Statism is failing, and the left's scared to death

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.

This vice isn’t confined to liberals: you can see it at work when foreign policy hawks suggest that mere presidential “toughness” is the key to undoing Iran’s clerical regime, or disarming North Korea. But it runs deepest among progressives. When Rachel Maddow fantasized last week about how Obama should simply dictate energy legislation to a submissive Congress, she was unconsciously echoing midcentury liberal theoreticians of the presidency like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who often wrote as if a Franklin Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy could run the country by fiat. (They couldn’t.)…

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.