Another Grand Explanation of Obama

We live in a time of grand explanations of Obama—Dinesh D’Souza’s post-colonialism, Stanley Kurtz’s socialism, and James Kloppenburg’s pragmatism have all come to the fore recently.

Now Sean Wilentz throws his hat in the ring. Our President is (or was) the leader of a social movement, in which

policies and politics were slighted in favor of feelings and values. Supposedly, these emotive spurs would bind participants in a new activist community, devoted to the collective good and not personal gratification, and dedicated to advancing the uniquely inspiring political leader who had sprung from the reliable ranks of community organizing, and not from the precincts of compromised “transactional” politics.

It’s an interesting argument, and there’s more to it than I can (or wish to) compass in this post. Boiled down to its bare essentials, Wilentz’s point is that social movements are successful when they are matched with political leaders who can master the institutional mechanics of policymaking and have command over the substantive details of policy. Movement organizers need wonks, in other words.

This is Obama’s problem:

[I]t was always difficult to imagine exactly how the newly defined role of organizer-in-chief would play out. Even according to the social movement model, movements push reluctant leaders who are skilled in the intricacies of lawmaking, especially the president. How was this supposed to work when the chief executive was the movement leader, though vastly inexperienced in the ways of the White House, let alone of the hazards of Washington? Where was the crafty president who needed to be pushed, the president who would know how and when to use a movement to his advantage?

As I said, an interesting argument, but it reminds me of a contrast drawn by liberal and conservative pundits during the Bush Administration. Conservatives, they said, had ideas, perhaps wrongheaded, but ideas nonetheless. Liberals had policies, so the argument went, but no overarching theoretical framework. I realize that the argument was a bit (or more than a bit) self-serving on both sides, but there was, I think, something to it.

The last really grand theoretical framework and master narrative on the Left was Marxism. When it finally collapsed of its own weight (I saw it happening to my colleagues on the Left in grad school), they turned away from class to all sorts of movements based upon social identity. If class consciousness couldn’t reliably be formed in the crucible of class conflict, there were plenty of other groups that could be said to have had a galvanizing experience of oppression—women, racial and ethnic minorities, gays, and so on. This, in a nutshell, is where social movement theory began. The problem, of course, is that these disparate groups and grievances don’t necessarily have enough in common to forge a coalition (which, I suppose, is where the white heterosexist male came in—there could at least be a common enemy).

But being against something doesn’t offer much in the way of a positive vision. This was the problem with Marxism and it remained a problem for its social movement progeny: suppose we overcome white heterosexist males, what then? What are the principles informing our action? What are the positive goals we’re pursuing? What will a just society look like? The canvas remains empty, or at least indistinct.

Now, you might rightly ask, what does high (or low) academic social theory have to do with today’s politics?

Consider, again, the purported contrast between conservative ideas and liberal policies. If your action isn’t informed by fixed principles of justice (I guess I can say natural law in this crowd), or by an authoritative tradition, then what you encounter are problems to be addressed by policies. (Sounds a lot like pragmatism to me.) But there are at least two ways of thinking about problems. One involves a kind of technocratic social engineering—finding an apparent inefficiency or a claimed maldistribution and fixing it. Another looks for grievances or problems identified by some group or another and addresses them. (Needless to say, the one doesn’t exclude the other: the technocrat could take his or her cue from the social movement, which may be Wilentz’s synthesis.)

Let me return now to Wilentz and Obama. For both, presumably the most successful American social movement is the Civil Rights Movement, but as a social movement it was an interesting one. While it certainly focused on grievances and problems, its understanding of them was formed by the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Bible. It wasn’t a pure post-Marxist social movement, in other words. Or rather, to understand it solely in those terms would be significantly to distort it.

In America, a social movement fueled solely by grievance can go only so far. We like our political leaders to to uniters rather than dividers. But if we can’t unite on principles, what’s left? Wilentz has what he supposes to be Obama’s answer:

According to Ganz’s theory and practice of the Obama movement, policies and politics were slighted in favor of feelings and values. Supposedly, these emotive spurs would bind participants in a new activist community, devoted to the collective good and not personal gratification, and dedicated to advancing the uniquely inspiring political leader who had sprung from the reliable ranks of community organizing, and not from the precincts of compromised “transactional” politics.The crucible of the Ganz strategy in 2008 was the numerous “Camp Obamas,” which trained thousands of campaign volunteers. Participants were instructed not to discuss politics and policies in favor of, as the Sacramento Bee reported, “telling potential voters personal stories of political conversion.” The problems facing liberals, by this reckoning, had nothing to do with their ideas or programs, or with the longstanding political divisions in the Democratic Party stemming back to the 1960s. They had to do with a deficit of “values,” which, according to Ganz, the Republicans had in surplus.

As further developed through a labyrinthine analysis that drew on social psychology, brain chemistry, and human transaction theory, Ganz’s model posited that the root of the “values” problem was essentially emotional. “Values are not just concepts, they’re feelings,” Ganz explained knowingly. “That’s what dropped out of Democratic politics sometime in the ‘70s or ‘80s.” Thus, the Obama campaign presented itself as a social movement that was more sentimental than political, pushing gauzy “values,” like “hope” and “change,” while leaving policy concerns to the wonks.

But feelings are not principles. They’re something like grievances, but they lack the concreteness of being rooted in an alleged structure of oppression. They are, rather, evanescent—here today, in the joyous exuberance of Obama’s triumphant rallies, gone tomorrow, when the problems people had “hoped” to “change” (whatever they precisely were) still remain. Wilentz may be right that a movement centered on an appealing personality has no staying power. The charisma has to be routinized (by wonks, presumably), and when routinized, loses some (if not all) of its energy. The 2008 moment can never be recaptured; neither my students—head over heels for Obama in 2008—nor their younger brothers and sisters will feel that way in 2012.

Wilentz is not convinced that the problem he has identified is insoluble: Obama the social movement leader could pivot to become Obama the wonk. The charisma could be routinized in a way that’s very hard for even determined opponents to undo.

But his solution, such as it is, bespeaks a problem with contemporary American liberalism (or, if you will, progressivism): without big ideas, it relies on big (or apparently big) personalities. But it’s hard to see how a personality could genuinely be big without a big idea. Therein lies the difference between Barack Obama and his sometime model, Abraham Lincoln.