Ross Douthat on liberal Green Lantern-ism

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat correctly diagnoses the surge of Green Lantern-ism among liberals noted here a few days ago:

At work in this liberal panic are two intellectual vices, and one legitimate fear. The first vice is the worship of presidential power: the belief that any problem, any crisis, can be swiftly solved by a strong government, and particularly a strong executive. A gushing oil well, a recalcitrant Congress, a public that’s grown weary of grand ambitions — all of these challenges could be mastered, Obama’s leftward critics seem to imagine, if only he were bolder or angrier, or maybe just more determined.

This vice isn’t confined to liberals: you can see it at work when foreign policy hawks suggest that mere presidential “toughness” is the key to undoing Iran’s clerical regime, or disarming North Korea. But it runs deepest among progressives. When Rachel Maddow fantasized last week about how Obama should simply dictate energy legislation to a submissive Congress, she was unconsciously echoing midcentury liberal theoreticians of the presidency like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who often wrote as if a Franklin Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy could run the country by fiat. (They couldn’t.)

For those who aren't familiar with the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency^TM, here's my original definition:

During the Bush years, [Matthew] Yglesias coined the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics* to mock conservatives who believed that "[t]he only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower" in foreign policy. What he identifies here is nothing less than a Green Lantern theory of the presidency in which all domestic policy compromises are attributed to a lack of presidential will. And, like the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics, this view is nonfalsifiable. Rather than learning from, say, the stimulus vote that Obama faces severe constraints in the Senate, liberal GL proponents have created a narrative in which all failure and compromise is the result of a lack of presidential willpower. (Hamsher, for instance, claims that "The failure to establish a public option to control medical costs and increase competition is President Obama’s failure alone.") It's a fantasy world...

* Here's Yglesias explaining the Green Lantern reference:

[T]he Green Lantern Corps is a sort of interstellar peacekeeping force set up by the Guardians of Oa to maintain the peace and defend justice. It recruits members from all sorts of different species and equips them with the most powerful weapon in the universe, the power ring.

...[The ring] lets its bearer generate streams of green energy that can take on all kinds of shapes. The important point is that, when fully charged what the ring can do is limited only by the stipulation that it create green stuff and by the user's combination of will and imagination. Consequently, the main criterion for becoming a Green Lantern is that you need to be a person capable of "overcoming fear" which allows you to unleash the ring's full capacities...

Comments

[Rob]

People don't give President Obama enough credit for his accomplishments. As he said in his Oval Office address last week, we don't know where we're going, we don't know how we'll get there, but we're making great time!

[t groan]

Thank god for Glenn Greenwald and his unwillingness to defer to power. Douhat's article is little more than a joke. He honestly called obama's gift to the insuranc companies 'universal healthcare'. He didn't, of course, go into any specifics since that would have shown the speciousness of his obama worship. Brendan if you're not reading Glenn Greenwald, I suggest you start.

[Andrew]

Look, Greenwald is right about the president's power over civil liberties policy, though he undersells the possible consequences of certain policy choices (a backlash from Congress or the public, demagoguing by Republicans). It really is in the president's power to change civil liberties policy. That's why he begins his post today by describing the case of one particular detainee. If the facts as Greenwald describes them are right, this is certainly an area ripe for criticism!

But Greenwald places that one incident in a box of "areas where Obama isn't liberal enough" to illustrate his larger narrative. In doing so, he conflates areas where the president has clear formal authority (foreign policy, civil liberties, detainee treatment) with areas where the president has no formal authority (legislation on energy and the public option). For legislation, the administration faces a different set of constraints -- "whatever Ben Nelson (and now Scott Brown) wants."

In conflating all these areas and all these commentators who have commented on different aspects of those areas, Greenwald uses the unfortunate rhetoric of, "Don't listen to these people, the people who claim to know things about how the presidency and Congress work. Don't evaluate their arguments on the merits. They are disreputable people, and you should not let them trouble your brains with their 'logic.' The problem is always that Obama is not pure enough or enough of a fighter. Oh, and the public agrees with us on everything, really!" This is demagoguery. I wish he would've stuck to his accurate point that the "weak president" folks are underselling Obama's power over civil liberties policy.

[JP]

Doesn't the Green Lantern have some sort of inability to destroy things that are colored yellow? I think that was why the Green Lantern couldn't kill Doomsday and maybe why the GOP is pushing these t-shirts.

http://www.stopliberals.com/cgi-bin/store/cpshop.cgi/allrepublican/elephantusa.166830063

[Rob]

Sure enough, according to Wikipedia, the Green Lantern's power ring is ineffective against yellow objects. There's also this arresting information about Parallax: "Because Parallax is a manifestation of fear, and yellow, none of the other Green Lanterns, including Hal, could harm Parallax and, therefore, came under his control." So if I have this Green Lantern analogy right, Rahm Emanuel is Parallax.