| America's New Chapter |
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| Written by Amol Rajan |
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Amol Rajan is a reporter at the Independent Barack Obama will be a failure by almost every conceivable measure, but posterity may nevertheless rank him in the top league of Presidents. This is not just because of the charming improbability of his biography. More than any leader of the free world since Franklin Roosevelt, History has dealt him a favourable hand. His second term in office already seems likely, because Americans will take a long time to blame their sluggish economy on him rather than George W Bush. This does not detract from his deserved victory: this son of a Kenyan scholar ran the most disciplined campaign in modern times, using technology with genius and enduring immense personal strain with fortitude. Bush’s unpopularity made Obama’s vacuous message of Change resonate but his defeat of John McCain owed still more to a calm temperament and superior intellect. In achieving victory he conquered America’s greatest living hero shortly after imposing a similar fate on its most powerful political machine, the Clintons.Already the Republican Party is exhibiting a degree of self-flagellation not seen since Richard Nixon narrowly lost to John F Kennedy in 1960. Talk in the National Review is of a coming Democratic generation. The most voguish book by a conservative intellectual in 2008 was a manifesto called Comeback: Conservatism that can win again. Billionaire businessmen are deserting the Republicans in favour of their new friends from the other side. If this is the start of a new era in American politics, it is because of three related but distinct inheritances: a fundamental but reversible change in attitude to government; a fading in the relevance of the 1960s; and an exhausted Republican brand in need of intellectual and administrative renewal. It was difficult, standing twenty metres from the tall, slender Senator in Chicago’s Grant Park last November 4th, not to feel in the grip of profound historical forces. I was in the gargantuan press area when, half a mile away, gates opened and 70,000 members of the public were allowed to run into the main section of the Park, each seeking as close a view as possible of Obama’s victory speech. Onrushing hordes, like so many wildebeest eyeing a salt-free lake after a particularly harsh drought, battled to be closest to their new hero. A wall of skyscrapers, many of them abandoned before completion because of shrivelling credit, formed an exquisite backdrop. Giant, fluorescent letters U, S, and A beamed across them. Above us helicopters aimed their spotlights among the crowd, illuminating a mist that gave Chicago more than a passing resemblance to Gotham City. In front of us, and behind Obama, the vastness of Lake Michigan unfolded. The irony was that to students of American history (even those as young as me) it was all eerily familiar. Grant Park, on this night the stage for the supposed rebirth of American liberalism, had four decades previously been handmaiden to its death. The anti- Vietnam riots of August 28th 1968, taking place just metres away from the site of the Democratic convention and culminating in the arrest of a hippy who climbed a flagpole and started lowering the American flag, helped solidify a countrywide suspicion of the Democrats, who lost seven of the next ten elections. American presidents are always voted in mainly because they are the more believable provider of economic security. The scenes in Grant Park back then sanctified the growing impression that Democrats were synonymous with social upheaval and economic disorder. A fussy east Coast elite, breeding these crazed hippy kids, could not satisfy the American yearning for stability. Ronald Reagan’s message that ‘We the people are the driver, the government is the car’, resonated because, in contrast, it offered the possibility of control. Today, as we stare into the abyss of what might be a 21st century Depression, Republicans have become synonymous with chaos and insecurity. The second Bush has personified fiscal mismanagement. America’s recent wealth originates in a myth of ever-expanding asset prices and, once this deceptive coil has painfully unwound, nobody knows what will replace it. The free market associated with rampant excess and private gain (of which there has been an enormous but overlocalised amount) is considered hostile to public order. Bernie Madoff is considered the zeitgeist made flesh. This attitude is, of course very immature, for capitalism needs defending urgently now. But Americans have come to a position advanced, with characteristic cogency, by John Gray in his 1994 essay The Undoing of Conservatism. ‘It is a general truth’, wrote Gray, ‘that, when they are disembedded from any context of common life, and emancipated from political constraints, market forces — especially when they are global — work to unsettle communities and delegitimize traditional institutions’. This assertion now seems prophetic for America where it has recently become orthodoxy. Bush is thought to have sponsored a kind of reckless market fundamentalism. In response, for the first time in several decades, government is seen as a warm blanket of security. Long suspicious of centralised power, Americans suddenly feel moved to embrace it. Partly because he seems to embody responsibility, and openly talks about it (for example when he tells black Americans not to abandon their children, as his father did), Obama is able to make the link between government and economic stability explicit. He acquired an insurmountable lead in the polls when the collapse of Lehman Brothers pushed the economy even more clearly to the top of voter concerns and many young Americans to whom the sixties are increasingly irrelevant favoured him by a huge margin It is difficult for many amateur observers t o understand the significance of that decade on the American psyche. It can hardly be overstated. Yet in 2008 its relevance lay chiefly in Obama and McCain’s having missed it. The former was just emerging from diapers; the latter was having his arms stretched in the Hanoi Hilton. Consequently, this election offered Americans the chance to move on, not just from Grant Park in 1968, but from the whole ethos of ‘positive polarisation’ started by Pat Buchanan, Richard Nixon’s chief strategist, two years earlier. Republican politics has for four decades attempted to split America in two, knowing it would have the bigger half, and has used the culture wars of the 1960s to do so. This is true even of the Reagan era. The template was Nixon’s campaign against George McGovern in 1972. When in doubt, Republicans revert to the most divisive issues thrown up by that decade: guns, God, and abortion, so when he knew he was losing, McCain chose Sarah Palin, a wholly inadequate candidate (though she may not be in 2012). Such issues matter in America, but less than they used to. The culture wars are a national memory beyond the experience of many new voters, especially in the swing states. Increasingly, they find such issues boring, and prefer the idea of national unity. It might have been trite, but Obama’s line about America being composed not of blue states or red states but united states was effective. David Frum, the Canadian author of Comeback, mentioned above, has told The New Yorker: ‘Republicans have been reprising Nixon’s 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century. As the excesses of the 1960s have dwindled into history, however, the 1972 campaign has worked less and less well’. The central thesis of Frum’s book is not only that Republicans continue to ignore the issues of today, but that America’s demographic destiny hugely favours the Democrats. American voting intentions used to form a bell shape: the poor and the rich voted Democrat, but the majority in the middle leaned right. In 2008, however, the graph forms a straight line: the richer you are, the more likely you are to vote Democrat. The middle classes are fleeing leftward at a time when ever more voting Americans are college educated and earning strong salaries — that is, becoming middle class. America’s population, meanwhile, is changing and becoming irreversibly younger and less white. Young people and immigrants leaned heavily towards the Democrats even before a 47 year-old black man became their President. As Frum and the writer David Brooks are constantly urging their fellow conservatives, if Republicans wish to resurrect themselves, they must appeal to the instincts of these new voters by talking about issues — like healthcare and the environment — which they have long avoided. They must talk less about the 1960s. This requires new faces, new ideas, and new leadership, very little of which is presently forthcoming. For all their current self-doubt, Republicans won’t forget that America remains a deeply conservative country. Despite Bush, Katrina, Iraq, and economic catastrophe, 46 per cent of Americans voted against Obama. Partly because he knows how conservative America is, his initial appointments have been in the mould of a pragmatic anti-ideologue and he will govern as a centrist. There is no point portraying him as a dangerous left-winger. Doing so would only reinforce the recklessness with which Republicans have become associated. Their task now is to restore the link between conservatism and stability, and wake up to the fact that America has changed while they have not.
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