Liberalism restored: Obama's regulatory "revolution"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

President Obama isn't "doing all kinds of crazy stuff that risks destroying America," as Bill Kristol claims, echoing a common Republican talking point that Obama himself ridiculed at last Friday's Q&A -- and Kristol just proved his point -- but he is leading what TNR's John Judis calls "The Quiet Revolution":

[T]here is one extremely consequential area where Obama has done just about everything a liberal could ask for -- but done it so quietly that almost no one, including most liberals, has noticed. Obama's three Republican predecessors were all committed to weakening or even destroying the country's regulatory apparatus: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the other agencies that are supposed to protect workers and consumers by regulating business practices. Now Obama is seeking to rebuild these battered institutions. In doing so, he isn't simply improving the effectiveness of various government offices or making scattered progress on a few issues; he is resuscitating an entire philosophy of government with roots in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century. Taken as a whole, Obama's revival of these agencies is arguably the most significant accomplishment of his first year in office.

This isn't so much about change as it is about restoration, about the recovery of the American liberalism of the last century, about equilibrium, about the possibility of a good, just, and decent society.

It's a "revolution," of sorts, but more accurately it's rejection of the neo-liberal anti-government movement that has come to dominate American conservatism since 1964, a movement that has torn apart the social fabric of the nation and replaced it with a neo-Darwinian "free" market propped up and promoted by a state rendered largely impotent, by a state that exists solely to protect the "winners" from the "losers," and when necessary to bail out those "winners."

Now, Republicans will still cry "Socialism!" or "Fascism!" or whatever other lie/smear they dream up, but this restoration is an effort to free the American people from the false freedom of the unregulated market. There's nothing totalitarian about it. As Obama's policies clearly show, it is an effort designed to save America, not to destroy it.