Obama Cannot Save Us From Ourselves

Obama Cannot Save Us From Ourselves – by Johann N. Neem

On July 17, former President Barack Obama emerged from relative quiet to deliver the Nelson Mandela lecture in Johannesburg at the invitation—or, as Obama put it, the insistence—of Mandela’s widow Graça Machel. What a breath of fresh air it was to hear Obama. In many ways, he is the best of what America offers. Born of an immigrant father and a midwestern mother in the Pacific state of Hawai’i, President Obama’s life story embodies what we aspire to be. But most of all, his intellect. At a time when our current President, Donald Trump, refers to most Americans as stupid, even as he and his advisors proclaim, with pride or shock, that President Trump never reads books, Obama’s capacity to contextualize the present within the broader contours of history, philosophy, ethics, economics, and social science reminds us what it means to be learned. It was a beautiful moment, a reminder of what we can be.

But, unfortunately, President Obama’s address in Johannesburg reflected how little he has learned about humanity and democracy since Trump’s election. Sadly, President Obama cannot save us from the world in which President Trump is thriving. I wish he could and I wish he would, but his intellectual commitments are also blinders. He is committed to a worldview that, as historian James Kloppenberg and political scientist Rogers Smith have written, combines republicanism with pragmatism and progressivism. Sadly, Obama’s pragmatism has become, paradoxically, dogmatic.

President Obama’s speech opened with a sense that perhaps he, too, recognizes that he lacks the intellectual tools to make sense fully of the present moment. “We’re living in strange and uncertain times,” he commented. Strange and uncertain to Obama, perhaps, but all too familiar for students of history. The erosion of democratic norms, the loss of trust in institutions, the appeals to tribalism, they were all laid out in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935). The American founders designed our Constitution, in fact, in fear of ancient exemplars of authoritarian populism as Catiline or Caesar. We have seen, in such places as Russia, Turkey, and elsewhere, how what Obama rightly calls “strong man” politics can flourish in times of economic and cultural stress. Whether or not there is anything new under the sun, what we are seeing today is troubling and scary precisely because it is not at all strange.

But what makes it so difficult for Obama to understand is the former president’s unwavering commitment to progressivism. Soon after the election, Obama wondered if he was just ahead of the times and “pushed too far.” He did not question whether he was right or wrong, but whether he just pressed too far too fast and did not prepare for the fact that “people just want to fall back into their tribe.” Obama’s self-understanding of himself advancing fearlessly while ordinary Americans retreat behind walls reflects his earlier comment that his political opponents “cling to guns and religion” rather than embrace the unyielding, necessary march of history forward. He cannot imagine that history swerves, circles back, or even that it has no direction. Despite his own recognition that fortunetellers of the end of history were wrong, Obama’s progressivism blinds him to a true historical sensibility.

Born of the Progressive era, pragmatism, Obama’s deeper epistemological commitment, remains tied to the belief that the world changes in a certain way and that ideas and people must catch up or be left behind. (It does not hurt that many in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street, with their celebration of disruptive innovation, say the same thing.) To John Dewey, in The Public and Its Problems (1927), if people and their ideas do not fit the changing social and economic contexts of industrial society, they will be left behind, incapable to solve the problems of today. There is a Darwinian presumption that societies must adapt or die. But adapt or die to what? A changing world that itself cannot be questioned, Obama made clear in his speech. “Globalization and technology” are in the inexorable agents of change, Obama told his Johannesburg audience, just as the forces of production were to Karl Marx. They are not subject to human intervention. We can, Obama asserts, either adapt our self-understanding to these superhuman forces or be left behind with our guns and religion and tribalism.

Since the forces of change are beyond our control, we need to adapt not the changes, but the narratives we offer of them. In Achieving Our Country (1999), Richard Rorty argued that historical narratives need to be present-minded. Rather than simply seek to re-create the empirical past, they must offer stories that lead us where we want to go. Obama embraces, consciously and purposefully and knowingly, I’d wager, Rorty’s hope. What’s at stake are the narratives we offer, and their capacity to help us achieve our aspirations.

Rorty sought to reclaim the national narrative for the American left. To Obama, however, globalization and technological change seem to be inevitable and non-negotiable. National identities, while they must be acknowledged and dealt with, are no longer plausible or workable in an integrated world. What is up for grabs, then, is the story we tell. He thus argued that we are faced with “two narratives,” one of hope that looks forward to a better future, and one of fear that looks backward. Most of his talk was devoted to brilliantly unpacking these two narratives. The first was grounded in nationalism and tribal identities. The other in a new open world order in which democracy and global markets thrive. We are faced with a choice, not about how to respond to the real fears many Americans are experiencing, and the real concerns that they have, but with the narrative that best fits (in a pragmatic sense) our capacity to live in the present and guide us toward a future beyond our control:

“So on Madiba’s 100th birthday, we now stand at a crossroads – a moment in time at which two very different visions of humanity’s future compete for the hearts and the minds of citizens around the world. Two different stories, two different narratives about who we are and who we should be. How should we respond?

