Rob Brezsny and Judith Butler theorise Barack Obama!
December 6th 2008 21:55
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Two of my favourite intellectuals have published their responses to Barack Obama's election, and I thought I'd share them with you...
Rob Brezsny wrote on Free Will Astrology:
[...]I'll go ahead and express my joy in Obama's ascendancy:
BRAVO! VIVA! HALLELUJAH! EUREKA! ABRACADABRA!
More than a vindication of a particular ideology or political agenda, his selection by a majority of American voters (ratified by an even vaster majority of the world's citizens) is a triumph of emotional intelligence, integrity, reasonableness, compassion, and the higher powers of human consciousness. It is a profound sign that Americans are growing up. Obama invites us to be motivated not by fear and hatred but by the "better angels of our nature," in Abraham Lincoln's phrase.
What's especially thrilling to me is that Obama's spirituality is the soulful, thoughtful kind. His humble, rational relationship with the divine mysteries suggests that fundamentalists, whether they're the religious right or the new atheists, will no longer be able to frame the mainstream debate about spiritual matters. Here is a good essay about the issue.
I think the rise of Obama also vividly demonstrates an important point about pronoia. Many of us have been convinced that we've been living through the New Dark Ages; we've been entranced by the belief that the world is in terrible trouble and we're all on the brink of disaster. Even those of us who don't swallow that cynical meme have had to acknowledge that some crazy bad stuff has been happening.
But the way I see it, the election of a smart, spiritual black man who is a good listener with a flexible mind is not some impossible miracle, not some inexplicable escape from certain doom. The truth is that many of us have been preparing the way for this outbreak of pronoia for years. Obama's emergence as a prime leader is a natural evolution of the work we've all been doing behind the scenes and outside of the media's spotlight -- both on ourselves and on our local institutions.
As Sam Smith has written: "Obama is not a catalyst of change, but rather its beneficiary."
Here are two essays that capture some of the essence of other important themes in Obama's victory:
"Obama is the first postmodern president"
American culture is slowly moving from modernism to postmodernism, the type of major shift in collective worldview that hasn’t happened since the Enlightenment of the 18th century. If this transition were a river, we’d see the Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) standing on the modern side of the river, Generation X (1965-1980) in the middle trying not to get swept away, and the Millennials (1981-2000) comfortably positioned on the postmodern side. Generation X, then, is the bridge that is taking us from one era to the next.
Having been born in 1961, Obama is technically a Baby Boomer. But the recent presidential debates demonstrate the fact that Obama is functionally a postmodern “X’er” in both style and outlook. John McCain, by contrast, is still firmly rooted in the world of modernism:
Personal morality vs. communal values. Dichotomizing vs. consensus. Confrontation vs. negotiation. Nationalism vs. globalism. Obviously, these distinctions cannot be universally applied to McCain and Obama. But the debates did clearly show how Obama operates from a very different approach and a very different way of looking at the world. The Obama victory indicates the fact that although the United States as a whole might not be a postmodern culture quite yet, we are certainly moving steadily across that river. That so many younger voters who are firmly rooted in the postmodern worldview came out and voted for Obama further illustrates this shifting reality.
Personally, I am more excited about the postmodern flavor of the upcoming Obama presidency than anything else. Much is being made of the significance of his victory for African Americans and all minorities, as it should be. Much is being made of the defeat of neo-conservatism and the weakening of the Republican Party, as it should be. And much is being made of the great gains made by women in this campaign, as it should be.
But all of those triumphs can be placed under this much larger shift in our culture that has now made its way to the highest office in the land. Obama will be a different kind of president. To many folks in the older generations, the way he does things and the way he talks about things will seem foreign. But to those of us in the younger generations, he will be an absolute breath of fresh air - for we will finally feel that our worldview and our way of dealing with reality is being represented.
'He tried his best to veil it, but Obama is an intellectual'
* Jonathan Raban
* The Guardian, Saturday November 8 2008
On Tuesday, dodging the hubbub of election parties, I watched the results come in with two close friends and my teenage daughter. We might have been patients showing up at a hospital for a surgical procedure, nervously joking over the early returns from Vermont (predictably, Barack Obama) and Kentucky (predictably, John McCain). When, at 8:01pm, Pacific time, CNN called the race for Obama, we collapsed in one another's arms. Even my dry tear ducts did their job, and, for a few moments, the room swam out of focus. The champagne, whose presence in the fridge I had thought to be ominously bad karma, was opened. No toast. Just "Thank God, thank God, thank God", spoken by four devout atheists. There was little triumph in our emotion, only an overpowering wave of relief that, after eight years of manic derangement, America had at last come to its senses.
Inevitably, Wednesday's headlines were all about Obama's skin colour and the historic milestone of the first black presidency. For the United States and the rest of the world, that is a fact of huge symbolic importance, but it is the least of Obama's true credentials. What America has succeeded in doing, against all the odds, and why we cried when it happened, is to elect the most intelligent, canny and imaginative candidate to the presidential office in modern times - someone who'll bring to the White House an extraordinary clarity of thought and temperate judgment.
Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there. Much of the nightmare of the last eight years has arisen from the fact that one of the least intellectually curious or gifted presidents in history was in thrall to a group of passionate, but second-rate, neoconservative intellectuals, all associated with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose imperial agenda for the US was lost on the man they guided and advised. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, the architects of the war on Iraq and the "war on terror", were treated by George Bush as experts on parts of the world of which he was ignorant. "Wolfie" knew all about the Middle East; that this knowledge proceeded from a hardline political philosophy instilled in him by Richard Pipes of Harvard and Albert Wohlstetter of the University of Chicago, both avid cold warriors and proponents of US military, political and cultural domination of the globe, was grasped, if at all, only very dimly by the 43rd president, who prided himself in reading no newspapers and being in bed by nine. While Bush was bicycling and cutting brush at his Crawford ranch in Texas, the intellectuals in his administration were staying up late in DC, busy about the task of reshaping the United States into the Roman Empire of the 21st century.
Since September 11 2001, the damage inflicted by intellectuals on America and its constitution and justice system, as well as on the outside world, has been so great that we ought to be wary of the election of an intellectual to the presidency, and, though he tried his best to veil his proclivities while on the stump, Obama is an intellectual. At the University of Chicago, he taught constitutional law, the most demanding and far-reaching area of study in US law schools. He names Philip Roth and EL Doctorow among his favourite living writers. In his memoir Dreams From My Father, the late-night life he describes himself as leading inside his own skull is every bit as real and vivid as the exterior life he records on the streets and in the homes of Honolulu, Jakarta, New York, Chicago and Kenya. Again and again in that book, one finds Obama in the small hours, reconstructing in his mind recent events, searching for patterns, making connections, a novelist teasing meaning and significance from the chaotic stream of daily contingencies.
