Obama’s own cultural instincts run right down the middle of the road. His politics are more neo-Truman than neo-Woodstock, more compatible with “It’s a Wonderful Life” than “Easy Rider.”
He supports abortion rights but argues for fewer abortions. He supports religious liberty but thinks religion has a legitimate public role. He wants to fix but not abolish George W. Bush’s faith-based program. MTV loyalists love him, but he models a family life more likely to play on the Disney Channel.
That’s E.J. Dionne in his Washington Post editorial “The Fighting Conciliator.”
Dionne has been milking this “third way” stuff for decades so there’s nothing particularly new here. What is noteworthy is his claim that Obama “supports religious liberty but thinks religion has a legitimate public role.” But, what’s with that “but?”
The disjunctive is revealing because it suggests a certain understanding of American notions of religious liberty that Obama ostensibly transcends. Dionne is telling us, I think, that Obama transcends those progressives (or liberals) who: “support religious liberty but thinks religion has no legitimate public role.”
Dionne thinks this is great progress, but that would depend on the view of religious liberty on the other side that Obama also wants to transcend. So, just what understanding of religious liberty held by conservatives is Obama transcending? Maybe Dionne has in mind all those right wing cypto-theocrats out there. But that would be a straw man and theocrats don’t really believe in religious liberty anyway. Dionne would not resort to such ad hominem .
So, maybe the “conservative” understanding of religious liberty that Obama also aims to transcend is one that will have nothing to do with the disjunctive. Conservatives “support religious liberty and think that religious liberty necessarily entails that religion has a legitimate public role.”
But why Dionne or Obama would want to transcend or “move beyond” or find a “third way” different from that understanding is beyond me.
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