The Scientistic Fallacy: Peter Kramer, Judith Warner, and the Debate Over Psychiatric Medication

(x-posted to The Valve)

For scholars in the humanities, there is no way to avoid reflecting on what’s ahead for the discipline, a question that branches in two directions. First, how do scholars respond to the perception that they need increasing amounts of “hard evidence,” particularly historical evidence and cognitive research, in order to justify their claims? A strange disequilibrium has emerged: scientists who appreciate and cite cultural materials are heralded as Renaissance men, while literary scholars and philosophers who draw upon work from other disciplines are merely being faithful to the necessity of rigor, and saving themselves from laughable kinds of theoretical speculation. Second, what can we do with the expanding field of cultural studies? Its impact has been enormous: it has eroded traditional distinctions between media-specific fields (art history and literary studies, for example) as well as between modes of analysis (e.g. anthropology and “close reading”). What kind of work can cultural studies perform for the culture?

The real value of cultural studies is the revival of the broad study of rhetoric, with the aim of creating a more self-aware culture. A case in point is the current debate over medication prescribed for psychiatric disorders. For years now, one of the most recognizable voices in this debate has been that of Peter Kramer, a psychiatrist who rose to fame after publishing an anxious little volume entitled Listening to Prozac. Listening to Prozac was, essentially, a plea for caution. Kramer was impressed by what he’d seen then-newer antidepressants accomplish for suffering patients, but he was concerned that they would be over-prescribed or used to enforce conformity. Then as now, Kramer used amateur credentials as a lover of culture (he has, among other things, published a novel) to add depth and shading to his claims. Over time, Kramer has responded to the evolving conversation about psychiatric medication by taking on the new critics of antidepressants. Instead of urging us to be cautious about medications like Prozac, he now works to neutralize the perceived threat of books like Charles Barber’s Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating A Nation.

Judith Warner, writing for The New York Times, recently applauded Kramer’s deeply critical review of Barber, published on Slate. Both Warner and Kramer make extremely poor arguments, arguments whose weaknesses appear to be invisible to them because of their disciplinary confidence and ways of understanding expertise. What is remarkable about both columns is the absolute lack of rhetorical understanding: blindness to the rhetorical function of certain medical practices in the context in a given culture, and a worrisome readiness to ground claims about the culture in irrelevant scientific data. What we need is not Kramer’s misleading “hard evidence,” but rather knowledge of what cultural factors are producing the debate over psychiatric drugs, and a sense of how the discourse can be not “disproven,” but transformed.

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To begin with Kramer’s ending:

We may—this concern was at the core of Listening to Prozac—be using medication to achieve the assertiveness and confidence that our society demands. Or, as Barber suggests, we may be numbing ourselves. But two other possibilities remain on the table. We may be doing pretty well with the imperfect medicines we have. Or we may still be failing to reach numbers of people with substantial mental illness.

Kramer has got to get over the idea that his credentials as a sensitive and concerned individual are guaranteed for perpetuity because he once wrote Listening to Prozac. His penchant for leaving questions open is misleading, since he has no patience at all with Barber and his ilk. Instead, Kramer’s guarded language is designed to camouflage the fact that he uses Listening to Prozac, a book about vigilance and the value of concern, to justify incredibly complacent statements like “we may be doing pretty well with the imperfect medicines we have.” For someone who takes such an active interest in the culture, he has no inkling of how much his own comments echo similar rhetorical moves by ex-radicals, and before them, ex-Communists like Sidney Hook. Warner’s solution is to list all the panicky volumes that reside on the shelf at her office, as though the mere fact of having purchased these books at Borders implies her full and serious consideration of them.

In addition, Kramer has for a long time tried to set inadequate mental health services against criticisms of therapeutic practice, as though Charles Barber’s book had the power to keep impoverished Americans with mental illness from receiving needed prescriptions. How Americans with access to health care are treated is almost entirely separate from the American health care gap. You might just as well argue that attempts to reform nursing homes hurt elderly citizens who haven’t been able to find or afford assisted living. In fact, the health care industry quite cynically advances versions of this argument all the time, for example around the issue of malpractice suits.

These logical fallacies aside, there is a problem with the way Kramer and Warner put such absolute faith in diagnoses of mental illness, at the expense of every historicist anxiety. For example, Warner writes,

We don’t know how many adults suffered from things like depression in the distant past because no one ever asked. The words and concepts through which we understand common mental health disorders today didn’t exist until the last few decades.

