How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then, in less than two years, find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?
The first answer is well-known: His policymaking has been grandiose, thoughtless and bullying. His health-care bill was ambitious to the point of destructiveness and, finally, so chaotic that today no citizen knows where they stand in relation to it. His financial-reform bill seems little more than a short-sighted scapegoating of Wall Street. In foreign policy he has failed to articulate a role for America in the world. We don’t know why we do what we do in foreign affairs. George W. Bush at least made a valiant stab at an American rationale—democratization—but with Mr. Obama there is nothing.
All this would be enough to explain the disillusionment with this president—and with the Democratic Party that he leads. But there is also a deeper disjunction. There is an “otherness” about Mr. Obama, the sense that he is somehow not truly American. “Birthers” doubt that he was born on American soil. Others believe that he is secretly a Muslim, or in quiet simpatico with his old friends, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, now icons of American radicalism.
But Barack Obama is not an “other” so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new “counterculture” American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying “otherness” but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.
[…]
Among today’s liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness. More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and governmental power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil—I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on), so I need your vote.
“Hope and Change” positioned Mr. Obama as a conduit between an old America worn down by its evil inclinations and a new America redeemed of those inclinations. There was no vision of the future in “Hope and Change.” It is an expression of bad faith in America, but its great ingenuity was to turn that bad faith into political motivation, into votes.
But there is a limit to bad faith as power, and Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party may have now reached that limit. The great weakness of bad faith is that it disallows American exceptionalism as a rationale for power. It puts Mr. Obama and the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great nation. They bet on America’s characterological evil and not on her sense of fairness, generosity or ingenuity.
When bad faith is your framework (Michelle Obama never being proud of her country until it supported her husband), then you become more a national scold than a real leader. You lead out of a feeling that your opposition is really only the latest incarnation of that old characterological evil that you always knew was there. Thus the tea party—despite all the evidence to the contrary—is seen as racist and bigoted.
But isn’t the tea party, on some level, a reaction to a president who seems not to fully trust the fundamental decency of the American people? Doesn’t the tea party fill a void left open by Mr. Obama’s ethos of bad faith? Aren’t tea partiers, and their many fellow travelers, simply saying that American exceptionalism isn’t racism? And if the mainstream media see tea partiers as bumpkins and racists, isn’t this just more bad faith—characterizing people as ignorant or evil so as to dismiss them?
I think I can answer those questions for you, Mr Steele, rhetorical though you meant them to be: bugger off, Uncle Tom.
To that, I’ll further add, re: Obama and his being inscribed by the academics who were themselves products of the counterculture: the real problem is not so much that he grew up in such an ethos. The problem is, he truly believes what it is they taught him.
He is American in the sense that many Americans truly hate the American experiment; but that just makes him an anti-American American, and it further illuminates the dangers he poses to what is, in effect, a long-standing social contract that he is working tirelessly (and, in some cases, lawlessly) to undermine and then rewrite.
He and his enablers / fellow-travelers are attempting to create a new text from the Constitution, then sell it back to us as the same text filtered through a new, progressive interpretive filter — a living document they will tell you is being correctly re-imagined to keep up with the changing context in which it exists.
To do this, the Constitution need be envisioned as having a textual ontology separate from the intentions that produced and ratified it — a maneuver that is not difficult to rationalize, our ideas of interpretation having been systemically altered over the years to provide readers and interpretive communities with the power to determine meaning.
The death of the author Barthes wrote about foretold the demise of meaning as anything other than a contest of will and a bald assertion of power. The New Critics before him had cast this will to power as democratic. But your intent — what you meant — shouldn’t be decided upon by the whims of some interpretive consensus if said interpretive consensus, as a matter of ascendant hermeneutic theory, is no longer required even to appeal to original intent as in any way dispositive.
Intent — the autonomy of the individual, the desire to mean and to have meant — we have allowed to be (structurally) usurped by the receivers of our texts.
And frankly, that was never going to end well.
***
update: Harsanyi begins to vibe on the intentionalist groove. Soon, all the libertarians will be doing it! OUTLAW!
(thanks to sdferr and BobR)
And Harsanyi on that today.