Dreams From My Father reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader. The self at the centre of the book is, above all, an intent watcher and listener - one of those on whom, as Henry James said of the ideal writer, nothing is lost - and there runs through the story an almost worshipful regard for what Obama calls "the messy, contradictory details of our experience".
The unique contradictions and messinesses of his own childhood made him an empiricist by instinct, finding a path for himself by testing his footing each step of the way. His education at Columbia and Harvard made him an empiricist by training. As a law professor at Chicago, he pressed his students to adopt contrarian views while playing his own opinions close to his chest. In July this year, the New York Times reported:
Obama liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones. "I remember thinking, 'You're offending my liberal instincts," a former student remembered.
In the Illinois state senate as well as in the US Senate, this has been his habit as a legislator, to solicit counter-arguments against his own position, to deploy his unusual talent as a close and sympathetic listener, to probe, to doubt, to adapt, to change.
Such chameleonic powers are liabilities on the American campaign trail, where constant iteration of simple maxims ("Drill, baby, drill!" or "Read my lips: no new taxes") is required, and any variation of policy is derided as a "flip-flop", but Obama the chameleon has conformed to the rules of this game, too. It's only now that we can expect to see the full extent of his natural flexibility of mind.
During the last two years he has been quietly surrounding himself with other intellectuals. Two are law professors: Cass Sunstein of Chicago and Laurence Tribe of Harvard, who taught Obama there and called him "the most impressive student I'd ever worked with".
There's Austan Goolsbee, Obama's senior economic adviser, from the business school at Chicago, a highly eclectic behavioural economist, who writes about the dismal science with both impressive clarity and sceptical humour. Funny economists are in lamentably short supply: Goolsbee has moonlighted as a stand-up comedian.
This growing coterie of wits and scholars looks a lot like the "brain trust" which Franklin Roosevelt assembled in 1932 to shape the New Deal. Happy in the company of prominent intellectuals, and with a mind equal to theirs, Obama promises to spectacularly raise the IQ and the standard of debate inside the White House (unlike John Kennedy, who liked intellectuals as ornaments of his administration, but never seriously engaged their talents).
Heaven knows, he will need all the intelligence and range of viewpoints he can muster to cope with the toxic legacy he inherits from the 43rd president: the mounting turmoil in Afghanistan, the dangerous, simmering cauldron in Iraq; an America cordially loathed by at least half the world; an impending global economic catastrophe, triggered by the lunatic improvidence of deregulated Wall Street. Not since Lincoln and Roosevelt has an incoming president been landed with an America in such desperate need of rehabilitation and repair, and it was no surprise that, in his Chicago victory speech on Tuesday, Obama conjured the ghosts of those two presidents.
Early in the campaign, he was painted as an empty optimist - a description that couldn't be more wrong. For every rousing "Yes, we can!", there was the caveat of "It won't be easy", and, uniquely among the raft of candidates in the primaries, Obama brought to the election a clear-sighted grasp of the tragic aspect of US history. His most uplifting speeches were grounded in images of the shame of slavery, the national agony of the civil war and the intimate humiliations of poverty in America, and it was by reminding his audiences of the depths to which the country is prone to sink that he was able to summon them to hope.
On Tuesday, there was a strong echo of Roosevelt's first inaugural speech when Obama said, "I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree."
After eight years of an administration whose hallmarks have been secrecy, dishonesty, and a refusal to listen to any voice outside its own inner circle, this promise of candour and conversation was probably the most important policy statement that he could make as president-elect.
If there is one prediction that one can make with near-certainty, it is that, by January 20 2009, inauguration day, things will be rather worse than they are now, at least in Afghanistan and on the economic front, on which ever more dismal results and forecasts continue to roll in. Yet the worse the crisis, the more latitude it will allow the new administration in showing its intellectual mettle quickly and decisively, and it's to be assumed that, even now, Obama is talking with Goolsbee, Paul Volcker, Lawrence Summers, Jason Furman, Warren Buffett and his other on-tap economic advisers, in an extended seminar on the financial meltdown and its possible solutions. The best thing about living in the United States since Tuesday has been the gilt-edged assurance that, somewhere out there, very smart people are thinking and talking in a serious conversation from which narrow ideologues have been rigorously excluded.
We've elected as president someone who is empirical, cautious, conservative with a small "c", yet unusually sure of his own judgment when he makes it, which is often slowly. He's sure to disappoint those of his supporters who believe he can raise the dead, turn water into wine, and walk on water. But he has rescued the White House from the besotted rationalists of PNAC with their Platonist designs on the world, and restored it to the realm of common reason. It's a measure of the madness of the last eight years that, for this seemingly modest contribution to the nation's welfare (and not just this nation's), grown men and women wept in gratitude on Tuesday night.
Now I want to mention two big caveats about this monumental shift in the collective destiny of America.
First, Obama and his team have a lot of work to do. That's why I endorse many of the points listed on these two websites:
The first 100 days: What Obama can do to address the cratering economy, broken healthcare system, two wars, poverty and inequality, and the stained US reputation in the world.
At the end of this remarkable week, we're starting to look ahead to the First 100 Days of the Obama presidency. Already, we're hearing calls in the mainstream media warning the new administration "not to overreach." And working overtime, the Inside-the-Beltway Punditocracy continues to reveal its ability to ignore reality--even while describing itself as "realist"--with its claims that this is still a center-right nation, despite all evidence to the contrary.
But as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman writes in today's New York Times, "Let's hope that Mr. Obama has the good sense to ignore this advice...this year's presidential election was a clear referendum on political philosophies--and the progressive philosophy won."
Obama himself his talked about needing to measure his accomplishments over the first 1,000 Days, rather than 100, given the problems he has inherited from arguably the worst president ever (my words, not Obama's). Indeed, it will take years to undo the damage of the Bush administration and the conservative ideology that has dominated this country for nearly thirty years. But the First 100 Days are still crucial--not only in signaling to the American people and the world that the administration will take determined steps to repair this nation--but there is a historical precedent for the need to move forward expeditiously in order to seize the moment and the mandate.
President Obama will need to be bold to deal with the challenges he faces: a cratering economy, broken healthcare system, two wars, poverty and inequality, and the stained US reputation in the world. The millions who were mobilized and inspired by Obama's campaign and candidacy also have their work cut out for them--continuing to drive a bold agenda to respond to these crises--just as progressives have in recent years on the war, energy independence, trade, healthcare, and other issues that are defining the new "center" of American politics and hearts and minds.
