Tag Archives: President Obama

a singular failure

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It seems pretty clear now that the Obama presidency has failed.

Don’t get me wrong. I still support Obamacare, and I support the president in his current round of struggles with the Republican rump in the congress, as long as he holds firm. I even think President Obama’s decision to hand off the Syrian affair to the United Nations was correct. It’s what should have happened with the situation in Iraq that was hyped by the Bush administration as cause for war. The only losers are hawks on the left and right for whom the only live issue was whether the United States looked like a superpower.

When I say that I now think the Obama presidency has failed, I mean that the president has failed to govern, even to attempt to govern, as the transformational leader his successful campaigns seemed to promise. This is not entirely the fault of the president or of his advisors. Mr. Obama was able to campaign to be the president of the entire country, to appeal to the broad perception that democracy is being undermined in the land, and to promote a near progressive agenda. That his campaign had broad appeal is borne out by the results of two elections in which he won substantial victories.

But the national electorate is not represented by the United States Congress or the Supreme Court. These institutions, and the bureaucracies that surround them (as well as the bureaucracies that surround the presidency itself), have been skewed so as to give more power to right-wing thinking than it presently deserves, if public opinion is taken into account on countless issues from gay rights to voting rights to firearms regulation. Our country, even in these benighted times, may still be a creation of the liberal establishment brought together by the Roosevelt revolution, but our nation’s capital is now a creature of the Reagan revolution with its neoliberal economics and its bias against social programs and the social role of the state.

Add to this fundamental difficulty the continued power in our nation’s capital of corporate wealth with its interests in social control, high unemployment, income inequality, and the suppression of labor. Add the continued power of rightist religion that shares the interest of corporate wealth in social control, particularly in attempts to halt the progress of second-wave feminism. Add to both of these the complexes of phenomena contingent upon President Obama’s status as our first president of African American descent, and you have a mixture of forces that have made against the success of his presidency as we hopefully imagined it five years ago.

Even so—and I’m aware that this may not be entirely fair, President Obama has attempted to govern from a position somewhat to the right of center, backing away from full blown support of economic stimulus to deal with the consequences of the great recession, refusing to hold banks and bankers accountable for their role in the debacle (as the first President Bush did not fail to do during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s), abandoning support for a public option in Obamacare legislation, generally continuing to promote neoliberal economic “reforms” of our nation’s educational institutions, caving to the congress with respect to the sequester in 2011, ratifying and enlarging the surveillance state and concomitant suppression of the press. I could make a much longer list.

While these things have been going on, the President has of course provided progressives a few token victories in the areas of gay rights and environmental concerns. But even these have left the major difficulties faced by LGBT advocacy and environmentalist groups intact. The net result is that the forces of societal sadism and institutionalized greed have seen their fortunes advance during the Obama presidency. The prison industrial complex grows richer every day. The militarization of police continues unabated. State officials now refuse requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act. The resegregation of public schools now seems an accepted fact. The country is now rife with anti-immigrant sentiment, ratified and reinforced by the Obama administration’s program of deportations. Voter suppression legislation is now pending in many states. The American middle class is now all but dead.

Have I overstated the case? Perhaps. But Republican rightists constantly tell us that government is our problem, and that is because the governments of today’s nation states represent the only force capable of standing against the greed and decadence of the corporate oligarchy that now more or less runs the world and owns the Republican party. The same oligarchy also owns much of the Democratic party, and it apparently wields a powerful influence over our young president. It’s too bad. He seemed to have such promise.

Yet once more: the terrible beauty

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There’s an interesting thread at Facebook commenting on a recent New Yorker piece by Teju Cole entitled “A Reader’s War.” Much of the thread is ideological hip-shooting, but not all. Perhaps the reason for both sorts of commentary is that Cole’s essay muses poetically about the apparent moral disjunction between President Obama’s undoubted high-mindedness (perhaps partly developed or at least influenced by a wide literary experience) and his prosecution of the war on terror, particularly his increasing reliance upon use of drone aircraft to perform targeted assassinations.

I like the Cole essay very much. It’s ironies are my own. Last weekend a dear friend and I talked late into the night about this very matter and found no end. Neither of us is losing sleep over the drone strikes, but perhaps we should be. Cole frames his meditation by reference to an age-old humanist dilemma. President Obama’s own use of language and the books to which he seems devoted “add up to a picture of a man for whom an imaginative engagement with literature is inseparable from life.” Yet in spite of this apparent moral conditioning, and in spite of his many ringing endorsements of the highest ideals of humanity and justice, this president has led us into focused expansions of the war on terror, even as he professes to be winding it down, so that we have arrived at policies that give our leaders license to kill at will. “How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief?” Cole asks rhetorically.

