At this point, the media frenzy that currently surrounds John McCain's surprise selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate and the Republican National Convention are obscuring Barack Obama's convention speech, causing many to miss one of its central and extremely important elements. This particular aspect of the speech attests to an essential, but often overlooked, strength of his candidacy: his ability to make left-liberal politics palatable to Middle America.
On August 28, Obama stridently and full-throatedly defended left-wing policies, but did so on fundamentally libertarian grounds. The problem with Republican economic policy, for Obama, is not just the pain it causes, but also the freedom it takes away.
This defense of left-wing policies marks a sharp break from the European-style leftism John Kerry came to embody in 2004, and demonstrates a fundamentally correct insight of Obama and his advisors: To win as a left-liberal in the United States, you have to speak like the classic liberals whose ideas have so thoroughly dominated the American political landscape throughout the nation's history.
To explain why I thought this theme came through so strongly in Obama's convention speech, I need to first explain the difference between "left" and "liberal," two terms that are used identically in the United States but actually have quite different meanings.
"Left" means what we most often refer to as "liberal:" a view that generally supports more government intervention in the market, individual freedom on social issues like abortion and gay rights and a more multilateral and cooperative foreign policy.
"Liberal," by contrast, refers (in its most precise form) to a specific set of beliefs about the nature and role of government. Defined (very) briefly, liberals believe the primary purpose of government is to guarantee the liberty and freedom (but not necessarily welfare) of its citizens. Hence, one can be left without being liberal (e.g., Marxists), or liberal without being left (e.g., libertarians).
The United States has been a liberal nation in this classic sense since its inception: John Locke, the first truly liberal political philosopher, is widely believed to have profoundly influenced Jefferson, Madison and the other Revolutionary luminaries, an influence that is palpable in the text of the Constitution (especially the Bill of Rights).
Since then, the liberal belief that government exists to ensure that all are free to pursue their own ends has become, and I don't think this is an exaggeration, the most widely accepted value in mainstream American politics.
This belief contrasts sharply with Western European welfare states who, though liberal in most senses, emphasize government's responsibility to protect its citizens from harm over its responsibility to ensure their freedom in ways that make many American liberals uncomfortable.
Right about now you're probably wondering what this historical cum philosophical digression has to do with contemporary American politics. For starters, it partially explains why John Kerry lost to George Bush in 2004. Bush was successful in painting Kerry as an effete, out-of-touch "liberal" because his leftism was, well, not liberal enough to succeed in the United States.
In Kerry's 2004 convention speech, he paid lip service to traditional liberal values like hard work and freedom, but his most substantive description of what he believed American values to be made him sound like a European-style collectivist: "Whatever our faith, one belief should bind us all: The measure of our character is our willingness to give of ourselves for others and for our country."
For Kerry, we ought to be on the political left because we have a moral obligation to subordinate ourselves and our own interests to the collective good, a theme that doesn't play at all well in the United States. He paid the electoral price.
Which brings me back to Obama, whose speech recognized Kerry's political failures right off the bat. Obama's defense of left-wing policies like universal health care and increased funding for public education is not centered on some nebulous concept of a public good, but rather on the impact that lack of access to basic resources has on the ability of Americans to freely pursue their own ends.
For Obama, we are not meaningfully free when a lack of health care forces us to stay in bed sick rather than going out to work, or when a regressive tax system prevents children from low- and middle-income families from getting the tools necessary to compete with wealthy kids in the job market.
Obama's quintessentially left liberalism shines through brightest in his characterization of McCain's economic plan: "Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps - even if you don't have boots. You're on your own." In Obama's world, the government helps its citizens not because its purpose is to ensure their well being, but because sometimes people face unfair obstacles that they simply can't beat on their own.
This liberal defense of the contemporary left is in one sense nothing new - political philosophers have been doing (espousing) it since at least the early 1970s. But Obama is the first 21st century Democrat to successfully translate this message from the academy to a national political stage. If John McCain misses this central part of the Obama campaign, and tries to run the same campaign Bush ran against Kerry in 2004, he's in for a rude awakening - whichever of his several beds he wakes up in.
Zack Beauchamp '10 is a left-liberal, too.