Here is a list of actions--ones I care deeply about--that President Obama can take in the First 100 Days to immediately achieve real and significant change. Some of these he can literally achieve on Day 1 with the stroke of a pen, others will demand coalition building and an inside-outside strategy to push legislation. Many of these ideas are drawn from good groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International USA, the Apollo Alliance, and Public Citizen. You may have others and I'd welcome hearing yours - just post a comment.
Bush Executive Orders: As Obama himself said of his first 100 days when campaigning in Denver, "I would call my attorney general in and review every single executive order issued by George Bush and overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the constitution."
Economic Stimulus: Stop the bleeding--through expanded health and unemployment benefits and providing real aid to beleaguered state and local governments so they can sustain essential public services.
Iraq: Present plan and hold to your timeline for withdrawal.
Health Care Reform: Begin immediately by expanding health insurance to kids and passing the State Children's Health Insurance Program legislation vetoed by Bush.
Women's Health and Reproductive Rights: Repeal the Global Gag Rule that requires NGOs receiving federal funding to neither promote nor perform abortions in other countries.
Energy and the Economy: Announce a clean energy strategy that will reduce oil dependence, address global warming, create thousands of green jobs, and improve national security. Groups like the Apollo Alliance, Center for American Progress, and Natural Resources Defense Council have strong and concrete plans in this regard. Incorporate elements of this plan into stimulus package.
Bailout for Main Street: Work to ensure that homeowners have real opportunities to renegotiate mortgages and remain in their homes
Poverty and Inequality: Appoint a Hunger Czar--as Senator George McGovern and Congressman Jim McGovern call for in a recent op-ed--who would "coordinate the various food, nutrition and anti-poverty programs... to increase the independence, purchasing power and food security of every human being." Announce your commitment to the goal of cutting poverty in half in ten years.
Labor and Trade: Reject Colombia, Korea and Panama trade agreements as currently written and ensure future agreements promote the public interest. Work towards passage of Employee Free Choice Act.
Science: Allow federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
Global Warming: Reverse the Bush EPA decision and allow California to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. Call for a new climate treaty and ask Al Gore to lead that effort.
Guantánamo: Close it, and try people in the US or resettle in countries where they face no risk of persecution or torture. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof offers a compelling idea to "turn it into an international center for research on tropical diseases that afflict poor countries... [serving as] an example of multilateral humanitarianism"
Detention: Close all CIA black sites and secret detention sites. End extraordinary rendition. Abolish preventive detention that allows people to be held indefinitely without charge. Initiate criminal investigations into programs of rendition and secret detention. End trials by military commission. End opposition to full habeas corpus hearings for detainees in Guantánamo and other similar situations. Make known the names and whereabouts of all those detained in rendition and secret detention programs.
Torture: End use in court of any evidence obtained through torture. Officially reject all memos, signing statements and executive orders that justify the use of torture. Establish an independent commission of inquiry into all aspects of detention and interrogation practices in the "war on terror." Announce administration will work for redress and remedy for victims of human rights violations for which US authorities are found to be responsible.
Protect Dissent: Ensure that the FBI adheres to surveillance guidelines. Open Justice Department investigation into surveillance related misconduct. Pledge to end all secret surveillance programs not reviewed by courts or congressional committees.
Limit State Secrets Privilege: issue new Executive Orders that reverse the expansion of state secrets privilege and the over-classification of documents. Pass legislation making it clear that military contractors are accountable for abuses.
Roll Back Executive Power: Repudiate unitary presidency. Renounce use of signing statements as a tool for altering legislation. Pledge to abide by the War Powers Act and end abuse of Authorization to Use Military Force. (Or as Bruce Fein--a key player in the Reagan Justice Department--said, "Renounce presidential power to initiate war anywhere on the planet, including Iran.")
These are doable, and by taking these steps--with deliberate haste-- President Obama would get a real start on repairing our nation and people's lives.
and here:
Fix This, Barack
Second we Americans have a lot of work to do. The resuscitation of our country will have to be accomplished primarily by we-the-people, and as much on the local level as in the federal realm.
This won't just be a matter of political organization. It will also require us to be continually at work on ourselves, purging the parts of us that resonate in harmony with the dying world and feeding the parts of ourselves that are capable of creating a paradise-on-earth.
Here's a quote from my book:
As much as we might be dismayed at the actions of our political leaders, pronoia says that toppling any particular junta, clique, or elite is irrelevant unless we overthrow the sour, crippled mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality" -- including the part of that hallucination we foster in ourselves. We can't change the world unless we change ourselves.
The revolution begins at home. If you overthrow yourself again and again, you might earn the right to help overthrow the rest of us.
Here's a quote from Carl Jung:
"The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others."
Finally, a quote from Tom Robbins:
"Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self."
According to Judith Butler, of the University of California, Berkeley:
November 05, 2008
Uncritical Exuberance?
Judith Butler
Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time. My friends on the left write to me that they feel something akin to "redemption" or that "the country has been returned to us" or that "we finally have one of us in the White House." Of course, like them, I discover myself feeling overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement throughout the day, since the thought of having the regime of George W. Bush over and gone is an enormous relief. And the thought of Obama, a thoughtful and progressive black candidate, shifts the historical ground, and we feel that cataclysm as it produces a new terrain. But let us try to think carefully about the shifted terrain, although we cannot fully know its contours at this time. The election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of identification that he proposes ("we are all united") or that we propose ("he is one of us"), we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times. There have always been good reasons not to embrace "national unity" as an ideal, and to nurse suspicions toward absolute and seamless identification with any political leader. After all, fascism relied in part on that seamless identification with the leader, and Republicans engage this same effort to organize political affect when, for instance, Elizabeth Dole looks out on her audience and says, "I love each and every one of you."
It becomes all the more important to think about the politics of exuberant identification with the election of Obama when we consider that support for Obama has coincided with support for conservative causes. In a way, this accounts for his "cross-over" success. In California, he won by 60% of the vote, and yet some significant portion of those who voted for him also voted against the legalization of gay marriage (52%). How do we understand this apparent disjunction? First, let us remember that Obama has not explicitly supported gay marriage rights. Further, as Wendy Brown has argued, the Republicans have found that the electorate is not as galvanized by "moral" issues as they were in recent elections; the reasons given for why people voted for Obama seem to be predominantly economic, and their reasoning seems more fully structured by neo-liberal rationality than by religious concerns. This is clearly one reason why Palin's assigned public function to galvanize the majority of the electorate on moral issues finally failed. But if "moral" issues such as gun control, abortion rights and gay rights were not as determinative as they once were, perhaps that is because they are thriving in a separate compartment of the political mind. In other words, we are faced with new configurations of political belief that make it possible to hold apparently discrepant views at the same time: someone can, for instance, disagree with Obama on certain issues, but still have voted for him. This became most salient in the emergence of the counter Bradley-effect, when voters could and did explicitly own up to their own racism, but said they would vote for Obama anyway. Anecdotes from the field include claims like the following: "I know that Obama is a Muslim and a Terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway; he is probably better for the economy." Such voters got to keep their racism and vote for Obama, sheltering their split beliefs without having to resolve them.