In other words, finally, after untold millenia of darkness, we have attained a clear and objective understanding of the human mind. Yet consider what Henry James wrote in 1902, when he published The Varieties of Religious Experience:

Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are [...] It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgement. It has no physiological theory of the production of these favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent [...] for aught we know to the contrary, 103 or 104 degrees Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees.

James is already fully aware of schizophrenic symptoms, which he terms “hereditary degeneracy” and attributes to George Fox and Saint Francis among others. He is aware of manic states, which he calls “auto-intoxication” and attributes to Carlyle, as well as “melancholy,” various anxiety disorders, and epilepsy. The key difference between James’s pragmatism and Warner’s scientism is James’s willingness to uphold those epiphanies that exert a consistent fascination for a human being and her sympathizers, because they seem to possess “immediate luminousness,” which James parses as “philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness.”

Warner has no feeling whatsoever for the tensions that exist between “ordinary spiritual judgement” and “immediate luminousness” within the discourse of psychiatry. She assumes that if we could establish a historical baseline for psychological problems like depression, we could then evaluate whether current levels of treatment are scaled appropriately. This misses the fact that even if you could explain to someone from the 17th Century that “melancholy” was actually the illness “depression,” there is no guarantee that you could convince them to accept modern causal explanations or forms of treatment. Differences of psychological and medical vocabularies do not merely divide truth from error; they express competing and potentially unresolvable value judgements. Warner makes no allowance for the contemporary paradigm that would condition such historical research, despite the fact that even while she imagines a complete history of depression, relying completely on the fixity of modern diagnostic words and concepts, Kramer is trying to stretch the definition of treatable illness to cover any person who has “suffered mental illness in the past” or has “one of three other indicators of need.”

In Kramer’s review, inattention to these implicit value judgements plays out when he describes his research on Valium. In response to complaints that Valium was substituting for other kinds of therapy, Kramer observes that women received more talk therapy than men, then announces cheerfully that “Prescribing did not replace ‘quality time’; it supplemented it.” Looking at that data, either the women were being condescended to, therapeutically speaking, or the men were getting inadequate treatment, but this does not worry Kramer. All such concerns must be sacrificed to the grand narrative of “doing pretty well with the imperfect medicines we have.” He continues:

A quarter century later, the evidence about mother’s little helpers is no clearer, but the case can be made that what was at stake had less to do with medication than with society at large. Yes, Valium had its beneficiaries and its victims. But the broad trends now look to have had their own momentum—more conflicting responsibilities for women, less time with patients for doctors, and a loss of cohesion and gravitas throughout the culture.

That’s right — women were taking Valium because all that social turmoil was giving them a pain! There was a serious loss of gravitas (a vitamin found in deep manly voices) causing distress everywhere! Nowhere does Kramer note that women faced “conflicting responsibilites” due to a combination of frozen wages, which forced many women to go to work, and patriarchal domestic life, which forced them to continue doing most of the work of the household. Nor does he talk about the women’s movement, which encouraged many women to take up careers, and the psychological toll involved in thus challenging the expectations of husbands, families, and friends. Any of these explanations would raise questions about the relationship of American psychiatry to ongoing conditions of oppression and injustice — questions, not accusations, designed to maintain our awareness of the historically contingent nature of mental illness and legitimate mental health treatment. Instead, he gives a suspect and reactionary account that detaches psychiatry from “broad trends” that “look to have had their own momentum,” and so turns psychiatry into something it must not be: a discipline that takes no responsibility for its role in American society, existing unconscious of its own ideological foundations.

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Most troubling of all, though, is Kramer’s (and then Warner’s) trump card: the fact that other industrialized countries prescribe Valium and antidepressants as well, sometimes at a higher rate per capita. As a result, Kramer concludes that “little in the scientific literature suggested a crisis or even a uniquely American response to anxiety.” Warner ties this to her amazingly out-of-character (for a psychologist) statement about the irrelevance of our sentiments in light of Human History Since The Beginning Of Time:

Just because it feels like, just because it sounds like, just because soaring drug company profits and obnoxious direct to consumer advertising seem to indicate that everyone around us is popping pills like mad doesn’t mean that they are doing so. Nor does it mean that we’re in the grip of some new, previously unheard-of, and uniquely epoch-defining social phenomenon.

