In the latest edition of Hillsdale College?s Imprimis, Claremont Review of Books editor Charles R. Kesler compares our current president to his left-of-center predecessors.

While Kesler finds that much of President Obama?s agenda fits well with the goals and attitudes of the liberalism espoused by Woodrow Wilson and FDR, two differences stand out. First, ?there is the postmodernism that crops up here and there.? In other words, there?s no truth that guides the liberal ? only preferences.

Second, the president is ?uncomfortable? with American exceptionalism ?and thus with America itself.?

This is a very different state of mind and character from that of Franklin Roosevelt, who was the kind of progressive who thought that America was precisely the vanguard of moral progress in the world. This was the way Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, and every great liberal captain before Obama thought about his country?as a profoundly moral force in the world, leading the nations of the world toward a better and more moral end point. Obama doesn’t think that way, and therefore his mantle as an American popular leader?despite his flights of oratorical prowess?doesn’t quite fit him in the way that FDR’s fit him. One can see this in the tinges of irony that creep into Obama’s rhetoric now and then?the sense that even he doesn’t quite believe what he’s saying; and he knows that but hopes that you don’t.

Obama’s ambivalence is, in many ways, the perfect symbol of the dilemma of the contemporary liberal. How can Obama argue that America and liberalism reject absolute truths, and in the same breath affirm?as he did recently to the United Nations?that human rights are self-evidently true? You can’t have it both ways, though he desperately wants and tries to. Here, surely, is the deepest crisis of 20th-century American liberalism?that it can no longer understand, or defend, its principles as true anymore. It knows that, but knows as well that to say so would doom it politically. Liberals are increasingly left with an amoral pragmatism that is hard to justify to themselves, much less to the American public. The problem for liberals today is that they risk becoming confidence men, and nothing but confidence men.