Fifty Bazillion Reactions to the Inaugural

We watched it on the computer with the kids. Not often you see dramatic American history happening before you eyes as a scheduled event.

I think what struck me was how similar American rhetoric on both sides of the aisle is, when compared with rhetoric about America from anywhere else. C.S. Lewis once remarked in his introduction to Athanasius’ “On the Incarnation”:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.

Most commentators have remarked on how Obama’s address was a repudiation of the previous Administration, both for good and for ill. That is certainly true. Some of it is obviously evil, such as the telegraphed embrace of cannibalism so that vain Baby Boomer can keep their looks a few more years. Some of it was obviously good, such as the not-so-veiled rejection of the Bush embrace of torture and war crimes so that cowardly Baby Boomers can feel safe.

But underneath these cosmetics was a solid and sturdy conviction that America remains a secular messianic (and increasingly alternative) Light to the Nations that promises a better hope for the world than the Kingdom of Christ. Obama is every bit as convinced the American Missionary Imperative to remake the world in our Image and Likeness as Bush was. He simply thinks Bush did it the wrong way. His call for responsibility (which I welcome and applaud) was as rooted in neo-Puritanism as Bush’s ideas about faith-based renewal of American society. He believes in exporting American “values” as fervently as Bush (and the rest of us). He merely quibbles about which values are paramount. For Bush, it was democratic capitalism. For Obama, it is the triumph of the imperial autonomous self over the ancient tribal ties of blood and life.

America has always had a streak of antipathy to Catholic social teaching, expressed very frequently in the love of consequentialism and the notion that good ends justify evil means. Obama’s stated purpose of finding “what works” with no reference to “what is right” is classically American and undergirds both Abu Ghraib and Planned Parenthood. Obama’s conviction that we have a mission in the world is also. Only nations still in the grip of revolutionary fervor speak that way. When was the last time we heard of the Canadian or Spanish or Japanese “mission to the world”? We have talked that way since the start. It has nothing to do with our being a superpower. Lincoln talked that way when the country was tearing itself in two. Our very money bears the legend “Novus Ordo Seclorum”. It’s in the DNA.

All of which is to say, what impressed me about the inaugural was rather counter-intuitive for those who are still caught up in the fires of internecine partisanship within out borders: how very similar both the American Left and the American Right are–because they are both so deeply American.

Just a FWIW.