In the Washington Post, Rutgers historian David Greenberg calls Barack Obama the “great white hope”, and argues that his broad-based appeal amounts to little more than “a fantasy of easy redemption…Inspiring and exhilarating as it is, Obamamania allows us to sidestep the hardest challenges, at least for now.” Now, Greenberg is a friend and colleague with whom I’ve disagreed in the past. Still, with all due respect, this is about as wrong as I’ve ever seen him, and, by putting so much argumentative emphasis on race, this article veers dangerously close to being the historian’s version of the “imaginary hip black friend” argument of earlier in the week. My quick response, originally posted over at Cliopatria, is below.
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The problem for me with Greenberg’s piece is that he too readily dismisses the ideological appeal of Obama’s candidacy in one sentence. “On the contrary, Obama’s ideology, insofar as he has articulated it, seems to be a familiar, mainstream liberalism, heavy on communitarianism. High-minded and process-oriented, in the Mugwump tradition that runs from Adlai Stevenson to Bill Bradley, it is pitched less to the Democratic Party’s working-class base than to upscale professionals.“ I consider Greenberg a friend and an excellent historian, but as I’ve written before, I disagree with him fundamentally on this point. Obama’s language of civic-minded progressivism cannot be dismissed so readily. It’s a huge part of his appeal, bigger — to my mind — than the simple fact of his race. And by sloughing off Obama’s ideological appeal so quickly, Greenberg is then forced to overstate significantly the racial nature of Obama’s candidacy, and make extremely dubious claims about we Obama supporters looking for “easy redemption.” Also, I’m by no means a reflexive Clinton-hater, although I do feel the past week in American politics has tarnished their legacy considerably. Still, I would not concur with Greenberg that Clinton managed to “formulate a viable and vital new liberalism.” The restoration of fiscal sanity in 1993 notwithstanding, by the middle of his first term, Clinton liberalism was in full rout, and it pretty much has been ever since. The remaining six Clinton years were spent mainly just triangulating madly to stay afloat. Putting race aside — if we can still manage to do that after the past few days — Obama’s rhetoric calls for a repairing of the civic fabric and a progressive-minded style of governance that dreams big. And that — not easy fantasies of racial reconciliation — is what people are responding to. Without vision, the people perish…and, frankly, school uniforms and V-chips just aren’t going to cut it anymore. |
Update: See also TNR’s Noam Scheiber.