Along with strong economic motivations, less empirically discernible factors have come into play in these election results. We cannot underestimate the force of dis-identification in this election, a sense of revulsion that George W. has "represented" the United States to the rest of the world, a sense of shame about our practices of torture and illegal detention, a sense of disgust that we have waged war on false grounds and propagated racist views of Islam, a sense of alarm and horror that the extremes of economic deregulation have led to a global economic crisis. Is it despite his race, or because of his race, that Obama finally emerged as a preferred representative of the nation? Fulfilling that representative-function, he is at once black and not-black (some say "not black enough" and others say "too black"), and, as a result, he can appeal to voters who not only have no way of resolving their ambivalence on this issue, but do not want one. The public figure who allows the populace to sustain and mask its ambivalence nevertheless appears as a figure of "unity": this is surely an ideological function. Such moments are intensely imaginary, but not for that reason without their political force.
As the election approached, there has been an increased focus on the person of Obama: his gravity, his deliberateness, his ability not to lose his temper, his way of modeling a certain evenness in the face of hurtful attacks and vile political rhetoric, his promise to reinstate a version of the nation that will overcome its current shame. Of course, the promise is alluring, but what if the embrace of Obama leads to the belief that we might overcome all dissonance, that unity is actually possible? What is the chance that we may end up suffering a certain inevitable disappointment when this charismatic leader displays his fallibility, his willingness to compromise, even to sell out minorities? He has, in fact, already done this in certain ways, but many of us "set aside" our concerns in order to enjoy the extreme un-ambivalence of this moment, risking an uncritical exuberance even when we know better. Obama is, after all, hardly a leftist, regardless of the attributions of "socialism" proffered by his conservative opponents. In what ways will his actions be constrained by party politics, economic interests, and state power; in what ways have they been compromised already? If we seek through this presidency to overcome a sense of dissonance, then we will have jettisoned critical politics in favor of an exuberance whose phantasmatic dimensions will prove consequential. Maybe we cannot avoid this phantasmatic moment, but let us be mindful about how temporary it is. If there are avowed racists who have said, "I know that he is a Muslim and a terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway," there are surely also people on the left who say, "I know that he has sold out gay rights and Palestine, but he is still our redemption." I know very well, but still: this is the classic formulation of disavowal. Through what means do we sustain and mask conflicting beliefs of this sort? And at what political cost?
There is no doubt that Obama's success will have significant effects on the economic course of the nation, and it seems reasonable to assume that we will see a new rationale for economic regulation and for an approach to economics that resembles social democratic forms in Europe; in foreign affairs, we will doubtless see a renewal of multi-lateral relations, the reversal of a fatal trend of destroying multilateral accords that the Bush administration has undertaken. And there will doubtless also be a more generally liberal trend on social issues, though it is important to remember that Obama has not supported universal health care, and has failed to explicitly support gay marriage rights. And there is not yet much reason to hope that he will formulate a just policy for the United States in the Middle East, even though it is a relief, to be sure, that he knows Rashid Khalidi.
The indisputable significance of his election has everything to do with overcoming the limits implicitly imposed on African-American achievement; it has and will inspire and overwhelm young African-Americans; it will, at the same time, precipitate a change in the self-definition of the United States. If the election of Obama signals a willingness on the part of the majority of voters to be "represented" by this man, then it follows that who "we" are is constituted anew: we are a nation of many races, of mixed races; and he offers us the occasion to recognize who we have become and what we have yet to be, and in this way a certain split between the representative function of the presidency and the populace represented appears to be overcome. That is an exhilarating moment, to be sure. But can it last, and should it?
To what consequences will this nearly messianic expectation invested in this man lead? In order for this presidency to be successful, it will have to lead to some disappointment, and to survive disappointment: the man will become human, will prove less powerful than we might wish, and politics will cease to be a celebration without ambivalence and caution; indeed, politics will prove to be less of a messianic experience than a venue for robust debate, public criticism, and necessary antagonism. The election of Obama means that the terrain for debate and struggle has shifted, and it is a better terrain, to be sure. But it is not the end of struggle, and we would be very unwise to regard it that way, even provisionally. We will doubtless agree and disagree with various actions he takes and fails to take. But if the initial expectation is that he is and will be "redemption" itself, then we will punish him mercilessly when he fails us (or we will find ways to deny or suppress that disappointment in order to keep alive the experience of unity and unambivalent love).
If a consequential and dramatic disappointment is to be averted, he will have to act quickly and well. Perhaps the only way to avert a "crash" – a disappointment of serious proportions that would turn political will against him – will be to take decisive actions within the first two months of his presidency. The first would be to close Guantanamo and find ways to transfer the cases of detainees to legitimate courts; the second would be to forge a plan for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and to begin to implement that plan. The third would be to retract his bellicose remarks about escalating war in Afghanistan and pursue diplomatic, multilateral solutions in that arena. If he fails to take these steps, his support on the left will clearly deteriorate, and we will see the reconfiguration of the split between liberal hawks and the anti-war left. If he appoints the likes of Lawrence Summers to key cabinet positions, or continues the failed economic polices of Clinton and Bush, then at some point the messiah will be scorned as a false prophet. In the place of an impossible promise, we need a series of concrete actions that can begin to reverse the terrible abrogation of justice committed by the Bush regime; anything less will lead to a dramatic and consequential disillusionment. The question is what measure of dis-illusion is necessary in order to retrieve a critical politics, and what more dramatic form of dis-illusionment will return us to the intense political cynicism of the last years. Some relief from illusion is necessary, so that we might remember that politics is less about the person and the impossible and beautiful promise he represents than it is about the concrete changes in policy that might begin, over time, and with difficulty, bring about conditions of greater justice.
Rob Brezsny wrote on Free Will Astrology:
[...]I'll go ahead and express my joy in Obama's ascendancy:
BRAVO! VIVA! HALLELUJAH! EUREKA! ABRACADABRA!
More than a vindication of a particular ideology or political agenda, his selection by a majority of American voters (ratified by an even vaster majority of the world's citizens) is a triumph of emotional intelligence, integrity, reasonableness, compassion, and the higher powers of human consciousness. It is a profound sign that Americans are growing up. Obama invites us to be motivated not by fear and hatred but by the "better angels of our nature," in Abraham Lincoln's phrase.