What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? . . . I wonder if the Presidency is . . . a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever [sic.] walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

I’m as interested in the humanist dilemma here as I am in the broader issues of war and peace, for the facts are that wars corrupt those who prosecute them at a far deeper level than the mere power to which Lord Acton referred. Though there may be necessary wars (I believe there are such) there are no good ones, and sometimes particular leaders are manifestly damaged by the corruption entailed by war, no less than if they had been wounded by bullets or bombs. As I view the photographic record of Franklin Roosevelt’s life as he aged into his fourth term at the end of World War II, our last supposedly good war, I think I see signs of psychic damage as well as the physical wasting that was a partial consequence of his polio.

Here is the humanist dilemma. How is it that persons who have received the education that tradition and faith both affirm should incline them to nobility of spirit and benevolence sometimes embark upon lives of crime and cruelty as private persons and as public persons sometimes pursue courses of action that would be judged criminal were they pursued by private persons? The humanist faith in right learning is deeply embedded in Western culture; though it was not in ancient times associated with an abhorrence of war. Alexander the Great was Aristotle’s most famous pupil. He carried a copy of the Iliad with him wherever he went. It was his bible as he conquered the known world for no higher reason than naked ambition. The elite class whose education is outlined in Plato’s Republic is a class of warriors.

The humanist faith in goodness transmitted over time through textual tradition is typified by a literary example from Philip Sidney, who muses over Virgil’s picture of Aeneas fleeing the destruction of Troy by the Greeks, carrying his father on his back and leading his litle son by he hand, an image that was often struck upon medals worn by sixteenth-century courtiers like Sidney: “Who readeth Aeneas carrying olde Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perfourme so excellent an acte?” Of course, Aeneas’ wife, Creussa, walks behind and is killed, but that’s another story. In a preceding sentence Sidney has drawn out the moral he intends in language that will amuse readers of Cervantes, of whom Sidney who died in 1586 was not one:

Truely I haue knowen men, that euen with reading Amadis de Gaule, (which God knoweth wanteth much of a perfect Poesie) haue found their harts mooued to the exercise of courtesie, liberalitie, and especially courage.

In much classical poetry warlike atrocities are carried out by the enemies of goodness (though we could spend a long time arguing about the last books of the Odyssey); and the Iliad can be read as the story of how the good warrior, Achilles, is from time to time corrupted into atrocity, which the gods force him to abandon. Here is part of Apollo’s condemnation of his actions in desecrating Hector’s body:

So Achilleus has destroyed pity, and there is not in him
any shame: which does much harm to men but profits them also.
For a man must some day lose one who was even closer
than this; a brother from the same womb, or a son. And yet
he weeps for him, and sorrows for him, and then it is over,
for the Destinies put in mortal men the heart of endurance,
But this man, now he has torn the heart of life from great Hektor,
ties him to his horses and drags him around his beloved companion’s
tomb, and nothing is gained thereby for his good, or his honor (Lattimore translation).

Cole introduces his New Yorker essay with references to remarks made by Mario Vargas Llosa and Toni Morrison in Nobel lectures, remarks that are clichés but nonetheless proclaim the humanist faith that “it is better to read than not to read, for reading civilizes us, makes us less cruel, and brings the imaginations of others into ours and vice versa.” “We persist in this belief,” Cole avers, “regardless of what we know to the contrary: that the Nazis’ affection for high culture did not prevent their crimes.” Perhaps it is more to the point that neither this faith nor its problems is new, nor is either particularly tied to novel reading except in the minds of postmodern philosophers and literary critics. Cole mentions some of these. I might add one he does not mention, Martha Nussbaum, whose little book, Poetic Justice, is a minor classic.

But if the humanist faith in the civilizing power of literacy is not new, as I’ve already suggested, in ancient times the arguments about it primarily concerned what the proper study might be: what books, what sorts of books, what types of poetry and music, and what other disciplines produced the good person speaking and acting well, to paraphraase Cicero. The most serious argument in the Christian West was about the legitimacy of the surviving books of ancient Greece and Rome, that is about the place of secular culture in the developing medieval theocracy, a conflict that began with the church fathers and continues today. Our own culture wars since the 1980s are a version of this argument. Our present conflicts over the purposes and content of education from kindergarten through graduate school continue it.

