
 |
|
May 13, 2013
David G. Savage: Church-state, literally? Supreme Court weighing public school graduation in a church
May 10, 2013
Rabbi Berel Wein: Be all that you should be
May 8, 2013
Peter Ford: Why China is welcoming both Israel's Netanyahu and Palestinians' Abbas
Warren Richey: Obama administration quietly backs out of appeal over new contraceptive mandate
Fred Weir: At Kerry-Putin meeting, US-Russia relations thaw --- a tad
The Kosher Gourmet by Leela Cyd Ross : Almost too pretty to eat, this colorful salad with Sicilian inspiration will tickle the taste buds and delight your visual sensibility
May 6, 2013
May 3, 2013
Kids, kittens the Same? With employee perks at struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! it's hard to tell
Sandy Kleffman: Artificial kidney offers hope to patients tethered to a dialysis machine
April 29, 2013
Roy Gutman: Poland's new Jewish museum celebrates life, doesn't revisit Holocaust
Mark Clayton: Terrorism in America: Is US missing a chance to learn from failed plots?
Kim Murphy: Boston Bomber's 'Svengali' Revealed
Pete Spotts: Tiny satellites + cellphones = cheaper 'eyes in the sky' for NASA
April 26, 2013
Clifford D. May: Defense in the Age of Jihadist Terrorism
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: How to feel your best -- with plenty of energy, a healthy weight and optimal mental and physical function -- without driving yourself batty
April 24, 2013
|
| |
Jewish World Review
August 27, 2009
/ 7 Elul 5769
Obama's Lyrical Left Struggles With Liberalism
By
Michael Barone
| 
|
|
|
|
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
As it becomes clear that a large percentage of Americans are rebelling against the prospect of a larger, more intrusive government, including many whom Democratic politicians assume would see themselves as beneficiaries of government spending and activity, debate among supporters of the Democratic agenda has focused on tactics.
Should the Democrats have depicted their health care program as providing security rather than cutting costs? Should Barack Obama insist that the "government option" is essential, or should he let that provision drop by the wayside? Was it a mistake to whip the cap-and-trade bill through the House in June rather than focus on health care? Should the president have crafted a smaller stimulus bill that pumped money into the economy more rapidly?
Those are all good questions, but they do not go to the heart of the matter. The problem the Democrats face is not just a question of this administration's tactics or those of the Clinton administration in 1993-94. It is, I think, more deep-seated a basic contradiction in what the party and the liberal movement stand for.
"War," wrote the liberal intellectual Randolph Bourne in 1918, "is the health of the state." Bourne, a writer for The New Republic and the Atlantic who died in the influenza epidemic later that year at 32, is mostly forgotten today. But in the second decade of the last century, he was a leading member of what author Edward Abrahams dubbed "the lyrical left," a group of intellectuals whose attitudes are not unfamiliar today.
Bourne celebrated the diversity of immigrants in America and opposed their assimilation into a single national culture. He opposed the racial segregation of the South ("the least defensible thing in the world"). He hoped that industrial workers would produce bottom-up reform of economic institutions through something like community organizing.
And unlike most New Republic writers of the time, he vehemently opposed U.S. entry into World War I not out of pacifism, but for fear of what it would do to the country. "All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offense or a military defense," he wrote in 1918, "and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's business and attitudes and opinions."
This was a perceptive description of the dominant trend of the unlyrical warlike left of the first two-thirds of the 20th century. In World War I, the Wilson administration nationalized the railroads and shipyards; in World War II, the Roosevelt administration mobilized 16 million into the military (the proportionate equivalent today would be 35 million) and commandeered much of the private-sector economy.
The Woodrow Wilson war policies provided a blueprint for much of the New Deal. The Franklin D. Roosevelt war policies were a template for the makeshift welfare state of the postwar years. Lyndon Johnson declared a "war" on poverty. It was even clearer that war was the health of the state in Britain, where voters rejected the welfare state in the 1930s depression and embraced it after the experience of wartime mobilization and controls.
But in the late 1960s, the American left started going Bourne's way. They rejected Lyndon Johnson's "guns and better" and renounced the Vietnam War. They cheered rather than objected when Richard Nixon abolished the military draft. They supported civil rights and tolerance of diverse lifestyles and multiculturalist responses to immigration. They opposed military action in Grenada, in the Gulf War and in Iraq, and oppose it today in Afghanistan.
Barack Obama is very much part of this lyrical left. He seems to have absorbed its tenets somewhere between Punahou Academy and Columbia University. He never considered military service despite the large presence of the military in his native Hawaii. He left the business world and big law firms for community organizing.
The problem for Obama and America's lyrical left is that dovishness abroad and statism at home don't readily go together. Mobilization in a war effort, as Randolph Bourne taught, tends to create a frame of mind that welcomes regimentation under big government at home. Denigration of military discipline and tolerance of cultural diversity tend to create a frame of mind that resists government ukase and standardization. A big government president, Obama is learning, needs to be a war president first.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment by clicking here.
JWR contributor Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.
Michael Barone Archives
© 2009, Washington Examiner; DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
|
|

Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Jay Ambrose
Michael Barone
Barrywood
Lori Borgman
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Richard Z. Chesnoff
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
Christine Flowers
Frank J. Gaffney
Bernie Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Argus Hamilton
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Ron Hart
Nat Hentoff
A. Barton Hinkle
Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ch. Krauthammer
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Ann McFeatters
Dale McFeatters
Dana Milbank
Jeanne Moos
Dick Morris
Jim Mullen
Deroy Murdock
Judge A. Napolitano
Bill O'Reilly
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Star Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Sharon Randall
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Heather Robinson
Debra J. Saunders
Martin Schram
Greg Schwem
Culture Shlock
David Shribman
Roger Simon
Lenore Skenazy
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Ben Stein
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Dan Thomasson
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
ZeitGeist
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Lisa Benson
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
John Branch
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
Matt Davies
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Glenn Foden
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Walt Handelsman
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holbert
David Horsey
Lee Judge
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Jimmy Margulies
Jack Ohman
Michael Ramirez
Rob Rogers
Drew Sheneman
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Scott Stantis
Danna Summers
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters
Dan Wasserman

Tech Q&A
Mr. Know-It-All
Ask Doctor K
Richard Lederer
Frugal Living
On Nutrition
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
|