What's especially thrilling to me is that Obama's spirituality is the soulful, thoughtful kind. His humble, rational relationship with the divine mysteries suggests that fundamentalists, whether they're the religious right or the new atheists, will no longer be able to frame the mainstream debate about spiritual matters. Here is a good essay about the issue.
I think the rise of Obama also vividly demonstrates an important point about pronoia. Many of us have been convinced that we've been living through the New Dark Ages; we've been entranced by the belief that the world is in terrible trouble and we're all on the brink of disaster. Even those of us who don't swallow that cynical meme have had to acknowledge that some crazy bad stuff has been happening.
But the way I see it, the election of a smart, spiritual black man who is a good listener with a flexible mind is not some impossible miracle, not some inexplicable escape from certain doom. The truth is that many of us have been preparing the way for this outbreak of pronoia for years. Obama's emergence as a prime leader is a natural evolution of the work we've all been doing behind the scenes and outside of the media's spotlight -- both on ourselves and on our local institutions.
As Sam Smith has written: "Obama is not a catalyst of change, but rather its beneficiary."
Here are two essays that capture some of the essence of other important themes in Obama's victory:
"Obama is the first postmodern president"
American culture is slowly moving from modernism to postmodernism, the type of major shift in collective worldview that hasn’t happened since the Enlightenment of the 18th century. If this transition were a river, we’d see the Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) standing on the modern side of the river, Generation X (1965-1980) in the middle trying not to get swept away, and the Millennials (1981-2000) comfortably positioned on the postmodern side. Generation X, then, is the bridge that is taking us from one era to the next.
Having been born in 1961, Obama is technically a Baby Boomer. But the recent presidential debates demonstrate the fact that Obama is functionally a postmodern “X’er” in both style and outlook. John McCain, by contrast, is still firmly rooted in the world of modernism:
Obama spoke with empathy about the personal effects of the current financial crisis on Main Street America. McCain spoke of individual greed and said the government needs to hold the failed executives accountable. McCain underscored personal morals where Obama accentuated communal values.
Obama consistently drew attention to points of agreement with McCain. By contrast, McCain perpetuated the Right vs. Left dichotomy by describing Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate. While Obama sought to build consensus, McCain pointed out their differences.
Nationalism is a key reality of the modern world. But postmodernism prioritizes the global community. Talking about Iraq, McCain promised to seek American “victory and honor.” Obama was more concerned about America’s global reputation.
In their exchanges, Obama called McCain by his first name, drawing attention to his personality. McCain never reciprocated, indicating respect for Obama’s office but not necessarily for Obama himself.
Obama consistently drew attention to points of agreement with McCain. By contrast, McCain perpetuated the Right vs. Left dichotomy by describing Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate. While Obama sought to build consensus, McCain pointed out their differences.
Nationalism is a key reality of the modern world. But postmodernism prioritizes the global community. Talking about Iraq, McCain promised to seek American “victory and honor.” Obama was more concerned about America’s global reputation.
In their exchanges, Obama called McCain by his first name, drawing attention to his personality. McCain never reciprocated, indicating respect for Obama’s office but not necessarily for Obama himself.
Personal morality vs. communal values. Dichotomizing vs. consensus. Confrontation vs. negotiation. Nationalism vs. globalism. Obviously, these distinctions cannot be universally applied to McCain and Obama. But the debates did clearly show how Obama operates from a very different approach and a very different way of looking at the world. The Obama victory indicates the fact that although the United States as a whole might not be a postmodern culture quite yet, we are certainly moving steadily across that river. That so many younger voters who are firmly rooted in the postmodern worldview came out and voted for Obama further illustrates this shifting reality.
Personally, I am more excited about the postmodern flavor of the upcoming Obama presidency than anything else. Much is being made of the significance of his victory for African Americans and all minorities, as it should be. Much is being made of the defeat of neo-conservatism and the weakening of the Republican Party, as it should be. And much is being made of the great gains made by women in this campaign, as it should be.
But all of those triumphs can be placed under this much larger shift in our culture that has now made its way to the highest office in the land. Obama will be a different kind of president. To many folks in the older generations, the way he does things and the way he talks about things will seem foreign. But to those of us in the younger generations, he will be an absolute breath of fresh air - for we will finally feel that our worldview and our way of dealing with reality is being represented.
'He tried his best to veil it, but Obama is an intellectual'
* Jonathan Raban
* The Guardian, Saturday November 8 2008
On Tuesday, dodging the hubbub of election parties, I watched the results come in with two close friends and my teenage daughter. We might have been patients showing up at a hospital for a surgical procedure, nervously joking over the early returns from Vermont (predictably, Barack Obama) and Kentucky (predictably, John McCain). When, at 8:01pm, Pacific time, CNN called the race for Obama, we collapsed in one another's arms. Even my dry tear ducts did their job, and, for a few moments, the room swam out of focus. The champagne, whose presence in the fridge I had thought to be ominously bad karma, was opened. No toast. Just "Thank God, thank God, thank God", spoken by four devout atheists. There was little triumph in our emotion, only an overpowering wave of relief that, after eight years of manic derangement, America had at last come to its senses.
Inevitably, Wednesday's headlines were all about Obama's skin colour and the historic milestone of the first black presidency. For the United States and the rest of the world, that is a fact of huge symbolic importance, but it is the least of Obama's true credentials. What America has succeeded in doing, against all the odds, and why we cried when it happened, is to elect the most intelligent, canny and imaginative candidate to the presidential office in modern times - someone who'll bring to the White House an extraordinary clarity of thought and temperate judgment.
Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there. Much of the nightmare of the last eight years has arisen from the fact that one of the least intellectually curious or gifted presidents in history was in thrall to a group of passionate, but second-rate, neoconservative intellectuals, all associated with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose imperial agenda for the US was lost on the man they guided and advised. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, the architects of the war on Iraq and the "war on terror", were treated by George Bush as experts on parts of the world of which he was ignorant. "Wolfie" knew all about the Middle East; that this knowledge proceeded from a hardline political philosophy instilled in him by Richard Pipes of Harvard and Albert Wohlstetter of the University of Chicago, both avid cold warriors and proponents of US military, political and cultural domination of the globe, was grasped, if at all, only very dimly by the 43rd president, who prided himself in reading no newspapers and being in bed by nine. While Bush was bicycling and cutting brush at his Crawford ranch in Texas, the intellectuals in his administration were staying up late in DC, busy about the task of reshaping the United States into the Roman Empire of the 21st century.