People have been unofficially drugging themselves for as long as they’ve had the capability to do so. They smoked cigarettes to boost their concentration. They drank cocktails with lunch and dinner — and more — to deal with anxiety and despair. Prior to the modern era of F.D.A.-regulated prescribing practices, they slugged down untold quantities of tonics and bromides.All of which suggests that what social critics now identify as the signature event of our time (the urge to manage psychic pain through substance use) may, in fact, almost always have been a facet of the human condition. It may just be that we’re better at it than ever before – with cleaner, safer, less addictive and debilitating tools at our disposal.

This is the cognitive version of James’s “medical materialism.” Since neurotransmitters and drug interactions have always been the same, there is nothing unique to a time or place about “drugging.” Imagine Kramer following this train of thought even further:

I was able to help compile research that proved that vodka was being exported out of Russia in enormous quantities; vodka is consumed in almost every country in the world, and even plays a prominent role in the “cosmopolitan” cocktail that is so central to the American experience of “Sex and the City.” Little of this evidence suggests a uniquely Russian relationship to vodka.

Based on the evidence I have compiled at Starbuck’s and countless independent coffeeshops in the West, little suggests a uniquely Japanese response to green tea; human beings have been consuming caffeine for as long as they’ve had the capability to do so.

People love wine; they love its smooth and complex flavor, and they often have it as the delicious complement to their dinner, just as their ancestors did. It seems hardly likely that Catholics attending religious ceremonies have a different experience of fermented grape juice than anybody else.

The point should be clear enough; but in addition to these examples of “drugging” in their real social contexts, there are all the cases where human beings have reacted with fear and moral concern against self-medication. Examples range from religious abstainers, including Mormons and Muslims, to atheistic teetotalers like Percy Shelley and Friedrich Nietzsche. Presumably, none of these individuals are interested in “cleaner, safer, less addictive and debilitating” forms of intoxication.

Warner deploys the tools of cultural studies; she calls fears about psychiatric medication “one of the defining tropes of our era,” and later refers to the “storyline” or “narrative” of “mentally vulnerable children and adults” as a fable without an upside. Kramer is similarly eager to engage with culture through its own products: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” he writes, sounding a bit like Wordsworth. But neither writer can see what we’re prescribing along with the somewhat plastic drugs themselves when we prescribe psychiatric medication in the United States. Naturally, these implicit cultural narratives affect not only patients under treatment, but everyone else as well, for whom the drugs create dividing lines between what is pathological and what is not. Kramer and Warner make their forays into cultural analysis in order to protect against it, a bad methodology that leads to wildly untenable statements about history and culture. Quoting Wordsworth begins to seem tactical, rather than earnest. Their approach will only entrench both sides, particularly when they try to use facts like prescription rates in Sweden to devalue felt responses to the current situation. If Kramer and Warner are serious about protecting the mental health of Americans who need psychiatric medication, they have to accept the challenge of discovering what it is about the ideology of treatment that is making lots of people so uncomfortable: not just drugs that help people resume their lives, but tropes and narratives they can live with.

Why Americans Did Not Watch The Oscars

(x-posted to The Valve)

The Oscars mean two things to most Americans. First, it’s a chance to celebrate the most impressive films of the year, from a mainstream point of view. We wash ourselves clean of forgettable trash like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and look back (through a series of painfully short and choppy montages) at films that reflected national fears, intoxications, and bouts of moral seriousness. Second, it’s a celebrity parade and fashion event. This year we didn’t need it. Why?

No Country For Women

At this particular moment, the filmmakers able to hold the aestheticist high ground are making Westerns and gangster movies (blatantly indebted to Westerns) without women. Petitpoussin already faced down this trend here, though she was content just to fire one shot, touch the brim of her hat, and move on in her quiet, laconic way. There Will Be Blood was so pathetically lopsided in this respect that it became farcical. In the final scene of the film, Paul Thomas Anderson attempts to achieve the iconicity of the word “rosebud” by having Daniel Day-Lewis give a speech about “drinking another man’s milkshake,” which means siphoning the oil from an adjoining piece of land.

