit card interest rates, family medical leave and other federal interventions for family life.
Breaking it all down, there's virtually not a single issue left untouched wherein Obama wants to let the free market, the "engine of America's great progress," do its job. What it all boils down to is either:
1) Obama believes that the market has been the most important thing in making America progress but he wants to destroy America's progress
2) Obama doesn't believe in the market at all, and instead he thinks government intervention is the most important way to drive the economy, but he decided to drop a bald-faced lie about how he loves free market economics to throw off the scent of the commie-hounds.
For Obama's sake, I'll assume it's the latter and not the former, but that still leaves a president dedicated to making absolutely false statements that run antithetical to his actual positions.
And let's not even get into the hypocrisy, negligence, and reckless disregard of life and sovereignty behind the gunwalker debacle. Obama cannot be held accountable for rogue or illicit actions taken by individual members of his cabinet, assuming he identifies and punishes such abuses, but with regard to policy coming out of an executive branch organization, the buck stops at the Oval Office.
That's the president's position with gun control, where he gave platitudes to a ruling he couldn't change while supporting the laws that violate his stated position, and it's similar with free speech.
One must note that one of my predictions prior to his inauguration has come true in the form of botched Net Neutrality rules which basically gave the big telecom corporations everything they wanted and sacrificed true neutrality on the altar of progress. And then, of course, with the power to end the PATRIOT Act, not only did he decide not to end it, but he instead doubled-down by deciding no one can get on a plane without permitting their genitals to be either groped or photographed. I imagine that if one suggested to George Washington that Martha couldn't get on a ship unless some stranger felt her up or at least peeped on her naked form, George would probably shoot that person in the face, and no one would have questioned it. But apparently unreasonable is the new reasonable in this day and age.
But wait—you're saying Obama didn't sign the original PATRIOT Act, Bush did! This brings me back to the initial concern I voiced in reading Gorman's original post. I wrote, "I see this request for information to be somewhat disingenuous, as you're clearly looking to point to Bush about this or that. Many of us who dislike Obama's policies had similar contempt for those of Bush." And while I had my misgivings about leveling an accusation in the face of an outward call for civility and fair discussion, it seems I was quite vindicated, for as much as Gorman has chosen to defend Obama, he instead did far more to attack a hodge-podge army of strawmen dressed up as the stereotypical Bush-loving neoconservative. Among the things he decides to attack are the opposition to same-sex marriage in the country. I have a hard time focusing that blame on the conservative camp when people like Ron Paul, Ahnold Schwarzenegger, scores of my libertarian-leaning friends and family members, and yours truly all take a stated position supporting the legalization and state recognition of same-sex marriage, while Obama is clearly on the record opposing it. Seeing as how California was carried by Obama so handily in the 2008 election that the news networks called it with 0% of precincts reporting, it surely can't be simply Republicans that are keeping same-sex marriage illegal; that same election cycle brought California the passage of Proposition 8, after all.
Gorman then moves into a variety of other social issues. By far, the most offensive and intellectually dishonest portion regards his accusation that "modern conservatives" support slavery and oppose the 13th amendment. I'd be amusing were it not so tragic that the terms "conservative" and "Republican" are used interchangeably when a Republican supports a large government program like the EPA or Medicare Part D, but when it gets to a policy respected by the vast majority of Americans today, Gorman not only assumes that credit as part of his own ideology, but by so taking it precludes it from the rest.
Gorman suggests that my statement that conservatives' "first concern is against new mistakes, especially those at the national level which are hardest to undo," indicates that we are opposed to things like the abolition of slavery. This is both disingenuous and specious; slavery was the mistake, and the mistake of slavery was manifest, not hypothetical. It was known from the time of the founding that it was the most divisive issue and the greatest threat to the union, and this is observation was expanded upon in the antebellum period by many people, including Alexis de Tocqueville. Republicans, in their pursuit of liberty and decentralization of power, sought to grant enfranchisement to all Americans, regardless of race.
