The uncategorizable-in-chief

In "The New Liberalism", The New Yorker's George Packer spends over 6,000 words searching for Barack Obama's intellectual identity. It's a tricky, slippery business journeying into the ideological heart of the next American President, yet Packer is a hardy explorer. In his travelogue, he quotes David Axelrod, who describes Obama's thinking as "very eclectic". But even though Packer makes the standard comparisons with FDR and Reagan, he struggles to come up with a coherent ideological identity:

Unlike Reagan, Obama has no clear, simple ideology. People who have observed him in meetings describe a politician who solicits advice and information from a variety of sources, puts a high value on empirical evidence, and has the self-assurance to reach his own conclusions. A word that comes up again and again, from Obama himself and from people who know him, is “pragmatic.”

I wonder if Obama's supposed pragmatism -- this refusal to be ideologically pigeon-holed, a hostility to traditional right-left distinctions, even a rejection of the two parties as the anchors of American politics -- is emblematic of a new individualism in American political thinking. That Obama doesn't fit into tradition categories suggests, then, the appearance of a key new ideological category in American politics -- the uncategorizable. So can Obama's pragmatism -- which Packer believes is sometimes post-partisan and sometime progressive -- transform America?  Packer believes that it can. But for Obama to reinvent America, Packer argues, he'll need a highly mobilized public that can help drive his agenda:

Transformative Presidents—those who changed the country’s sense of itself in some fundamental way—have usually had great social movements supporting and pushing them. Lincoln had the abolitionists, Roosevelt the labor unions, Johnson the civil-rights leaders, Reagan the conservative movement.

Here, of course, is where the Internet comes in. Packer believes that, to be a transformative figure of the stature of Lincoln or FDR, Obama needs a movement that can challenge Washington. The challenge, Packer argues, is to convert the "breadth", "organization" and "generational energy" of his grass-roots organization. Obama, therefore, could use his vast Internet following to put pressure on Washington to change its archaic ways:

The Internet could be used to insure transparency; almost every activity of the federal government could be documented online, as some state governments have begun to do. The White House could use the vast Obama e-mail list to convey information about key issues and bills, and to mobilize pressure on Congress. Just as F.D.R. used radio and Reagan television to speak to the public without going through the press, Obama could do the same with the Web.

And this is where Packer's 6,000 word odyssey seems to conclude -- with an "electronic social-network platform" that could usher in a new era built around the "public good" rather than "private goods". But I'm not convinced by this communitarian conclusion. Just as Obama is an uncategorizable, so I suspect that his followers represent an electronic mass movement of uncategorizables. What unites them all is the Internet. That's the new liberalism. As Packer acknowledges, the Obama revolution will "look more like Google than like the Tennessee Valley Authority."

Comments

[Eric Gauvin]

Yes. You're right. Part of the Change that Obama promises requires that Americans care much more about how the country is run and world affairs. I don't think Obama's win represents Americans' response to specific political issues, but a general American-Idol-esque passion for an undefined hope for something magical. Do we really expect Americans to become that much more involved in American politics and world affairs?

Here's the kind of thing our top newspapers offered as analysis of one of the debates. I hope Obama's body language will help him solve some of the problems in the US.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-debateside8-2008oct08,0,3020617.story

[Stephen Smoliar]

As Henry Miller wrote (in TROPIC OF CAPRICORN), "Confusion is a word he have invented for an order which is not understood." I find great appeal in Edelman's thesis that our very consciousness is grounded in our capacity for forming and recognizing categories. To call anything "uncategorizable" is nothing less than cognitive laziness. Perhaps Packer just does not know how to deal with someone who wears different category-defining hats in different contexts (just as in the physical world we wear different hats in different weather)? As to cyberspace, it is not so much "an electronic mass movement of uncategorizables" as it is a venue for more diversity than most of us are used to managing. History teaches us that such diversity can be as much a curse as a blessing. After all, Karl Rove knew how to manage it well enough to give us eight years of George W. Bush!

[Vince Williams]

Packer's parenthetical statement about the WSJ, "If the editorial had had more space, full employment and the conquest of disease might have made the list..."[of the Journal’s nightmare scenario of Obama America] was a nice comic touch.

Cass Sunstein's conception of a government reluctant to impose mandates, but shrewd about using the science of behaviorism to nudge society in 'good' directions, must strike fear in the stony heart of every neocon admirer of Newt Gingrich or in the reptilian brains of conspiracy theorists everywhere.

If Obama's political revolution uses information technology as creatively from the White House as it did from the hustings it might be a success.

And the complexion of the generalship's apotheosis should resemble Google's business model more than the bureaucratic intransigence of the TVA.

Surely, though, it's an error to confuse Google's business practice with good psychological hygiene, like Douglas LaBier at the Washington Post-- unless we really want society to produce a generation of deceptive sociopaths.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/07/AR2008110703319.html?sub=AR

[andrew]

Vince -- don't we already have a society of deceptive sociopaths?

[Paul M]

Perhaps in this internet age we should use internet metaphors. Rather than compare Obama to Reagan or FDR he could be compared to computors and operating systems. McCain and the traditional Washingtonites are PCs, clunky, business like, and dull. Obama however is an Apple, bright, shiny, and multi-media (though his followers might see him as Linux as well).
The country and the ecomony are frozen and ready to crash. The last election replaced some of the hardrive. Will Obamas appointments do the defragging needed so we can safely reboot ? Or is the blue screen of doom ready to shut us down. The pending decisions and policys just circuits in the plastic casing of Washington and the new administration new software waiting to be opened and installed in an obsolete and possibly defective machine.

[Vince Williams]

Andrew, I don't make a habit of advertising my native solipsism, but when pressed I will admit that the only person I feel really sure about is called Vince.;-)

[Stephen Smoliar]

The reason I invoke Isaiah Berlin so much is because of his persistent skepticism of fascism, regardless of the source. Sunstein's utopian vision is as fascist any any neoconservative wet dream. Ultimately, he is advocating an approach to manipulating a dictatorship of the proletariat! That makes him as much a sociopath as Dick Cheney in my book!