The New Neo

Commenter FredHjr wonders:

I am very concerned that [Obama’s] popularity is quite high and is sticking there despite everything. This goes to my worry that the nation has indeed turned to the Left.

I share his concern. Those of us in the center or on the Right who follow the news closely are hard pressed to understand the attitude of those who still like Obama and his policies. Has the country really turned so far to the Left? Or are most people just not paying attention to what’s happening? Or do they simply not understand the logical consequences of Obama’s actions, especially in the economic sphere?

I can only answer by looking at those I know best—my friends and relatives—and doing a bit of speculating as well. To begin with, I’ve noticed that most of the people I know are very busy. Just to take one example, a good friend of mine (let’s call her Laurie) has a stressful job at which she works about seventy hours a week. She’s divorced and lives alone, so all the cleaning, shopping, upkeep of the house—everything she needs to do—falls on her. She also has a toddler grandchild whom she loves and visits regularly. The mother of this child (Laurie’s daughter) is pregnant, works full time (as does her husband), is not feeling well, and could use all the help my friend can give.

Laurie expresses an interest in following what’s happening in the news, but she is simply too exhausted. And that exhaustion is real; I can see it. Her priorities are her job and her family and the things she must do, and when she gets the rare chance to relax the last thing she is drawn to doing is to read gloomy news headlines.

Or to read blog posts of mine, even though I’m her good friend. Laurie has made it clear that she is interested in reading them, at least in the abstract. She (unlike many of my other friends) is curious about different points of view. Also, she has told me that she’s actually somewhat conservative economically. But although I’ve expressed my deep concern about Obama especially in the economic sphere, she has told me she doesn’t have the time or energy to read the details even if I were to send them to her.

My guess is that Laurie (and/or many of my other friends, as well as other people who are not Leftists) not only lacks the time and energy to follow all of this too closely, but is almost fearful of doing so. After all, if what I say is true, it would not only challenge many of her assumptions, and make her feel bad about the vote she cast back in November (which was—albeit somewhat reluctantly—for Obama), but it would also greatly increase her already considerable and almost unbearable stress. Who would intentionally seek out such a state? Not very many people.

And so some of what’s going on is a tense avoidance, an immersion in the tasks of day-to-day life, which for most people in the present recession are plenty stressful enough. And there’s a certain amount of reinforcement for this “don’t ask, don’t tell” point of view; after all, hasn’t the US done pretty well so far? Haven’t we dodged a great many bullets, and haven’t most of our fears not come to pass? Is eternal vigilance on the part of every citizen necessary?

That may work in ordinary times. But these are no ordinary times.

I’ve used Laurie as a symbol for one sort of reaction. But there are others. Take Margaret as another example. She is much closer to what one might call a Leftist. She doesn’t hesitate to talk about politics, and if she doesn’t follow events especially closely, she certainly reads the Times and listens to NPR and watches CNN.

Margaret is very happy about what’s going on; she finds Obama refreshing, charismatic, and inspirational, a wonderful corrective to the awful Bush years. She believes that the US has done terrible things for which it must atone, that we need to take our place as only one humble nation among many, and that income redistribution and higher taxes are the way to go.

But when I talk to Margaret, the foundations of her Leftism seem very different from those of the few ideological Leftists I’ve talk to. She has not read nor does she quote any theoreticians on the Left, for example, nor can she express the principles of the Left except in terms more appropriate to social work: she believes the Left will do good in the world. Her beliefs are passionately held, and are expressed in very emotional terms, but she doesn’t see it that way. And although she makes an exception for me and remains my friend, she thinks that those who think other than she does are in general bad and selfish people.

Then there’s Catherine. She is very religious, and she would talk politics with me except that we’ve learned to avoid the subject because the discussion always becomes too heated and never leads anywhere. I learned quite some time ago that, even more than with Margaret, Catherine’s beliefs are faith-based and not subject to argument or what I would call logic. For example, war is just plain unacceptable to her. The fact that her particular religion (Catholicism) has a more nuanced view of war is not the point; she is an absolute pacifist. She also believes in a Christian ideal of self-sacrifice. Catherine most definitely puts her money where her mouth is: she owns very little, and gives away a great deal.

And then there’s Wendy, who’s probably most typical of the greatest number of my friends—and perhaps of most liberals. She’s a very well-educated teacher. She is comfortable but not rich. She lives in a blue state and most of her friends are of like mind; I just might be the only person she has regular contact with who doesn’t identify (anymore) as liberal. She reads the news more or less the way I used to: she skims the headlines in the MSM and reads some of the articles if they happen to interest her. She also watches a bit of cable news (never Fox!), maybe Jon Stewart on occasion, and her face lights up when she says how wonderful the Obama presidency has been so far.

Wendy doesn’t want to talk to me about politics, and so I don’t talk to her about them either. I keep thinking that, if I could be locked up with her in a room for about a month (no waterboarding allowed!) and we could just talk, I could change her mind on a number of very important things. Perhaps that’s just hubris on my part. But at any rate, it’s irrelevant, because she’s not interested in listening even for a few minutes, and so I’m not talking.

My sample is small and non-representative: middle-aged middle class white women. But I somehow think they stand for very many: most are not really on the Left, except for one or two—and even their Leftism is not ideologically based but rather emotionally or even spiritually driven. The others are liberals, displaying varied combinations of traits: fearful avoidance, stress, contentment, disinterest, and/or ignorance.

What would it take to change their minds? A great crisis that happens on Obama’s watch? But my guess is that it would take more than that to have them make the connection between his policies and the consequences, especially if the press doesn’t make that connection explicit for them.

It’s very sobering, but I don’t think the phenomenon represents a grounded ideological turn to the Left so much as a coming together of a group of trends that have been building for decades: MSM bias towards a more liberal and even Leftist point of view, the norming of PC thinking, historic revisionism to emphasize America’s flaws and errors, the glorification of emotion over logic as a mode of thought, and the need to be thought of as a good and kind person and the identification of those traits with liberalism. And it will take a great dose of reality, and the ability to make connections between policies and their effects, to change this drift.