On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Doug Henwood wrote, jumping off from Dwayne Monroe's analysis:
>> "Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded
>> within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the
>> ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised
>> its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should
>> be perfected over time."
>
> [...]
>
>> The use of "perfected" above is clever; it provides the Senator with a
>> very useful thematic hook, the sort of thing crafty screenwriters and
>> movie directors understand. The theme, which is elegantly implied and
>> subtly communicated, is that we aren't 'perfect'...yet, but we are
>> indeed (perhaps unlike other peoples) 'perfectible'. This gives the
>> Senator a safe way to critique the US' record: 'yes,' he says' 'bad
>> things have happened. But look at our direction; it's up!'
>
> This is right out of Bill Clinton's playbook: he once said that "what's
> wrong with America can be cured by what's right with America." Thus our
> flawed Constitution nonetheless contained the seeds of its own
> perfectibility. I know this shit plays very well in some circles, but it
> makes me want to scream.
Why? To me, that seems not only extreme but self-destructive. There is no way that liberals or the left will ever change the convictions of this country except by changing the dominant interpretation of the American creed. And this formula is exactly the means by which you do that.
In broader terms, there is no way that you ever change anyone's defining convictions, or win an argument over what those convictions imply, without affirming that you share the collective identity those convictions define. Only then can you argue that their position betrays that identity, and that your position affirms it -- that your position represents living up to our shared convictions, and theirs is a betrayal of it. A charge that strong -- which is exactly what you're talking about when you're talking about fundamental convictions -- can only be accepted from someone on the same side. And you convince someone you are on the same side by pledging allegiance to those shared convictions and evoking them, calling them up emotionally, so that you can evoke an emotional clash between what people are arguing and what you can make them feel about who they are and ought to be. Changing defining convictions is ultimately about emotions based in identity.
For national politics, the ultimate, most encompassing identity is the national identity. And in America, the national identity is defined by the American creed. The American creed is a set of ringing terms ultimately based on two things. First, a small collection of texts -- the preface to the Declaration; the Bill of Rights; the 14th Amendment; a pile of other snippets that have been attached to this archive over the last 2 centuries; and a set of citable morals drawn from our simplified, narrative, collective history. And the second basis is the central tendency of the feelings among the present citizenry of what is right and wrong. If you want to change the latter, you have to speak in terms of the former.
This is precisely what gets people excited about Obama, that he can do this. The ability to evoke this creed, reinterpret it, inscribe it in the moment -- and present yourself as the embodied symbol of the new message you're proclaiming -- that is the basis of American presidential charisma.
If this sort of thing makes you run screaming from the room, than it's no longer any mystery why Obama does nothing for you, or why you find his appeal mysterious or are instinctively repelled by it. But what I don't understand is what you have to offer in the place of the creed. Ultimate principles will always stand firmly in the air as that which we believe because we believe it, because it defines who were are. That's what makes them ultimate principles -- they're the last in the line of reasoning.
If you want to have an argument over those principles, you need a defining text you can refer to (which is always a changeable collection of small except texts, even if they are all from one book, like the bible or Capital). This is precisely where the right in America uses the bible. We on the left can't, because we're defined as including people who hate that book and there's no way we're excluding them. But the American creed we can use. And it's not just opportunistic. It actually is the ultimate text of appeal for most of our principles about social and cultural politics. And best of all, it's not a second best choice -- it trumps theirs.
The right says gay marriage is wrong because it contradicts the bible. We say it is obviously right because it so clearly and obviously lives up to a principle that is not only right in itself but which defines all our laws or ought to: the principle that all people are created equal. But where does that principle come from? Why are we so positive that anyone who understands American law should know it determines? Because it's based in the creed, which is only partially based in law, and partially always outstrips it as an asymptote the law is measured against. That is to say, our conviction is based in the creed *as it evolved* in precisely this process of perfection that you're objecting to here.
The writers of the declaration of independence didn't mean that gay people should be equal when they wrote those words. Nor that black people should be equal nor that women should be equal. But later generations of American have come to feel that there being true to this principle means overthrowing what the founders thought. That being an American meant the principle had to become truer and purer and more and more without qualification -- and that reality had to change to accommodate this changing meaning. The torque between the "increasingly true" principle and American institutions is part of what gave us the 14th amendment, and the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s that finally made the its clauses into binding law -- all of which is now such a central part of the American creed that it takes an act of imagination for any of us to even imagine what the Bill of Rights meant before the 14th amendment and the doctrine of incorporation based on it.
In the course of that evolution, the principle has entirely changed its meaning from what it meant when the Declaration was signed. And yet, I think everyone in America today would say it is now closer to its true meaning than what it was in the beginning. I thinks that's beyond dispute. And I think that's what it means to say that you can fix what is wrong in the American identity by what is right. It's the only way you fix any collective identity: by claiming that change going forward is the way to go back to the truth, to the truer meaning of the principles which define us.
