Lately I haven’t been blogging. Meanwhile, Barack Obama hasn’t been Presidenting – and he gets paid for that.
A possible explanation is that he’s read Dickens and recalls that Mr. Micawber ended his days quite happily and prosperously in Australia. Something did turn up after all. Maybe the same good fortune will follow President Wilkins Obama: The budget deficit will miraculously shrink. Businessmen will shrug off taxes and regulations to create goods, services and jobs. Peace will envelop the world, and Islamofascists will lie down with the Jews. A kind of worldwide National Siblinghood Week.
Presidential drifting seems to puzzle many people. They devise theories to unriddle it: He’s allergic to making decisions. He’s a puppet of the government labor unions. He’s lying low till last November’s election results wear off. He’s smarter than any of us, and masterful inactivity is really a cunning plan. I’d like to suggest a simpler, Ockhamite hypothesis: Barack Obama lets the winds carry him along, because he likes the direction they’re blowing.
Sure, conservatives see disaster looming, but don’t we always? From a progressive point of view, are matters all that dire?
Take the federal budget, for instance. The President’s latest proposal aims eventually to equalize revenues (at a level about 25 percent above the historical average) with outflows, disregarding interest on the National Debt. Anybody who’s ever had a credit card recognizes that practice as the gateway to bankruptcy. But bankruptcy isn’t the same for sovereign nations as for you and me. If/when the United States defaults, creditors won’t repossess the Great Plains. Instead, whoever is then in power will decide which obligations get paid and which get stiffed. It will be a moment for rearranging wealth and restructuring the entire American economy. If one believes that central planning by experts is the key to fairness and prosperity, while free markets are a barbarous relic, a crisis for U.S. bonds is not to be wasted.
There’s a risk, admittedly, that the “wrong” sorts will be charge when interest payments overwhelm the fisc, but the President’s strategy maximizes progressive political prospects. As the budgetary situation grows worse, the steps needed to forestall default will become more and more drastic and thus harder and harder to sell to the electorate. If Paul Ryan’s roadmap makes politicians nervous today, imagine what the equivalent will look like ten or fifteen years from now. I imagine we’ll all be Micawbers then.
The President’s passivity abroad is even more readily comprehensible. It’s conventional wisdom among progressives that America is widely and rightly hated by the rest of the world, and that our only proper stance is to sink humbly to our knees and beg forgiveness. The Obama White House reportedly is quite open about the joys of guiding a shrinking superpower.
There could, in fact, be intention rather than sheer incompetence behind the Administration’s most egregious misstep: declaring that the buffoonish tyrant Qaddafi “must go”, then making only the feeblest efforts to push him out the door. When you shoot at a king, you must kill him. If the President had no intention of acting, he should have kept silent. Now, if Qaddafi survives, as the Administration’s top intelligence official foresees, America will be not just a “weak horse” but, in the eyes of much of the world, a dead mule. On the other hand, if the rebels somehow topple the tyrant, they will have not a scintilla of reason to feel grateful to America.
That sounds bad, but isn’t there more than a sliver of sunshine if one shares the progressive daydream? America is powerful, because it has, by a huge margin, the world’s largest economy and strongest armed forces. What makes that power usable, though, is credibility and prestige. If no one believes that American forces will be deployed, the only way to win an unresolvable conflict will be to deploy them, no matter how small the objective. Once we reach the point where our choice is between perpetual wars and retreat into an isolationist shell, there will be no more hawks. In short, by being ineffectual today, Mr. Obama can render his successors ineffectual tomorrow.
He can also foster a trend that seems dear to progressive hearts: the reemergence of Islam. The alliance between Islamic supremacists and the Western Left is bizarre but understandable. Once America has withdrawn from the world, political and social arrangements elsewhere won’t be a progressive concern. What matters is that Islamic supremacism is an ideology that can rally the Third World and enable it to maintain its independence against any future resurgence of Western imperialism. A future George W. Bush won’t be able to pick off an isolated Saddam Hussein, nor will America be able to find allies in the dar-al-Islam. As for that imperial outpost in Tel-Aviv, it will fall before the united Moslem peoples.
That Barack Obama is, in reality, so foresighted and devious may seem improbable, but the worst of this speculation is that his state of mind doesn’t matter. Whether he is shrewd or inept, the consequences are the same. Today’s progressives are too bitter and misanthropic to feel happy, but, if they could see clearly through their anger, they would be smiling broadly nowadays instead of working themselves into a paranoid lather about Scott Walker and the Koch brothers.
Comments