Chaotic neutral, p.24
Chaotic Neutral, page 24
But Obama’s appeals to pragmatism as the only way forward were hardly novel. Jimmy Carter’s disastrous neoliberal turn is lauded as “evidence-based pragmatism” by biographer Daniel Sargent, a sharp contrast with the “nostalgic” and “quixotic” Ted Kennedy.18 Walter Mondale’s historically bad 1984 campaign was noted for its “cautious, pragmatic approach.”19 Michael Dukakis rose to the 1988 nomination after using his second term as governor of Massachusetts to prove that he could reject liberalism in favor of “caution and pragmatism.”20 In 1992, Jesse Jackson’s decision not to run against Bill Clinton (himself an uber-pragmatist) led prominent Black Democrats to adopt a “new pragmatism” in throwing their weight behind a candidate who seemed unusually eager to take cracks at people of color to win the approval of recalcitrant white voters.21 Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform, per Hillary Clinton’s memoir, was necessitated by “pragmatic politics.… If he vetoed welfare reform a third time, Bill would be handing the Republicans a potential political windfall.”22 (Thanks for taking one for the team, poor people!) And Al Gore’s 2000 campaign revealed a “pragmatic politician” (but also, forebodingly, a “panicky panderer” who lacked conviction) who co-stewarded eight years of economic prosperity.23 Barack Obama in 2008 was the Democrat who could finally “synthesize idealism with pragmatism” and won the highest plaudit in the pantheon of liberalism from Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle: “Those who accomplish the most are those who don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. Barack is a pragmatist.” Cass Sunstein (of the aforementioned nudging, later an official in Obama’s Office of Management and Budget) stressed: “Above all, Obama’s form of pragmatism is heavily empirical; he wants to know what will work.”24
But wait; there’s more. The Sanders-Clinton nomination contest of 2016 opened a new gulf in the Democratic camp with the pragmatists on one side and starry-eyed, unserious people in opposition. Clinton’s task in 2016 was “peddling pragmatism,” and her ascent to the nomination was a victory for “pragmatism over flair.”25 After the cataclysm of Trump’s victory, Democrats needed to find a “pragmatic progressivism” to return to power, identifying a just-right combination of the visionary and the realistic.26 Democrats retook the House in 2018 not because Trump had governed for two years like a combination of Ceauşescu and Yosemite Sam but because they were “willing to check progressive purity at the door in favor of progressive pragmatism.”27 And was Joe Biden a pragmatic choice in 2020? You bet your ass he was! He understood nothing less than “the arc of history” as “[coming] down to pragmatism” in his frank assessment of “the art of the possible” during his presidency.28 As events stand as of this writing, the art of the possible has not included following through on a number of campaign promises the executive branch could address unilaterally, like relieving student loan debt.
I could cite examples until you fling the book in frustration: every policy, every defeat, every retreat, every political battle invoking pragmatism as a guiding principle at some point. It suffices to say that pragmatism has been something of an obsession among Democrats since their coalition began crumbling in the 1960s. This is in stark contrast to Republicans, whose path to power involved focusing ever more intensely on ideological language and goals to be achieved by whatever means necessary. (When was the last time you heard Mitch McConnell ask if something is “realistic” or a GOP presidential contender polling above 3 percent described as “pragmatic”?) What is the Democratic love affair, which bloomed so elaborately under Obama, with pragmatism? Who are the voters that demand it? And most crucially, what has all this pragmatism accomplished?
Pragmatism’s starring role in the Democratic worldview stems from its ability to justify whatever course of action (or inaction) political actors choose to take in the eyes of people with little stake in outcomes. Like its cousin “electability,” pragmatism is the art of what is possible, and what is possible happens to be whatever Democrats in positions of power want to do. Joe Lieberman (a legendary “pragmatic centrist in debt to JFK” as the title of an embarrassing 2003 Washington Post piece put it29) refused to allow a public option in the Affordable Care Act on grounds of pragmatism—certainly not because Joe Lieberman himself did not want it in there or that he had spent his entire career as a lickspittle for the medical insurance industry. No, it had to be removed because with it the ACA would lose votes. It would lose, more specifically, Joe Lieberman’s vote. Isn’t pragmatism great? The shape of the ACA was also dictated heavily by pragmatic concerns about its effects on the 2010 midterms. Strangely, every sacrifice to that end made the policy worse without compensating electoral benefits.
