Last week David Bromwich had an important piece at Huffpo/TomDispatch on the Bush-Obama presidency–the remarkable continuity in policy between the two administrations. He put special emphasis on the aides Obama has kept around as long as he can, like Rahm Emanuel and Cass Sunstein and Dennis Ross and Larry Summers, and the ones he has cashiered, like Greg Craig and Dennis Blair. Ross is of course the Israel lobby’s horse. And Obama has come to adopt Sunstein’s acceptance of the Patriot Act:
When it comes to national security policy, Sunstein is a particularly strong example of Bush-Obama continuity. Though sometimes identified as a liberal, from early on he defended the expansion of the national security state under Cheney’s Office of the Vice President, and he praised the firm restraint with which the Ashcroft Justice Department shouldered its responsibilities…. He deserves wider attention, too, for his 2008 proposal that the government “cognitively infiltrate” discussion groups on-line and in neighborhoods, paying covert agents to monitor and, if possible, discredit lines of argument which the government judges to be extreme or misleading.
And what is it about the Obama style that finds comfort in these men?
A… hint may come from Obama’s recently released National Strategy for Counterterrorism, where a sentence in the president’s own voice asserts: “We face the world as it is, but we will also pursue a strategy for the world we seek.” If the words “I face the world as it is” have a familiar sound, the reason is that they received a trial run in Obama’s 2009 Nobel Prize speech. Those words were the bridge across which an ambivalent peacemaker walked to confront the heritage of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King with the realities of power as experienced by the leader of the only superpower in the world.
Indeed, Obama’s understanding of international morality seems to be largely expressed by the proposition that “there’s serious evil in the world” — a truth he confided in 2007 to the New York Times columnist David Brooks, and attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr — combined with the assertion that he is ready to “face the world as it is.” The world we seek is, of course, the better world of high morality. But morality, properly understood, is nothing but a framework of ideals. Once you have discharged your duty, by saying the right words for the right policies, you have to accommodate the world.
This has become the ethic of the Bush-Obama administration in a new phase. It explains, as nothing else does, Obama’s enormous appetite for compromise, the growing conventionality of his choices of policy and person, and the legitimacy he has conferred on many radical innovations of the early Bush years by assenting to their logic and often widening their scope. They are, after all, the world as it is.
Obama’s pragmatism comes down to a series of maxims that can be relied on to ratify the existing order — any order, however recent its advent and however repulsive its effects. You must stay in power in order to go on “seeking.” Therefore, in “the world as it is,” you must requite evil with lesser evil. You do so to prevent your replacement by fanatics: people, for example, like those who invented the means you began by deploring but ended by adopting.