Now in this particular speech, where Obama has essentially been accused of anti-Americanism, it's not surprising that it is rather heavy on the pledging allegiance side. But he doesn't just stop there. He employs the creed aggressively. He expands what it means. And he implies that the people who are attacking him are betraying that creed, not him. I'll be fascinated to see whether this works in the 5 second mediawhirl we live in. It's an open question if it will. But simply as an attempt, this seems to be a very encouraging an example of how his "unity" rhetoric (which is usually American creed rhetoric) doesn't inherently mean meeting the other side halfway and accepting their defining framework as a starting point. This is an example of how the creed can be deployed aggressively to delegitimate the other side. If it works, it will be by making onlookers not only proud to be Americans, but prouder to stand on Obama's side than to stand with those attacking him.
Now of course most of this list are outside that clash. They don't stand with either side. The attacks on Obama here have been not for being un-American, but for not denouncing America enough.
That's fair enough. We have the right to assert our own identity, and our own fundamental truth, which is that the entire acceptable political discourse is bounded miles from where it ought to be.
But deep down we all know, and even say, that Obama can't join us in denouncing the US because no presidential candidate ever can. Half the president's job is being the articulator of national identity, the interpreter in chief. No spokesperson ever denounces the side they're being the spokesperson for. And certainly no one auditioning for the job.
So Obama cannot embrace Wright's denunciations and we know it. And if we take glee in pointing that fact out, I think it's perhaps in part glee in parading just how much more free and honest we can be than anyone who runs for office. It's the intellectual's glory.
But in siding with Wright, and asserting how much more he is to our taste, I think we're in danger of missing the most exciting thing about this speech (besides the fact that he can simply give one, which is a much, much rarer ability than people give it credit for -- esp. considering his talent at cadential and thematic meter, which we're leaving to one side, but which is essential for its effect). And that is that while Obama denounces everything Wright says, he doesn't renounce Wright -- he explicitly doesn't renounce him -- and he doesn't denounce his anger. When he upholds Wright as pastor and a leader of the community and as US Marine, what he is saying is that this man who says these things is not an anti-American. He is an American. His anger is justified -- and we know it. The black community that feels that anger is not betraying the American creed. Rather what outrages them is the defining collective memory of how the American creed betrayed them. And furthermore, that those betrayals are still here, sedimented into the realities of America, and still waiting to be changed centuries later.
To acknowledge that anger, and to redefine it as not un-American but ur-American -- that is an expansion of the bounds of presidential discourse. That is something no presidential candidate has ever said before. And that he could say it now, when under attack for being un-American, when under attack for being an angry Negro, bodes very well for his ability to meet attacks in the future and to use them as opportunities to assert the fundamental principles of his side -- to assert that multicultural liberals are the real Americans, and not their narrow minded attackers.
If he can win in that battle, it will be good for the left, even if it isn't the left's main battle.
And last but not at all least, after asserting that the anger of the black community is justified anger at a history of betrayal -- which is, in essence, exactly what Wright was saying with more call and response -- Obama then says -- again rightly -- that the only real solution to this problem is a solution that helps everyone. That what we need is a new New Deal where everyone feels secure about their pensions, health care and education for their children. And that the way to get that is through concerted collective action.
Rhetorically, that's about as good a pitch as you're going to get from a Democrat. And it's not a bad pitch. And it's the same pitch from his book, where he adds one more point: we don't know how to get there. Because the New Deal depended on golden age economic structures that never going to return. We have to build this structure on the flows of the globalization -- which no one's ever done and which frankly we don't know how to do yet. But because it's the right thing to do; because it's the only kind of country worth striving for; because we believe that there is finally nothing that the collective power of mankind can't accomplish -- we have the audacity of hope.
Again, that's not a bad line. It transmutes ignorance into sophisticated commitment -- into what the left used to call criticism of the mind and optimism of the will.
And last but not least: it's his pastor's line. Everyone knows he got that line from Wright.
So no, I don't see this as a mere shuffle and brush off. And I don't see a problem with making the American creed the basis of his argument. In both case, quite strongly, I would argue the contrary.
His policies are no different from C's. But his speechmaking ability is profoundly better than hers or anyone else's we've seen run in decades precisely because he can evoke the creed like this and use it to build on. That might be outweighed for some people by his inexperience or because you distrust his advisors or his instincts more than hers. But it's a real asset, not a gimmick or delusion.
And now we'll see what it's worth. If he emerges stronger from this, it will be a real victory for his speechmaking ability and a real proof of its worth. And if he emerges weaker, then it will be clear that his best shot is no match for the buzzsaw of itty bitty sound bites.
Michael