If it was still 1988, then maybe, just maybe, that wouldn’t be a ridiculous speech. However, it’s 2008, and “your milkshake” and “my milkshake” irresistibly recalls the Kelis song “Milkshake”:

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
And they’re like, it’s better than yours
Damn right, it’s better than yours
I could teach you, but I’d have to charge

All his life, virile Daniel Day-Lewis sits apart from women, and Paul Thomas Anderson exiles them from the frames, until the whole sexual life of the film is channeled into the gushing spurts of black oil and the oil merges with Kelis’s bizarrely euphemistic dirty talk. It’s sort of homoerotic, since it comes during an intimate moment between Day-Lewis and his enemy (a boy preacher), but the film has no idea what to make of that; mostly, it’s the inevitable return of the repressed.

It’s worth observing that one of most emotionally turbulent moments in the film comes through Kelis’s metaphor, since men without emotion were so central to 2007’s heralded films. Even Joel and Ethan Coen were guilty of finding this problem more interesting than it really is: grim lands demand grim heroes, money and death have a chill touch, and the masculine cult should be celebrated and condemned. Romance becomes the sterile, pre-pubescent romances of technology and treasure: Javier Bardem blows up a car and performs surgery on himself, Denzel Washington finds a good way to transport heroin, the fields are so rich with oil that Day-Lewis gets some on his shoe.

In fact, what emerges from the supposed aesthetic purism of this year’s nominated films is really the cowardice of the Academy. Superficially, Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood) is a pawn: the sum of his life’s ambitions amounts to choosing to work with one oil monopoly rather than another. Nonetheless, the film tries to minimize that truth, and compares unfavorably with Gangs of New York, where Day-Lewis played a very similar character but the politics (and the little thug’s illusion of power) were the central point of the final act, not one rich man’s boring decline into decadence. The academy was too stodgy to award Gangs of New York an Oscar for Best Picture, preferring to wait until The Departed, which had about as much political meaning as a hair-dye infomercial. By the same token, when a film appeared that embraced the homoeroticism of the Western mythos, Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar went to Crash.

Julianne Moore, where have you gone? When Paul Thomas Anderson completed his real flawed masterpiece, Magnolia, Moore was there, giving an unforgettable performance as a gold-digger gradually discovering her feelings for her husband. When the Coen Bros. made the modern comedy classic The Big Lebowski, Moore was there as the painter and radical feminist Maud Lebowski, and it’s through her collision with the Dude that “the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself.” In Children of Men, clearly the best picture of 2007, Moore was the leader of the insurgents who convinces Clive Owen to return to the cause. These films weren’t preachy or self-consciously politically correct about gender; they were simply realistic.

Admittedly, the Coen Bros. did better than Anderson: we have Llewelyn’s wife and her hilariously grumpy mother, as well as a miscellaneous woman who manages the trailer park where Llewelyn lives. These women are the only characters who refuse to play Anton’s games of death — the trailer park woman won’t give Anton information, and Carla Jean won’t flip a coin for her life. They are victims of the men around them, including Llewelyn, who puts their lives in danger while dreaming that he’s saving Carla Jean from continuing to work at Wal-Mart. The film almost manages to suggest that all the men — the “good” guys like Llewelyn, the bounty hunters, the suits, the police — are caught up perpetuating the machinery of death. But Carla Jean is still little more than Andromeda in chains, little more than Naomi Watts in Eastern Promises, compared to Maud Lebowski or Marge Gunderson from Fargo. Confronted by this artificial wasteland of maleness, audiences were supposed to applaud; most of them just turned away. It was The Godfather without Kay, Casablanca without Ilsa.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that vitiated political commentary and lopsided representations of gender went hand-in-hand this year, but I don’t think so. The great political film of the year was Michael Clayton, and it owed much of its power to Tilda Swinton’s astonishingly believable villain. Female characters do not merely create possibilities for heterosexual romance and desire, or for (potentially sexist) outpourings of emotion. Without them, you cannot portray what Martin Heidegger termed “average everydayness,” the interwoven fabric of consummation and disappointment, luxury and poverty, birth and death, family and social life that gives rise to the political. Look at the examples from television — try to imagine The Sopranos without Carmela and Meadow. Al Swearengen (from Deadwood) is a better version of Daniel Plainview, in part because we see him interact with Trixie, Alma Garret, and the cripple Jewel. The hermetic world of men is also the American cult of the exceptional individual, taken to the point of feverish delusion and inimical to the common ground that political thought and work requires.

