‘I Am the Change’ by Charles R. Kesler

Once upon a time there was a radical president who tried to remake American society through government action. In his first term he created a vast network of federal grants to state and local governments for social programs that cost billions. He set up an imposing agency to regulate air and water emissions, and another to regulate workers' health and safety. Had Congress not stood in his way he would have gone much further. He tried to establish a guaranteed minimum income for all working families and, to top it off, proposed a national health plan that would have provided government insurance for low-income families, required employers to cover all their workers and set standards for private insurance. Thankfully for the country, his second term was cut short and his collectivist dreams were never realized.

I AM THE CHANGE

Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism

By Charles R. Kesler

276 pp. Broadside Books/HarperCollins Publishers. $ 25.99

• Up Front (September 30, 2012)

His name was Richard Nixon.

Whenever conservatives talk to me about Barack Obama, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. But what exactly? The anger, the suspicion, the freestyle fantasizing have no perceptible object in the space-time continuum that centrist Democrats like me inhabit. What are we missing? Seen from our perspective, the country elected a moderate and cautious straight shooter committed to getting things right and giving the United States its self-­respect back after the Bush-Cheney years. Unlike the crybabies at MSNBC and Harper's Magazine, we never bought into the campaign's hollow "hope and change" rhetoric, so aren't crushed that, well, life got in the way. At most we hoped for a sensible health care program to end the scandal of America's uninsured, and were relieved that Obama proposed no other grand schemes of Nixonian scale. We liked him for his political liberalism and instinctual conservatism. And we still like him.

But more than a few of our fellow citizens are loathing themselves blind over Barack Obama. Why? I need a level-headed conservative to explain this to me, and Charles R. Kesler seems an excellent candidate. An amiable Harvard-­educated disciple of the conservative philosopher Leo Strauss, an admirer of Cicero and the founding fathers and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. and Ronald Reagan, he teaches at Claremont ­McKenna College and is the editor of The Claremont Review of Books, one of the better conservative publications. It is put out by the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, an increasingly influential research group that also runs educational programs for young conservatives of a Tea Party bent. The Claremont Review doesn't like Obama one bit. But it has usually taken the slightly higher road in criticizing him, and when Kesler begins his book by dismissing those who portray the president as "a third-world daddy's boy, Alinskyist agitator, deep-cover Muslim or undocumented alien" the reader is relieved to know that "I Am the Change" won't be another cheap, deflationary ­takedown.

Instead, it is that rarest of things, a cheap inflationary takedown — a book that so exaggerates the historical significance of this four-year senator from Illinois, who's been at his new job even less time, that he becomes both Alien and Predator. Granted, there is something about Obama that invites psychological projection, notably by Scandinavians bearing gifts. But Kesler outdoes the Nobel Prize committee by raising the Obama presidency to world-historical significance, constructing a fanciful genealogy of modern liberalism that begins just after the French Revolution in the works of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel; passes through Karl Marx and Charles Darwin and Oswald Spengler; and culminates in . . . "The Audacity of Hope" and 2,000-plus pages of technical jargon in the Affordable Care Act.

It's some performance, and actually quite helpful. A sense of proportion, once the conservative virtue, is considered treasonous on the right today, and Kesler cannot be accused of harboring one. But his systematic exaggerations demonstrate that the right's rage against Obama, which has seeped out into the general public, has very little to do with anything the president has or hasn't done. It's really directed against the historical process they believe has made America what it is today. The conservative mind, a repository of fresh ideas just two decades ago, is now little more than a click-click slide projector holding a tray of apocalyptic images of modern life that keeps spinning around, raising the viewer's fever with every rotation. If you want to experience what it's like to be within that mind on a better day, then you need to visit "I Am the Change."

Let's start the slide show. The Obama story begins with Professor Hegel, who had this new idea back in old Berlin. Looking down at history from an Olympian distance, and with Olympian heartlessness, he believed it showed the progressive development of human nature toward absolute freedom. This freedom, he thought, developed through the State, though, not against it. This meant that history's task would be complete only when the State coordinated the basic machinery of life, from the economy to politics, through a professional bureaucracy staffed by specialized experts trained at modern universities. Though all the bad stuff in 20th-century European history derives from Hegel's idea, according to Kesler, servile Europeans still hold to it.

Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. His books include "The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics."

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