SIX QUESTIONS ON AN HISTORIC ELECTION
By Jorg Lau

[This web blog published 11/4/2008 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, blog.zeit.de/joerglau/. Jorg Lau writes regularly on foreign policy for the Hamburg weekly DIE ZEIT.]

Cambridge, Massachusetts. In America, people are standing in lines today to cast their vote. This election will probably show a record participation.

What drives the people? What is really at stake in this election?

Today’s election takes place in an “historical moment.” For the first time, a black candidate has the best chance for a victory.

The race theme all too often pushes the other aspects of this vote into the background.

I see six questions that Americans must answer today:

IS THE “REAGAN-REVOLUTION’ OVER?

The financial crisis has put the desire for security on today’s agenda. For weeks, McCain positioned Obama in the corner of a raging distribution policy. Obama wants “to spread the wealth around.” That McCain uses this Obama quotation to discredit him reveals the Senator from Arizona as a child of the Reagan revolution of 1980. With him, the focus is still on limiting spending and tax cuts. In contrast, Obama proposes higher taxes for the higher-paid and wants to improve the chances for health insurance for the millions of uninsured. Obama does not stand for the return to the old social-democratic approach of democrats before Clinton but clearly turns from Bill Clinton’s way that ultimately represented a continuation of Reaganomics (against “big government”). A strong vote for Obama could mean a return of the state in American (domestic-) politics.

IS AN ERA BEYOND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION DAWNING?

A President Obama could paradoxically be a symbol that skin color does not play a great role any more. A President Obama would help correct perspectives. What appears as a racial barrier pervading society is very often a class barrier. One can speak about racial discrimination in America but class distinctions obviously are politically taboo. America is a class society that doesn’t want to see this and therefore prefers to speak about discrimination of groups.

IS AN ALTERNATION IN GENERATIONS OCCURRING?

The candidates are unusually far apart according to age. Unlike Clinton and Bush, Obama does not belong to the Baby-Boomer generation marked by the 1960s and 1970s. Obama is not marked by the cultural battles of that era that led to a sharp polarization of society. McCain tried to move him in this context through association with the ex-radical Ayers. The postwar generation (to which Blair and Schroeder also belong) has left behind an ideologically torn society. This generation made the private life more acceptable and more liberal (for persons of all political persuasions) but the public institutions have become weak (family) or absolutely dysfunctional (education misery). Obama faces the challenge of repairing the latter without abandoning the achievements of the baby-boomers.

DO AMERICANS CARE ABOUT THE OPINION OF THE REST OF THE WORLD?

In the past, Americans have never really been influenced by world opinion in their election decisions. Reagan was and is very popular though he was regarded as dangerous and harmful abroad. Carter was loved abroad and flopped at home. The dimension of the crisis could change something here. Since the Vietnam War, America has never had such a miserable reputation in the eyes of the world. Now the economic crisis supervenes so that people can feel America’s decline in their own pocketbooks. Dependence on Arab oil and Chinese money is nothing abstract any more. America must set itself in a new relation with the world. A president named Barack Hussein Obama could certainly revolutionize America’s picture in the world.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A CONSERVATIVE TODAY?

The underrated story of this election is the crisis of conservatives. John McCain as the “maverick” is evidence of this. The erratic way he has acted confirms this. What being conservative means today has never been as open as after the foreseeable end of the Reagan-revolution, after the disaster of the neocons under Bush and after the failure of the deregulation policy in the Wall Street fiasco. By choosing Palin for vice-president, John McCain showed he wasn’t ready to seriously reflect about this. Others have long been ready to assume leadership in the event of a defeat. They may even belong to a new generation.

CAN THE CHILDREN OF THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY LEAD SOCIETY THROUGH SCARCITY?

This is the most important question of all. It transcends party lines and points beyond them to America. Obama is marked by the fat years when life always went upwards somehow. He went to the top in the longest phase of the uninterrupted growth of the American system. But now a new scarcity threatens on several fronts. Financial crisis, energy crisis and the crisis of American foreign policy sidetracked in too many fronts flow in one another. Obama promises many things to people that obviously cannot be financed. Will he be able to sell limitations as well as “hope” and “change”? Will he tell people the truth about America’s reduced power? Will he say to people they must restrict their frivolous energy consumption? If he does, will he be finished as Carter was once finished?

