Historian: Obama Pragmatist, Not Socialist

Hey, all you gooney-birds who think President Barack Obama is a socialist: maybe you should study what the President actually thinks and reads and writes.

Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg has. He has a book coming out on the President's intellectual evolution, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition. Kloppenberg finds our President is a classically American pragmatist, a "philosopher president" like Jefferson, Madison, both Adamses, Lincoln, and Wilson. He finds a man dedicated like our Founding fathers to promoting civic discourse.

He does not find a socialist:

Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) are far off the mark, he said.

“Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” he told the audience in New York. “He has a profound love of America.”

And his opposition to inequality stems from Puritan preachers and the social gospel rather than socialism [Patricia Cohen, "In Writings of Obama, a City Is Unearthed," New York Times, 2010.10.27].

By Kloppenberg's analysis, President Barack Obama is not some outsider trying to disrupt the American Dream. President Obama is a product and proponent of the American Dream, trying to make America live up to its founding ideals.

Beck's Reporters Love Truth... So Get on These Stories!

Randell Beck, publisher of that Sioux falls paper, celebrates Sunshine Week with a celebration of newspaper reporters:

In an era increasingly shaped by ideological trench warfare - a media-saturated world in which folks are lured to consume prepackaged news mirroring their own narrow worldview - the very best reporters challenge authority, ask the hardest questions, challenge conventional thinking and hold accountable those who presume to speak for all of us - all with a relentless fidelity to the truth, "without fear or favor" [Randell Beck, "The Best Reporters Pursue Truth," that Sioux Falls paper, 2010.03.14].

Like Beck, I am grateful for reporters. The paid media do a lot of investigative work that even the most passioante among us bloggers cannot afford to do on a regular basis. It's their job to be watchdogs over government and industry for the rest of us who are busy working other jobs all week long.

In that spirit, I hope Mr. Beck will dispatch his reporters to find some truth about the following stories that have yet to get much attention from the newspapers:

• Rick Millner's state-supported Veblen East Dairy has been cited for violating DENR regulations. The dairy, now in receivership, appears to follow the same pattern of financial woe and willful environmental disregard that characterize other Millner business ventures. Just what is going on in Veblen, and why has the state offered so much support to this particular mega-CAFO?
• Last October, Senator Thune voted against an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that prohibits private defense contractors from preventing employees from taking cases of workplace sexual assault, battery, and discrimination to court. Thune's hometown media in Sioux Falls have yet to hold the Senator to a serious accounting on that vote. (I welcome examples to the contrary.)
• Beck touts some up-and-coming journalism scholarship winners, saying "we've got some pretty strong future reporters in the pipeline." But they've had darn few reporters on the pipeline—the Keystone pipeline, that is. The biggest construction project in the country plowed through South Dakota last summer, tearing up roads and farm fields. Where were the newspaper reports about the disruption and grief caused to our local farmers?
• Beck shares my thirst for transparency in government. Locally, however, Madison has an economic development corporation, the LAIC, that operates in near complete secrecy. The city and county dump tax dollars into the LAIC, and the public never receives a detailed accounting of how that money is spent. The LAIC keeps a lid on useful information that should be public by charging exorbitant fees for access. Our local newspaper gives the LAIC nothing but the "rainbows and sunshine" one of Beck's scholarship winners derides.

My fellow bloggers and I can likely offer more examples... but we've got to head off to our paying jobs.

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p.s.: Beck makes a big deal about how reporters and editors refuse to align with any philosophy and keep their opinions out of their work. Again, Beck peddles the harmful myth of journalistic objectivity. He himself enunciates a clear (and admirable!) philosophy that motivates the best journalists: challenge authority and conventional thinking, hold the powerful accountable, seek truth... sorry, Randell, that's a philosophy. We do better to wear our philosophies on our sleeves than to pretend we don't have them.

Beck also invokes God twice in this one editorial. That's philosophy, too.

