Thinking about Obama: Burke or Dewey?

I have a bit of a soft spot for David Brooks, as well as appreciation of Edmund Burke, so I was initially smitten with this argument.  The US expenditure of over $700 billion on Keynesian economic policy, which has a scant empirical track record, at a time when US public debt already exceeds 75% of GDP in the worst recession in a generation, is terrifying.  Even more terrifying is the fact that the US might someday struggle to issue new debt.  It's not clear how policies like universal healthcare will fit into this dreadful economic landscape.  Against this backdrop, Burke's gradualism sounds compelling: we should focus on getting a few small things right slowly, learning from our mistakes, before we turn government upside down.

Brooks recalls how he was assigned Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" as a first-year student in college, and how he grew from hating to appreciating it.  At that same university, I was assigned that same book 25 years or so later, and I can't say I liked it much either when I first read it.  But as a first-year student I was also assigned another book: John Dewey's "The Public and Its Problems".  It deals with many questions and problems in society, some rather theoretical.  But one of Dewey's more famous propositions in the book is that social science and public policy should be experimental.  He states:

Burke and Dewey initially seem to be at odds: Burke wants to preserve institutions and Dewey wants to experiment.  But this analysis is too superficial.  Burke was writing in response to the French revolution, which catastrophically attempted to overturn the Old Regime through rigid and ideological social planning.  His sense of "epistemological modesty", which Brooks praises, was in response to people who thought that they could reorder society in a utopian manner.  As the quotation above indicates, Dewey's experimentalism has no such preconceptions.  He sees that we are all ignorant, but he thinks that the only way to learn anything is to try lots of stuff.  Certainly Burke and Dewey have philosophical differences, but they are not diametrically opposed.

As much esteem as I now have for David Brooks and Edmund Burke, I also (paradoxically?) love John Dewey.  But contained in David Brooks's reference to Edmund Burke in his critique of Obama is an implicit comparison of Obama to the French revolutionaries.  I completely disagree with this comparison.  Instead I think Obama is a faithful adherent to Dewey, trying to aggressively tackle many problems in an adaptive, nondogmatic manner (that is, when he can avoid the partisan hackery of the congressional Democrats).  I don't think anything Obama has said indicates that he thinks he has all the right answers.  But I think it's clear that he wants to try something out.  I can only hope that Obama recalls the lessons of Burke while forging ahead like the good Deweyan he truly is.