I’m about to do that annoying thing where I characterize a wide set of people, without offering any particular examples of the phenomenon. I understand that this is problematic. But this feels right – as an aggregate sense of my reading of many, many people. So it’s quite possible that it doesn’t perfectly apply to any single person in a perfect fashion, but I think it’s true nonetheless.
(Edit: It occurs to me that this Frank Rich column is actually a pretty great example of the problem)
The people who are really angry about Obama right now seem to be making a lot of accusations about those who support him – calling us members of a cult of personality, etc.
But here’s the thing. For me, at least, it has never been about expecting the world from this guy. I thought the ‘hope’ message was a good one, and I believed in the power of ‘change’ but I didn’t think that meant moving the world by himself. Nor did I think it meant a move to the extreme left wing.
Change, for me, meant a return to thinking seriously about real issues. About being willing to make tough decisions and stick to them. About genuinely caring about things enough to value real, material progress over optics. Part of what was so toxic about the Bush era was the extent to which politics became more and more ideological. Of course, all politics is ideology to some extent. The difference with Obama, I hoped, was that he would have some sense of his own limitations. That’s what he promised, and it’s precisely what he’s given.
He’s not the guy who’s going to go out guns-blazing for the public option because he fears losing health care entirely a lot more than he fears losing the public option. And he’s going to play the game in a lot of annoying ways. And I’ll disagree with him on a lot of the details. But one thing I remain fairly confident about is that the moral backbone which underlies these decisions is one that is focused on the achievement of real, practical social good.
That may not sound like a lot, but I do think that represents ‘change’ in a pretty important way.
The people who claim total disillusionment, that they’ve been abandoned, etc. on the other hand seem to have been expecting a lot more. They’re the ones who read into what Obama was saying a lot of things that THEY wanted. And now that they’re getting roughly what he promised they’re really upset.
Paul Krugman (a pretty hardcore Hillary supporter, if you’ll remember) makes this point quite well:
There’s a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn’t the man progressives thought they were voting for.
But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that
(a) There wasn’t a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders
(b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive
…
But back to Obama: the important thing to bear in mind is that this isn’t about him; and, equally important, it isn’t about you. If you’ve fallen out of love with a politician, well, so what? You should just keep working for the things you believe in.
It’s certainly not unreasonable to think that the left could have gotten more out of this moment. I do think that it is unreasonable to accuse Obama, or those who support him, of some fundamental betrayal. As Krugman says, I don’t really see how it’s Obama’s fault that people insisted on mis-reading him.
Or, even if it is his fault insofar as he built a campaign that made him sort of a Rorschach test designed to appeal to lots of people, then the people who made him into some sort of magical Changeasaurus are the ones who were reading everything through personality. Those of us who saw a left-wing, but fairly pragmatic guy are getting what we voted for.
Whether you think that constitutes meaningful change, well…
I’m reminded of a great quote, from one of my favorite books: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. It’s by Barbara Smith, and she’s talking about lesbian separatism, but I think the general idea is important to a lot of contexts – and maybe this one.
A solution to tokenism is not racial separatism. There are definitely separatist aspects emerging among the Black and Third World feminist community and that is fine. But, ultimately, any kind of separatism is a dead end. It’s good for forging identity and gathering strength, but I do feel that the strongest politics are coalition politics that cover a broad base of issues. There is no way that one oppressed group is going to topple a system by itself. Forming principled coalitions around specific issues is very important. You don’t necessarily have to like or love the people you’re in coalition with. This brings me back to the issue of lesbian separatism. I read in a women’s newspaper an article by a woman speaking on behalf of lesbian separatists. She claimed that separatists are more radical than other feminists. What I really feel is radical is trying to make coalitions with people who are different from you. I feel it is radical to be dealing with race and sex and class and sexual identity all at one time. I think that is really radical because it has never been done before. And it really pisses me off that they think of themselves as radical. I think there is a difference between being extreme and being radical. This is why Third World women are forming the leadership in the feminist movement because we are not one dimensional, one-issued in our political understanding. Just by virtue of our identities we certainly define race and usually define class as being fundamental issues that we have to address. The more wide-ranged your politics, the more potentially profound and transformative they are.