It’s absurd. We’ve lost our minds. We’re in a period of know-nothingism in the country, where truth and science and facts don’t weigh in. It’s all short-order, lowest common denominator, cheap-seat politics.
What you mean “we,” JFnK?
I’ve never been proud of vote until I was able to early vote against everyone supportive of O! in my district.
I haven’t been this active, politically, since 1984. This rubbish has stirred up people more than the “bad faith” crowd could have ever feared…
Halp Us Jon Cary!
You know McGehee. Voters. The little people. We just keep them fat and happy, hopefully slathering their various meat products with my wife’s condiments, and focused the baseball and football.
Seriously people, like me, get to pull the levers of powers and control the strings on the little people.
As you can tell I am not up for re-election this cycle. Voters have short memories.
Hey, if I ever lose my job, I can always pitch for the Sox. My super sissy bouncer pitch is very difficult for a batter to hit.
LTC John’s typing skills finally come in handy!
(I kid!)
I went so far as to request a Democrat ballot during the primaries, just so I could have the satisfaction of voting TWICE against some of the worst of the Obama butt-lickers here in Missouri.
Harsanyi hits on the curious “rule” that I’ve seen employed – the actual fucking text of the Constitution is always amenable to “interpretations” to the point that it can mean pretty much the exact opposite of what the text clearly means, however judicial opinions (at least the ones that they like) are viewed as chiseled in stone. When you are appointed to the Supreme Court you have to swear to Schumer and Boxer that you won’t touch Roe, and that you don’t take the Second and Tenth Amendments at all seriously.
I don’t know about bad faith. Bumblefuck embraces American decline. Team R wants to slow the decline down a tad. The Tea Party people think decline can be halted with “commonsense solutions.”
The solution, therefore, is widespread Ghey Marriages and all-around Palin mockery.
hf–bad faith is exactly correct. And I don’t know that there’s anything more “commonsense” than realizing that if you have an operating document that resulted in your country becoming the greatest nation on earth, maybe it’s time to start paying attention to that document again as opposed to pissing on it, then when that doesn’t work, wiping your ass with it, and when that doesn’t work, turning to philosopher-kings who tell you that the decline is someone else’s fault.
if Obama is acting in bad faith then Team R acts in… what? Semi-bad faith? Kinda sorta bad faith? Team R nominated Meghan’s coward daddy for to be president. Team R was solidly rebuked in 06 and 08 and changed congressional leadership not a whit jot or tittle. See what I mean? This idea of bad faith is a lot not very helpful when bad faith is as ubiquitous as it is.
Obama has been surrounded by people espousing the “bad faith in America” philosophy his whole life. His mother was a white-bread nobody who carved out her own uniqueness in what she might describe as Ozzie and Harriet America by totally embracing the ideology of our greatest foes at the time; Soviet Marxists. And she at once demostrably cleaved to that belief, her “counterculture transnationalism, as well as flout the social sensibilities of the time, by marrying a Marxist true-believeing African foreign national. And perhaps, was even happier still when he abandoned her and the child of that union; single-motherhood as a result of such circumstances being all the more edgy and stand-out.
Of course, there’s Obama’s maternal grandfather, who seemed to become an ouspoken socialist following his return from WWII; a deliciously ironic existence when you consider that his wife supported the family by laboring in the capitalist-running-dog banking industry.
And who could forget his tutelage at the knee of Frank Marshall Davis. “Nuff said…
So it’s really no surprise that Obama would embrace all of the drivel proferred in the academy later; he’s lived in that environment his whole life!
This is not to say that it absolves him. As an adult, he should have been able to, you know, think about all of the things people said, and compare them with the reality.
But it goes a long way towards clarifying why he was chosen as the perfect, true-believeing, front man for attemting the final putsch in turning America into just another communist workers paradise.
This kind of comment has nothing to do with the readers of this site.
Maybe if you posted it on a few of the other sites you visited, it might could resonate. I can think of a few right off hand…
I think you’re using a flawed equivalence happyfeet. The “bad faith” Steele speaks of is a tenet of ideology, and is incomparable to team R’s.