OBAMA IS THE TRUE CONSERVATIVE
By Jorg Lau

[This web blog entry from 11/3/2008 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, blog.zeit.de/joerglau/.]

On ZEIT online, my very esteemed colleague Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff (our former Washington correspondent) predicted a rosy political future for Sarah Palin as a new hope of the Republican Party – irrespective of the election result.

I must register my dissent at one point. Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff sees Palin as the hope of “conservatism.” This amazes me. Through the irresponsible choice of Palin, McCain abandoned the claim to the conservative value “experience.” The catastrophic polls of the last weeks on the conservative standard bearers from the Republican Party are another evidence.

To speak of Palin as a conservative only has a meaning for me when this term is emptied of all substance – in the sense that conservative is whatever republicans want it to be. That was the great misunderstanding about George W. Bush whose domestic and foreign policy were not at all conservative as everybody knows (spending money until the doctor comes; waging revolutionary wars for the conscious destabilization of a whole region; democratizing the Middle East).

Palin succeeded, Thomas thought, in inspiring the “conservative” little people. Perhaps this is true. But she did this – by using the old cultural struggle emotions – and so merely enlarged the problem of conservatism today. Conservatism must reconstitute itself as a serious reality that has something to say on the (partly self-created) problems of a changed world (financial crisis, America’s self-absorption through 2 wars, energy dependence on the Middle East and China’s ascent). Palin suggested return to the old reality was possible with small town values and American self-confidence, that is redemption was nothing but a question of style.

That would be a trap for conservatives after a possible loss in power. Much more reflection and consciousness on their own values is necessary than Palin gave.

This insight is implicit in the remarkable conversion of so many conservatives to Obama. No one expressed this better than Jeffrey Hart, the speechwriter of Ronald Reagan and Nixon:

There are common sense conservatives who are prudential, who try to match means with ends, and who calculate the probabilities of gains and risks. But there are philosophical (analytical) conservatives, the most useful being Edmund Burke, whose “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) understood the great dangers in trying to change society through abstract (republican) theory. My first book that dealt with these matters was “English Political writers: From Locke to Burke” (Knopf, 1963).

Republican President George W. Bush has not been a conservative at all, either in domestic policy or in foreign policy. He invaded Iraq on the basis of abstract theory, the very thing Burke warned against. Bush aimed to turn Iraq into a democracy, “a beacon of liberty in the Middle East,” as he explained in a radio address in April 2006.

I do not recall any “conservative” publication mentioning those now memorable words “Sunni,” “Shia,” or “Kurds.” Burke would have been appalled at the blindness to history and to social facts that characterized the writing of those so-called conservatives.

Obama did understand. In his now famous 2002 speech, while he was still a state senator in Illinois, he said: “I know that a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, of undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without international support will fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al Qaeda. I’m not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”

Burke would have agreed entirely, and admired the cogency of so few words. And one thing I know is that both Nixon and Reagan would have agreed. Both were prudential and successful conservatives. But all the organs of the conservative movement followed Bush over the cliff—as did John McCain.

Obama was the true conservative, the Burkean. Like the French radicals of 1790, Bush wanted to democratize Iraq, turn it, as he said in a speech at Whitehall, into a “beacon of liberty in the Middle East.” Now, Robespierre and the other radicals were criticized by Burke for wanting to turn France into a republic. Not a bad idea, but they tried to do it all at once, and according to republican theory.

Maxmillien Robespierre himself would have been horrified by the notion of democratizing Mesopotamia. That may—possibly—happen. But it will take a long time, an Enlightenment, and the muting of sectarian hatreds.

Social Security has long been considered one of the most successful New Deal programs, working well now for 70 years. Yet in 2005, the Bush plan to establish private accounts that could be invested in the Stock Market got nowhere. McCain, too, has embraced this idea. In 2008 it looks ridiculous. The Stock Market! Again, this is a radical proposal, not a conservative one.