The Unity Fantasy
FERGUSON, ANDREW
The Unity Fantasy The donkey and the elephant are not about to lie down together. BY ANDREW FERGUSON He was a college professor with strong political opinions— two marks against him right...
...In a platform trick reminiscent of Huey Long, Obama actually asked his supporters during campaign rallies how much money they made, the better to drive them away from the unsavory, nonunited elements that earn more than they do...
...For that matter, his victory in 1984 wasn’t as big as the victory recorded in 1972 by Richard Nixon...
...Together they produced a complicated and expensive set of reforms that appeared to lasso every warring faction into a united effort...
...Stalinists and Nazis were terrific at unifying countries...
...But how...
...By positioning himself as the third way between two absurd alternatives that no one favors, Obama has persuaded voters of his reasonableness and moderation...
...Reagan as a unifying force...
...Horrifying...
...Think about his third way in education reform...
...The most recent and consequential example of it is the mesmerism of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign...
...Who, after all, could have argued with such improbable accomplishments as they took shape...
...In his stump speech, Obama pretended that every major political disagreement was merely the consequence of a false choice...
...He had noted my skepticism...
...Right at the top he promised that his victory would “put an end to the politics that would divide a nation just to win an election...
...There he sits, or so he says, nobly perched between the (nonexistent) more-money and more-reform factions...
...He communicates through a kind of subverbal music, half-heard and absorbed rather than cogitated on...
...The sales pitch was a proposition that seemed self-evident: The only way “to get things done” and “move this country forward” was to “bring us together,” just as we believe Reagan did even though he didn’t...
...But consider that promise above...
...Among the many examples are the hapless attempts that political geeks make year after year to form third parties that will transcend ideology and return us to our natural, prelapsarian state of cooperation...
...But don’t you see Obama has the potential to be a unifying force,” he said...
...When his opponents dissented from his tax plan, he said they were making “a virtue of selfi shness...
...He’ll be elected and unity will ensue...
...Reagan sold some fantasies of his own, as his critics never tired of pointing out...
...The unity didn’t last long, as you’ve probably noticed, though in a way, I suppose, No Child Left Behind did prove a unifying force: When put into practice, it managed to frustrate and anger nearly every interested party—for contradictory and irreconcilable reasons...
...Like all but 17 of America’s college professors, he was an Obama supporter...
...He’s got to know this, even if his blissed-out followers don’t...
...When it comes to giving every child a world-class education,” he said, “the choice is not between more money and more reform...
...That illusory advantage will go poof soon enough, though...
...Obama does both, depending on the rhetorical point he’s trying to make...
...When it comes to jobs,” he said, “the choice in this election is not between putting up a wall around America or allowing every job to disappear overseas...
...Elections presuppose a divided nation...
...Or he can pretend they don’t exist...
...Things didn’t go so smoothly at the time...
...His fi nal stump speech— which his campaign called, with customary pomposity, the “closing argument,” as though the candidate had suddenly turned into Perry Mason — was drenched in togetherness...
...that tries to pit region against region, city against town, Republican against Democrat . . . ” Obama’s theatrical gift is such that his listeners seldom pause to think about what he’s saying...
...Obama’s supporters were asked to divide the country between those who were united—that would be them —and those who weren’t, for whatever reason...
...Trust me, though: They didn’t...
...When it comes to health care,” he said, “we don’t have to choose between a governmentrun health care system and the unaffordable one we have now...
...Certainly the campaign of Obama’s opponent—who promised, among much else, to balance the federal budget in four years—was built largely on fantasy...
...If we’re lucky he won’t go back to blaming criminal CEOs and sleazy lobbyists...
...Just about everybody I knew hated him—really couldn’t stand him, with a teeth-grinding, skin-crawling disdain...
...But we probably won’t be lucky...
...He doesn’t look like a cynic to me...
...How do these things get started...
...Yet unity was Obama’s theme...
...Success, they say, has a thousand fathers, and we kid ourselves into believing we all of us were papa to the Reagan revolution...
...The fi ring of the air traffi c controllers, the huge tax cuts of 1981, the huge tax hike of 1982 (in the middle of a recession...
...I didn’t know what to say...
...Like vacation brochures or softcore pornography or TV ads for Ronco’s Chop-O-Matic, political campaigns are exercises in fantasy...
...Now there was a unifying force...
...Division is what politicians do...
...Our infatuation with “unity” is a recurring delusion of American politics...
...He managed to bring his “conservative reformers” together with liberals like Senator Edward Kennedy, water carrier for the educational establishment...
