Barack Obama and the Idea of America
by Benjamin Ramm
Similarly, Obama is attuned to the shift and break of the current, in syncopation with the (heart)beat of a nation in need of rejuvenation. “I chose to run for President at this moment in history”, he remarked in Philadelphia – as if he himself had sculpted circumstance and anticipated its arrival. Like a notional WikiCandidate, Obama has become an embodiment of American idealism, personifying both its exceptionalism (“in no other country on Earth is my story even possible”) and its universal appeal, as “the last, best hope on earth” (the phrase of another lawyer-cum-senator from Illinois, himself the subject of beautiful portrait by Obama). In this context, his story is America’s ‘story’, an enticing advert for the cosmopolitan project, a vindication of the challenging, rich plurality of liberal democracy (‘Out of Many, [he is] One’). His biography is also, in part, the resolution of an American anxiety, and a representation back to Europe of the synthesis that it so hankers after (“America”, wrote Hegel, “is the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself”). Truly, as Anthony Barnett put it bluntly, “American secret service will never be forgiven if once more it messes it up”.
A recurring theme in Steiner’s writings, and one explored in depth in ‘The Idea of Europe’, is that of a civilisation negotiated through the “rival ideas, claims, praxis” of Athens and Jerusalem; “of the city of Socrates and that of Isaiah”. This ‘tale of two cities’ forms the prologue to America’s own story, and its presence is evident in the approaches of the “senator and lawyer, Christian and skeptic” (Obama’s autobiographical sketch), for whom the Hellenic and the Hebraic express the twin themes of ‘Change’ and ‘Hope’.
A consistent early criticism of Obama addressed his apparent aversion to challenging the ‘forces of conservatism’, either by virtue of his timidity (‘Obambi’), inability or unwillingness to engage in combative politics. Barnett recounts his own initial scepticism: “I learned about [Obama’s] appeals for unity and regarded it as turning triangulation into a circle”, before quoting Michael Tomasky’s remark that the senator “is not a political warrior by temperament. He is not even, as the word is commonly understood, a liberal. He is in many respects a civic republican – a believer in civic virtue, and in the possibility of good outcomes negotiated in good faith”. Of course, civic republicanism (with a small ‘r’) is a key tenet of liberalism, as the term is commonly understood in Europe; and the notion of re-engaging the citizen with the polity goes to the heart of Obama’s radical vision – in that it goes to the ‘root’ of the structural failings that inhibit political change. Hillary Clinton’s well-formulated response – that “We cannot achieve unity that lasts, unity that is real, unless we accept that sometimes people disagree, not just to be disagreeable or to play political games but because they have honest and principled differences” – misses the point: Obama is not arguing against division per se, but against a false dichotomy devised by the defenders (from both sides of the division lobby) of the profoundly illiberal status quo. These men and women, who “use religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon”, are seasoned campaigners in the politics of ‘community’; a politics not inclusive and co-operative, as its name suggests, but identitarian and coercive – in that it empowers not the individual but those who speak on behalf of the ‘communities’ to which s/he (often involuntarily) belongs. This patronising approach is open to easy manipulation:
Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for president, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.
(Remarks on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, South Carolina)
Obama’s campaign may be understood as an attempt to prove that this politics is not the only viable politics: indeed, his candidacy stands for nothing less than the recalibration of political debate itself. The “smallness of our politics” is incapable of addressing nuance (“Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose”; a concise summation of John Kerry’s lament in 2004), or of treating the ailing and increasing alien environment of Washington. In Toni Morrison’s rich metaphor, we can no longer “settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it” (or, as Obama more prosaically puts it: “A strong hand on the wheel won’t make a difference if your car is stuck in the mud; a good leader has to persuade enough people to get out and push”). Morrison conceives of this change as a ‘coming into being’:
Our future is ripe, outrageously rich in its possibilities. Yet unleashing the glory of that future will require a difficult labor, and some may be so frightened of its birth they will refuse to abandon their nostalgia for the womb.
Post this article to:
Del.icio.us | 
Digg | 
Facebook | 
NowPublic | 
Reddit