Should we see that wave of hope that we felt with Madiba’s release from prison, from the Berlin Wall coming down – should we see that hope that we had as naïve and misguided?

Should we understand the last 25 years of global integration as nothing more than a detour from the previous inevitable cycle of history – where might makes right, and politics is a hostile competition between tribes and races and religions, and nations compete in a zero-sum game, constantly teetering on the edge of conflict until full-blown war breaks out? Is that what we think?”

It is a dualistic choice. It is also undemocratic in that it does not empower us to control the forces of change, but simply to renarrate them. To Obama, “things may go backwards for a while, but ultimately, right makes might, not the other way around, ultimately, the better story can win out.”

Obama reflects what historian Timothy Snyder, in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) has called the “politics of inevitability.” To progressives in Europe and America, the direction of history was clear, and all it took was the managed guidance of expert technicians in Washington or Brussels. Vladimir Putin understood the human condition better, Snyder implies. Funding far-right nationalist projects in Europe, throwing fuel on the Brexit fire, and appealing to white Americans’ darkest fears and impulses in our recent presidential election, Putin demonstrated that history, if anything, will not deny humanity. And, Snyder writes, European and American progressives, thinking the world would have to move in one direction, were intellectually unprepared for what is happening today. That’s why, Snyder argues, we need history and a more historical sensibility.

Instead, Obama’s commitment to the idea of embedded progress, which goes back to Condorcet, Hegel, and Marx, renders us lost. Thomas Jefferson, no stranger to a commitment to progress, knew, I arguedsome time ago, that history does not move in any direction. Progress requires democratic participation, enlightenment, deliberation, and action. One must be ever vigilant. Democracy needs citizens to take control of history, not be subject to it.

Obama’s republicanism has no place for real human beings. He recognizes and tallies the cost of globalization and economic change. They shut down plants and threaten civic and cultural solidarity. They lead, in his words, to many Americans’ “fears that economic security was slipping away, that their social status and privileges were eroding, that their cultural identities were being threatened by outsiders, somebody that didn’t look like them or sound like them or pray as they did.” He recognizes that the technocratic and capitalist global elite made their decisions “without reference to notions of human solidarity – or a ground-level understanding of the consequences that will be felt by particular people in particular communities by the decisions that are made. And from their board rooms or retreats, global decision-makers don’t get a chance to see sometimes the pain in the faces of laid-off workers.” He knows that the world looks different from Dayton or Chattanooga than it does from Davos.

Or does he? Obama wants us to overcome these fears, but he cannot help us do so because even if he understands them, his framework cannot make sense of them. In good Stoic fashion, he wants to elevate the human above all the particulars that make a human a person. We have identities and emotions, but Obama urges us to rise above them and be cosmopolitan and rational.

We need to respond to what Obama rightly called the rise of “a politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment” gaining strength around the world and threatening global peace and democracies. But we can’t do that when we see the world as positioned between those on the right and those on the wrong side of history. We cannot do it when, even as Obama states the motivations behind the “backlash” (his word), his forward-moving story cannot change to accommodate it. He may “believe we have no choice but to move forward,” but what is ahead is not subject to deliberation. People may yearn for solidarity, but their yearnings are always primitive and atavistic. We must transcend them. He asks us to embrace our “human inheritance,” not particular traditions. The human must come prior to the particular identities that most people hold dear: “Embracing our common humanity does not mean that we have to abandon our unique ethnic and national and religious identities,” he admits, but it must be placed ahead of them.

But what if we become human through those particulars? What if democracy depends on deeper levels of social trust, which in turn relies on deeper levels of cultural solidarity? What if globalization and technological change are eroding the reservoirs on which democratic social orders depend? And what if that means that we must see globalization and technological change as part of the problem, not just part of the solution? And, finally, if we read the history of capitalism and technology, we know that even if economic and technological forces have their own agency, they are still subject to human intervention. What if the future is not known, but instead is something that we must create collectively? Then we will need to challenge Obama’s worldview as well as Trump’s. We will need to be more historical in our sensibility, more democratic in our aspirations, and more humble about the future.

At the close of Obama’s memoir Dreams from my Father (1995), after a global search for his true self, Obama finds himself at his own wedding, noticing that as people from around the world interact, the claims of their particular identities weaken, and his friends and family become more open, more human. The camera surveys the closing scene of the book, in which culture becomes subordinate to a common humanity. A dream worth having, perhaps, but one that may find us unable, as a nation, to work collectively to achieve the goals we have and the problems we face in the here and now. For that the camera needs to close in just a bit. We humans need a sense of solidarity, of nationhood, to work together as citizens. This is not a cry for isolationism, but a recognition that, as Rorty understood, if the left abandons the nation for the world, emotion for reason, then the nationalists will reclaim the nation for themselves. And that, indeed, will be ugly.