Category: Barack Obama

Michael Lind, who I always find worth reading, argues that Obama’s liberalism is timid, compared not only to FDR and LBJ, but to Eisenhower and Nixon. Why? Because those guys were in office before the neoliberal dogma took hold which demands that even public goods should be provided by the private sector. Instead of this faux-privatization (often favored by various conservative and libertarian think tanks), they thought that public goods should be provided by … the public sector!

It’s not necessary to nudge the Obama administration leftward until it arrives at socialism. When it comes to the public provision of public goods, Eisenhower Republicanism would be just fine.

Read the rest here.

I’m not sure I agree with all of Lind’s arguments, but surely, in light of some recent rhetoric from the Right, he’s correct about this:

Once upon a time in the United States, public goods — from retirement security and energy research to public roads — were provided by the government and paid for by taxes. As late as the Nixon administration, the provision of public goods by government was considered perfectly compatible with a robust market economy by so-called Modern Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon as well as New Deal Democrats like Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. In the intervening 40 years, however, free-market fundamentalists of the Chicago School have managed to change the debate, redefining “socialism” to mean not only public ownership of the means of production, but also public provision of public goods.

Conservatives have struggled mightily to depict pure laissez-faire as the only genuine alternative to a command economy. This seemed to be bolstered by the end of the Cold War, which, in the minds of many, permanently discredited “socialism,” and by the apparent success of neoliberal globalization. But for a long time, including during most of the Cold War, the consensus in the U.S. was more or less in favor of a mixed economy, with public provision of goods that people thought, for a variety of reasons, should be “de-commodified” (this could include not only public goods properly speaking, but retirement and welfare benefits, health care, etc.). It’s hard to see why events have discredited the mixed economy, or even its more left-wing cousin social democracy, and, if anything, they might be positioned for a resurgence.