What is the proper study? This present generation’s answer may be that there isn’t one, that the concerns of old-fashioned liberal studies are no longer legitimate public concerns, if indeed they ever were legitimate. But the reason why Cole’s essay is worth talking about, it seems to me, is that it elevates consideration of the proper study above the naive and essentially petty economic considerations that are shaping our present day discourses about education. We speak of competitiveness, of training up little economic prodigies who can design the widgets and money products of the future in a world whose only imperatives are to maximize profits and to satisfy the market demands of the moment, whereas our forebears thought of souls, citizenship, and politics.

In today’s market driven ethical environment there need be no discussion of means and ends. Timothy Geithner was quoted in 2009 as saying that punishing those responsible for the 2008 economic catastrophe might have given us some moral satisfaction, but it would have come at the expense of further economic chaos. In resisting this and other like dismissals of justice I am aware that my thinking is archaic. Still, with respect to endless war as well as to the ghost of “too big to fail,” one might ask under what conditions it might be truly legitimate to use a bad means in the service of a supposed good end, given that bad means tend to corrupt the ends they serve. A traditional moral education suggests the question.

But in today’s ethical environment we tend not to consider such things. Supposed greater goods such as saving lives, promoting economic growth, and creating jobs, today’s ethical clichés, are not open to question. Reference to any or all of them stops conversation about means. Any and all means necessary to achieve these ends are taken to be self-evidently justified. But if I might offer our President some small archaic wisdom with respect to the present war effort, I hope that he has narrowed our objectives to the arena of necessary war. And since there are no good wars I hope, I pray, for him that he proceed as the Book of Common Prayer once advised with regard to marriage, “reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.” Cole concludes similarly:

I believe that when President Obama personally selects the next name to add to his “kill list,” he does it in the belief that he is protecting the country. I trust that he makes the selections with great seriousness, bringing his rich sense of history, literature, and the lives of others to bear on his decisions.

And knowing that even necessary war corrupts, and that that is a very good reason to insist that we begin any war only when we have envisioned its end, for to envision its end is to envision its purpose, I can only concur in Cole’s final gesture of frustration and bafflement that “we have been drawn into a war without end, and into cruelties that persist in the psychic atmosphere like ritual pollution.”

Early on I refused believe that 9/11 had changed the world in any fundamental way. Now I’m not so sure. Globally speaking we in the West seem to be embarked upon a struggle to preserve Euro-American imperial hegemony since 9/11. I am obliged to grant that this hegemony has made my own life possible: my education, my career, my intellectual and cultural pursuits, my identity—and that it now undergirds my relatively comfortable old age. But the history of empire, about which my traditional education informs me, makes me squirm in my comfortable chair as I think of my own cultural touchstones in ironic juxtaposition to the brute fact of robotic war that has rendered normative the constant explosion of small 9/11s in the world beyond, like the crucifixions with which the Romans liked to litter the landscape of conquered territories.

Cole arrives at a similar conclusion via a series of apothegms constructed by paraphrasing the opening lines of some famous novels to fit our changed world:

Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.

I had thought I might do the same, but I think I’ll quote W. B. Yeats instead, thinking of Cole’s claim that “we are acquiring . . . the angriest young enemies money can buy”:

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Though we may be able to name the dead, not all death in war is holy, and those who are blown apart by bombs may not be war’s only casualties. Words from another forever war only recently brought to uneasy stalemate. Perhaps no paraphrase is necessary.

Metaphysical politics

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The Podium, The Pulpit, and the Republicans:
How Presidential Candidates Use Religious Language in American Political Debate

by Frederick R. Stecker

229 pp., Praeger, $44.99

An old friend has written an astute book about political language. He is Frederick R. Stecker, an Episcopal Priest, retired from the parish ministry and now an adjunct professor at Colby Sawyer College in New London, New Hampshire. Fr. Stecker also holds a doctorate from the Institute for the Study of Violence of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. For his dissertation, as he explains in his introduction, he “studied the heavily rehearsed language of the presidential debates of 2000 and 2004,” from a perspective informed by George Lakoff’s work on political language in Moral Politics (1996) and by other work in the literature relating to ways we humans process fear and rage, form world views, develop identity and group identification, etc.1 The present book appears to have expanded and enlarged the work of the dissertation to include, among other things, an analysis of the language of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Fr. Stecker’s book is both incisive and informed. It avoids the clichés of contemporary media discourse while speaking directly to the categories that enframe those clichés. Here’s an example from chapter five:

[George W.] Bush first rocked the political world when he was asked in a debate, prior to the 1999 Iowa caucus, about his favorite philosopher. Bush responded, “Jesus, because he changed my heart.” The Des Moines Register reported that Governor Bush had misunderstood the question to be “Who’s had the most influence on your life?” However it was heard, Governor Bush changed the direction of the political discourse from that moment on. Orrin Hatch, who followed Bush, noted Abraham Lincoln as his favorite philosopher, but then added, “I bear witness to Christ, too.” Then Gary Bauer chimed in and echoed Bush’s testimony. John McCain was the only one of the six candidates who did not reference God that night; there were, in all, 20 such references by the other five. What started out as a misunderstood question resonated with the citizens of Iowa that polled 40 percent of caucus participants to be evangelical or “born again.” It set the tone for all that followed.

Particularly cogent in displaying how certain religious tropes resonate with various groups of voters, Fr. Stecker’s documentation is impressive, presented informally in the text. Like Lakoff, Fr. Stecker could be charged with speaking as a liberal, but that doesn’t trouble me; and I think the quantitative evidence in this qualitative study is forceful.

That’s not what I want to talk about, however. Fr. Stecker traces the rise of the religious right in post-1960s American politics in his second and third chapters and links that history both with the economic interests it serves and with its growth as a counter-culture. Central to his primary argument in the chapters that follow is an analysis of how George W. Bush and Richard Cheney (perhaps under the tutelage of Karl Rove) combined use of religious language identifying themselves with the supposed certainties of “faith” and skillful manipulation of the fear of terrorism to foster and maintain a siege mentality in the public mind during the years following 9/11 until support for the Iraq war began to erode.

A chief finding of Fr. Stecker’s research is that these rhetorical gestures and the gestures they provoked from Democratic candidates were successful for Republicans in 2000 and 2004 and validate Lakoff’s “nation as family” metaphors; but a further finding is that Barack Obama was able to turn the Republicans’ rhetoric against them and reclaim both the language of faith and the language of patriotism for his own campaign and best “the Republicans at their own game” in 2008. It is this latter finding for which I am particularly grateful.

Back in 2008 my beloved and I met a young couple from Oklahoma and their small children as we were all standing in line at the Edward Jones Dome to be admitted to an Obama rally. Even on a cold winter evening the crowd was huge, but we gained admission easily and had a pleasant time talking as we waited. I wrote about that conversation here. As the years have gone by and I have watched the Obama presidency develop, It has come more and more to seem to me that the president should be judged not on foreign policy, though I have much to say about that, and not on his performance with respect to the economic meltdown he inherited, but rather in relation to the hopes and dreams of young people like the couple we met at that long ago rally. They had driven all the way from southwestern Oklahoma to hear candidate Obama speak. They are part of that generation of Americans who do not expect the social safety net to be there for them but who remain hopeful that their children will inherit the American dream.

I have been severely critical of President Obama. I have been and am still a conscientious objector to his apparent willingness to keep the prison at Guantanamo Bay open, to his apparent willingness to sanction suspension of the right of habeas corpus, and to his apparent validation of Bush era policies that subjected enemy combatants (so called) to torture in spite of his claims to the contrary. But I have also been distressed that President Obama has apparently been unable, or unwilling, until very recently to pursue economic policies that fostered the hopes of Americans like me who believe that government policy has for thirty years favored the interests of a wealthy minority to the detriment of the great majority of Americans. My distress reached its apogee (or nadir) last summer with the President’s capitulation to a vicious Republican minority in the matter of the debt ceiling.

We live in a time of political ambiguity brought about by decades of irreconcilable disputes, as Fr. Stecker notes. Republicans have successfully demanded attention to these disputes as the price of attention to all other matters. In addition, Republicans have preempted the public sphere with absolutist religious and moral claims. The idea that morality is dependent upon religion is an absurdity. Even more absurd is the spectacle of political alliances between religious groups who do not expect to meet one another in heaven. Still, there’s a hard truth in all of this. These groups share a commitment to what Isaiah Berlin termed metaphysical politics.

Berlin begins his famous 1958 essay on two kinds of liberty with the observation that “Where ends are agreed, the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines, like arguments between engineers or doctors.” Berlin characterizes this outlook as Utopian, but it might just as readily be called ideological.2 Berlin’s ideas were formed in the shadow of the Nazi terror that he and his family had escaped. It seemed self-evident that “fanatically held social and political doctrines” were as dangerous as the technologies of death they engendered in Germany and Eastern Europe during much of the twentieth century.