Over and over we went through wash cycles of Obama the progressive becoming Obama the pragmatist, the man who had to make compromise after compromise because reality simply left no alternative. The economic stimulus his White House pushed through Congress in 2009 had to be insufficiently large for practical reasons—not because Obama filled his team of advisers with well-known neoliberal ghouls like Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Rahm Emanuel (who insisted, based on research pulled from his own ass, that the stimulus could not exceed $1 trillion because reasons). He had to bow to reality and keep Guantanamo Bay open and troops in Iraq and Afghanistan not because he wanted to—heavens, no!—but because political reality so dictated. His signature health-care plan had to go through dozens of rounds of reworking, never to make it better but to take out something else in the fruitless quest to appease Republican faux moderates and Blue Dog Democrats. Like his fervent wish that something could be done about climate change if only it were possible, this powerlessness afflicted many issues during his presidency. I want to do something, but you must understand that I can’t.
If that doesn’t sound much like a winning message for a political party, we may be getting somewhere toward understanding the electoral fortunes of Democrats in the past half century. The cult of pragmatism among Democratic elites and elected officials trying desperately to appeal to two very different constituencies, one oriented toward outcomes and prone to alienation and disengagement when those outcomes are disappointing, the other happy to settle for “we tried” and other symbolic stabs at progressive goals because they neither feel the effects of failure nor ideologically desire the party to be any more liberal than it presently is. After hearing it for decades, “I share your progressive goals, but you have to be realistic about what we can accomplish” starts to sound less like an intelligent assessment of the world and more like an elaborate justification. It begins to sound, in fact, like the people preaching pragmatism are trying to convince themselves more than they’re trying to convince voters who are demonstrably sick of hearing that better things aren’t possible.
AFFORDABLE PARED ACT
Postmortems abound on the policy choices of the Obama administration, blessedly obviating a need for an eight-year play-by-play rehashing here. Because it is so closely intertwined with Obama’s legacy and was his signature legislation, though, a closer look at the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is warranted. Long after everything else from the Obama years is forgotten, Obamacare will persist—if not as policy then at least as a showcase for the flaws in Democrats’ approach to legislating. I will not, as leftists are so often accused of doing, use a “magic wand” theory to claim Obama could have gotten single-payer health care had only he tried harder. Obama could have pushed for a better bill and told Americans why it was a great idea, though, and he may even have succeeded given his strong political position in 2009.viii
Instead, they chose not to try in favor of an approach based on three fundamental miscalculations. One was their obliviousness to the ways the program could be undermined at the state level. Another was that crafting a sufficiently moderate policy could save Democratic congressional majorities in 2010 (it didn’t). And the lingering problem is their failure to recognize that, far from being the kind of generational social welfare policy that people get fired up to defend à la Social Security, the ACA is at its best a stopgap solution that has gotten worse, not better, over time. It was sold to the Democratic base as a stepping-stone toward truly universal health care, yet that goal has receded into the distance as the right chips away at the ACA and satisfied liberals declare the problem they call “access to” health care solved.
