It’s Not 2008 Anymore

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, September 06, 2014

Even the most historically literate of human beings can from time to time succumb to the conceit that what is true now will be true forever. Writing at the bitter end of the Victorian era, fretting paleofuturists expressed grave concern that if the market for transportation continued to grow apace, by 1950 every street in London “would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure,” while, across the Atlantic, the “droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows.” To read the newspapers of yesteryear is to discover that such bodements are all too common. We are always, it seems, on the verge of running out of oil and of food, thereby giving Thomas Malthus the hideous last laugh. From time to time, we are told that catastrophic ice ages are imminent and, when they are not, that we might expect their opposite. And in politics, where the tendency is perhaps most pronounced, the status quo is held by the fashionable to be immutable, the dissenters of the moment being destined always to go the way of the Whigs.

As George W. Bush’s reelection had done four years earlier, Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 yielded a ream of overconfident prognostications, coupled with the premature suggestion that a new and unbreakable political coalition had arrived on the scene. After he managed to vanquish the ostensibly “inevitable” Hillary Clinton in the primaries and then beat John McCain in the general election, Obama’s brand of “smart power” was swiftly deemed by the stylish set to be the model of future foreign policy — his opposition to the once-popular war in Iraq serving now as an asset and not a liability. Domestically, social-democratic proclivities that would have once been considered disqualifying were seen as reflective of a rapidly changing zeitgeist. The banking crisis, popular thinking held, had finally exposed the dark underbelly of what British prime minister Sir Edward Heath referred to as “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism,” rekindling at last the voters’ interest in a “middle way.” Both of these changes were presumed to be permanent. Excited by the times, the historian Sam Tanenhaus rather naively announced “The Death of Conservatism.” Elsewhere, a thousand hasty think-pieces explored the weighty question of whether capitalism itself was a thing of the past.

As its dramatic rhetoric confirms daily, the spirit of those heady days still motivates the president’s base. An unseemly and obsequious song, released this year at the Netroots Nation conference in Detroit, contends jauntily that the populist hero Elizabeth Warren is just what disgruntled Americans need once Obama has left office. Asserting that “the power is shifting,” the ditty informs listeners that the United States is in need of “a leader who won’t stand for all the Wall Street bulls***” or tolerate “corporate bullies,” and who will “tell the truth that we’ve been chipped, squeezed, and hammered.” “Run, run, run; Run, Liz, run,” the lyrics urge, “you gotta run for the office and get the job done.”

For those in the unreconstructed quarters of the contemporary Left, this rather saccharine call to arms will no doubt work wonders. But, one suspects, for the rest of the electorate, such brazen appeals do not enjoy the same potency as they did six years ago. Just as conservatives continue to damage their present appeal by fixating too keenly upon the 1980s and employing as their political touchstone a president who left office before anybody under 30 had recorded his first memory, progressives are perhaps now in danger of clinging too enthusiastically to the spirit of ’08 and of presuming lustfully that its orthodoxies will persist ad infinitum. For those whose everyday politics is motivated both by general opposition to American intervention abroad and by a heartfelt conviction that the United States is in need of substantially larger government, the last two years of the previous decade were undoubtedly thrilling. Crises, as we were told ungraciously at the time, are invariably profitable for the radicals. But for most Americans, the early Obama years were not electrifying but terrifying, and the tumult represented not the pinnacle of domestic political opportunity but an economic nadir from which the majority wished to escape.

For a short while, the pendulum swung leftward. By 2009, the financial crisis had pushed Americans toward all-out loathing of Wall Street and what it represents, with supermajorities holding a net negative impression of the banking and real-estate industries, and voters souring on the free market in general. Voters, to borrow a phrase, felt “chipped, squeezed, and hammered.” Today, however, things look remarkably different, Gallup recording this morning that:

    Americans’ views of the banking industry are positive for the first time since 2007, at a net positive rating of 8. The public also has an improved view of the real estate industry (12), marking the first time Americans’ image of this industry has been positive since 2006. Net positive views of banking increased 18 points from 2013, while opinions of real estate rose 11 points.

This trend is a general one. “The average net positive rating across all 24 industries this year,” Gallup notes, “is 18.” The bottom line: “The positive images of most industries have returned to prerecession levels, including three business sectors that the recession most directly affected: banking, real estate, and the automobile industry.”

In the realm of foreign policy, too, the old songs are no longer bringing in the crowds. “Obama’s ‘don’t do stupid s***’ foreign policy doctrine might sound great in the White House mess,” the Washington Post’s Daniel Drezner observed in June, “and, five years ago, it probably sounded pretty good to an American public sick of George W. Bush’s galactic foreign policy blunders.” But now? “It just sounds like a really low bar that’s simultaneously full of arrogance and devoid of any aspirational desires.” Unsurprisingly, those jockeying to replace Obama at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have noticed, hitting him not from the left but from the right. “Great nations need organizing principles,” an acid-tongued Hillary Clinton told Jeffrey Goldberg last month, “and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, has refused to play the progressive hero on foreign affairs. “ISIS is growing in strength,” she contended this week, “so when we think about a response we have to think about how to destroy that.” Later, Warren struck a tone reminiscent of George W. Bush: “The terrorists have moved, and we have to move in response,” she insisted, which “means we’re going to have to change in fundamental ways how we monitor our citizens when they go abroad.” This approach was of a piece with her attitude toward Israel. “When Hamas puts its rocket launchers next to hospitals, next to schools, they’re using their civilian population to protect their military assets,” Warren explained. “And I believe Israel has a right, at that point, to defend itself.”

This lattermost asseveration prompted the lawyer Ben Rosenfeld to lament on Counterpunch that Warren was engaging in “pure Washington sophistry” and wonder if, after all the hype, there is actually “nothing new or refreshing about her.” One understands well Rosenfeld’s upset. It is never agreeable to see a politician in whom one has placed great hope reveal herself as a disappointment. Nevertheless, Rosenfeld is quite wrong to conclude that there is nothing “new” about Warren’s stance. That a politician of her ilk feels comfortable calling so stoutly for the “destruction” of a foreign enemy should tell us that something is afoot — something that, before long, may alter her domestic rhetoric, too; for while human beings can be unimaginative and obstinate creatures who look at their present circumstances and surmise that the world will be forever thus, most will nevertheless permit the horse**** to pile up in the streets for only so long before, defying the credulous expectations of the chattering classes and their enablers, they insist that it’s time for a change. It’s not 2008 any more.