BUT THERE IS NO WE IN "I":

Now it’s time to put the ‘we’ into ‘Yes we can’: The inauguration of Barack Obama as the Forty-Fourth President captured people’s yearning for historic momentum, and Obama’s lack of it. (Brendan O’Neill, 1/21/09, Spiked)

[W]e’re already seeing the downsides to the Obama momentum, signals that this new administration might fail to live up to people’s expectations of History with a capital H. Yes, people have had enough of dull mainstream politics, yet for Obama that seems to mean we should get rid of partisanship and debate – the lifeblood of politics – entirely. ‘On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics’, he said, implicitly demonising the rough-and-tumble of political infighting and outfighting that accompanies every true historic leap forward. ‘We will return science to its rightful place’, he said, which was widely and rightly interpreted as a swipe at the Bush administration’s ‘ignorance of scientific facts’. Yet it also suggests we will see the further elevation of expertise over debate, and cool judgements over fiery discourse. In their policy promises, also published yesterday, Obama/Biden said they will: ‘Restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on ideological predispositions.’ In short, we can expect under Obama the intensification of managerial, ideology-free and principle-lite politics, only it will have the grand title of ‘respecting science’. This is not history so much as physics.

The inauguration was a supremely revealing snapshot of our age. It showed people’s thirst for change. And it captured the absence of a sense of agency that means we project this desire for change on to one man who has ‘come’. It showed Obama as the beneficiary of a yearning for historic momentum. And it showed Obama as a man who seems to lack the vision or political programme to transform old, small, cynical politics into something properly historic. Most strikingly, it confirmed that, so long as we the people remain passive observers of officially decreed History, politics will be dominated by expertise and the wisdom of the few, rather than by passion and the desires of the many. It might be time to put the ‘we’ into ‘Yes we can’.

A hollow man can't fill a hole.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 21, 2009 12:49 PM