David Mills
“He [Obama] invoked the American family last week. It’s a lie, brother. You’ve got to be able to tell the truth to the American people. We’re not a family. We’re a people. We’re a nation. And a nation always has divisions. You have to be able to speak to those divisions in such a way that, like FDR, like Lincoln, you’re able to somehow pull out the best of who we are, given the divisions. You don’t try to act as if we have no divisions and we’re just an American family, with the poor getting treated in disgraceful ways and the rich walking off sipping tea, with no accountability at all . . . .”
That’s Cornel West, interviewed by Salon about his thoughts on the president’s being “a brown-faced Clinton. Another opportunist. . . . It’s like you’re looking for John Coltrane and you get Kenny G in brown skin.” We’re not a family, we’re a nation, that’s an important insight.
I think much of current policy comes from trying to settle disputes as if we were a family, where forbearance can be imposed and concessions to the odd or eccentric or egotistical member can be required, even if his demands aren’t fair or reasonable, because the alternative is division. Hence what’s called political correctness — which has a conservative as well as a liberal mode — which tries to squelch possibly divisive arguments in favor of a kind of family coziness, which of course is in fact dysfunctional.
Nations thrive on disagreement and dispute. Some arguments are political, some cultural, some economic. Fighting’s the cost of doing business. Nations necessarily produce winners and losers, and sometimes the losers are going to be really angry. Well-running nations have mechanisms that make sure the anger isn’t permanent. This is why politics can be a noble calling. Someone has to make the arguments and work for the answers and find ways of accomodating those who win and those who lose and those who lose and get angry.
That Cornel West seems to see. In his bitterness at the president for running as a progressive and then revealing himself to be “a Wall Street presiden[t],” though, West forgets that Obama always ran as if America were a family. He was the great unifier, the man who stood above the divisions and brought the divided, battling people together. He was going to be the dysfunctional country’s mom. The compromises of which West complains were implicit in his campaign rhetoric.
That being the great unifier, healer, uniter, etc., really meant “Do what I want you to do” was obvious to some of us. It was a political rhetoric that pretended not to be a political rhetoric. While he still talks like that, as when he speaks as if all problems would be settled if only the Republicans didn’t oppose him, this conception of the nation and his role as the agent of its unification — that he is the mother who calms and pacifies the family — allows the kind of corporatism and the retreat from progressive politics of which Cornel West complains.
It’s not surprising that so few people are happy with Barack Obama.
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