The ACA was complex to the point of self-parody. Liberal policy wonks don’t believe policy can be good unless it shows off their enormous cleverness, manifesting as convoluted amalgams of flowcharts, formulas, and ten-dollar words. It is one reason why simple ideas like “if people are poor, give them some money” are so often dismissed out of hand. Proponents of the ACA—proponents—beamingly described it as the most complex piece of legislation ever passed by Congress.30 What an accomplishment! To ordinary voters, complexity produces policy that is neither understood nor trusted and gives political opponents an easy opening to muddy the waters with disinformation. What is hard to understand is easy to undermine. As with Hillarycare in 1994, a major challenge for the White House was simply explaining what the proposal was. Unlike the Clinton plan, Obama and congressional Democrats did successfully communicate the basic idea. The use of words like exchanges helped many Americans grasp that a website would let users shop insurance plans, and the cost of those plans would be subsidized by the government for some buyers.ix
All the flowcharts and rules aside, that was the crux. The ACA would funnel both private and public money to for-profit health insurance companies—which Obama and Democrats felt was necessary to prevent industry opposition from sinking the legislation—and previously uninsured people would have access to a website where they could buy insurance. Crucially, the plan assumed states (who would administer these online exchanges) would automatically accept the offer to expand Medicaid eligibility to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.x
When in 2012 the Supreme Court ruled that states were not obligated to accept Medicaid expansion, Democrats still didn’t panic. After all, Medicaid expansion meant the federal government would hand states a substantial amount of money. Nobody would turn down money! Many Republican-led states, however, turned out to be so willing.31 To Obama’s policy architects, this was inconceivable. Incentivizing budget-squeezed states with money had to work. But partisanship is a hell of a drug, as the White House should have foreseen. During the pre–civil rights era, the New Deal regularly incentivized states to accept federal money with the caveat that programs paid for with those funds must be race neutral. And Jim Crow states sometimes rejected the money or threatened to do so if they could not administer the programs with racial preference.xi It was more important to them to maintain the racial hierarchy of segregation than to get money from Uncle Sam.
Without Medicaid expansion, large populations of people who cannot afford ACA insurance even with subsidies (or are not eligible to receive subsidies for one of a cornucopia of reasons) remain uncovered. No-expansion states have nearly twice as many uninsured adults as states with expansion.32 Disproportionately, these uninsured are Black and Hispanic. Republicans don’t seem too bothered by it. A Vox piece in 2021—Democrats are still trying to fix this—succinctly summarizes the problem: “Republican governors.” The fanatical GOP reaction in 2009 when the bill was being debated should have been all the warning needed that Republicans would gladly shoot themselves in the foot to undermine the plan. It was all part of a total war strategy to deny any victories to Obama, a strategy it took the White House years to grasp.
Democrats contemporaneously justified the play-it-safe approach to the ACA, which avoided potential lightning rods like single payer, by arguing the electoral necessity of creating something moderate Democrats in Congress could support without enraging their constituents. As usual, congressional Democrats failed to approach their majority—an unusually large one by modern standards—as an opportunity to enact an agenda before inevitably returning to the minority. They convinced themselves that with the right moves they could save seats that they only held because 2006 and 2008 had been anti-Republican wave years.
Cynically, perhaps the leadership catered to moderates because nobody in the Democratic caucus really wanted to pass a bill more liberal than what moderates wanted. In that view, the Blue Dogs simply provided the cover influential Democrats needed to move the legislation to the right to reflect their own preferences. If not, then Democrats spectacularly misread the electoral tea leaves. We were assured in 2009 that pushing for anything more liberal than what was on the table would result in Democrats losing their majorities in 2010. Then they lost the majority anyway. No matter how much progressivism was stripped from the ACA, the reaction from the right never changed pitch. For all the difference the efforts at appeasement made, the Democrats might as well have enacted fully automated luxury space communism.
Throughout the process, Democratic power players seemed almost comically eager to steer the bill to the right. In 2010, a special election was held in Massachusetts to replace deceased Senate fixture Ted Kennedy. When Republican Scott Brown defeated inept Democratic challenger Martha Coakley,xii Washington Democrats became apoplectic. Evan Bayh, soon to leave Congress to become a lobbyist for the Chamber of Commerce, warned his party that it was a wake-up call. Anthony Weinerxiii declared that health-care reform might be dead. Virginia senator Jim Webb called it “a referendum not only on health-care reform but also on the openness and integrity of our government process.” Even famously liberal Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts rushed to declare that everything had changed overnight.33
Golly. It’s worth noting that after Brown’s fluky win (he was soundly defeated in 2012), the Democratic Senate majority shrank to—fifty-nine. Oddly, the GOP manages to enact parts of its agenda with the slimmest of majorities in either chamber, but for Democrats, a supermajority is the bare minimum. The White House ended up having to lean on congressional Democrats with the argument that it would be disastrous to pass nothing after all the energy devoted to health care. The Senate version of the bill already passed (and awaiting House passage) was better than nothing. However milquetoast its critics believe the ACA is, Democrats almost talked themselves out of passing anything at all.
