ALAN WOLFE
The future of
By Alan Wolfe | August 27, 2009
WE ALL NOW KNOW that Teddy Kennedy died yesterday. It remains to be seen whether liberalism died with him.
Many will claim that the passing of the one inevitably means the demise of the other. Kennedy was the last living embodiment in American politics of the liberalism that did so much to shape the contours of American life after World War II. Teddy’s two brothers eloquently laid out plans to make the United States a more humane society. Teddy did more to realize those ideals than either Jack or Bobby. From his perch in the Senate, he got the legislation passed in this generation that their books and speeches inspired a generation ago.
The very fact that Teddy Kennedy is being so lionized suggests that no other figure will live up to his ideals. Both recent Democratic presidents - Bill Clinton and Barack Obama - compromised their liberalism to pass their legislation. Even if Congress eventually passes health care reform, the final bill will be a far cry from the ambitious domestic legislation associated with the Kennedy legacy. And health care, in any case, is yesterday’s business, a reform we need now only because we neglected to achieve it in an earlier era. Liberalism these days is more about preventing losses than achieving gains. Teddy Kennedy spent so much of his political life in recent years making friends across the aisle because there were so many Republicans for him to seek out.
Yet Teddy Kennedy’s legacy serves to remind us that government can be a force for good in modern life. Once we acknowledge that government is here to stay - a proposition to which George W. Bush and Karl Rove were as committed in the last presidency as Obama and Nancy Pelosi are in this one - the only question is whether government will be allowed to do its job well. Liberals, none more so than Teddy Kennedy, believe it should be.
Teddy Kennedy was a liberal, but he was no ideologue. At a time when even so-called moderate Republicans all but announce that they will never vote for a health care bill, no matter how watered down it might be to please them, we need to recall that Kennedy was perfectly happy to work with the Bush White House on education reform. Like any good liberal, Kennedy was more interested in broadening the support for legislation than he was in killing it for the sake of possible electoral gain. He took governance too seriously to treat government so cavalierly.
Kennedy’s liberalism - the best kind of liberalism - lives on in those who master both legislative complexity and the mysteries of congressional procedure to pass laws that promote the common good. When Barney Frank abandons his partisan knife-throwing to work on new rules for financial regulation, he is operating in the spirit of Kennedy-like liberalism. But so are those senators and representatives who, having sought Republican support for health care reform, are determined to pass a bill even if they have to do so without the Republican support they wanted.
Teddy Kennedy was as committed as any liberal politician of our times to working with his opponents across the aisle. But he would be among the first to recognize that if they do not work with you, you cannot work with them.
The only way liberalism can die without a Kennedy in the Senate is for Americans to abandon the idea that an active government is in their best interest. That is unlikely to happen. One of the oddest spectacles of recent American political life is the presence of seniors at town halls demanding that government ought not to be allowed to interfere with their Medicare, a government program if there ever was one. Medicare was signed into law in 1965 in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s death. No more fitting tribute to Teddy exists than the fact that those who rail against government still idealize this program - one of the great liberal legacies of the family that has just lost its most influential member.
Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
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