Change, Hope, Unity and – Grievances

Barack Obama didn’t follow any of my suggestions for his “major address on racism and religion”; not that I expected him to. What he did say has drawn enthusiastic applause from people who wanted him to wash away whatever doubts may have been raised by his 20 years of close association with a racist crank. My own reaction is, I fear, rather less positive. Maybe it is churlish to say so, but the speech revealed to me, beneath a fine flow of words, an ideology that is fundamentally inconsistent with our country’s founding ideals. While Senator Obama invokes “self reliance”, he calls on us to nurture our grievances and seek redress from a government powerful enough to give us all we want.

His picture of a land of misery, oppression and squalor has never before been laid out so starkly. He describes not a nation that leads the world in prosperity and freedom, the most popular destination for emigrants, but a wasteland of “crumbling schools”, emergency rooms filled with people “who do not have health care” (one wonders what they are receiving in the ER), “shuttered mills” and “stagnant wages”. The America Senator Obama sees is wracked by cynicism, bigotry and “a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many”.

Senator Obama’s America is also burdened by a history so heavy and malignant that slavery, abolished 140 years ago, and Jim Crow laws, never prevalent outside one region and gone for over 40 years, still determine the fate of a majority of black Americans and instill in them a legacy of unappeased anger. He believes, or at least says, that his “mentor”, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted”. That is an outright falsehood. Neither in Philadelphia, where Jeremiah Wright grew up, nor in most of the rest of the United States, was segregation then “the law of the land”, and, while opportunities for blacks were less abundant than they are today, no one was constricting them “systematically”. This was, after all, the period when an all-white Supreme Court held that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and an overwhelmingly white Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964 and 1965 with huge bipartisan majorities. Uninterested in any kind of balanced view, Senator Obama sounds exactly like a classic European nationalist, decrying the historic ills inflicted upon his own volk, blaming all of their problems on the crimes of others, denying that anyone has ever done them a good turn, and implicitly justifying a mood of revanchism.

So far, the Senator follows Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. His novel, and politically clever, move is to invite people of every race and ethnicity to join the grievance parade. White conservatives, he informs us, support welfare reform, anti-crime initiatives and racial neutrality in hiring and education not because they believe those policies to be good for all Americans, but out of “resentment” of efforts that have been made to help blacks.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

The opening paragraphs of the speech praised “a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time”. Yet the ensuing summary of America’s unsatisfactory past and dismal present suggests that fidelity to the Constitution’s ideals has been the possession of only a small minority, which has extracted homeopathic doses of liberty and justice from the majority “through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk”. It’s no surprise that he finds little decency in the majority of his countrymen throughout the majority of our history. If practically everyone is motivated by anger or resentment, what is to be expected?

Now that it has been established that subrational emotions stand in the way of perfecting the Union envisioned by the Constitution, one might expect to hear a plea for putting anger and resentment aside. But Senator Obama calls for the opposite: channeling them toward different enemies, toward the shadowy powers that oppress us all (apparently without being part of “us”) and, once the “special interests” are overthrown, enacting governmental programs that will provide quality education, abundant health care, high paying jobs and all the other desirable things. Missing is an iota of confidence in the creative powers of free individuals or any recognition that the areas where complaints about the status quo are most justified, such as education and health care, are where the government’s hand is already most heavily felt.

Ultimately, according to Senator Obama, the key difference between Jeremiah Wright and himself is simply that the pastor sees a “static” world, rather than one where a sense of grievance can unite Americans to effect change. The clergyman’s diagnosis is correct: This is a racist society governed by a malevolent power elite. But he doesn’t realize that a doctor and a cure have been found. The doctor is Barack Obama. The cure is bigger and better government.

Other reactions: Investor’s Business Daily, “Obama Merely Changes the Subject”
Mickey Kaus, “Can’t We Ignore Race? Please?”
Victor Davis Hanson, “An Elegant Farce”
Stanley Kurtz, “MoveOn MoveIn”
NRO Symposium, “Philadelphia Story: Obama on Race
Byron York, “Obama and His Audience”
The Wall Street Journal, “Discovering Obama
Rand Simberg, “Will Obama Be a Genius?”
James Taranto, “Obama and His ‘White Grandmother’”

And more: Thomas Sowell, “Wright Bound”
Dean Barnett, “Obama the Ditherer”
Jonah Goldberg, “Yesterday’s Baggage”
Michael Meyers, “Obama Blew It”
Peter Wehner, “The Wright Stand”
Charles Krauthammer, “Justifying a Scandalous Dereliction”