THE BELONGERS VS THE BOMBERS:

Barack Obama and the American void: The president of the United States inaugurated on 20 January 2009 remains a political enigma. What are the true lineaments of his character, his vision, his faith, and his appeal? (Simon Critchley, adapted from remarks delivered at the American Political Science Association in Boston on 30 August 2008, OpenDemocracy)

There is something desperately lonely about Barack Obama's universe. One gets the overwhelming sense of someone yearning for connection, for something that binds human beings together, for community and commonality, for what he repeatedly calls "the common good". This is hardly news. We've known since his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic national convention that "there's not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America - there's the United States of America."

Obama's remedy to the widespread disillusion with politics in the United States is a reaffirmation of the act of union. This is possible only insofar as it is possible to restore a sense of community to the nation. That, in turn, requires a belief in the common good. In the face of grotesque inequality, governmental sleaze, and generalised anomie, we need "to affirm our bonds with one another". Belief in the common good is the sole basis for hope. Without belief, there is nothing to be done. Such is the avowedly improbable basis for Obama's entire push for the presidency.

The obvious criticism one could make is that Obama's politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It lies behind the appeal to the common good, that "no one is exempt from the call to find common ground"; or "not so far beneath the surface, I think, we are becoming more, not less, alike". This, one might claim, is the familiar delusion of an end to politics, the postulation of a state where we can put aside our differences, overcome partisanship, and come together in order to heal the nation.

The same longing for unity governs Obama's discourse on race, with his call for a black-brown alliance and his appeasing remark that "rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself". Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.

One might add that the source of this longing for union is its absence. We anxiously want to believe, because we don't and we can't. The yearning for the common good comes from the refusal to accept that perhaps Americans have very little in common apart from the elements of a sometimes successful civil religion based around a sentimental, indeed sometimes teary-eyed, attachment to the constitution and a belief in the quasi-divine wisdom of the founding fathers.

Close, but wrong in an important way. Rather, consider that the unity is real, in the most conformist of countries, and that it is precisely because Americans have such a commonality of vision that those who are estranged from it feel so lost. The void is within themselves, not within America.

It is hardly surprising that someone like Mr. Obama has led a professional life that involves submerging himself into the institutions of his society in search of the sense of belonging that has eluded him in a personal life defined by a broken family. He may not know what "race" he is or who his parents were but by rising to the top at Harvard Law School and of the American constitutional order he can prove beyond a doubt that he is quintessentially "one of us."

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 25, 2009 9:42 AM