Though many modern progressives seek to take credit for the work of Lincoln's Republicans, I'd say that the Republican Party maintains a legitimate claim as the party of Lincoln and of the 13th Amendment, as modern conservatives define their values as the pursuit of *individual liberty*. The founding idea behind individual liberty is that all individuals have the same rights, and that these rights are not owed to groups or collectives to be divvied up. One place where this is evident is in the subject of abortion, another social issue that Gorman drags into the debate. As was the case for abolitionists, the liberty extended to slaves greatly out-weighed the loss of "popular sovereignty" held by slave-owners. If you believe blacks are human beings entitled to all the rights and dignities of whites, the case here is undeniable. Similarly, if you believe that a fetus is a human being entitled to all the rights and dignities of those already born, this becomes a case where liberty stands firmly and undeniably on the side of abolition of abortion.
While there's much to be said on this matter, it's at this point I need to simply let the issue drop. If we were being intellectually honest, this matter would be a philosophical question on the moment of inception of sacred human life rather than a political pissing contest. Despite my agreement with the Roe v. Wade ruling, my support for safe and legal abortion, and my support for widely available contraception, there are some who would vilify me for any statements that might even closely approximate any argument to stem even in the slightest a woman's right to choose. This debate is a case in point; Gorman doesn't even acknowledge the perspective that a fetus is a sacred human life, much less counter it. He uses this issue as a shibboleth, or some blunt tool for directing scorn.
This is shown when he moves on to decry that Republicans oppose medical marijuana. Has Obama done anything to remove Federal pressure from impinging upon the rights of states to set their own laws in this regard? Of course not. It's just another litmus test. The only public declarations about the War on Drugs I've heard from him regard Federal sentencing guidelines for crack vs. cocaine be evened out because the base drug is the same.
(That's a ludicrous argument, by the way. In terms of receptor interaction, heroin is essentially identical to morphine. Bayer tried to improve the efficacy of morphine the same way they improved the efficacy of salicylic acid; acetylate it, and it will cross the blood-brain barrier more effectively. In essence, regardless of a slight alteration to the molecule itself, the differences between heroin and morphine are exclusively in their pharmacokinetics. Similarly, the difference between freebase cocaine and powder cocaine are in the pharmacokinetics, and anyone who has spent much time working in an E.R. will tell you that the pharmacokinetic differences make morphine and heroin very different, just as crack and cocaine are—in their impacts and effects—very different.)
The unfortunate truth for Gorman and the rest of Obama's supporters is that it's always easier to deride than to defend an incumbent. As soon as they start enacting policies and hit the wall of limitations brought about by separation of powers—or, as soon as they need to make good on promises made to their financiers—it becomes obvious that all of the rhetoric was worthless, and that the policies you'd hoped for are not the ones you'll be getting.
But what I find so interesting about the case Gorman makes is that he actually tries to promote Obama's double-speaking as an advantage, saying that Obama has strengthened our position in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict by giving the Israelis a minor, meaningless toss under the bus. Somehow, we empower our country by these futile and ineffective attempts to appease despotic regimes and by insulting our allies.
Obama took the same tack with the U.K., endorsing a call to open negotiations between Argentina and the U.K. regarding the Falkland Islands. Bear in mind that this is an island populated by British colonizers nearly 200 years ago, and maintaining a solidly pro-U.K. majority. This is also an island that suffered losses to Argentine aggression that sought to take by force the region over which no living Argentine could pretend to have any legitimate claim. Argentina is a violent aggressor trying to take lands by force, and the U.K. has no more reason to sit down and discuss the Falkland Islands with Argentina than they should be discussing the cessation of the Shetland Islands with the People's Republic of China.
And if you'd like a dose of irony, this came within a week of Obama's visit to Puerto Rico. Would he be endorsing a call for the US to sit down and have talks with Spain on returning them Puerto Rico (and maybe Florida and the US west of the Mississippi watershed to boot)?