The unfortunate complement to these tough-guy films are the insular domestic dramas. They have incredibly weak male characters, mostly of the man-child variety, and take similarly improbable turns in order to be nothing more than twee celebrations of family. They’re love poems to America’s white suburbs with facades of anti-suburban hip. Last year, it was Little Miss Sunshine. This year, it was Little Miss Pregnant Sunshine. The Academy turned a blind eye to Quentin Tarantino yet again, but I’ll take The Bride or Zoë Bell over Juno anyday.

Fashion at the Oscars; or, Goodbye Red Velvet Carpet

One of the most interesting effects of the increasingly horizontal possibility of celebrity — reality television, celebrity bloggers, and so forth — has been the way it has redounded on traditional arenas and duties of celebrity. To the best of our ability, we now try to put ourselves in the position of celebrities, which means reacting to the phenomenon with the same ambivalence that they seem to feel. It’s no longer that we want celebrities to be flawed, human, and approachable — “grounded,” as the old compliment used to go — but rather that the process by which ordinary people with talent become famous is now our primary concern.

Think of how central Britney Spears’s story has been to the entire year in tabloid reporting. Her adventures this year were sold to us as a series of nightmares about custody and control. Britney’s out of control! Britney’s lost custody of her children! Various antagonists, including Britney’s mother, manager, and boyfriend, all took turns in the role of the morally dubious handler who seizes control of Britney’s life, particularly when she was forcibly committed to a mental health institution. They, in turn, would accuse each other of trying to control Britney, either directly, or through drugs, or by exploiting Britney’s insecurities and/or mental health problems. The reception of Britney’s artistic work was likewise transformed. For example, when Britney gave a terrible performance of the single “Gimme More” on the MTV Music Awards, viewers responded with comments like “Why can’t they find her a decent wig?” The anonymous “they” of this comment stands in for all of the people, of whom we are now fully aware, who find ways to manipulate Britney into being a marketable commodity.

The allure of the red carpet pre-show at the Oscars always had to do with our relationship to the stars: at their most distant and un-approachable, they were symbols of style. We still believe icons like Frank Sinatra and Audrey Hepburn to have been stylish; even as television announcers gave us the names of the designers for each piece, we gave the stars credit for picking it out, and for exemplifying the glamour to which it alludes.

Three reality shows in particular — American Idol, America’s Next Top Model, and Project Runway — have de-mystified glamour to an extraordinary degree. (To some extent, the makeover shows have also contributed to this, but they are as much concerned with normalcy as with celebrity.) The dynamic of each show works to objectify glamour as something existing outside of any particular human being, to which any human being can aspire. The brutal honesty of Simon Cowell, Tyra Banks, and Tim Gunn is delicious for viewers in its cruelty, but is also meant impersonally. Glamour is not subjective; if it were, you could never teach it.

Therefore, it’s no longer possible to be much interested in what celebrities are wearing on the red carpet, because it’s no longer possible to attribute to them their own choices. If a celebrity is wearing something terrific, we understand that they have been guided to this choice by a series of handlers working with them. If they wear something terrible, we just wonder why they can’t get better advisors. It’s the same with the rest of the celebrity’s functions: while a dinosaur like Hugh Hefner might still have a reputation for throwing wild parties, a show like Super Sweet Sixteen makes it clear that party planners throw parties. The hosts merely afford them.

The dynamic has become the same sadomasochistic dynamic running through Britney’s story. For example, it was leaked to the press that the women on America’s Next Top Model were forced to go without food or sleep, denied ways of amusing themselves (like books), and generally put under unbearable strain. The show itself flaunted trials like having the models do photo shoots in icy water. Far from diminishing the show’s popularity, these revelations served to confirm what we already knew, which was that the process of becoming famous is a painful and violent re-education, with all the dramatic tension centered on what the wannabe accepts, and what she resists, and how, and for how long, all the while risking returning defeated to an ordinary life. Meanwhile, we are increasingly willing to watch specialists perform: dance coaches, karate coaches, personal trainers, stunt men and women, party planners, makeup artists, fashion designers. (My pick for movie of the year, Death Proof, is about stunt drivers battling an evil stunt driver.) It used to be that the red carpet was the stage for the individual accomplishment of taste. The depth of the image was the star’s own subjectivity. Now that we are conscious of the objective and cooperative process of producing style, depth is provided by interactions between people, insofar as each will or will not sacrifice themselves to the demands of the ideal. Anything less, for the contemporary viewer, is too shallow to do justice to the illusion.

