cover image I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism

I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism

Charles R. Kesler. HC/. Broadside, $25.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-207296-2

While recalling the wildly inflated expectations that greeted President Barack Obama’s 2008 election, conservative scholar Kesler argues that “fundamental political change”—through the building of a permanent Democratic majority and the “effective disappearance of conservatives”—is still the agenda of Obama’s self-aggrandizing and messianic mission. According to Kesler, liberalism is a big-government and antibusiness bogeyman with totalitarian bent and the antithesis to an American conservatism that resists “the European model of social democracy” and “Keynesian magic.” In dissecting liberalism’s misguidedness, Kesler returns to its modern roots, beginning with Woodrow Wilson’s Progressivism. Obama, he suggests, is in a direct line with a “top down” radical reform agenda—never mind the rhetoric about the grassroots—Obamacare being a particularly glaring instance of “the modern liberal state” in action. But a century of liberalism has bred a philosophical and fiscal crisis that now dooms it to obsolesce or dangerous fascistic transformation. The author’s argument raises important red flags concerning state power generally (although such excesses can hardly be laid exclusively at the feet of liberals), yet loses urgency by being alternately alarmist and dismissive concerning the menace of liberalism. A familiar critique from the right. (Sept.)