More Liberty Means Less Government? Hasty Generalization

I dabble less and less in political philosophy. Thank goodness! cry Sibby and others who find my philosophy wanting.

But permit me this digression:

I notice on Mr. Woodring's site an ad for a book: More Liberty Means Less Government by Walter E. Williams. The title is exactly the sort of easy platitude I liked to substitute for pragmatic politics that addressed real problems in my younger Rush Limbaugh days. The title is also at best a hasty generalization, if not an outright contradiction.

1. Liberty is the freedom we enjoy within the context of law and civil society. Liberty would not exist without government. There can certainly be too much government, but there can also be too little.
   
2. "More liberty means less government" seems to assume the only players in the social contract are citizens yearning for liberty and government scheming to seize it from us (as if citizens and government were two separate entities). However, government is the agency that we create to protect and expand liberty. Take labor laws. The factory owners of the 19th century sought to take away their workers' liberty. Government (a.k.a. we the people) imposed rules to check the power of big businesses and ensure greater liberty for workers.
   
3. Today's corporations have much more power (lawyers, non-compete clauses, billions of dollars, tricky sub-prime lending schemes) to take away our liberty than did the businesses of our Founding Fathers' time. Government has an even more important role now to protect our liberty by checking corporate power.
   
4. Government also protects our liberty from simple misfortune. A friend of mine has had a single incident of MS. To fight a recurrence of the disease, this friend now relies on steroid shots that cost $2000 a month. To afford those shots, this friend has to stick with a less-than-satisfying job, largely because this friend would find it impossible to replace the job's health coverage with non-group coverage. More government in the form of universal health coverage would increase this friend's liberty to seek better employment and move to different cities.

"More liberty means less government" makes a nice soundbite for politicians who like to parrot Ronald Reagan for the inattentive voters. But philosophically and practically, it misses the point of why we create government in the first place.

Unlike Sibby, Corporations Driven by Profit, Not Philosophy

I'm always tickled to make Sibby's headlines. I hesitate to respond, though, since I know a lot of my readers may ask, "What the heck are they talking about?" or, more likely, "Who cares?"

But Sibby is just so wrong this time, I must indulge. Sibby, my response follows. But for those of you who don't care for our little blog-world back-and-forth, here: watch a bit of the cultural bedrock of my own secular humanism, Star Trek (see this episode synopsis for context):



Now Sibby, do you really believe that the problem Naomi Klein points to (and that John W. Whitehead and I amplify is "certain business leaders who adhere to the secular humanist worldview"? No, the problem is that those business leaders don't give a tenth of the damn that you do about philosophy. Those CEOs are not the liberal patsies you envision strolling fuzzyheadedly about Harvard Yard advocating Marxism and denying Christian professors tenure. Those CEOs were too busy treating college as vo-tech for MBAs to even notice the secular humanism the liberal arts crowd espouses.

Klein says American corporations are developing and promoting technology that helps China oppress its people and that will help other governments, including our own, take away citizen liberties. You can't pin that problem on secular humanism or any other worldview windmill you care to tilt at. Corporations have no worldview. They don't value human life the way either Christians like you or secular humanists like me do. They don't believe in God's salvation or man's inherent goodness. Corporations, these artifical entities that our courts blasphemously endow with personhood, are driven by profit, period. Not patriotism, not religion, not truth, nothing but profit.

I would suggest that conscientious secular humanists are as interested as conscientious Christians in fighting human rights abuses in China (and everywhere else), and that both my people and yours are more interested in standing against totalitarianism than the corporations and free-market fundamentalists who say we can't afford to upset the world economy. Don't be fooled: those CEOs defending free trade with China aren't motivated by principle; they're motivated by the very selfish, materialist desire to keep their access to a market of 1.3 billion well-controlled Chinese workers and consumers.

Corporations profit from totalitarianism. That's not secular humanism. That's exactly what I called it yesterday: amoral materialism.