To say that there are individuals in team R that, through compromise, unwittingly slow the transformation is one thing. But to say that they were actively seeking the same kind of transformation is another all together.
At least in my way of thinking.
And, as always, pardon my typos folks.
More Coffee!
Equally bad faith, hf.
Mr. Bob this is the coward piece of shit Team R tried to put in our little White House and what Sarah Palin thinks deserves 6 more years in the Senate.
That is not the same as good faith.
I worry very much that our doom is already upon us.
Also it’s lunchtime and I need to do a report thingy.
“This idea of bad faith is a lot not very helpful when bad faith is as ubiquitous as it is.”
Doesn’t it serve the same function as the “still small voice crying in the wilderness” as performing a critically defining distinction?
oh. you heard that? I was trying to cry into my pillow.
Critters are remarkably well tuned to the vocal outbursts of their fellows, so despite the ambient roar of a train passing by, for instance, a wren will only hear the plaints of another wren warning of the presence of a cat nearby.
Oh I agree happyfeet, that Mav believes in more government regulation than any of us here; but he did win the primary.
And it’s important to draw a distinction between team R’s backing of the Presidential primary winner, and conflating their overarching ideology with that same person.
McCain wanted to regulate supplements. I don’t recall that being a plank in team R’s platform.
I was mostly looking at this part… There was no vision of the future in “Hope and Change.” … I think there’s a vision of America in decline what bumblefuck has pictured in quite a lot of detail.
McCain wanted to regulate supplements.
McCain wanted to take advantage of a dirty socialist congressional majority to enact legislation he couldn’t otherwise have had any hope of enacting.
This is why he’s dangerous and scary and disheartening.
The opportunists of the political right, among whom I’d count John McCain, don’t seem either inclined by their natures, nor equipped by education, to do the work necessary to fully understand what it is they are dealing with in the political left — and the further left — on theoretical grounds (for one thing, it’s boring as all get out to have to go through), so they won’t know and don’t know when they’ve walked right into positions nearly inseparable from those of the left. Shit, they can’t even be bothered to work on their own home grounding beyond learning to spout a handful of useful platitudes. So also for many of the opportunists of the political left, the same stuff applies to figuring out what’s up with us.
That’s McCain happyfeet, not team R. And my guess is that outside of Grahamnesty, and the Maine sisters, there wouldn’t have been any team R support.
I know I’m getting repetitive, but my own view is to draw an analogy betwee team R and the Catholic church; both have corrupt members of their supposed leadership that they need to be rid of, but the presence, and acts, of those players doesn’t damn the institution nor invalidate what they stand for.
A few bad apples don’t ruin the whole bunch.
Pardon my cliche :)
Jim,
At first, I wasn’t sure you were pointing out my typos in #4 or the deliberate ones in #5…. man, I need help…
The bad faith argument put forth by happyfeet is frustrating and discouraging.
The original point is that Obama and his fellow travelers look on America with suspicion. They don’t believe in individual liberty; they don’t believe in property rights; they don’t believe in capitalism. These ideas that form the very bedrock of our society — a society so wildly successful that it dwarfs anything in the history of our race — they’re held in contempt by our current ruling cadre.
Team R may be mendoucheous and self-centered and power mad, and the Maverick may be a poor sort of leader, but at least that team still preaches (and I think they believe in) the idea of American exceptionalism, and the idea of success through hard work, and the idea of being entitled to the fruits of your labors, as opposed to the fruits of someone else’s labors.
There’s a significant difference between those who’ve lost their way and strayed from the path, versus those who deny the value of the path’s destination, and who work to force the body politic onto a different path, one which is incongruous with the principles our republic was founded on.
I’ll be curious to hear an articulation of the mandate Team R claims wednesday morning.
Which part of “Team R”?
Comment by Squid on 10/29 @ 2:11 pm #
The bad faith argument put forth by happyfeet is frustrating and discouraging.
So you’re noticing this for the first time?
To clarify, I meant the argument happy was making about bad faith, not in bad faith. (Those he saves for the snowbilly queen.)
I guess “the leadership” will be interesting to hear. And the chitter chattery weekly standard monkeys. And if any of the prospective nominees will have anything to say about it.
