“My party has been brain-dead for years,” Moynihan mournfully
responded.
With all due respect, being brain-dead nowadays may actually be
a good thing. In recent decades, generating lots of new, big ideas has not been
especially good for the United States and its allies.
The Democrats were the party of ideas in the 1960s, but the
results of their implementation were at best mixed. Civil rights legislation
had been long overdue, but Great Society programs were a failure, and Lyndon B.
Johnson’s War on Poverty was poorly conceived and calamitously lost. There had
been too much hubris and unrealistic expectations. Poverty was not defeated
while social fabric disintegrated, crime flourished and great American cities
were allowed to decay.
On the international arena, the Democrats were equally
determined to use America’s power to reshape the world for the better. In the
early 1970s, as leftist Democrats vehemently protested the Vietnam war, a joke
was making rounds about an aged general, a Republican hawk, who suddenly
realized that all the wars in which he fought had been started by the
Democrats.
The Democrats’ idealism at home and abroad culminated in the
disaster of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Mainstream Republicans at the time tended to be more
conservative, and their realism acted as a restraint on the Democrats’ social
and political experimentations. Even Ronald Reagan pursued a cautious foreign
policy, based on containing the Soviet Union rather than confronting it
directly in anything but rhetoric. While building up America’s military, he was
extremely reluctant to get it involved in any confrontations.
But Reagan also ushered in the big ideas era on the Republican
side. Conservatism used to mean avoiding major changes on the assumption that
old institutions and policies, while doubtless imperfect, had a track record,
whereas new ideas, even if they looked good on paper, were unproven. Starting
with Reagan, the Republicans developed an ideology based not on traditional
conservatism but on discontent with the existing system. They wanted to turn
back the clock and go back to some imagined America of the good old days –
which is what all fascist ideologies are based on. Soon enough, the
Republicans’ so-called conservatism transmogrified into ugly right-wing
radicalism.
The Democrats, meanwhile, having run out of great ideas, became
become the true conservatives. Barack Obama has been one of the most moderate,
common sense-driven men ever to occupy the White House. True, Republicans in
Congress have been blocking most of his policy initiatives, but his natural
inclination in all situations has been to do less and to wait. His legacy,
Obamacare, which extended health insurance to millions of the uninsured, merely
brought the United States into line with every other rich developed nation –
while also reducing the financial burden on the state and slowing inflation in
the healthcare industry. That the Republicans have chosen this totally
common-sense, eminently centrist policy as a rallying cry to stir hatred for
Obama among their followers is in itself a measure of their dangerous
extremism.
In the early post-World War II decades, political scientists
wrote extensively on the role of America’s middle class in preventing political
radicalization. They were right all along: in recent decades – and especially
on Obama’s watch, since the 2008 financial debacle – the great American middle
class has eroded. What we’re seeing now is the collapse of the political center
and sudden radicalization not just on the right but on the left, as well – with
a dramatic rise of Bernie Sanders’ political revolution.
Radicalization has a tendency to escalate. The Russian
experience in 1917 offers an example how it can happen. In January 1917, Lenin
told a gathering of Swiss socialists that he might not live to see the
revolution – which started barely a month later. In just eight months, a
centuries-old empire veered out of control, as its population kept rejecting
more and more radical parties and ideas and in the end opted to support the
Bolsheviks on the extreme radical fringe. Opposition to Bolshevism likewise
moved rapidly to the extreme right, regressing from monarchy and constitutional
democracy to proto-fascist extremism.
Germany suffered a similar slide toward radicalization in the
early 1930s.
In the United States, we’re seeing a similar pattern. Blatant
racism, nativism and violence of the kind not seen in American politics for two
generations has been surfacing at mainstream rallies. Words that have not been
uttered publicly for a long time are being voiced. So far, America’s extremism
has been less extreme, of course, than in Russia in 1817 or in Germany in the
early 1930s – but then again, it is still a work in progress.
Hillary Clinton is the only status quo candidate in the current
U.S. presidential field. She’s promising a third Obama term and, as matters now
stand, she remains the likely winner in November. But holding the center has
become untenable – certainly not given the current truculent mood among voters
on the right as well as, increasingly, on the left. Clinton’s presidency may
become a disaster – not because of anything she’s likely to do, but in the way
her every move will be seen and interpreted. Just as Obama has been a red rag
for right-wing radicals in the Republican party, so Clinton is perfectly suited
to be a catalyst for a further radicalization of the U.S. political landscape –
but this time, on both political fringes.
Paradoxically, Obama, who was thought to have effected a
revolution by becoming the first African-American president, may actually
become the last moderate one.
Given the pivotal role of the United States in the world, a
radical reshaping of America’s policies will mean a major reshuffling of the
existing world order. This will have major implications for every nation in the
world – but, especially, for Ukraine, a victim of aggression by a stronger and
utterly unscrupulous neighbor. Without America’s support, an independent
Ukraine could have easily disappeared from the map in 2014.. While Obama has
been criticized both at home and abroad for being too timorous in confronting
Putin, his position on Crimea and Donbas has actually been both consistent and
uncompromising – precisely because he is a conservative politician who
appreciates the value of the status quo.
The taste of what a more radical U.S. president would do in
Europe has already been provided by Donald Trump, still the likely Republican
presidential nominee. He has indicated that he would be willing to do a deal
with Putin, called for a weaker NATO no longer focused on containing Russia and
suggested that Europeans – and, notably, non-nuclear Germany – took the lead in
resolving the Ukraine problem with Putin.
Sanders and his revolutionaries, meanwhile, are more interested
in resolving America’s domestic problems that acting as a global cop, and they
would regard any international effort as a distraction.
What it means for Ukraine is that today, more than ever, it
holds its fate in its own hands. Two years have passed since the victory of its
revolution. Corruption has not been defeated, oligarchs and their pocket
politicians are still dominant and important reforms have not been implemented.
The pro-Ukrainian coalition is breaking down. Given America’s political
realities, Ukraine has no more than two years left to get its act together – to
make sure that even with an isolationist inward-looking America it won’t become
an easy prey for Putin.
