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AI Overview
On the
crowd chart,
Barack Obama is placed in the authoritarian right quadrant with coordinates around
6.0 for economic (right-wing) and
6.0 for social/authority (authoritarian).
The Tyee +1
Key Details on Obama's Placement
- The Official Stance: The creators of the
Political Compass website
place mainstream American politicians—including Barack Obama and his Republican opponents—tightly clustered in the upper-right (authoritarian right/conservative) quadrant when viewed from a global or European political perspective.
The Tyee +1
- Economic Score (~6.0): This reflects his support for capitalist economic systems, corporate structures, and market-based policies rather than socialist economics.
- Social/Authoritarian Score (~6.0): This reflects policies from his administration regarding national security, continued or expanded executive surveillance authorities (like certain FISA provisions), and drone strikes, which the test categorizes on the authoritarian side of the social axis.
- Context vs. U.S. Perception: While he is viewed domestically in the U.S. as a liberal or center-left figure, the Political Compass model places him on the right side of its global economic scale because mainstream American politics generally centers around capitalist governance.
President Obama will leave behind plenty of populist rhetoric, but his record on economic policy is eight years of corporatism.
For two terms, Obama grew the government’s role in the economy, often in concert with big business, and usually to its benefit. If President-elect Trump was aided by the perception that Washington rigs the game in favor of the big guys, Obama’s consistent corporatism is a key culprit.
The phrase “crony capitalism” became popular on the Right during the Obama years, but it’s a little off-target as a criticism of Obama. Crony capitalism connotes doing favors for friends and hurting enemies. Did some of that go on under Obama? Of course. (See the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance.)
But mostly, Obama wasn’t doling out quid-pro-quo goodies as much as he was creating an economic system — of more regulations, more mandates, more subsidies — that favored the big guys.
Obama’s corporatist streak revealed itself early with his pick of Tim Geithner, a chief author of the Wall Street bailouts, as treasury secretary. In crafting the Troubled Asset Relief Program under President Bush and implementing it under President Obama, Geithner wasn’t simply trying to stop panic and ward off a meltdown. He was trying to make sure the post-crisis financial sector looked a lot like the pre-crisis one. That is, Geithner wasn’t just trying to save the economy, he was trying to save the big banks.
Big banks have many virtues. An economy without Bank of America and Wells Fargo, and with a smaller JP Morgan would lack some things. It also might be a financial sector less in danger of systemic meltdown, and with more competition. Geithner probably saw that trade-off, but he thought the liquidity and the particular type of stability provided by the big guys was too important to give up.
Obama and Geithner’s bailouts and regulations helped widen the moat that protects the big guys from competition, and helped make the big banks more or less immortal. It would be easy to call it Wall Street cronyism, but financial corporatism is more precise.
Obama’s stimulus, in his second month, was a giant raft of subsidies for everyone from the concrete pourers to the computer makers to the solar-panel peddlers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed this massive spending bill.
Obamacare was another exercise in corporatism. Hammered out in the back room with the drug lobby and the hospital lobby, Obamacare directly (and perhaps deliberately) has driven consolidation among hospitals and insurers. The law includes subsidies for hospitals, mandates to buy private insurance, plus protections and subsidies for drug companies. No wonder the drug lobby celebrated the law’s passage and pledged money to re-elect Democratic senators who voted for it. No wonder insurers and hospitals defended it in court.