Since September 11 2001, the damage inflicted by intellectuals on America and its constitution and justice system, as well as on the outside world, has been so great that we ought to be wary of the election of an intellectual to the presidency, and, though he tried his best to veil his proclivities while on the stump, Obama is an intellectual. At the University of Chicago, he taught constitutional law, the most demanding and far-reaching area of study in US law schools. He names Philip Roth and EL Doctorow among his favourite living writers. In his memoir Dreams From My Father, the late-night life he describes himself as leading inside his own skull is every bit as real and vivid as the exterior life he records on the streets and in the homes of Honolulu, Jakarta, New York, Chicago and Kenya. Again and again in that book, one finds Obama in the small hours, reconstructing in his mind recent events, searching for patterns, making connections, a novelist teasing meaning and significance from the chaotic stream of daily contingencies.
Dreams From My Father reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader. The self at the centre of the book is, above all, an intent watcher and listener - one of those on whom, as Henry James said of the ideal writer, nothing is lost - and there runs through the story an almost worshipful regard for what Obama calls "the messy, contradictory details of our experience".
The unique contradictions and messinesses of his own childhood made him an empiricist by instinct, finding a path for himself by testing his footing each step of the way. His education at Columbia and Harvard made him an empiricist by training. As a law professor at Chicago, he pressed his students to adopt contrarian views while playing his own opinions close to his chest. In July this year, the New York Times reported:
Obama liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones. "I remember thinking, 'You're offending my liberal instincts," a former student remembered.
In the Illinois state senate as well as in the US Senate, this has been his habit as a legislator, to solicit counter-arguments against his own position, to deploy his unusual talent as a close and sympathetic listener, to probe, to doubt, to adapt, to change.
Such chameleonic powers are liabilities on the American campaign trail, where constant iteration of simple maxims ("Drill, baby, drill!" or "Read my lips: no new taxes") is required, and any variation of policy is derided as a "flip-flop", but Obama the chameleon has conformed to the rules of this game, too. It's only now that we can expect to see the full extent of his natural flexibility of mind.
During the last two years he has been quietly surrounding himself with other intellectuals. Two are law professors: Cass Sunstein of Chicago and Laurence Tribe of Harvard, who taught Obama there and called him "the most impressive student I'd ever worked with".
There's Austan Goolsbee, Obama's senior economic adviser, from the business school at Chicago, a highly eclectic behavioural economist, who writes about the dismal science with both impressive clarity and sceptical humour. Funny economists are in lamentably short supply: Goolsbee has moonlighted as a stand-up comedian.
This growing coterie of wits and scholars looks a lot like the "brain trust" which Franklin Roosevelt assembled in 1932 to shape the New Deal. Happy in the company of prominent intellectuals, and with a mind equal to theirs, Obama promises to spectacularly raise the IQ and the standard of debate inside the White House (unlike John Kennedy, who liked intellectuals as ornaments of his administration, but never seriously engaged their talents).
Heaven knows, he will need all the intelligence and range of viewpoints he can muster to cope with the toxic legacy he inherits from the 43rd president: the mounting turmoil in Afghanistan, the dangerous, simmering cauldron in Iraq; an America cordially loathed by at least half the world; an impending global economic catastrophe, triggered by the lunatic improvidence of deregulated Wall Street. Not since Lincoln and Roosevelt has an incoming president been landed with an America in such desperate need of rehabilitation and repair, and it was no surprise that, in his Chicago victory speech on Tuesday, Obama conjured the ghosts of those two presidents.
Early in the campaign, he was painted as an empty optimist - a description that couldn't be more wrong. For every rousing "Yes, we can!", there was the caveat of "It won't be easy", and, uniquely among the raft of candidates in the primaries, Obama brought to the election a clear-sighted grasp of the tragic aspect of US history. His most uplifting speeches were grounded in images of the shame of slavery, the national agony of the civil war and the intimate humiliations of poverty in America, and it was by reminding his audiences of the depths to which the country is prone to sink that he was able to summon them to hope.
On Tuesday, there was a strong echo of Roosevelt's first inaugural speech when Obama said, "I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree."
After eight years of an administration whose hallmarks have been secrecy, dishonesty, and a refusal to listen to any voice outside its own inner circle, this promise of candour and conversation was probably the most important policy statement that he could make as president-elect.
If there is one prediction that one can make with near-certainty, it is that, by January 20 2009, inauguration day, things will be rather worse than they are now, at least in Afghanistan and on the economic front, on which ever more dismal results and forecasts continue to roll in. Yet the worse the crisis, the more latitude it will allow the new administration in showing its intellectual mettle quickly and decisively, and it's to be assumed that, even now, Obama is talking with Goolsbee, Paul Volcker, Lawrence Summers, Jason Furman, Warren Buffett and his other on-tap economic advisers, in an extended seminar on the financial meltdown and its possible solutions. The best thing about living in the United States since Tuesday has been the gilt-edged assurance that, somewhere out there, very smart people are thinking and talking in a serious conversation from which narrow ideologues have been rigorously excluded.
We've elected as president someone who is empirical, cautious, conservative with a small "c", yet unusually sure of his own judgment when he makes it, which is often slowly. He's sure to disappoint those of his supporters who believe he can raise the dead, turn water into wine, and walk on water. But he has rescued the White House from the besotted rationalists of PNAC with their Platonist designs on the world, and restored it to the realm of common reason. It's a measure of the madness of the last eight years that, for this seemingly modest contribution to the nation's welfare (and not just this nation's), grown men and women wept in gratitude on Tuesday night.
Now I want to mention two big caveats about this monumental shift in the collective destiny of America.
First, Obama and his team have a lot of work to do. That's why I endorse many of the points listed on these two websites:
The first 100 days: What Obama can do to address the cratering economy, broken healthcare system, two wars, poverty and inequality, and the stained US reputation in the world.
At the end of this remarkable week, we're starting to look ahead to the First 100 Days of the Obama presidency. Already, we're hearing calls in the mainstream media warning the new administration "not to overreach." And working overtime, the Inside-the-Beltway Punditocracy continues to reveal its ability to ignore reality--even while describing itself as "realist"--with its claims that this is still a center-right nation, despite all evidence to the contrary.
But as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman writes in today's New York Times, "Let's hope that Mr. Obama has the good sense to ignore this advice...this year's presidential election was a clear referendum on political philosophies--and the progressive philosophy won."
Obama himself his talked about needing to measure his accomplishments over the first 1,000 Days, rather than 100, given the problems he has inherited from arguably the worst president ever (my words, not Obama's). Indeed, it will take years to undo the damage of the Bush administration and the conservative ideology that has dominated this country for nearly thirty years. But the First 100 Days are still crucial--not only in signaling to the American people and the world that the administration will take determined steps to repair this nation--but there is a historical precedent for the need to move forward expeditiously in order to seize the moment and the mandate.
