Liberalism’s Need for the Moral Equivalent of War

While everyone is debating President Obama’s capitulation on taxes, it might be worth taking a look at what Obama had hoped would be the conversation yesterday: His speech in North Carolina.

An excerpt:

In 1957, just before this college opened, the Soviet Union beat us into space by launching a satellite known as Sputnik.  And that was a wake-up call that caused the United States to boost our investment in innovation and education—particularly in math and science. And as a result, once we put our minds to it, once we got focused, once we got unified, not only did we surpass the Soviets, we developed new American technologies, industries, and jobs.

So 50 years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back. This is our moment. If the recession has taught us anything, it’s that we cannot go back to an economy that’s driven by too much spending, too much borrowing, running up credit cards, taking out a lot of home equity loans, paper profits that are built on financial speculation.  We’ve got to rebuild on a new and stronger foundation for economic growth.

I have no problem with American students getting more interested in math and science, and if invoking Sputnik can do that, then I guess that’s fine. But I don’t think it will work, and that’s just for starters. A few other thoughts:

First, I’m hoping that the formulation “Our generation’s Sputnik moment is back” was a forgivable flub and not in the original text. What generation is he talking about when he says “our”? Sputnik was 50 years ago, before Obama was born. The kids in the audience were mostly born in the 1990s. How can “our generation’s” Sputnik moment be “back” if we weren’t around for it in the first place?

More substantively, I do love how American liberals who spent years decrying excessive anti-Communist “paranoia” and the wasted resources of the Cold War “scares” now routinely look to it for inspiration. Were it not for what Jimmy Carter called our “inordinate fear” of Communism, we never would have had the space race Obama now invokes as a guiding metaphor for his vision.

Of course, what’s new is the Sputnik line. The truth is Obama has been perfectly consistent, invoking the space race as his lodestar for years now. “If we can put a man on the moon” … we can do all sorts of nifty stuff, according to Obama. My favorite example came during his Oval Office address on the oil spill, when he said that if we could put a man on the moon we can switch to a green economy, even though we don’t know how to do that. Oddly, he didn’t say “If we can put a man on the moon, we can plug this leak”—something we did know how to do.

More broadly, this highlights a point I’ve been making for years now: American liberalism is enthralled by the quest for a “moral equivalent of war” and has been ever since William James coined the term. The zeal of the space race was a function of Cold War rivalries many feared would get hot.

Obama wants to make “competitiveness” with China and India into an organizing principle for the country. One presumes—and hopes, in the case of India—he wants to do this without demonizing the Chinese or the Indians (authoritarian China deserves its share of demonization). The problem is that you probably can’t get the kind of psychological commitment and mass mobilization Obama clearly yearns for without an enemy. Cherry-picking accomplishments out of the Cold War without acknowledging the central role fear of the enemy played is hopelessly naïve. And trying to arouse those kinds of passions when they are not called for could be dangerous.