Obama’s DNC Speech Was the Same Old Technocratic Liberalism
Obama’s speech last night at the DNC showcased his rhetorical talent. But it was also a reminder of his incrementalist brand of liberalism, which failed to meaningfully address the profound issues facing the working-class majority.
Former US president Barack Obama speaks on Tuesday evening at the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois. (Victor J. Blue / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Twenty years ago, Barack Obama skyrocketed to national prominence with a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC). It was full of soaring rhetoric. Everyone remembers the bit about how Americans are “one people” who can’t be divided into “red states” and “blue states.” No one seems to remember the policy substance — possibly because there just wasn’t much there.
He mentioned that health care should be more affordable and unemployment should be lower. There was also a gesture to the importance of protecting civil liberties — which would become deeply ironic given the record of his own presidency, during which he embraced warrantless mass surveillance and even ordered a drone strike on an American citizen.
But it was overwhelmingly clear that policy wasn’t the point of the speech. And the one he gave last night in Chicago was no different. In both cases, the real focus was inspirational storytelling, designed to fill the audience with confidence that the speaker (and, by extension, the candidate being talked up: John Kerry in 2004, Kamala Harris in 2024) is a good person who can be trusted to make the right decisions, whatever those might turn out to be.
Obama’s brand of liberalism is deeply technocratic. Politics isn’t really about opposing material interests or even clashing ideological preferences. It’s about problems that are solved when the best, smartest, and most dedicated people come together to devise the cleverest solutions.
At times last night, populist themes made a fleeting appearance. Obama referred to “well-heeled” Trump donors and said that Trump wanted tax cuts that helped him and his rich friends — all very true. But there wasn’t a shadow of a suggestion that the obscene concentration of wealth in these people’s hands, regardless of their personal merit, is a problem in itself. Rather, the problem, according to Obama, is that Trump and his supporters are too selfish to be trusted to make the right decisions with money and power.
In a particularly absurd moment, Obama extended his critique of Trump’s selfishness to lambast him for killing a draconian border security bill. The bill would have shredded the rights of asylum seekers. Trump killed it because he said it didn’t go far enough. Per Obama,
He killed a bipartisan immigration deal written in part by one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress that would’ve helped secure our southern border, because he thought trying to actually solve the problem would hurt his campaign.
Here Obama’s technocratic liberalism was on full display. The bill reflected the GOP’s anti-immigrant prejudices, and most Democrats shamefully went along with it. Today, rather than criticize the bill, Obama criticizes Trump for failing to temper his own ideology in order to “actually solve the problem.” Left unexamined is the premise that anyone should want this solution.
That’s Obamaism in a nutshell: don’t let core beliefs of any kind distract you from dutifully implementing the compromise of the day.
Winners, Losers, and Losers Who Should Have Been Winners
As Thomas Frank argues in his sharp 2016 book Listen, Liberal, this kind of liberalism tends to redefine social justice in a narrowly meritocratic way — a matter of clearing away any barriers to the best and brightest from each demographic group rising to the top so they can engage in this ideologically neutral problem-solving. (It’s never neutral, of course, only free of interference from anyone too far afield of the status quo.)
In the course of telling inspirational stories about his late grandmother and mother-in-law, Obama said that these women had toiled away in “jobs that were often too small for them.” Perhaps he’s right that their talents were going to waste in those jobs. But this relentless focus on people who should rise to the top staying at the bottom poses awkward questions about the rest of the people at the bottom.
After all, most jobs in any hierarchically organized economy are going to be those “small” ones. No matter how fair we make competition for the top slots, most people won’t end up there as a matter of sheer arithmetic. If the goal of Obama’s liberalism is to create conditions for the special few to rise from the ranks, what does it offer the rest of us?
Judging by last night’s speech, and by the record of his thoroughly mediocre presidency, the answer is “not much.” Obama isn’t heartless. He acknowledges that the losers in the meritocratic race deserve some help — more tax credits, that sort of thing. But he never suggests that the losers’ problems are a matter of injustice in quite the same way as the people who were supposed to win ending up working too-small jobs.
One Million Band-Aids
Obama’s signature policy accomplishment was the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare. In his speech at the DNC, he quipped that “since it’s become popular, they don’t call it Obamacare no more.” But he doesn’t seem to have spent much time in the fourteen years since it passed wondering why it was initially unpopular or why it took so long for so many people to resign themselves to the idea that it was the best they were going to get.
When Obama was originally rolling out the ACA, it was supposed to include a “public option” to compete with private insurance plans. This is already a fundamental injustice — at least if you can stretch your imagination to conceive of justice in more than meritocratic terms — since it means two-tiered health care for the rich and poor. But even that was quickly abandoned.
Instead, the problem with health care was defined down to its narrowest nub. It wasn’t that it’s obscene to introduce the profit motive into what is literally a matter of life and death. It wasn’t that millions of Americans stay in jobs they hate for fear of losing their employer health insurance. It certainly wasn’t that health care is a right that everyone should have, no questions asked, just for being a person. The problem was that it’s undesirable in utilitarian terms that not enough people have insurance coverage, and that those who do pay too much money. Hence, his proposal was called the Affordable Care Act.
Six years into its implementation, it was still so unpopular that a self-described socialist was able to win twenty-two states in the 2016 primaries — an outcome that would have been unthinkable in previous American elections — on a platform whose centerpiece was sweeping away the whole Rube Goldberg contraption of the ACA.
Bernie Sanders told the truth: the ACA was a failed policy that attempted to apply a separate technocratic Band-Aid to each of the thousand problems that are all symptomatic of treating health insurance as a commodity. Instead, he argued for a single-payer system that he called Medicare for All. In 2020, the Democratic debates were still dominated by arguments about Medicare for All, with even most of the centrist candidates trying to split the difference and acknowledging the need for major modifications to the ACA.
But you wouldn’t guess any of this from hearing Obama at the 2024 DNC. He simply said:
On healthcare, we should all be proud of the enormous progress that we’ve made through the Affordable Care Act. . . . But Kamala knows we can’t stop there, which is why she’ll keep working to limit out-of-pocket costs.
And he left it at that.
In the rest of his speech, about the closest he came to transformative policy ideas was praising Kamala for embracing the not-quite-convincing YIMBY economics of creating abundant housing by deregulating the housing market.
In what Democrats have told us over and over again is the most important election ever, an election where democracy itself is on the line, this is the economic agenda that’s supposed to inspire people? A bit of further tinkering with a law that keeps the profits flowing for Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield to “limit out-of-pocket costs”? A bit of zoning deregulation?
No wonder this man’s presidency ended with the election of Donald Trump.