...His landslide reelection victory in 1984 was impressive, but even then, at the zenith of his presidency, more than 40 percent of voters wanted to give him the boot...
...the nuclear freeze movement, aid to the contras and to the mujahedeen, the “three million” homeless, budget cuts, the invasion of Grenada, the Iran-contra scandal and the subsequent calls for impeachment—the real story of the Reagan years is a story of endless contention, much of it bitter, wrenching, and, to a squeamish public, unpleasant to watch...
...I spent a lot of time during the Reagan years in faculty lounges, on college campuses, with men and women just like this professor, and I don’t remember Reagan as a unifying force...
...He could bring the country together, the way Reagan did to win the Cold War...
...Their cynicism was instinctual...
...BY ANDREW FERGUSON He was a college professor with strong political opinions— two marks against him right there—but even so he seemed to be a very smart man...
...and thus of his ability to get things done...
...Maybe unity will ensue —but only in hindsight, 20 years on or more, after we’ve forgotten how we Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Please make it stop...
...Unity is a phantasm raising hopes for something that can’t be delivered —or that, once delivered, would be so un-American it would scare us half to death...
...He can declare that the nonunifi ers are philosophically or morally indecent...
...But of course nobody—really, nobody— thinks those are the only alternatives in the health care debate...
...When the law lapses next year, President Obama will fi nd himself smack in the middle of these crosswires, where every move touches off an explosion, often on time-release, set to blow when you least expect it...
...As a career politician, he has been required by his profession to face opponents and defeat them if he wants to get his way...
...They refused to honor American troops and veterans...
...President Bush, if I can mention the unmentionable, thought he was putting himself in the same position in 2001...
...Weekend after weekend, protesters swelled our great cities and hoisted placards calling him either a psychopath or a buffoon (they could never decide which...
...Who says it is...
...They were, he said, coddling criminal CEOs and responding with Pavlovian discipline to the commands of sleazy lobbyists...
...Obama’s chief fantasy is that he’s a politician who will relieve us of the burden of politics...
...It goes without saying that the easiest way to unify the country is to eliminate those elements within it that make trouble for the unifi er...
...And of course Obama’s chief pledge is to make it stop...
...Everybody loved him...
...Well, every kind...
...In his dealings with the Soviets, for example, Reagan was hampered at every step—fi rst by liberals for being too rough, then by conservatives for being too soft...
...When these elements have been dispensed with, unity becomes a simple matter of people identifying their own best interests and falling into one another’s arms...
...Obama’s “new politics of unity” would end “the old politics of division” by labeling those old politicians and their arguments irredeemably corrupt, hence unworthy of consideration...
...What kind of “politics . . . divides the nation just to win an election...
...He may wind up, like Reagan, a successful president...
...it expresses them and clarifies them...
...But if he does, it will be because, like Reagan, he engaged his ideological and political opponents in ferocious battles and beat them...
...Whether Obama really thinks such a thing is possible is anybody’s guess...
...But in dealing with the wayward elements, he has other options...
...According to today’s popular accounts he won the Cold War and touched off a great economic boom, so of course the country stood unifi ed in support...
...Only in retrospect has Reagan been tagged as a twinkly, grandfatherly presence, a fi rm but gentle leader who transcended ideology and brought us together to defeat the Soviet Empire...
...They sell something that could never exist in the real world, at least in its advertised form...
...Besides, politics, of whatever kind, doesn’t cause the divisions...
...Their techniques are closed to him, of course, Obama being neither a Stalinist nor a Nazi but only a hardworking, ambitious, well-meaning American pol...
...His foremost political adversary, Tip O’Neill, said he “had ice water for blood...
...Republicans pitted against Democrats...
...Even beyond the leafy lotus land of higher- ed, he was acknowledged by admirer and critic alike as a “polarizing presence...
...if the nation weren’t divided it wouldn’t need an election...
...You will note too that he declares his contempt for a politics that pits Republicans against Democrats...
...Experience shows that this method of expressing division is far preferable to the alternatives, which often involve bazookas...
...Ross Perot capitalized on the delusion by telling voters they could join together, hire a managerial expert to run the government “like a business,” and do away with a political class that was driving them apart (and not paying enough attention to him...
...This is more than rhetorical license...
...In his endless campaign, though, he never stopped talking as if the clashing political interests and contending ideas of a big, complicated, self-governing country were all just a terrible misunderstanding...
...What fogs our memory and makes the retrospective Reagan seem like a unifying force is his success...
Vol. 14 • November 2008 • No. 9
