I know we’ve been in three days of nonstop media Obamagasm, and I imagine everyone would now like to be left alone to absorb the historic moment in her/his own way. But if you’ll kindly bear with the political science professor for a post, she can’t resist offering a few reflections on the eve of the inauguration…
First, as zillions of pundits have already pointed out, this really is happening, and it really is hard to believe. I know a lot of people who study race in American politics, and I can assure you that not one of them would have dared to claim, even two years ago, that this country would be ready for an African American president. What the campaign pulled off, and how the grassroots showed up, is nothing short of a miracle, a sea change. The analysts aren’t exaggerating. We can’t take it for granted.
I have never felt so moved on election night as I did in November. After the election, though, I think I personally drifted into a mild state of suspended disbelief that this amazing man would actually enter office. Only 12 years of my 40 (is that possible? yes, I double-checked) have been lived under a Democratic administration. I was born the year Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; the year the hateful George Wallace ran for office under a racist campaign and effectively rooted the Southern Strategy for the next three decades; the year Nixon took over the presidency from Johnson and folks rioted at the DNC and across the nation over race, class, sex, Vietnam, and the soiled American Dream. When the political Right found the motor for its backlash, things changed for a long time. They played on our lesser instincts as a country. My (our) political experience is basically Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and bad, bad race politics all around. Not much fun. Not good. I hope the second 40 are a serious political improvement.
But enough about me. Here’s my inner political scientist weighing in:
Obama is happening because different currents in American political culture, which were always simmering beneath whatever gleeful authoritarian viral-capitalist nightmare we were living, finally began to find some traction after a long, unmoored period. Scholars a lot smarter than I have observed two major traditions in American political life, called “classical liberalism,” and “classical republicanism.” These are a bit hard to keep track of because they’re basically the opposite of what you’re thinking. To boil it down, classical liberalism is about our fixation on the (John) Lockean values of individual liberty. It’s sort of the selfish side of Americans, the part gets obsessed with pursuit of wealth; keeping government at bay; doing things the way we want when we want, goddammit; letting other people (or paying them to) worry about the hard business of governing; and blindly trusting that capitalist markets will work out in favor of some vaguely equal playing field. Yeah, classical liberalism is basically what we’ve come to call Republicanism. I like to use the founding father Alexander Hamilton as an early template of the liberal mold. It’s not that the liberal mold is inherently evil; in fact, its self-protective, libertarian, and mildly paranoid drives about government have given us great tools like the Bill of Rights.
Classical republicanism, on the other hand, is the more (Thomas) Jeffersonian idea that no democracy is worth its salt without virtuous, educated, active citizens who learn how to participate from the local level on up. My favorite FF (though flawed, I realize) also held that revolution is good shit for democracy, literally: “it is it’s natural manure.” And because he leaned small-r republican (and, to further confuse, he also led what was then called the Democratic-Republican Party), he advocated these things called ward systems, which were basically small-town civic structures through which people (read: ordinary yeoman farmers) would govern themselves with little intervention from the Federal government. To socialize citizens capable of such self-government he founded the University of Virginia, one of the first public universities.
I like to explain classical republicanism to students as the “We, the People” tone of the Preamble to the Constitution, or the whole Declaration of Independence. It’s about how we carry out the demands of active, accountable, messy citizenry, not simply by getting the government off our backs, but by being and doing good government. In our classically republican moments, we come out of our churches, our volunteer associations, our schools, our jobs–or, as Tocqueville noticed, we stay actively in them–and we pitch in to shoulder our part of the burden of creating a just community. In order to do this, and by doing it, we evolve into virtuous moral citizens.
The punchline here is that I believe Obama is happening, not just because he is uniquely Obama, but because after a long period of classical liberalism (or what political economists call neoliberalism) run amok, we’ve rediscovered our republican heartbeat. Collectively, we got exceedingly self-absorbed for awhile. But as markets have crumbled, corporations have vomited their toxic insides and given up the ghost, thieves have pillaged until there was nothing left to steal, presidents have broken sacred democratic promises, people have gotten epidemically depressed, and things have become profoundly fucked up, some deeper, older, saner part of “our better natures” (as O. keeps repeating) began to awaken. And someone came along, speaking just the right words with just the right tone and a whole lot of brilliant, informed strategizing–and we found a way to do the impossible. In turn, in asking us to hold his feet to the fire, in urging us to stay involved, to serve each other, to keep government accountable, he hopes that we will act like small r-republicans.
Here’s what I fear, though: that we will hang everything on the one man and not on ourselves; on a leader, and not on a process; on a hero, not a collective will that produced him. Because the one man is, as 1968 (and ‘63, and ‘65) should remind us, only a man, and a vulnerable man like all our best, truest heroes. If, God forbid, he should fall and we in turn falter and surrender to the darkest kind of despair, I fear we will be irreparably lost. We have been living on the edge already, and making the world pay. Look what happened in 40 years, when our heroes died and we got lost.
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the mighty, mighty security apparatus around him, but my hope is that we on this side, on the Obama movement side, will gain a newly empowered sense of we from this that doesn’t hang only on the man. He keeps reminding us over and over that We Can; he keeps assuring us that he comes from us, that his life, his story, are only possible because of what we, as part of a radical social experiment, created. My hope is that we remember what he has inspired in us–and not let things get that bad ever again.