Me I think there’s a basis to draw a border security/comprehensive immigration reform analogy here… something along the lines of predicating any engagement with bumblefuck’s dipshit deficit committee on bumblefuck making a good faith showing of serious serious spending reductions first.
Ignore the chitter-chattery Weekly Standard monkeys. They are increasingly irrelevent.
I think it’s best we want to ignore nothing, but put each thing in its proper context (which won’t be possible when stuff is ignored).
But you are correct; border security before any attempts at immigration reform, and serious spending cuts before any talk of tax increases…
And before any talk of tax increases, let’s talk about tax system reform…
I wasn’t talking about everybody ignoring them sdferr, just happyfeet, since they seem to upset him so much. Kind of like when I advised him to quit paying attention to HotAir if it bothered him so much.
I like making myself upset. It makes my day more interesting.
From one of Happy’s links:
Really? More like: So what? Who cares? And big deal.
Eh, just making a little joke about the “Halp us…” from the famous sign, LTC.
hf–don’t confuse McCain with “Team R.” The guy deserves much respect for his personal courage and fortitude, but his politics? Blech. He’s a statist, not a Republican.
eep. Wrong thread.
all I know is Team R nomernatered him Mr. KC…
What’s up with that?
team r wanted to make fatty megan happytits
So you ARE having an effect.
At some point, doing a post-mortem on previous elections is not helpful. The old guy was the “pragmatic” choice, and too many primary voters were pragmatic at the time. I have the feeling pragmatism is done for now.
happyfeet,
He was elected by the Republican primary voters. Would you have preferred team R override the will of the voters?
Well I don’t think we can wipe the slate clean and pretend it was just a highly embarrassing if ultimately unmeaningful occurrence.
I think it was meaningful.
Well, then let’s bitch about it for the rest of our frelling lives, then.
someone has to remember
Notwithstanding the Huck’s duplicitous action in W.Va., McCain won the primaries; he was the choice of the majority of Republicans, regardless of what any of us think.
How was it thranscendentally meaningful? How is it different than, say, nominating Nixon, Ford, or any other candidate that wasn’t a “true conservative”?
What was team R supposed to do? Tell him he couldn’t run, or tell the people they weren’t allowed to nominate him.
I think you should let the past fade into the past, as far as McMav goes.
Two words: Alvin Greene.
Who he?
Alvin Michael Greene (born August 30, 1977) is the Democratic Party’s nominee in the 2010 United States Senate election in South Carolina. Won the primary and everything.
Talk about an embarrassing candidate! He’s incoherent and vulgar, he’s barely literate, and he gets belligerent at the drop of a discouraging word. If Barbara Boxer is a good Senator, this guy is the gold standard.
Do you hear Democratic pundits and advisers going nuclear on him 24/7? You do not. They’re not boosting him, mind you, but they’ve sent a few people to help him keep from embarrassing himself and the Party on teevee too often, and the rest of them just keep their mouths shut. They know, as Karl Rove apparently does not (nor happyfeet!), that getting your candidate dissed by his own Party spills over onto all the other candidates of that Party.
It’s Katy bar the door and no illegal holds during the primaries. After that the Party’s candidate is the Party’s candidate, and if you can’t say something nice keep your pie-hole shut (or full of pie).
Sheesh. Doesn’t anybody here know how to play this game?
Regards,
Ric
This election season is different from where I’m sitting, at least to the extent that I find myself willing to read the likes of Jon Chait attempting to figure out a way to sooth himself and his pals (only to come up short at that), even before the wave engulfs them. Next week it’ll be: “What just happened?” all over again.
heh
#51 should be branded into some people’s foreheads , backwards, so when they look in the bathroom mirror or the rear-view mirror in the car or motorcycle, they would be reminded of this…
Interestingly, even if Chait is correct and “structural factors” already virtually ensure a Republican takeback of the House on Tuesday, it only means the Tea Party chose its moment with savvy and skill. Infusing a lot of new blood into Congress with a lot of new commitment to fiscal conservatism and smaller government, is something best done when the party you aim to take over is already set up to make gains.
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