Skip to main contentdfsdf

Todd Suomela
  • But what makes it so difficult for Obama to understand is the former president’s unwavering commitment to progressivism. Soon after the election, Obama wondered if he was just ahead of the times and “pushed too far.” He did not question whether he was right or wrong, but whether he just pressed too far too fast and did not prepare for the fact that “people just want to fall back into their tribe.” Obama’s self-understanding of himself advancing fearlessly while ordinary Americans retreat behind walls reflects his earlier comment that his political opponents “cling to guns and religion” rather than embrace the unyielding, necessary march of history forward. He cannot imagine that history swerves, circles back, or even that it has no direction. Despite his own recognition that fortunetellers of the end of history were wrong, Obama’s progressivism blinds him to a true historical sensibility.
  • Obama’s republicanism has no place for real human beings. He recognizes and tallies the cost of globalization and economic change. They shut down plants and threaten civic and cultural solidarity. They lead, in his words, to many Americans’ “fears that economic security was slipping away, that their social status and privileges were eroding, that their cultural identities were being threatened by outsiders, somebody that didn’t look like them or sound like them or pray as they did.” He recognizes that the technocratic and capitalist global elite made their decisions “without reference to notions of human solidarity – or a ground-level understanding of the consequences that will be felt by particular people in particular communities by the decisions that are made. And from their board rooms or retreats, global decision-makers don’t get a chance to see sometimes the pain in the faces of laid-off workers.” He knows that the world looks different from Dayton or Chattanooga than it does from Davos.

     

    Or does he? Obama wants us to overcome these fears, but he cannot help us do so because even if he understands them, his framework cannot make sense of them. In good Stoic fashion, he wants to elevate the human above all the particulars that make a human a person. We have identities and emotions, but Obama urges us to rise above them and be cosmopolitan and rational.

No more items

Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »

Join Diigo