Thomas Frank’s latest column for Salon is a perfect example of the kind of leftist anti-establishmentarianism that I always rail against. President Obama is faulted for nothing more than his willingness and success in propping up a government and a financial system that is rotten to the core and should have been left to die. He promised change and delivered stability. Nothing he did was good enough. His health care plan is inadequate; his stimulus package was inadequate; his regulation of Wall Street was inadequate; his change of U.S. foreign policy was inadequate. And these reforms weren’t lacking simply because he didn’t push a little harder to get a little more. They were lacking because they didn’t totally uproot our institutions and turn them all into something fundamentally distinct from what they had been. Never mind that Obama never promised the kind of hope and change that Mr. Frank wants to see, or that a financial collapse in September of 2008 upended Obama’s plans for his presidency. If Obama points at congressional Republicans to explain why he didn’t do more, it’s a cop out.
From a progressive point of view, the changes we’ve seen under Obama are inadequate, but this isn’t because Obama wasn’t bold enough or effective enough. It’s because people who disagree with us have a lot of power. For the most part, Obama didn’t promise us more than the system can deliver. I have medical insurance now that I can afford. Is it inadequate? Compared to what?
For someone like Mr. Frank, who really does understand the conservative movement, it’s amazing that he is so dismissive of their capacity to screw this country up. The following is astonishing:
Demonizing the right will also allow the Obama legacy team to present his two electoral victories as ends in themselves, since they kept the White House out of the monster’s grasp—heroic triumphs that were truly worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Does Mr. Frank really not want to contemplate what a McCain/Palin administration would have meant for the country and the world? Does he think a Romney/Ryan administration would have done anything about the price of a college education or rising income inequality? One of the most obvious political truisms in existence is that Obama deserves a prize simply for winning and saving us from a fate worse than hell. An end in itself? That’s exactly what Obama’s victories represent. Why deny it?
What percentage of the people does Mr. Frank think voted for Obama because they expected him to completely transform our political system and all our core institutions? How does he interpret the backlash of the 2010 midterms, if not as a rebuke of too much disruption to those self-same institutions? You can dismiss the 2010 electoral temper tantrum as an exercise in Know-Nothing stupidity, but you can’t deny that it happened and had massive consequences for Obama’s presidency. If you want to rail against the people, go ahead and rail against them. If you want to rail against the system, go right ahead. But don’t confuse the people and the system with the man in the Oval Office. He has a job to do, and that job comes with massive constraints. A different, whiter, president might have had a little more leeway here and there, but part of the hope and change we wanted to see was that America is now a place where a half-Kenyan, socialist, mixed-race, community organizer from an urban black congregation can get elected president and act mostly like any other president would.
Where the powers that be have allowed it, like on gay rights, the progress has been astounding. On things like Gitmo and climate change, they’ve erected an unmovable wall. So it goes.
If 2010 had never happened and Obama had been free to let his freak flag fly, people like Mr. Frank would be writing the exact same column, with the only difference being the particulars of their grievances.
This is America. It’s not a progressive country, yet.