Say that the worrywarts were right in 2010, though, and that passage cost Democrats that year’s midterms. Democrats today describe the ACA as their most significant policy achievement of the twenty-first century. Wasn’t it worth it? In 2018, Republicans looked at the Trump tax cuts and their success in confirming federal judges as such important accomplishments that their loss of the House majority led to little hand-wringing and certainly no grand reassessments of their fundamental ideology. Of course they’d rather have held the House. But the point of having the majority is to do something with it. They pursued their goals, accomplished some of them, and were confident that they would regain the majority before long.
The difference is that Democrats have the tendency to see holding power as the end, not a means to an end. They believe that voting just so on just the right bills will enable a permanent blue majority. This is patently silly, since gaining majorities depends on parties’ success, often fluky, in winning the relatively small number of competitive seats or lucking into improbable wins due to unique circumstances.xiv In an election year where everything goes one’s way, seats are won in unlikely places. Those seats, once the extraordinary circumstances that enabled winning are gone, will swing inevitably back to the other party.34 Tailoring policy toward saving the electoral fortunes of members in tenuous districts is folly, but folly that Democrats heavy on strategy and light on concrete ideological goals engage in too often.
Now that the ACA is law,xv liberals defend it vociferously, with a passion that derives from the conflation of the ACA with Barack Obama himself. Given the assurances to skeptics from the left, including Democratic progressives, that the ACA was an important but incremental step toward universal health care, the legislation is by definition an incomplete solution, a half measure. It has helped. More people are insured, and some provisions, like requiring insurers to cover people with preexisting conditions, have been literal lifesavers.xvi But the progress that was supposed to follow has not materialized, creating an untenable situation in which voters who raise legitimate complaints about the cost, quality, and clunkiness of the system hear only how thankful they should be for it.
Polling shows slight majorities of the public have favorable views of the ACA, a figure that has changed little over time.35 It is hardly an albatross for Democrats. But neither is it the milestone in human history that some liberal rhetoric has tried to make it. It’s an expensive, confusing, complicated, modestly successful policy that incompletely addressed the underlying problem and left millions uninsured. Not every piece of policy can be monumental and revolutionary. Some of it can be just OK. But perspective is necessary. As the centerpiece of one’s policy pitch to voters, as an example of what your party can do at its top-dollar best, the ACA has proven ineffective. It is neither the political poison Republicans claim nor the generational accomplishment Democrats wish it was.xvii One look at our still-broken (and eye-wateringly expensive) health-care system is proof that the ACA, whatever its merits, was not the solution.
OBAMA AND RACE
Ignoring race would make any reflection on Obama’s presidency seriously deficient. Fortunately, the topic has been covered extensively by people who are more expert in this area, so this section relies heavily on the work of others, particularly that of Black scholars and commentators.xviii
Viewed through the lens of race, the election of Barack Obama was a pivotal moment in American politics. Obama’s approach in government to the politics of racial issues, though, did not deviate significantly from his approach to any other political issue. He sought consensus, not radical change; he appealed to the better angels of Americans’ nature, not the heavy hand of federal policy. As a result, many of the institutionalized forms of racism in the United States either failed to improve or worsened under Obama. Tavis Smiley said of the Obama presidency that “black folk have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category over the past eight years.”36 Even adulatory Obama retrospectives have chapters with titles like “Unfinished Business (and Failures)” that cite race relations as a major area in which Obama fell short.37
