Why did we like Obama? Because both in the democratic primaries and in the presidential election he had expressed the constituent intention (not only as a 'form' of his projcet but also as a 'strength' of his politics) to use his executive powers so as to transform American society. That has all turned out to be illusory. Faced with the problems raised by the financial crisis, Obama has not found an adequate response to them, except by renewing trust in the financial institutions that dominate world politics and that had been the cause of that crisis in the first place; faced with the wars unleashed by George Bush, Obama not only failed to extricate himself from them, but actually stepped up the military and policing aggression. As regards welfare policies, and in particular questions of healthcare reform, Obama has only complicated the first reforming steps with crippling retreats and compromises.
But the problem is not Obama (even though obviously he is). The problem is the inability of the left to keep its promises once it has been swallowed into the system of power. Where does this limit lie? The left does not succeed in reopening the struggles while it is in government. Should we conclude that the weight of the structures of power has now reached such a level of complexity that elections can never match the necessary timings of reform? Or rather, are there other reasons (not only institutional) that render left proposals for reform illusory?
To answer these questions we have to remember that in both the United States and Europe there has been a big expansion of executive power over the past 30 years. Everywhere the executive bureaucracy has developed structures that duplicate the other two powers or compete with them: in the United States the legal officials of the executive dominate the judiciary; the executive's Office of Legal Counsel has become more powerful than that of the attorney general; the economic experts of the presidency dominate the legislative powers. In Europe, for some time now, government has been hollowing out the power of parliament through legislation by decree; ministries of the interior and the police have been put beyond any kind of control. The powers of war and the running of the army represent perhaps the most dramatic moment of this transformation. Why, then, give this disproportion of the powers of the executive in relation to other powers, has Obama not been able to develop his projects for reform? Obama has not put an end to the use of powers that, in the Bush era, had operated in the form of exception; so why has he not been able to use them effectively? To what extent is Obama himself a prisoner of that executive structure of which he should be the boss? Of course, Obama is not a revolutionary but rather a person who came into power with the intention of carrying out some modest but significant reforms. The same could be said of the left in Europe: the last example of strong left-wing reforms goes back to the first tow years of François Mitterrand. Since 1983 the left in power has never succeeded in renewing society through reformist projects.
To answer these questions, I think that we first have to note the difference between the effectiveness and success of the reforms of the right (Reagan, for example) and the ineffectiveness and failure of the reforms of the left – and analyse it. We believe that the right is able to make its reforms because democratic constitutions prefigure this possibility only for the right. Democratic constitutions, both the older ones and those built after the Second World War, were constructed within a framework of liberalism. The only opposing example, in other words the only radical left reform, Roosevelt's New Deal, does not prove the contrary, nor do the triumphs of social democracy in the immediate postwar period in Europe. In those cases it was the disaster of the capitalist economy and the war that had just ended that imposed those reforms: they were not reforms but transient and reversible compromises.
Conversely, it can be noted that the transformation and expansion of executive power in the United States, which began under the Reagan administration, was not only carried through by the Republicans but also perfected by Democratic administrations. The policies of the White House under Clinton and Obama have also furthered that concentration of power in the executive to which we have referred. Even in Europe the movements of the left have not been able to impose onto executive power a force that could break through in the direction of reform.