Yet again, Gorman regards this double-speak as a strength, as we can easily abuse our longest standing allies because they are our longest standing allies and because they need us, and maybe we get some bonus points from random countries run by despots. Our strongest allies are our strongest allies, so we can kick them in the ribs a few dozen times and they'll still come back. That's called diplomacy, it would seem, and apparently diplomacy increases our 'soft power.' I'm guessing 'soft power' is what you exercise when you 'lead from the back'..
Regarding wealth, Gorman links a graph that shows the GDP of the United States as a percentage of total global economic output, and declares that Clinton was great. There are two major problems with this tack. The first is that the link shows both nominal and real (PPP) GDP. In that great ascent under Clinton, the real change was negligible. Perhaps that should have been our first indication that the dot com bubble was a bubble, no? Even still, Clinton isn't Obama, and that's a diversion. The next big problem is in looking at economic progress solely in terms of percentages of the whole. As conservatives understand, economics is not a zero sum game, and wealth is created. The rise of emerging economies in China and India will reduce our production as a percentage of the whole even if we maintain growth at a steady clip; why would I have a problem with that? I begrudge nothing of any developing nations that better themselves through economic development. All I care about is growth in real GDP, which tends to show great stability irrespective of whether the Oval Offis is held by Democrats or Republicans. The graph is cherry-picked to make a specious point.
Gorman addresses the idea of "military might" and dismisses the differences between Republicans and Democrats with regard to their use of the military. That seems an easy case to make, given that Obama maintained Bush's Secretary of Defense, and later implemented a surge in Afghanistan he said wouldn't work (but did work) in Iraq. Here again, Gorman blurs the distinction between conservatives, Republicans, and libertarians in a manner convenient for his purpose. Republican Congressman Ron Paul, with a clear-stated and unwavering opposition to the War on Drugs far more in-line with liberty as Gorman regards it in terms of medical marijuana, doesn't count as a Republican or a conservative with regard to that issue, but apparently his military isolationism becomes significant with regards to the party and ideology at large. My guess is that Gorman makes this case for isolationism due to the decision of several members of the GOP in Congress challenging Obama's action in Libya. To that, I'd say that cultivating military might need not entail unnecessary displays of military might, but far more importantly, the GOP has a far better track record of keeping its military activities within proper constitutional constraints:
This is not the first unconstitutional war in American history. Truman's Korean war and Clinton's Kosovo war and his invasion of Haiti were all waged without congressional authorization (the Vietnam War was authorized by the Southeast Asia Resolution or "Gulf of Tonkin" Resolution). In contrast, Ronald Reagan obtained a congressional joint resolution authorizing his brief intervention in Lebanon (September 29, 1983), George Herbert Walker won a congressional joint resolution in favor of the Gulf War on January 12, 1991, while his son George W. Bush similarly obtained congressional authorization for the Afghan War (September 14, 2001) and the Iraq War (October 16, 2002).
From Michael Lind at Salon
Benjamin Gorman ultimately concludes that American exceptionalism is tautological, concluding—as Obama does—that if the holders of American Exceptionalism were Greek it'd be Greek Exceptionalism, or French Exceptionalism in France. This misses the point entirely, and brings me back to a point that Barack Obama recounts hearing from his extended family in Dreams From My Father: "If everyone is family, no one is family." Every country cannot be exceptional, or exceptionality has no meaning. I don't care if Sarkozy thinks America is exceptional, or if Jintao thinks America is exceptional, or if Chavez thinks America is exceptional. I'm not asking any of them to lead this country. If the head of the Smith family cares first and foremost about the Smiths while the head of the Rodriquez family cares about the Rodriguezes and the head of the Kim family cares about the Kim family, but the head of the Siegel family cares about all families equally, in the end this means that the Siegel family ends up at the bottom of the aggregate list of concerns. I'm not suggesting the Smiths and the Kims need to be at one another's throats any more than I'm saying that Putin's concern for Russia means he's at war with China and Norway; nor am I opposed to charitable works within our means. What I require is that your priorities align with the requirements of the office you're elected to fill.
