In a way, I believed Obama's campaign slogan of Change We Can Believe In. I thought Obama's and the larger Democratic victories were the beginning of a new center/left domestic consensus or hegemony in the US. Seeing the degree to which the Obama Administration and our national party leadership have shied away from rolling back Reaganism (neoliberalism) I am reexamining my previous position.
How does this make Obama like Nixon? Follow me below the fold.
I see things in terms of eras of domestic hegemonies. I see FDR ushering in an center/left dominated era that lasted from 1932-1968, where a conservative Eisenhower expanded social security. I see Reagan brining about a center/right era from 1980-2008 where a liberal Clinton gave us NAFTA. The period with Nixon, Ford and Carter represents an interregnum transitioning between these domestic hegemonies.
Nixon, a strong right-winger, still hung on to large parts of the old order: the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency; his (failed) proposal to replace the welfare system with a guaranteed annual income by way of a negative income tax; normalization of diplomatic relations with China and his détente with the Soviet Union. Noam Chomsky has called Nixon, "in many respects the last liberal president."
It looks like Obama is holding onto the old order in a similar way. If I am correct here, that means we are in a interregnum between the neoliberalism of the past and a revived social democratism of the future.
It seems unlikely that the change the we can believe in will come from Obama. He is very much administering from the center/left and that is kind of the problem. The center, certainly the Washington consensus to be sure, shifted so much to the right during the past thirty-one years.
And that is how Obama is like Nixon. Nixon marked the end of a the New Deal era but not the beginning of a new era. Obama marks the end of Reagan's neoliberal era but not the beginning of a new era.
Delving more into the analysis will provide us some clues as to the future: the previous two changes in domestic hegemony occurred differently. Whereas FDR hit the ground running after Hoover's defeat in '32, it took twelve years between Nixon's victory in '68 and Reagan's in '80. [I should point out, though, that while FDR and the Dems really started talking the talk right away, it actually took until '36 for FDR to really defeat the old order with the whole Supreme Court 'packing' battle...] Perhaps the level of dislocation and suffering of the Depression is the primary reason for this rapid change from the old to the new at that time. That is to say, many Americans today have not suffered enough to realize there is a class war and they are loosing.
If that is the case, it will take a bit longer for a real change to occur. Regardless, I think it inevitable. While I am highly resistant to making such predictions, the demographic change occurring as we speak makes it all but inevitable. The browning of America makes the change not a matter of if, but when.
Seeing as how it took twelve years to bring in Reagan and seeing has how the economic and societal malaise of our time is broadly similar as that of the late 1960s, it is probable that the it will take a similar amount of time this go round.
** WARNING: Fanciful Speculation Ahead!****
So, it may go like this: Obama gets re-elected in 2012. The House stays Republican. The Senate ... ?
A Republican get elected in 2016. In 2018, Dems shift largely left of center.
And in 2020, we get President Grayson. ;)