Michael Kazin on Obama's Presidency, the left, and the Republican Party

Michael Kazin wrote an evaluation of the development of the US left during the Obama Administration in his chapter of the book The Presidency of Barack Obama ("Criticize and Thrive: The American Left in the Obama Years", Julian Zelizer, ed; 2018)

He explains that the progressive left did grow during the years of the Obama-Biden Administration. He argues that this is consistent with what happened in the US in the 1930s with the union movement and the 1960s with the civil rights and antiwar movements. Because in all those cases, the President and the national Democratic Party gave credibility to policies and ideas that grassroots groups used to push those same Presidents to enact progressive changes. And, of course, they were more inclined to consider left-leaning ideas than conservative governments.

Kazin isn't presenting that observation as some kind of general Law of History or the like. As a historian of the Populist movement in the US, he's very aware that the growth of left movement does not depend solely on a left or center-left national government being in power. A long-standing political science trope is that third parties in American don't last too long because when the start gaining political traction, one of the two big parties coopts their appeals. Which is true as far as it goes, though other factors like the winner-take-all electoral districts and outright repression of radical political groups have played a big role, as well.

Kazin notes of Obama, who was generally understood as the more progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, "With his bracingly progressive rhetoric and activist biography, the first African American president had raised expectations among leftists of nearly every stripe."

He provides a helpful list of criticisms that Obama received from the progressive left, which I have formatted here into bullet points:

The most salient criticisms — whether voiced in sorrow or anger or contempt — included:

• Obama’s failure to fight for a public option in the Affordable Care Act;
• his reluctance to boldly protest an upsurge in racist talk and police killings of unarmed black men;
• his refusal to pull U.S. forces out of Afghanistan and to abandon the surveillance regime accompanying the unending “war on terrorism”;
• his lack of support for legislation that would have made it easier for unions to organize or to do anything else of significance to attack economic inequality;
• and his persistent attempts to compromise with the same Republicans in Congress who - backed by a large and well- funded network of right- wing groups like the Tea Party - sought to defeat him at every turn. [my emphasis]

The last point is particularly important for the Democrats in general and the Biden-Harris Administration in deciding how to approach their governmental and party decisions if they want to more effectively counter the intransigence and authoritarian bent of the Republican Party.

He also provides this broad summary of accomplishments with which progressives could be at least partially satisfied, that I've also arranged in bullet-point form:

• The economic stimulus plan
• the ACA [Affordable Care Act, aka, Obamacare]
• the Dodd-Frank regulation of high finance
• the beginning of a serious effort to stall or reverse global warming
• And, on climate change, the executive orders Obama issued, the international pacts he spearheaded, and the Keystone and North Dakota pipeline projects he halted (if only temporarily) were enough to cheer even most radical environmentalists.

And Kazin does give a practical description of real considerations facing the Obama-Biden Administration. One issue that progressives projected their hopes for change onto a guy who wasn't actually all that activist or progressive:

Those who saw him as a stalwart progressive impatient to launch a New Deal or Great Society for the twenty- first century and to denounce and defy anyone who got in his way did not take an accurate measure of the man. ... [Obama] was an instinctive pragmatist who believed that only patient, empathetic deliberation could generate beneficent change.

Another is the contrast he notes between FDR coming to power in 1933 three an a half years from the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 and Obama's coming to power soon after the spectacular financial crash of September 2008. The recession in the US technically began in December 2007, but the financial crisis made the seriousness of it dramatically clear weeks before the 2008 Presidential election.

When FDR took office in 1933, more than three years after the stock market crash, no one blamed him for the millions of unemployed or the thousands of banks that were in danger of going broke. But Obama had to weather the inevitable decline of the economy and so he reaped less credit from the slow recovery that followed. If Roosevelt had been elected in, say, 1930, he surely would have struggled mightily to enact the New Deal programs that became keystones of the modern liberal state. [my emphasis]

E.J. Dionne made that argument in real time in a 12/30/2010 column (Liberals should accept defeat and get back to their goals Washington Post):

The economic downturn began on Bush's watch, but its bitter fruits were harvested after Obama took office. By contrast, Franklin Roosevelt took power after Herbert Hoover had presided over three of the most miserable years in American economic history. Blame was firmly fixed on Hoover by the time FDR showed up with his jaunty smile and contagious optimism.

Kazin also notes that the Bipartisanship that Obama seemingly fetishized as an end in itself was a very different thing in earlier times:

Most of the president’s left critics also neglected the fact that he had to cope with much smaller majorities in Congress than FDR and LBJ enjoyed — and unbending opposition from nearly every GOP lawmaker in both houses. This was a stark contrast with the relative bipartisanship that prevailed during earlier liberal heydays. A sizable minority of Republicans had voted for such signature programs of the New Deal as Social Security and the G.I. Bill as well as for such pillars of the Great Society as Medicare and the Civil Rights Act.

In those times, ideological divisions int he US cut across both parties in ways hard to recall in 2020. During the Presidencies of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson, there actually were moderate and even liberal Republicans. Those two now-vanished political species were represented in Congress. And some of the more hardcore reactionaries were segregationist Southern Democrats.

Making that problem much worse for Obama was his apparent fixation on consensus building in pursuit of that impossible ideal of Bipartisanship. "Alas, when he got to the White House, this exponent of consensus- building took far too long to understand that neither he, nor any other president, could effectively govern that way. Driven by ideological conviction and electoral self-interest, his Republican opponents had no intention of making deals." (my emphasis)

That was the case in 2009 when Obama and Biden took office. It's gotten dramatically worse since.