President Obama will need to be bold to deal with the challenges he faces: a cratering economy, broken healthcare system, two wars, poverty and inequality, and the stained US reputation in the world. The millions who were mobilized and inspired by Obama's campaign and candidacy also have their work cut out for them--continuing to drive a bold agenda to respond to these crises--just as progressives have in recent years on the war, energy independence, trade, healthcare, and other issues that are defining the new "center" of American politics and hearts and minds.
Here is a list of actions--ones I care deeply about--that President Obama can take in the First 100 Days to immediately achieve real and significant change. Some of these he can literally achieve on Day 1 with the stroke of a pen, others will demand coalition building and an inside-outside strategy to push legislation. Many of these ideas are drawn from good groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International USA, the Apollo Alliance, and Public Citizen. You may have others and I'd welcome hearing yours - just post a comment.
Bush Executive Orders: As Obama himself said of his first 100 days when campaigning in Denver, "I would call my attorney general in and review every single executive order issued by George Bush and overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the constitution."
Economic Stimulus: Stop the bleeding--through expanded health and unemployment benefits and providing real aid to beleaguered state and local governments so they can sustain essential public services.
Iraq: Present plan and hold to your timeline for withdrawal.
Health Care Reform: Begin immediately by expanding health insurance to kids and passing the State Children's Health Insurance Program legislation vetoed by Bush.
Women's Health and Reproductive Rights: Repeal the Global Gag Rule that requires NGOs receiving federal funding to neither promote nor perform abortions in other countries.
Energy and the Economy: Announce a clean energy strategy that will reduce oil dependence, address global warming, create thousands of green jobs, and improve national security. Groups like the Apollo Alliance, Center for American Progress, and Natural Resources Defense Council have strong and concrete plans in this regard. Incorporate elements of this plan into stimulus package.
Bailout for Main Street: Work to ensure that homeowners have real opportunities to renegotiate mortgages and remain in their homes
Poverty and Inequality: Appoint a Hunger Czar--as Senator George McGovern and Congressman Jim McGovern call for in a recent op-ed--who would "coordinate the various food, nutrition and anti-poverty programs... to increase the independence, purchasing power and food security of every human being." Announce your commitment to the goal of cutting poverty in half in ten years.
Labor and Trade: Reject Colombia, Korea and Panama trade agreements as currently written and ensure future agreements promote the public interest. Work towards passage of Employee Free Choice Act.
Science: Allow federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
Global Warming: Reverse the Bush EPA decision and allow California to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. Call for a new climate treaty and ask Al Gore to lead that effort.
Guantánamo: Close it, and try people in the US or resettle in countries where they face no risk of persecution or torture. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof offers a compelling idea to "turn it into an international center for research on tropical diseases that afflict poor countries... [serving as] an example of multilateral humanitarianism"
Detention: Close all CIA black sites and secret detention sites. End extraordinary rendition. Abolish preventive detention that allows people to be held indefinitely without charge. Initiate criminal investigations into programs of rendition and secret detention. End trials by military commission. End opposition to full habeas corpus hearings for detainees in Guantánamo and other similar situations. Make known the names and whereabouts of all those detained in rendition and secret detention programs.
Torture: End use in court of any evidence obtained through torture. Officially reject all memos, signing statements and executive orders that justify the use of torture. Establish an independent commission of inquiry into all aspects of detention and interrogation practices in the "war on terror." Announce administration will work for redress and remedy for victims of human rights violations for which US authorities are found to be responsible.
Protect Dissent: Ensure that the FBI adheres to surveillance guidelines. Open Justice Department investigation into surveillance related misconduct. Pledge to end all secret surveillance programs not reviewed by courts or congressional committees.
Limit State Secrets Privilege: issue new Executive Orders that reverse the expansion of state secrets privilege and the over-classification of documents. Pass legislation making it clear that military contractors are accountable for abuses.
Roll Back Executive Power: Repudiate unitary presidency. Renounce use of signing statements as a tool for altering legislation. Pledge to abide by the War Powers Act and end abuse of Authorization to Use Military Force. (Or as Bruce Fein--a key player in the Reagan Justice Department--said, "Renounce presidential power to initiate war anywhere on the planet, including Iran.")
These are doable, and by taking these steps--with deliberate haste-- President Obama would get a real start on repairing our nation and people's lives.
and here:
Fix This, Barack
Second we Americans have a lot of work to do. The resuscitation of our country will have to be accomplished primarily by we-the-people, and as much on the local level as in the federal realm.
This won't just be a matter of political organization. It will also require us to be continually at work on ourselves, purging the parts of us that resonate in harmony with the dying world and feeding the parts of ourselves that are capable of creating a paradise-on-earth.
Here's a quote from my book:
As much as we might be dismayed at the actions of our political leaders, pronoia says that toppling any particular junta, clique, or elite is irrelevant unless we overthrow the sour, crippled mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality" -- including the part of that hallucination we foster in ourselves. We can't change the world unless we change ourselves.
The revolution begins at home. If you overthrow yourself again and again, you might earn the right to help overthrow the rest of us.
Here's a quote from Carl Jung:
"The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others."
Finally, a quote from Tom Robbins:
"Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self."
According to Judith Butler, of the University of California, Berkeley:
November 05, 2008
Uncritical Exuberance?
Judith Butler
Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time. My friends on the left write to me that they feel something akin to "redemption" or that "the country has been returned to us" or that "we finally have one of us in the White House." Of course, like them, I discover myself feeling overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement throughout the day, since the thought of having the regime of George W. Bush over and gone is an enormous relief. And the thought of Obama, a thoughtful and progressive black candidate, shifts the historical ground, and we feel that cataclysm as it produces a new terrain. But let us try to think carefully about the shifted terrain, although we cannot fully know its contours at this time. The election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of identification that he proposes ("we are all united") or that we propose ("he is one of us"), we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times. There have always been good reasons not to embrace "national unity" as an ideal, and to nurse suspicions toward absolute and seamless identification with any political leader. After all, fascism relied in part on that seamless identification with the leader, and Republicans engage this same effort to organize political affect when, for instance, Elizabeth Dole looks out on her audience and says, "I love each and every one of you."
