Sojourner Untruth? Obama, American

David Brooks seems to be making a curious, and curiously potent, argument about why Obama’s not possessed of a stronger lead — seeing as how he’s amply possessed of a stronger everything else. My lurid and amped-up summation of the answer runs something like this:

Famous sojourners of old — Sojourner Truth springs to mind — carried their stories and selves with them, stories and selves which were firm and unshakeable despite the vagaries of change and disruption that moved them through life. Obama presents a picture of a rather different kind of sojourner:

If Obama is fully a member of any club — and perhaps he isn’t — it is the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats. We now have a cohort of rising leaders, Obama’s age and younger, who climbed quickly through elite schools and now ascend from job to job. They are conscientious and idealistic while also being coldly clever and self-aware. It’s not clear what the rest of America makes of them.

It’s too glib to hang this framework around other Presidents and find Obama wanting — after all, Jackson was not a member of the Backwoods Club, and the Kennedys were not a club but a family. But it’s interesting to note the connective suggestion, which is that Obama is not a ‘full member’ of any club because he had no narrative identity fixed for him in a way that kept him full of inescapable cues and markers and commitments about who he was socially.

Now I think this is just so of the average heterodox young indie-conservative. Ditto, as Brooks suggests, many people at the tippy-tail of Gen X and younger, politics aside. It’s hard to make sense of ideology from this kind of perspective — hard to know what traction it gets you in everyday life. As a path to authenticity or sincerity, it seems fanciful and even outmoded; indeed, authenticity and sincerity themselves seem rather used and abused as life tropes or lodestars, corrupted in some way by the relentless psycho-humping they have received by the narcissists of the late twentieth century, and by the mass therapeutic-entertainment industry that has grown up to service and reproduce them. So Obama does not — does not even make an effort to — genuinely ‘feel your pain’. Instead he makes an effort to become — and succeeds in becoming — a cultural and political symbol of the full promise of America (for good and ill).

So too does the younger person of many stripes nowadays face a situation in which the malleable self is something of a humbled but still highly significant resource for orienting and directing life; there are few other such resources, and though long-lasting ones like faith and family still remain, they are often attenuated and complicated and do not quite cash out in stability and practical advantage like they seemed to. The problems of social life today are not exactly solvable, or even addressable, from the perspective of the sojourner of the past — even if the truth of that sojourner is of great power and authority in fortifying the internal self of the present.

Funnily enough, it’s exactly what makes Brooks uncomfortable about Obama, at least as a proxy for average Americans, that made me more comfortable with him — in that crucial period when he first transitioned from a hot ticket at the lectern to a patient, discriminating, studious ringfighter in the debates. All this silliness about Obama as white knight is half the coin; on the other half is another classic American trope, which isn’t quite an identity (for obvious reasons): the dark horse, the stranger who rides into town, even…um…the dark knight. It should be pretty plain here that race is a useless marker along the lines set by these tropes. We’re more than accustomed to expecting the salvific, feel-good gurus of today to not be white, and the dark stranger — because he is a strange hero but a hero nonetheless, someone who can walk in as a complete unknown and not be publicly stoned — has historically been safely white. Plus, as we should never tire of reminding ourselves, Obama is biracial. And he suggests that the white knight and the dark knight are two sides of the same vision that has run through American folk wisdom for a long time.

The gist, here, then, is that mocking up Obama as a weirdly un-American dude actually works only insofar as Americans register him in terms of familiarity, AND NOT OTHERHOOD. Liberals make a mistake if they think attacks against Obama for being strange and foreign are winning the day. We all know very well the character that Obama’s being mocked as. That character is one of us, as American as…Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Obama is not being attacked for being a dark knight from a strange land. He’s being attacked for being a white knight from right here in America. As I’ve claimed for some time now, acts of ‘othering’ are almost always comprehensible only in terms of sameness — discriminating by apples amongst apples instead of apples against oranges — and it’s clear now that Obama is being mocked and ridiculed for theopposite reason that Brooks’ evocative analysis would suggest: not because he is distant, calculating, and full of contingent, incomplete associations, but because he is a classic, contemporary male diva, all-too-American.

There is a subtle link here. With all one’s associations contingent and incomplete, one inclines toward thinking of sociality in one of two ways: either in highly particular and specific terms or in highly general and abstract ones. One inclines either toward a sort of existentialist approach to friends, lovers, and family — me and mine on one side, the whole world on the other — or toward a utopian approach to human solidarity. Actually, I just lied: there is a third way, which does both at the same time. And I suspect this is kind of the way it is for Obama.

But I suspect this because this is what Tocqueville says it will be like for all Americans — and for all peoples living in a democratic age. A man’s friends and family become the whole world to him, yet public opinion in the whole becomes more gentle and compassionate than ever before. The polarity between particularity and solidarity rises to an extreme, and the successful democratic person attempts to indulge in both simultaneously. But this requires power of some sort — the power to act on compassionate solidarity in a way that doesn’t pull against the particular and more real and tangible enjoyment of one’s chosen. That power is the power of the state, and its allure defines the convergence point between ‘right’ and ‘left’ in this country. It’s why — who said it? — said that Obama offers us neoconservatism with a smiley face.