How to Avoid Being Co-opted   

Dear Barack,

The outburst of tears, joy, hope, and worldwide celebration that we have all witnessed and been part of in the days following your election is a beautiful expression of what you and we have accomplished at this historical moment—namely, a breaking through of the years of sedimented fear, doubt, and authoritarian control that have separated us from each other and from our most idealistic aspirations for humankind. The integrity and authenticity of your human presence spontaneously called forth a desire in all of us to reciprocate by emerging from decades of doubt-filled isolation and social separation to create a circuit of energy sufficient to ricochet one another into a sweeping electoral majority in support of the possibility of creating a more loving, humane, socially connected, and spiritually elevated world.

Because you so consistently expressed this elevating possibility through an even-tempered steady confidence, you were able to pierce the veil of media distortions that sought to deflect and falsify your idealistic vision. You did so with enough force to successfully reach all of us out here in our disparate locations, and to touch and mobilize our own longing for a better world. Spurred by a vast circle of affirmation mediated through you, we each became a force vector for each other, leveraging us to volunteer in large numbers to make manifest our own collective presence and lay claim to a new idealistic future.

But watch out! No sooner had we begun to catch our breath following the euphoric moment of seeing “Barack Obama Elected President of the United States” flash across our television screens, than the force of fear, which rotates through our collective consciousness with lightning speed, had begun to take up its fall-back position, seeking to assimilate your victory to the status quo. Its method is to subtly rob that victory of its potentially transformative meaning and replace it with a safe meaning, in order to insure that the socially separated world—the fearful world of detached and withdrawn isolated individuals—does not in fact change.

The ideological technique that the force of fear has begun to adopt to try to assimilate and co-opt (y)our victory is to declare that what happened on November 4 was the demonstration that an African American can now win the presidency of the United States. This casts the meaning of the election as a victory for nondiscrimination, as if what we were all celebrating was merely that anyone can now compete for and win the presidency without regard to race. The corollary of this interpretation will be to test how well you are doing as president by analyzing not how transformative your leadership is but rather how conventional it is—by how well you manage the government, how well you manage foreign affairs, how well you manage the economy, or in other words, by how well you “play the role” of president within a system that is otherwise supposed to go on functioning the same as it ever was. It is in accordance with this very narrow interpretation of the meaning of your victory that so many conservatives (from George Bush, to Condoleezza Rice, to Brent Scowcroft) have hailed November 4 as a historic moment; that CNN asked as its first call-in question to its listeners after the election whether your victory should signal the end of affirmative action; and that so much early coverage of your presidency has addressed such conventional role-based matters as what new styles Michelle will bring to the White House or what kind of puppy you will get for the kids.

While the fact that racial discrimination did not keep you from being elected is of course a very good thing, that fact in itself is not the reason why so many of us cried at the moment of your victory, or why Kenyans spontaneously danced in the streets and declared a national holiday, or why young people all across the country are wanting for the first time to get involved in politics and change the world. The transformative meaning of your election is rather that you are the carrier of the great egalitarian social movements that have preceded you, movements that aspire to a world in which we can recognize each other’s whole humanity and love each other across our racial differences, in which a new ethos of social justice and beloved community can replace the selfish world of individualism and fear of the Other that has led to the proliferation of wars and the death by starvation or malnutrition of 20,000 children per day, and that in some measure consigns us all to a lifetime of spiritual isolation and passive social meaninglessness.

A confluence of forces came together to make your victory possible—from the surprise collapse of the economy that trapped your opponent into identifying with the policies that created the collapse while opening up a new space for you as the youthful and spirited agent positioned to change these policies, to the weakening, after three decades, of the reaction against the sixties that had fueled the rise of the new Right’s traditional God/family/country-based worldview and rendered unsupportable liberal openness, compassion for the other, and the very existence of a public sphere animated by a moral vision for a more just and connected world. This confluence created the political conditions for you to grab on tight to your own hope and idealism—expressive of the social movements that preceded and helped shape you—and to then “thread the eye of the needle” on election day by successfully carrying forward your own grounded ethical presence right through the web of false statements, doubt-mongering, and potentially compelling false images of who you actually are that were deployed in the effort to use the inertia of the long conservative hegemony to derail and undermine the expansive life force that was your momentum.

