American liberalism has two faces. One is the face that Democratic politicians wear when they’re on a political upswing, laying out big plans and sketching grand ambitions, with the wind in their sails and the country behind them. It’s an optimist’s face, a dreamer’s visage – think F.D.R. beaming with the cigarette holder between his teeth, Bobby Kennedy in shirtsleeves on the ’68 campaign trail. It’s a face that’s “in favor of a lot of things” and “against mighty few,” as Lyndon Johnson put it while coasting to re-election in 1964. It’s a face with nothing to fear but fear itself.
Pool photo by Ron SachsPresident Obama at the American Society of News Editors convention in Washington on April 3.There’s another face, though, that comes out when the debate turns to the difficulty of paying for the “lot of things” that F.D.R. and L.B.J. committed the government to doing. This liberalism fears a lot of things – Republicans, austerity, hard choices and change of almost any sort. It’s the liberalism that cries “Social Darwinism!” when conservatives suggest any alteration to the existing welfare state, that paints even modest reductions in government spending (or, indeed, reductions in the rate of increase in government spending) as the first step toward a Dickensian dystopia of “prisons and workhouses,” and that portrays the Democratic Party as the only thing standing between Americans and a Hobbesian war of all against all.
Barack Obama wore the first face during his campaign for the presidency in 2008. He ran on hope and change, not fear and loathing. He attacked cynicism more vigorously than he attacked conservatism (he even had kind words for Ronald Reagan), and painted special interests rather than Republicans as the main obstacle to the common good. He promised a chicken in every pot, an electric car in every driveway, the same health care plan for anyone who was happy with the status quo and a new plan for anyone who wasn’t. He didn’t just look to liberalism’s past accomplishments and promise to preserve them; he looked to the future and said “yes, we can.”
Three bruising years later, though, the president will be running for re-election on the liberalism of fear. Whether in his slashing attack last week on the “radical vision” of the House Republican budget, his finger-wagging at the Supreme Court over health care reform, or his administration’s transparently calculated outrage over the supposed Republican “war on women,” the incumbent is building a case for re-election that rests almost exclusively on the evils of the opposition. His campaign is likely to be a monument to what George Will has dubbed a “reactionary liberalism,” which defends the design of existing programs and the privileges of Democratic interest groups as doggedly as any monarchist defended the ancien régime.
In parts of the conservative press, the president’s increasingly scorched-earth rhetoric is being treated as a sign of his desperation. By resorting so quickly to partisan demagoguery, this argument goes, Obama is effectively conceding that he has nothing else to run on – that his policies are unpopular, that his agenda has largely been rejected, and there is no positive case for a second term that any swing voter is likely to be persuaded by.
There is truth to this: Obama’s legislative achievements are strikingly unpopular. His second-term agenda is vague to the point of nonexistent. And he no doubt would have preferred to run a re-election campaign on a more uplifting theme than the promise to stand athwart the Republicans yelling “stop” – especially given that his general-election opponent is now guaranteed to be Mitt Romney rather than the more easily demonizable Rick Santorum.
But elections won on fear count just as much as elections won on hope. It was fear that gave George W. Bush the edge over John Kerry in 2004, and it was fear that saved the Bill Clinton from political extinction. (Clinton’s rightward pivot helped him win re-election, but his willingness to savage the Dole-Gingrich Republicans on Medicare was just as crucial to his victory.)
What’s more, the politics of fear offers particular benefits for left-of-center politicians, because its inherent small-c conservatism – vote for me if you want to Keep Things As They Are, a message with particular appeal – provides a way to overcome the built-in disadvantage of running for office as a Democrat in a country where more voters identify as conservatives then liberals.
All of which is to say that Obama’s strategy may be cynical, but it isn’t necessarily desperate. (Indeed, it’s hard to call a politician desperate when he’s leading in the polls.) And it won’t be enough for Romney to point out that his opponent is running as a divider, not a uniter. In presidential politics, division often works, and it may well work again — unless the Republican nominee can present himself as something other than the liberal caricature of a heartless conservative, and ease the fears that this White House is determined to exploit.
