From the US elections in November, the American left will be largely absent. Americans voters will choose between the forces of moderate conservatism, headed by President Barack Obama, and the forces of radicalism, led by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Obama and most of his fellow Democrats are conservatives in two senses. To begin with, most of their policy agenda originated on the right, not the left. Obama’s foreign policy has its roots in the tradition of Republican realists like Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and his first defence secretary, Robert Gates, who was a carry-over from the Bush administration.
The Bush administration was dominated by neoconservatives — many of them former leftists and liberals devoted to a ‘global democratic revolution’ spread by the US military. In contrast, the Obama administration has shaped its grand strategy according to the precepts of classical realism. Realpolitik explains Obama’s policy of measured withdrawal from Bush-created debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and America’s low-key supporting role in the Nato intervention in Libya led by Britain and France. And the influence of the realists, who never believed that a ‘global war against terror’ replaced traditional power politics, is evident in the ‘pivot’ of the US military away from nation-building in Muslim countries toward balancing a rising China.
Obama’s domestic agenda, too, has its intellectual roots on the centre-right. His health-care law requires individuals to buy private health insurance from for-profit companies. Rejecting the progressive model of universal social insurance programmes such as Social Security and Medicare, Obama and the Democrats enacted a ‘market-based’ system of universal coverage inspired by a plan put forth by the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1990s. Another model for Obamacare was the health reform passed in Massachusetts under Governor Mitt Romney, who, to win favour with the right, now denounces the very approach he supported.
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