My message to you is this: resist the attempts to normalize your presidency by putting you on a pedestal of nondiscrimination, isolating you as “the leader,” and then gradually tearing you down after your absorption into isolation has demobilized your base. Instead, follow these four principles to help strengthen your base and deepen the meaning of your presidency:

1. Recognize that your election represents a collective effort to transcend selfishness and individualism. Take every opportunity to give voice to what you have already called “this new defining moment” as a moment of love and care for one another. Reject the Republicans’ “ownership society,” which you have already made fun of as meaning “you’re on your own,” and make clear your own conviction that “we’re in it together.” Express the meaning of your decisions and policy commitments in exactly these idealistic terms. Even more, indicate that this turn toward each other represents an evolutionary moment in American history, away from the exclusive preoccupation with individual rights that characterized the beginning of the republic and toward a new ethos of empathy, compassion, and connection between self and other.

The brilliance of your early speeches after your initial victories in the primaries was precisely that they linked the meaning of your campaign to the upsurge of social concern that was manifested in the abolitionist movement and then as an upward tendency in all the great social movements throughout American history—upward movements which taken as a whole have produced you yourself as an ethical manifestation of their aspirations and convictions. Now that you have won, give voice to this higher meaning by explicitly linking what you do in our name to going beyond individualism toward community.

2. In order to make manifest this idealism and upward movement in the context of specific issues, always give expression to the spiritually deep intention and purpose of each specific policy proposal. For example:
   • When advocating for Social Security, make it clear that you are standing up for one of history’s greatest manifestations of intergenerational care and concern, rather than letting yourself be pulled into “how will we fund it” debates that fail to evoke its high moral purpose.
   • When explaining the selection of new Supreme Court justices, make it clear in what way the person you have appointed is a practitioner of justice concerned with the well-being of all of us as embodiments of a common humanity. Choose an appointee who will interpret the law in accordance with the wisdom, compassion, and social concern expressive of the moral bond that unites us.
   • When recommending new legislation to pull the economy out of its current crisis, make it clear how the reforms you propose represent a new governmental ethos that understands “we the people” as a mutually supportive community, rather than as a scattered collection of self-interested, competitive individuals.
   • When advocating for educational reforms, indicate how these reforms will advance the spiritual and moral well-being of the next generation as caring and compassionate citizens, rather than simply allowing education to be defined as the mastery of skills needed to compete in the world economy.
   • When proposing environmental reforms like limiting carbon emissions or defending the Alaskan wilderness, give voice to the sacredness of the earth and the beauty of the natural world and our stewardship of it for future generations, rather than simply referring to the importance of reversing global warming as scientific phenomenon.
3. When appearing in public at news conferences or in giving speeches, pay attention to the symbolic elements in your self-representation by consciously signaling your continuing commitment to idealistic and transcendent meanings. For example, when giving a news conference on the economy, don’t only have financial experts like the Secretary of the Treasury or the head of the Federal Reserve present with you on the stage—also have representatives of labor, the environment, and the community as a whole to signal that interventions you will support will be taking account of our collective human and ecological well-being … and that care for the Other remains at the center of your consciousness, no matter how apparently “technical” a proposed intervention (like a “bailout” or a stimulus package) may appear.
4. Maintain the meditative quality that has been perhaps the most distinctive aspect of your public presence throughout your campaign. Captured in the slogan “no drama with Obama,” this quality of remaining underneath the hype of the moment has been immensely significant in transmitting to us the confidence that you are actually here with us on the planet rather than being elevated into an artificial, puffed-up, narcissistic role that customarily captures politicians and removes them from the realm of the real. By retaining this meditative presence, or groundedness, you convey that we really do exist as a “we,” and that the publicity enveloping you has not stolen you from the realm of authentic being and the spontaneous social concern that authentic being inherently carries within it. The more successful you are at retaining this authenticity, the less successful will be the attempts to separate and pedestalize you as The President and to isolate you from the authentic community of hope that actually elected you.

I sincerely believe that if you follow these four principles and think through all your actions with them in mind, your efforts will be successful no matter what events and circumstances befall you. I believe this because at the deepest level your task is to build upon the communal confidence, love, and hope that has elected you. What you actually are is the unity of this confidence as it rises up to throw off the fear of the Other that has been inherited from prior generations—or more precisely you are the democratically elected leader of this confidence. And you and we together are its unity as it tries to rise up and throw off the fear of the Other that has thus far undermined its full manifestation. Half the responsibility for that future embodiment of love is yours and the other half is ours, is mine. I hope we are beginning a new chapter in seeking to move each other toward that good end.