LarvalSubjects on Pedagogy

Dear readers,

I highly recommend that you check out Sinthome’s response to my tag about teaching. He teaches philosophy, and this remarkable post synthesizes the Socratic value of provocation, alienating others from their habitus, with the healthy alienation and skepticism many of us felt during our own student years — something to which it is hard to remain loyal as teachers.

-Kugelmass

Obama vs. Clinton: Long-Term Thoughts About Change in America

As part of my ongoing attempt to make my list of posts resemble a pay-per-view boxing channel, I am pleased to present “Obama vs. Clinton,” with apologies for not posting sooner in anticipation of Super Tuesday. (Tomemos did so; you can read his excellent post on informed indecision here, and the afterword on voting Obama here. Also, look for my upcoming post “Oilmen vs. Hitmen,” on P. T. Anderson and the Brothers Coen.) Of course, Hillary Clinton won my state, California, largely because California law gives certain people, including Jack Nicholson and Aaron Sorkin, one thousand votes each. Still, neither contender is as yet a clear favorite for the Democratic nomination.

Clinton’s my choice. In a run-off determined mostly by negatives — reasons not to vote for Clinton offset by reasons not to vote for Obama, in the hopes of not electing another Republican president — Obama is making overtures to centrist “undecided” voters with a series of rhetorical tactics and policy positions that will cripple his Administration, hurt Democrats running for Congressional office, and make it hard for a Democrat to succeed him in office. By comparison, Clinton’s biggest flaws are her pro-Bush, pro-Iraq War senatorial votes.

Clinton voted the way she did because she didn’t feel any other response was politically feasible. It was a shortsighted vote, albeit an understandable one. If she’s elected, she’ll going to end the war and withdraw American troops for precisely the same reasons. It’s what she thinks her constituents want. From the way she’s running her campaign, it’s clear that she believes she can make the greatest political gains by challenging Republicans and capitalizing on widespread disillusionment with the Bush Administration.

Obama, on the other hand, believes that the key to success lies in presenting himself as a bipartisan leader. His television ads and campaign material focus on jointly-sponsored legislation he worked on in the Senate, and his proposed fiscal reforms are thematized around “restoring fiscal discipline” to government.

Here are my concerns about Obama’s candidacy, concerns that are not parallel for Clinton:

1. Blurred differences between candidates.

The Democratic nominee will be running against John McCain. McCain’s people have pushed hard to give him a reputation for bipartisanship and independence, and he will use that against Obama. Whenever Obama talks generally about bipartisan change, McCain will use a similar rhetoric to distance himself from Bush. Whenever Obama gets into the specifics of change, McCain will cast him as too liberal for America, and he will mock Obama’s biggest projects (e.g. the health care plan) as the opposite of “fiscal discipline.” I have the audacity to hope that Clinton will go on the offensive, drawing unflattering attention to McCain’s canny masquerade of independence.

2. Incoherence at the level of the grassroots.

It’s true that Obama has a lot of grassroots support, but unfortunately that hasn’t helped define him or us. Some people are enthusiastic about him because they think he’s more liberal than Clinton, while others support his critical rhetoric about big government. Whereas evangelical grassroots movements forced American Christianity into everyone’s consciousness, no equally powerful self-definition of America can emerge from Obama’s motley of advocates. Obama has to take part of the blame. His rhetoric lacks substance. His calls for change and hope aren’t backed up by an original approach to policy.

3. Conflating military spending with domestic spending.

The debt the United States has accrued by fighting in Iraq sucks money out of our economy; conversely, expanding social programs puts money into circulation, particularly when those social programs are designed to help the poorest Americans. Instead of criticizing Bush’s imperialism, Obama is criticizing his lack of financial planning, and in response has proposed “pay as you go” legislation that would make it impossible to authorize new government spending without compensatory budget cuts or new funding sources.

He will try to cut the military budget, only to find that Republicans will use fears about our national security to block new social programs to which they are opposed. He will try to raise taxes in order to fund his new programs, and the Republicans will foreground the taxes rather than debating the programs on their merits. By making every fight a fiscal battle as well as a battle over domestic policy, he will enable his opponents to choose the most favorable tactics each time.

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Clinton was weak during the height of the Republican era. Obama is weak now, and will lead a vulnerable Administration if elected. We need to lay the foundations for Democratic dominance, instead of setting traps for ourselves by using the Republican rhetoric of smaller, bipartisan government. It is the only way, long-term, to regain lost ground in the battle for an American government equipped to care for the American people.