Barack Obama and the Idea of America
by Benjamin Ramm
Hope, then, is resolution and vision: the resolution of vision; the commitment to fulfil the ‘Promise of American Life’. From the Founding Fathers to the abolitionists to the ‘Greatest Generation’ that defeated fascism and faced down the Depression, this is how America was made: “how women won the right to vote, how workers won the right to organize, how young people and old people and middle-aged folks...came down on freedom rides; and they marched, and they sat in, and they were beaten, and firehoses were set on them, and dogs were set on them, and some went to jail, and some died for freedom’s cause – that’s what hope is:
imagining, and then fighting for, and struggling for, and sometimes dying for, what had seemed impossible before. There’s nothing naïve about that.
(MLK Day, SC)
Those who would, in Morrison’s words, “call searing vision naïveté”, are incapable of rousing the nation from its slumber, for they have mocked its mood (only to be mocked in turn). The revelation of revolution was fundamental to the designs of even the nation’s secularist antecedents: for Paine, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”; recreating the Eden that Locke imagines before the Fall: “In the beginning, all the world was America”. Indeed, the ‘story’ of America cannot be comprehended in linear time; rather, it is revealed cyclically, in moments that capture its essential nature:
And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black...
(‘Dreams from My Father’)
The ‘universal particular’, as William Blake might have christened it; a single note of empathy that opens up the world. For Blake’s Isaiah, this is the gift of conscience – “the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God” – with an ability to re-sculpt the landscape, as Isaiah 40:4 (in Dr. King’s version): “every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low”:
In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world. In the day-to-day work of the men and women I met in church each day, in their ability to “make a way out of no way” and maintain hope and dignity in the direst of circumstances, I could see the Word made manifest.
(‘The Audacity of Hope’)
Here is the Word as World, a realisation of the centrality of the Logos in American culture, from the Bible to the Constitution and beyond (as Marshall McLuhan, a seer of the advertising age, remarked: “America is the only country ever founded on the printed word”). It is this that bore the “reverence for the Law” that Lincoln called “the political religion of the nation”, and it is the Logos that provides Obama with his linguistic fusion of the Hebraic and the Hellenic, of the stirring cadences of the Southern Baptist tradition with the alliterative, formalistic, (re)iterations of Athenian and Roman rhetoric. In this tradition, there is simply no such thing as ‘just words’:
Don’t tell me words don’t matter! “I have a dream”. Just words? “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Just words? “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”. Just words, just speeches?
(Wisconsin Founders’ Day speech)
Words themselves are – in that phrase so beloved of Hillary – a ‘reality check’, as delivered by Dr. King: “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt...”. Critics have derided Obama’s vision for being messianic, which it is, in the most faithful sense: that, true to the Hebrew tradition, the Messiah will only arrive once the world has been perfected. Such a ‘fierce urgency’ has always focused the American mind: remember the last words uttered in public by Dr. King and sung at the funeral of Bobby Kennedy, from the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”.
“America is a passionate idea or it is nothing”, Max Lerner wrote in Actions and Passions, “America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos”. Obama’s unifying project aims to make the United States more than the sum of its parts – not a union divided and ruled, appeased and triangulated, but one capable of recognizing that ‘dreams’ are not a ‘zero-sum’ game. This approach, as Eugene Robinson has noted , may be characterised as less either-or than both-and: both white and black, rhetoric and action, Hellenic and Hebraic, and more profoundly, “both individual responsibility and mutual responsibility”, the possibility of making room for “the individualistic and the communal, autonomy and solidarity”. Liberalism is based on the conviction that both men and systems are capable of change, and that through an informed and sustained engagement with its citizens, a democracy may evolve worthy of its declared aspirations. And while we should be wary of an aestheticisation of politics, and acknowledge that its truths alone are unable to sustain us in what Obama calls “the quiet corners of our lives”; still, there is a better self in every citizen that may yet be cultivated and realised more fully, and ‘a more perfect union’ that must be strived for. The dignitas of which Steiner speaks itself recalls that beautiful phrase of Alan Paton: “the worth and dignity of man”; a motto for the whole of liberalism, and a ‘ripple of hope’ for the world.
Benjamin Ramm is editor of The Liberal.
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