Saying no deal to the New New Deal.

• Author: Kesler, Charles R.
• Position: American Thought

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IN PRES. BARACK OBAMA, conservatives face the most formidable liberal politician in at least a generation. In 2008, he won the presidency with a majority of the popular vote--something a Democrat had not done since Jimmy Carter's squeaker in 1976--and handily increased the Democrats' control of both Houses of Congress. Measured against roughly two centuries worth of presidential victories by Democratic nonincumbents, his win as a percentage of the popular vote comes in third behind Franklin Roosevelt's in 1932 and Andrew Jackson's in 1828.

More importantly, Obama was elected not as a status quo liberal, but as an ambitious reformer. Far from being content with incremental gains, he set his sights on major systemic change in health care, energy and environmental policy, taxation, financial regulation, education, and even immigration, all pursued as elements of a grand strategy to "remake America." In other words, he longs to be another FDR, building a New New Deal for the 21st century, dictating the politics of his age, and enshrining the Democrats as the majority party fur several decades to come. Suddenly, the era of big government being over is over, as tax-and-spend liberalism is back with a vengeance. We face a 1.4 trillion dollar Federal deficit this fiscal year alone and 10 trillion to 12 trillion in total debt over the coming decade. If the ongoing expansion of government succeeds, there also will be very real costs to American freedom and character. The Reagan Revolution is in danger of being swamped by the Obama Revolution.

To unsuspecting conservatives who had forgotten or never known what full-throated liberalism looked like before the Age of Reagan, Obama's eruption onto the scene came as a shock--and, in some respects, obviously, he is a new political phenomenon. Yet, in most respects, Obama does not represent something new under the sun. On the contrary, he embodies a rejuvenated and a repackaged version of something older than our grandmothers--namely the intellectual and social impulses behind modern liberalism. However, even as Pres. Obama stands victorious on health care and financial regulation and sets his sights on other issues, his popularity and that of his measures have tumbled. His legislative victories have been eked out on repeated party line votes of a sort never seen in the contests over Social Security, Medicare, and previous liberal policy successes, which were broadly popular and bipartisan. In short, a strange thing is happening on the way to liberal renewal. The closer liberalism comes to triumphing, the less popular it becomes. According to Gallup, 40% of Americans now describe themselves as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% call themselves liberal. After one of its greatest triumphs in several generations, liberalism finds itself in an unexpected crisis--and a crisis that is not merely, as we shall see, a crisis of public confidence.

To try to understand better the difficulties in which the New New Deal finds itself, it might be useful to compare it to the original. The term itself, New Deal, was an amalgam of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal, and was deliberately ambiguous as to its meaning. It could mean the same game but with a new deal of the cards, or it could mean a wholly new game with new rules, i.e., a new social contract for all of the U.S. In effect, I think, the term's meaning was somewhere in between. FDR liked to use the more conservative or modest sense of the term to disguise the more radical and ambitious ends that he was pursuing.

In its own time, the New Deal was extremely popular. Among its novel elements was a new kind of economic rights. The Progressives at the turn of the century had grown nervous over the closing of the American frontier and the rise of large corporations--developments they thought threatened the common man's equality of opportunity. Aside from antitrust efforts and wartime taxation, however, the Progressives did not get very far toward a redistributive agenda, and actually were wary of proclaiming new-fangled rights. They were more comfortable with duties than fights, and disapproved of the selfish penumbras cast by the natural rights doctrines of old. Wilson and Roosevelt preached moral uplift--doing your duty in a more socialized or socialistic era. They tended to associate rights talk with individualism of the backward-looking sort. It took the cleverness of FDR and his advisors to figure out...