Dick Howard: Obama's appeal
[Mr. Howard, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook.]
...The attractiveness of the Obama candidacy lies in its post-racial nature. It is as if the call of the Civil Rights Movement for integration and equality among all Americans had been realized; the old coalition politics, in which African Americans had become merely another interest group wanting its share of the pie, could finally be transcended. While Hillary Clinton’s victory might break what she calls “the hardest glass ceiling,” it’s not clear that she would inaugurate a post-feminist era—which might not be a good thing! She is a first-class politician whose victory, however, would be the triumph of partisan politics over the hope of democratic renewal.
There was a revealing implication in Mrs. Clinton’s insistence on the role of the president in the realization of civil rights reform. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Law, he told friends, “there goes the South for a generation.” And he was right; the Republican party conquest of the South, and Washington, began at that moment. Some praise Johnson for putting the national interest above partisan concerns. But, in spite of his tone-deafness to movements of national liberation abroad, Johnson was a politician who, like Machiavelli’s republican Prince, knew that opportunity knocks only once. In that sense, he may indeed be a kindred spirit to Barak Obama rather than Hillary Clinton.[11]
“It won’t be easy… It won’t be easy,” repeats Barack Obama at every recent speech. He’s right. But when people try to explain to him that he’d be better off remaining in the Senate, gaining experience and reputation before leaping onto the national stage, his response is more significant than he realizes. The moment for action arises only once; the time has found its man, who can’t shy away. Obama may have thought of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act IV), which insists that “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries.” But he of course does not cite the author’s probable source—Machiavelli—even though he is in fact applying the political teaching of the Florentine, who wagered on virtu to vanquish the vicissitudes of fortuna. It’s perhaps this old political lesson—understood by the Elizabethan dramatist better than the well-intentioned reformers—that suggests the possibility for the renewal of a republic that had fallen prey to a fear manipulated by political reactionaries.
This hope is bolstered by historical experience. As opposed to the European model whose origins lie with the French revolution—which had to seize state power and then use it to remodel society in a way that would overcome the distinction between the particular interests of society and the general interest incarnated by the state—the Americans sought to protect the autonomy of their social relations by creating republican institutions whose universality would protect the plurality of an active democratic society. The European model is a democratic republic, a social democracy in which class differences are leveled as far as possible; the American is a republican democracy in which political institutions keep alive the pluralism and pragmatism that insure the dynamism of social relations. What appears to Obama’s critics[12] to be the vague, merely rhetorical character of his campaign is from this perspective its power. It is not necessary to be a poet to recognize that words have a unique power just because they create a shared world of meaning in which individuals find themselves able to act together. Was that not, in the last resort, the power of John F. Kennedy, to whom Obama is often compared?
Read entire article at http://www.logosjournal.com (winter 2008)
...The attractiveness of the Obama candidacy lies in its post-racial nature. It is as if the call of the Civil Rights Movement for integration and equality among all Americans had been realized; the old coalition politics, in which African Americans had become merely another interest group wanting its share of the pie, could finally be transcended. While Hillary Clinton’s victory might break what she calls “the hardest glass ceiling,” it’s not clear that she would inaugurate a post-feminist era—which might not be a good thing! She is a first-class politician whose victory, however, would be the triumph of partisan politics over the hope of democratic renewal.
There was a revealing implication in Mrs. Clinton’s insistence on the role of the president in the realization of civil rights reform. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Law, he told friends, “there goes the South for a generation.” And he was right; the Republican party conquest of the South, and Washington, began at that moment. Some praise Johnson for putting the national interest above partisan concerns. But, in spite of his tone-deafness to movements of national liberation abroad, Johnson was a politician who, like Machiavelli’s republican Prince, knew that opportunity knocks only once. In that sense, he may indeed be a kindred spirit to Barak Obama rather than Hillary Clinton.[11]
“It won’t be easy… It won’t be easy,” repeats Barack Obama at every recent speech. He’s right. But when people try to explain to him that he’d be better off remaining in the Senate, gaining experience and reputation before leaping onto the national stage, his response is more significant than he realizes. The moment for action arises only once; the time has found its man, who can’t shy away. Obama may have thought of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act IV), which insists that “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries.” But he of course does not cite the author’s probable source—Machiavelli—even though he is in fact applying the political teaching of the Florentine, who wagered on virtu to vanquish the vicissitudes of fortuna. It’s perhaps this old political lesson—understood by the Elizabethan dramatist better than the well-intentioned reformers—that suggests the possibility for the renewal of a republic that had fallen prey to a fear manipulated by political reactionaries.
This hope is bolstered by historical experience. As opposed to the European model whose origins lie with the French revolution—which had to seize state power and then use it to remodel society in a way that would overcome the distinction between the particular interests of society and the general interest incarnated by the state—the Americans sought to protect the autonomy of their social relations by creating republican institutions whose universality would protect the plurality of an active democratic society. The European model is a democratic republic, a social democracy in which class differences are leveled as far as possible; the American is a republican democracy in which political institutions keep alive the pluralism and pragmatism that insure the dynamism of social relations. What appears to Obama’s critics[12] to be the vague, merely rhetorical character of his campaign is from this perspective its power. It is not necessary to be a poet to recognize that words have a unique power just because they create a shared world of meaning in which individuals find themselves able to act together. Was that not, in the last resort, the power of John F. Kennedy, to whom Obama is often compared?