I find this article sickening.
So with all due respect to all those Rabbis for Obama, maybe we should try another approach. If our goal is to heal the wounds in the world, maybe the right way to do that doesn’t involve seizing wealth from people who work hard to give it to people who don’t. Maybe it shouldn’t involve the construction of a vast super state of regulatory czars and czarinas, people capable of writing a rule that could, without review from elected legislators, destroy a citizen’s life work. Maybe we should ask ourselves whether tikkun olam means making people even more dependent on the goodwill of the state.
Maybe the best form of tikkun olam is to give people freedom and free markets as opposed to more state-sponsored goodies. Freedom and free markets have worked pretty well in lifting people out of poverty, creating strong middle-class societies, and supporting great voluntary and charitable institutions.
The economic arguments are familiar of course (leave aside the
characterization that Obama has "increased the welfare state in all directions"
when in fact the ACA is the only expansion of the welfare state and all the
increase in Food Stamps etc is due to the economic downturn). But though I find
the economics arguments unconvincing, I don't find those immoral or
anything- right-wing economists believe everyone will be more prosperous with
right-wing policies, and that's fine.
What's sickening is tying it to Tikkun Olam. In Jewish thought since the
time of Moses, great emphasis has been placed on caring for the poor. When
conservatives talk about gutting Medicaid, raising the social security
retirement age to 67 or higher (which is a much greater burden on working class
people than on professionals), and keeping taxes on the wealthy at historically
low rates, that may be good economics, but it sure aint Tikkun Olam.
Similarly, I'm consistently appalled by how the conservative Christian
churches have allowed their alliance with Republicans on social issues (which is
understandable) to color their view of the economic world. I'm not that
knowledgeable about Jesus, but I think he emphasized care for the poor a lot
more than "personal responsibility" and the wonders of creative
destruction.
To be clear, the real debate here is about whether a more "selfish" society
with less of a safety net unleashes enough prosperity to compensate for the
potential misery suffered by the lower classes. Maybe it does, though I don't
think so. But the Utopian society of Ayn Rand isn't very consonant with the
teachings our great religious sages- that's an argument that can't really be
justified.
Tikkun Olam- it doesn't mean what Noam Nuesner thinks it means:
Embattled President Obama took to the stage at the Democratic Convention tonight to a smaller venue where, for the past two nights, everyone from politicians to Hollywood tried to make the crowd more enthusiastic. Obama had to give the speech of his life tonight, to convince not just the independents watching, but his own base whose faith has been diminished after "yes we can" went to "no, we couldn't."
ReplyDeleteThe Obama Presidency, Explained is in this same Atlantic, uh, tradition. But the book is worth a download for what it tells us about liberal disenchantment with President Obama—that is, how one of his sophisticated admirers perceives the president’s failure to reconcile his uninspiring presidency with the dizzying expectations he goosed them all into way back in 2008.
ReplyDeleteFallows nicely illustrates this liberal consternation with a joke that the comedian Seth Meyers addressed to the president at a Washington ballroom dinner. This was in 2011, when even his most ardent admirers were beginning to wonder where the hell all that hope and change had got to.
“I’ll tell you who could definitely beat you,” Meyers said to Obama, referring to the upcoming election. “2008 Barack Obama. You would have loved him.”
Conservatives who consider Obama a thinly disguised Leninist will be surprised that liberals have grown disenchanted with their onetime hero. But you can’t underestimate the naïveté and ignorance that inflated the bubble of the Obama Delusion—how fragile it was, how vulnerable to the first pinprick of reality. It turns out they really did expect a “transformative” presidency that would move us beyond left and right. They meant it! And in this childish belief they were encouraged by their candidate, who might have meant it too, for the same reasons. Obama’s admiration for Barack Obama, after all, was even greater than theirs, and his ignorance of the messy practical realities of self-government almost as complete.
By now, Fallows writes, “there is plenty of evidence about the things Obama and his team cannot do.” These include managing the various crises in the Middle East, overcoming the culture wars, and restoring the economy to the full bloom of health. The author might have added several more items: writing a budget for the federal government, let’s say, or containing health care costs, or reducing, rather than enlarging, the federal debt. . . . I’m sure you can come up with a few items of your own. Even balanced with what Fallows insists are Obama’s successes—installing Obama-care, withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, “encouraging the Arab Spring” (?), managing relations with China—the executive tasks that were beyond Obama’s competence should be enough to declare a mostly failed presidency.