In regard to my statement that the United States does not look "across the ocean for a better model," Gorman replies that the idea of 'American Exceptionalism' is credited to a person 'across the ocean' (Tocqueville) and that the very idea of democracy comes from people who lived across the ocean. He misses my meaning. I do not suggest, nor have I ever said, that the U.S. could not look to other countries for ideas. All Americans look around for better ideas, from the Founders who compared our early situation to that of The Netherlands, to even the GOP Presidential Primary this week where the very conservative candidate Herman Cain invoked Chile's experience in privatizing their equivalent to Social Security. To be sure, one of the most important reasons that many of us defend Federalism and a division between state and federal control is that it allows greater experimentation in order to see the effects of new policies, while limiting the damage that may come from new changes.
When I stated that in reading Obama's memoir I sought love and respect of America and her greatness, Gorman turns this into a criticism of any and all criticism of the United States. This is a strawman argument; I do not require perfection. As our president agrees, we must not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Indeed, all striving to make this union more perfect requires critical self-reflection—up to and including critical self-reflection on our electoral politics, the values we act upon in electing a president, and the quality of the policies initiated by that president. This is precisely why I criticize Obama just as I criticized Bush. After all, a perfect nation would have a perfect president and a perfect electorate that always chose the best person to make the best polices. Conservatives and liberals alike know that that is a fairy tale perspective.
Which is, again, why I make the distinction of a model versus an idea. A model has its own dynamics and mechanics and is designed to be taken in whole. Ideas are constituent parts which may be extracted and extrapolated. I reject the notion that there is some other state that can be looked at as a model for superior governance all around, especially in the absence of the United States as-we-know-it. As our markets drive medical advancement and innovation and our military hegemony subsidizes the security of the rest of the first world, any attempt to regard another nation as being superior in its entirety is a farce. Our adoption wholesale of the policies and organization of any other nation would alter that other nation into something else as they reacted by necessity to any major change in the role of these United States on the global stage.
We make the mistake of conflating bad times with our nation and good times with those of others. Most every abuse in the history of this nation existed in most other nations, at least within 50 years, one way or the other. All great nations—and there are certainly many great nations—advance through the ages to better themselves. What I resent is looking only at the mote in our own eye while ignoring the beams in the eyes of others. I have no qualms with apologizing to a specific aggrieved party that we have wronged, but no nations I can name collectively fall in this category, and as such, I see no head of state worthy of receiving an apology from the American President, save a few where a return apology is clearly in order.
I don't 'hate' Obama. Hate is a very strong word and I reserve it for people who really deserve it. Then again, I also don't use bumper stickers to express my ideas, and ultimately I feel directed to confront a strawman argument. But I didn't vote for Obama, and I'm hoping that someone gets the GOP nod that would be a better president than Obama is. To that extent, the question is certainly directed at me. The final note for President Obama that I need to raise is the direct attacks on huge cross-sections of the American public. The best known is the 'bitter clingers' attack, launched not at republicans, but at rural Pennsylvanians being accused of racism for choosing Hillary Clinton over him in the primary campaign season. It doesn't matter if you think this statement was a Kinsley Gaffe or not. It was incredibly insulting, and barring irregular circumstances, you should expect a person so insulted to return contempt. Instead of backing away from that tired accusation of "That's racist!" (used so indiscriminately these days), Obama decided to double-down by stealing a Colbert line and deciding once again to caricaturize his political enemies. Hitting closer to home (due to my wife's profession), in his push to get PPACA through, Obama accused surgeons of deliberately bilking the system by needlessly performing amputations. This is an accusation of the most egregious order, and it leaves me nearly dumbstruck that anyone can't see why people feel such contempt for Obama. I'm left asking Benjamin Gorman this: if John Boehner had publicly stated that we need to break up the teachers' unions because they're just havens for child molesters to collude, what manner of anti-Boehner bumper stickers would you be looking to buy?
