Change I still believe in

As both sides gear up for tax-and-spending battles at the edge of the fiscal...slope, and as Obama quite noisily proclaims that public opinion is on his side with regard to raising taxes on the top 2%, I want to repost my best recent attempt to understand Obama's current stated theory of how 'change' gets done. Hint: it's not a matter of trying to sway public opinion -- Obama is as aware as Brendan Nyhan that that's a futile enterprise. It's a matter of deploying public opinion that's already on his side -- as he did with some modest success in 2012.  Here's the argument, engaged (one-sidedly, natch) with Ezra Klein six weeks ago.

Sept. 21, 2012

Ezra Klein, noting that Obama has recently revamped the way he talks about "change," attempts a massive debunk.  Obama is now claiming that he's learned, "you can't change Washington from the inside..you can only change it from the outside. That's how I got elected. That's how the big accomplishments like health care got done."

Nonsense, protests Ezra. All the change that Obama effected was the result of inside baseball -- buying off corporate interests, herding Democratic cats, striving (mostly unsuccessfully) to win opposition buy-in. Obama brought policy change, but not change in the way Washington works. The latter is an impossible goal for a president or any one person.

In my view, Klein is viewing this question too narrowly. Obama is well aware of the limitations of the bully pulpit, and he's got to know better than any person on the planet that presidential advocacy polarizes, entrenching the opposing party in implacable opposition to whatever the president proposes. Yet, in presenting a revamped theory of how the presidency works, he's not just feeding us a line of BS.  And if Obama wins reelection, I believe that we will look back five or ten or twenty years from now and recognize that yes, Obama did change the way Washington works. Or at the very least, he kept the US on a sane policy course in a time of extreme polarization and thus gave (will have given...) the system space to self-correct, as it has in the past.

Let's start with Klein's objection to Obama's characterization of how healthcare reform got done:

Ezra Klein's unconvincing theory that Obama misunderstands (or misrepresents) "change"

Ezra Klein, noting that Obama has recently revamped the way he talks about "change," attempts a massive debunk.  Obama is now claiming that he's learned, "you can't change Washington from the inside..you can only change it from the outside. That's how I got elected. That's how the big accomplishments like health care got done."

Nonsense, protests Ezra. All the change that Obama effected was the result of inside baseball -- buying off corporate interests, herding Democratic cats, striving (mostly unsuccessfully) to win opposition buy-in. Obama brought policy change, but not change in the way Washington works. The latter is an impossible goal for a president or any one person.

In my view, Klein is viewing this question too narrowly. Obama is well aware of the limitations of the bully pulpit, and he's got to know better than any person on the planet that presidential advocacy polarizes, entrenching the opposing party in implacable opposition to whatever the president proposes. Yet, in presenting a revamped theory of how the presidency works, he's not just feeding us a line of BS.  And if Obama wins reelection, I believe that we will look back five or ten or twenty years from now and recognize that yes, Obama did change the way Washington works. Or at the very least, he kept the US on a sane policy course in a time of extreme polarization and thus gave (will have given...) the system space to self-correct, as it has in the past.

Let's start with Klein's objection to Obama's characterization of how healthcare reform got done:

Fighting the elite tide

The power of elites is like entropy.  A robust society can keep inherited or socially acquired privilege in check for a season or six, but eventually the elites learn a trick too many. Life is a failing of the wing, said Marcus Aurelius, and that goes for societies too.

Cheering rejoinder: societies have very long life cycles, and democracy is a fountain of youth, or rather of regeneration.  When elites kill the golden goose, democracies self-correct -- cf. FDR from the left, and Thatcher from the right.

Question of the extended hour for the U.S.: can a democracy kill its own capacity for self-correction? E.g., by Citizens United, or by acclimating its citizens to torture as an entrenched instrument of "national security", or by a media establishment that debases public discourse, or by some tidal pull we don't yet fully understand toward ever-increasing income inequality?  There is a battle brewing between remaining democratic antibodies and the instruments of elite entrenchment that have built up since Reagan was elected.

Gideon Rachman cries wolf, and bids us listen

As a presumable preview of his forthcoming book, Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety the FT's Gideon Rachman has a cover story in Foreign Policy that seeks to strip away a cocoon of denial regarding American decline:

In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive -- and China is the wolf.

While the Soviet and Japanese challenges to U.S. economic hegemony faded, China's 30 year track record make its accession as the world's largest economy all but inevitable.  In raveling out the implications, Rachman takes on what he sees as a series of comforting myths: that "America still leads across the board" and will continue to do so for decades; that "globalization is bending the world the way of the west" and that China will inevitably become a democracy; that in a world in which all consequential countries are democracies, cooperation will trump conflict and mutual enrichment will result.

In response, Rachman gives us to understand that the U.S. lead is evaporating more quickly than anticipated; that China has managed 30 years of near-double digit growth without liberalizing as predicted; that as U.S. hegemony fades, so does mutual cooperation among democracies; and that protection is building momentum as the western consensus frays post-crisis.