Liberalism's Discontent

Ross Douthat has a very perceptive column in today's New York Times about the growing liberal angst that is being directed toward Barack Obama. He identifies three reasons for this discontent:

At work in this liberal panic are two intellectual vices, and one legitimate fear. The first vice is the worship of presidential power: the belief that any problem, any crisis, can be swiftly solved by a strong government, and particularly a strong executive. A gushing oil well, a recalcitrant Congress, a public that’s grown weary of grand ambitions — all of these challenges could be mastered, Obama’s leftward critics seem to imagine, if only he were bolder or angrier, or maybe just more determined....

The second vice is an overweening faith in theory. It’s now conventional wisdom among Obama’s liberal critics that the White House has been insufficiently ambitious about deficit spending. The economy is stuck in neutral, they argue, because Obama didn’t push last year’s recovery act up over a trillion dollars, and hasn’t pressed hard enough for a second major stimulus....

But it’s here, with the looming fiscal crisis, that the more legitimate liberal fear comes in. Liberals had hoped that Obama’s election marked the beginning of a long progressive era — a new New Deal, a greater Great Society. Instead, from the West Coast to Western Europe, the welfare state is in crisis everywhere they look. The future suddenly seems to belong to austerity and retrenchment — and even, perhaps, to conservatism.

Although I essentially agree with Douthat on these points, I think he misses an equally important fourth reason for liberals' increasingly critical take on the Obama presidency: the contemporary conservative movement is no longer worth taking seriously. Liberals have thus turned their attention toward improving their own movement since the utter lack of intellectual vigor and principled argument from the opposing side had made it an impossible ideology with which to debate. At this point, the liberal movement feels that there is more to be gained by critiquing a president who shares their basic ideological convictions than by arguing with an opposing movement that considers all major liberal initiatives to be "socialist" and that incessantly spouts outrageous inconsistencies about the deficit, climate change, and national security.