It becomes all the more important to think about the politics of exuberant identification with the election of Obama when we consider that support for Obama has coincided with support for conservative causes. In a way, this accounts for his "cross-over" success. In California, he won by 60% of the vote, and yet some significant portion of those who voted for him also voted against the legalization of gay marriage (52%). How do we understand this apparent disjunction? First, let us remember that Obama has not explicitly supported gay marriage rights. Further, as Wendy Brown has argued, the Republicans have found that the electorate is not as galvanized by "moral" issues as they were in recent elections; the reasons given for why people voted for Obama seem to be predominantly economic, and their reasoning seems more fully structured by neo-liberal rationality than by religious concerns. This is clearly one reason why Palin's assigned public function to galvanize the majority of the electorate on moral issues finally failed. But if "moral" issues such as gun control, abortion rights and gay rights were not as determinative as they once were, perhaps that is because they are thriving in a separate compartment of the political mind. In other words, we are faced with new configurations of political belief that make it possible to hold apparently discrepant views at the same time: someone can, for instance, disagree with Obama on certain issues, but still have voted for him. This became most salient in the emergence of the counter Bradley-effect, when voters could and did explicitly own up to their own racism, but said they would vote for Obama anyway. Anecdotes from the field include claims like the following: "I know that Obama is a Muslim and a Terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway; he is probably better for the economy." Such voters got to keep their racism and vote for Obama, sheltering their split beliefs without having to resolve them.
Along with strong economic motivations, less empirically discernible factors have come into play in these election results. We cannot underestimate the force of dis-identification in this election, a sense of revulsion that George W. has "represented" the United States to the rest of the world, a sense of shame about our practices of torture and illegal detention, a sense of disgust that we have waged war on false grounds and propagated racist views of Islam, a sense of alarm and horror that the extremes of economic deregulation have led to a global economic crisis. Is it despite his race, or because of his race, that Obama finally emerged as a preferred representative of the nation? Fulfilling that representative-function, he is at once black and not-black (some say "not black enough" and others say "too black"), and, as a result, he can appeal to voters who not only have no way of resolving their ambivalence on this issue, but do not want one. The public figure who allows the populace to sustain and mask its ambivalence nevertheless appears as a figure of "unity": this is surely an ideological function. Such moments are intensely imaginary, but not for that reason without their political force.
As the election approached, there has been an increased focus on the person of Obama: his gravity, his deliberateness, his ability not to lose his temper, his way of modeling a certain evenness in the face of hurtful attacks and vile political rhetoric, his promise to reinstate a version of the nation that will overcome its current shame. Of course, the promise is alluring, but what if the embrace of Obama leads to the belief that we might overcome all dissonance, that unity is actually possible? What is the chance that we may end up suffering a certain inevitable disappointment when this charismatic leader displays his fallibility, his willingness to compromise, even to sell out minorities? He has, in fact, already done this in certain ways, but many of us "set aside" our concerns in order to enjoy the extreme un-ambivalence of this moment, risking an uncritical exuberance even when we know better. Obama is, after all, hardly a leftist, regardless of the attributions of "socialism" proffered by his conservative opponents. In what ways will his actions be constrained by party politics, economic interests, and state power; in what ways have they been compromised already? If we seek through this presidency to overcome a sense of dissonance, then we will have jettisoned critical politics in favor of an exuberance whose phantasmatic dimensions will prove consequential. Maybe we cannot avoid this phantasmatic moment, but let us be mindful about how temporary it is. If there are avowed racists who have said, "I know that he is a Muslim and a terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway," there are surely also people on the left who say, "I know that he has sold out gay rights and Palestine, but he is still our redemption." I know very well, but still: this is the classic formulation of disavowal. Through what means do we sustain and mask conflicting beliefs of this sort? And at what political cost?
There is no doubt that Obama's success will have significant effects on the economic course of the nation, and it seems reasonable to assume that we will see a new rationale for economic regulation and for an approach to economics that resembles social democratic forms in Europe; in foreign affairs, we will doubtless see a renewal of multi-lateral relations, the reversal of a fatal trend of destroying multilateral accords that the Bush administration has undertaken. And there will doubtless also be a more generally liberal trend on social issues, though it is important to remember that Obama has not supported universal health care, and has failed to explicitly support gay marriage rights. And there is not yet much reason to hope that he will formulate a just policy for the United States in the Middle East, even though it is a relief, to be sure, that he knows Rashid Khalidi.
The indisputable significance of his election has everything to do with overcoming the limits implicitly imposed on African-American achievement; it has and will inspire and overwhelm young African-Americans; it will, at the same time, precipitate a change in the self-definition of the United States. If the election of Obama signals a willingness on the part of the majority of voters to be "represented" by this man, then it follows that who "we" are is constituted anew: we are a nation of many races, of mixed races; and he offers us the occasion to recognize who we have become and what we have yet to be, and in this way a certain split between the representative function of the presidency and the populace represented appears to be overcome. That is an exhilarating moment, to be sure. But can it last, and should it?
To what consequences will this nearly messianic expectation invested in this man lead? In order for this presidency to be successful, it will have to lead to some disappointment, and to survive disappointment: the man will become human, will prove less powerful than we might wish, and politics will cease to be a celebration without ambivalence and caution; indeed, politics will prove to be less of a messianic experience than a venue for robust debate, public criticism, and necessary antagonism. The election of Obama means that the terrain for debate and struggle has shifted, and it is a better terrain, to be sure. But it is not the end of struggle, and we would be very unwise to regard it that way, even provisionally. We will doubtless agree and disagree with various actions he takes and fails to take. But if the initial expectation is that he is and will be "redemption" itself, then we will punish him mercilessly when he fails us (or we will find ways to deny or suppress that disappointment in order to keep alive the experience of unity and unambivalent love).
If a consequential and dramatic disappointment is to be averted, he will have to act quickly and well. Perhaps the only way to avert a "crash" – a disappointment of serious proportions that would turn political will against him – will be to take decisive actions within the first two months of his presidency. The first would be to close Guantanamo and find ways to transfer the cases of detainees to legitimate courts; the second would be to forge a plan for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and to begin to implement that plan. The third would be to retract his bellicose remarks about escalating war in Afghanistan and pursue diplomatic, multilateral solutions in that arena. If he fails to take these steps, his support on the left will clearly deteriorate, and we will see the reconfiguration of the split between liberal hawks and the anti-war left. If he appoints the likes of Lawrence Summers to key cabinet positions, or continues the failed economic polices of Clinton and Bush, then at some point the messiah will be scorned as a false prophet. In the place of an impossible promise, we need a series of concrete actions that can begin to reverse the terrible abrogation of justice committed by the Bush regime; anything less will lead to a dramatic and consequential disillusionment. The question is what measure of dis-illusion is necessary in order to retrieve a critical politics, and what more dramatic form of dis-illusionment will return us to the intense political cynicism of the last years. Some relief from illusion is necessary, so that we might remember that politics is less about the person and the impossible and beautiful promise he represents than it is about the concrete changes in policy that might begin, over time, and with difficulty, bring about conditions of greater justice.
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Comment by Morgan Bell
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Artist Quirk
very informative article!