Tablet Magazine has published
this very long tantalizing speculative peak into the life and times of Barack
Obama.
I have no expertise on the matter
from which to comment or judge the accuracy of it. I post the link here in case
you are interested to read it in whole or in part.
Reading it myself, I recalled my
own reaction to the campaign and election of Obama, and, for what its worth, I
decided to record here my current evaluation looking back. I think Obama has
been misjudged by his many admirers, who see him as a highly intelligent,
affable human being who brought a refreshing light to America as the first
black president. My assessment is quite the opposite. And perhaps history will
agree more with me in light of the miserable nature of our current public
discourse.
Whereas I absolutely despise the
man that Donald Trump is, while favoring many of the policies he followed in
his presidency, I absolutely despise the policies and sentiments associated
with Barack Obama, even though I acknowledge his intelligence, eloquence and
political astuteness. I think, in the end, Obama will be credited with more
damage to America than Trump. Here is why.
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Very early on I found myself
repelled by the content of Obama’s speeches. And during his presidency I could
not watch him talk. He annoyed and frightened me. I was surprised to find how
many people, by contrast, simply ate it up. I wonder how many actually thought
about what he was saying, rather than simply reacting to his charisma and the
fact that he was black. They liked the idea, the showcasing of a black American
president. [Of course, to be picky, but quite relevant, Obama is not black, he
is bi-racial, and he did not, like Michele Obama and his many black fans, grow
up with the “black American experience” – he adopted this persona, it is a kind
of an act.] At the time I opined that he was the worst president in my
lifetime.
What irked and disturbed me was
that, every time he opened his mouth, he insinuated the existence of some sort
of festering grievance to be concerned about. To be sure, he did it cleverly
and subtly, which made it scarier for me – because when Hillary Clinton tried
to do it, it was so obvious and clumsy and earned her a lot of antagonism – when
Obama did it scared me because it was insidious, it wormed its way into the consciousness
without people realizing what they were admiring.
Basically, what Barack Obama did
was to break with the long sweep of black American liberalism from Frederick
Douglas to Martin Luther King to current black intellectuals, like John
McWhorter and many others. Frederick Douglas, an ex-slave, was crystal clear.
He rejected slavery and lingering racism. He rejected them as un-American, as a
betrayal of basic and universal liberal American values. [Americans have always
thought of classical liberal values as both an aspect of American exceptionalism,
and as universal. After all, they emanate from British Enlightenment thought.] For
Douglas, American liberalism was aspirational and inspirational. He took the
words of the Declaration of Independence seriously – the self-evident truth
that ALL people are equally endowed with the right to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. America had fallen down, had failed in its striving to
implement these values, but the values themselves were unassailable. These
included freedom to trade, to own property, to express one’s views, to assemble.
He was explicit in rejecting special treatment for ex-slaves. He rejected
paternalism as insulting. Similarly, MLK was clear in his condemnations, not of
American liberal values, but of the failure to implement them, as they should
have been implemented to create an America in which his children would be
judged by the content of their character and the color of their skin would be
irrelevant. Both were, in this sense, proud Americans. And there are today many other proud classically liberal black Americans who feel the same way – who
embrace the progress against racism that has been made and seek an ever-better
America.
Obama’s story is different, has
always been different. He explicitly downplayed American exceptionalism and encouraged
the view that the American experience was one that was dominated by the white
race to the unambiguous detriment of non-whites. So-called American values are
the values of colonial domination. It is time for blacks to rediscover their
own authentic black experience, which involves the rejection of much of
so-called liberalism. High on the list is the challenge against free speech, because
the establishment powers control the channels of public expression for their
own purposes. The damages of white domination need to be addressed, firmly
using the mighty power of the federal government with access to an unlimited amount
of tax money restored from the property of the unjustifiably rich. Social
justice must be done. And this will involve, sooner or later, a complete transformation
of the current economic and social system. Obama was at the forefront, if not the leader,
of a separate black identity, separate from and antithetical to the American
identity. This became clear when Michele Obama, less subtly perhaps than her
husband, declared soon after the election: “for the first time in my life, I am
proud to be an American.” If this sounds like “wokism” it is because it is, before
the name was invented. The fork in the road was Obama, not Biden. And his
presidency left many Americans very uneasy, feeling an undercurrent of something
very un-American, very hostile and threatening, being pushed by the Democratic
party and its very unpopular nominee Hillary Clinton. In this very real sense,
Obama caused Trump. Make no mistake about that.
And this black identity is really
more than that. It is really an anti-white identity, where “white” is more a
state of being than a skin color. Thus, the anomaly of the Jews and the Asians.
Obama was never overtly anti-semitic, but his view of the Jews as a group, as
distinct from his “Jewish friends,” is undoubtedly hostile. The Jews cannot
claim to be non-white, no matter what their experience as victims or their skin
color as north Africans. I know too little about foreign policy to claim to be
able to provide expert opinion, but Obama’s foreign policy, for which the world
is paying dearly today, was palpably anti-Israel. He worked long and hard,
against the domestic and foreign current of events, to fashion a middle eastern
alliance that patched up things with Iran and excluded Israel. [His capitulation to Russia in Syria, Crimea
and the Donbas arguably also encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine.] Besides this,
is his clear refusal to disavow his friendship with and admiration of his one-time
spiritual leader, the overtly anti-sematic Jeremiah Wright. Be this as it may,
whether Obama can be credited with it or not, his black identity worldview has
developed a new strain of virulent anti-semitism alongside its anti-white
racism.
The flowering of woke ideology,
with its intolerance of any dissident views, and rejection of any limits to the
scope of social-justice-funded government activity, starts with Barack Obama. In
the Tablet piece it fits with his childhood abandonment and resentment and his
unbridled narcissism, but I leave that to the social psychologists. In more mundane terms, Obama is the starting point
of the ramping up of state-capitalism (“you didn’t build that”) buoyed by the
emergency of the Great Recession and the permission it gave him to blow out the
federal budget to unprecedented levels and pile on regulations in all aspects
of life, especially business life (a ball picked up eagerly by Biden who has
run even further with it). Obama honed the practice of disregarding and bending Congressional
limits to implement unlegislated policies (something his successors have
eagerly emulated). And even now, while still ensconced in D.C. he is apparently
pulling the strings influencing policy directions.
Like all politicians Barack Obama should not be trusted, but more than most he should be feared.
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