But what Berlin calls the metaphysical view of politics seems protean in human affairs. It has renewed itself in American politics since 1980 and seems to be renewing itself in European politics as well.3 Indeed, future historians may characterize our time as a time of resurgent fundamentalism worldwide—though we need a better term; contemporary French sumptuary laws forbidding the wearing of the veil by Islamic women, for instance, reflect a reified secularism that is metaphysical in Berlin’s sense but not precisely fundamentalist even in the broad sense in which we presently use the term.

I was a strong supporter of President Obama in 2008. I did not think him a superhero, but I saw his candidacy and election to office as ratification of the pluralist society we have built in this country since the time of my childhood. Like Berlin I believe “that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another.” I believe that we humans “choose between ultimate values; . . . because [our] life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are . . . over large stretches of time and space, and whatever their ultimate origins, a part of [our] being and thought and sense of [our] own identity; part of what makes [us] human.” I believe that pluralism in politics and the willingness to proceed ad hoc are positive goods because over time these values seem to generate more liberty for more of us humans than does devotion to some dream of future perfection or past excellence or adherence to some system of practice believed to be rooted in the natural order or authorized by divine command.

I don’t mean to imply that I think Fr. Stecker shares these views. His purpose in writing seems to have been modest. At the outset of his last chapter, he makes this claim:

Since 9/11, it has become imperative to monitor our own responses to political pronouncements. We must be able to pause and reflect on our reactions as well as to examine the information we’ve been given. I use the pew to sort out issues. It provides a transitional space for me to help grasp what’s important-authority, not power.

Then after a recapitulation of his book’s major themes he says further:

As I write this, America now focuses on vitriol in politics. The attempt to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) brings the focus on linguistics to new heights; it is time that we stop finding unity solely in sorrow. By mid-2011, we will begin to see candidates testing the waters (and our credibility) once more. Keep an ear to the use of religious language and to the nuanced use of fear. I’ll be willing to bet that both will continue to resurface; it is a lightning rod that touches our emotions; it works every time, unless we become aware.

After some reflection I remain at least provisionally convinced that President Obama’s tenure in office affirms the ideals of human flourishing4 that I believe represent my country at its best. But that best is always open to critique, subject to correction, contingent, and historical. I am being persuaded by writers like Andrew Sullivan, James Falows, and now Frederick Stecker, that I should reevaluate my reaction to the president’s first term. I’m grateful to these persuasive writers; and though I agree with Fallows that the president will likely be regarded a failure if he does not win reelection, I begin to be hopeful about that eventuality. Frederick Stecker’s book lends credence to the view, more and more expressed these days, that President Obama is capable of deflecting the rhetorical weapons that will be used against him and turning them to his advantage as a candidate, that he takes a long view of the times and the tasks he has set for himself as president, and that he has always intended to serve two full terms.

Notes

1Fr. Stecker’s book is cross-disciplinary, citing work in psychology, pychiatry, history, rhetorical criticism, and other disciplines.
2I am thinking of Mannheim here, especially.
3See Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010) and here.
4I have the term from Martha Nussbaum.

rope-a-dope

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Or, maybe I’m wrong. Noam Scheiber thinks so, or at least has a different reading of events. Writing for “The Plank” at The New Republic, Scheiber contends it’s all a rope-a-dope and that Obama is in complete control of the discourse and the politics of the stimulus. Here are a couple of salient pragraphs:

Here’s what I’d guess is likely to happen over the next few days: The conference committee tasked with ironing out differences between the House and Senate stimulus bills will undo most of the roughly $65 billion in cuts to state aid, education, and health care spending the Senate centrists negotiated. To pay for it, they’ll junk the $70-billion in Alternative Minimum Tax relief the Senate showered on the upper-middle class.

Republicans will protest that Obama and Congressional Democrats have trampled on the Senate compromise and unilaterally re-imposed their liberal priorities. They’ll sprinkle in a collection of shopworn clichés, like “behind closed doors,” and “dead of night.” But, in the end, it won’t matter. The media, having already proclaimed Obama the Beltway’s only bona fide bipartisan, is hardly going to rewrite the narrative at this late stage. And no senator who voted for the bill in the first time around is going to want to explain why he or she suddenly became “anti-job.”

According to this narrative, Republicans tried to hijack the process of developing the stimulus and Obama stole it back. As Scheiber concludes, “By yesterday evening, you could almost see it dawn on Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell that he’d been played.” If this is so, then John McCain’s appearance on Face the Nation last Sunday should be read as damage control, not gloating.

—I hope so.