How are we to understand the malaise, the feelings not only of disappointment but also of disinterest, depoliticization and even hopelessness that the Obama Presidency has brought in its wake? The “liberal” supporters of Obama, such as David Remnick, Hendrick Herzberg or Jonathan Alter give us two contradictory explanations. On the one hand, the campaign raised too-high expectations, there was bound to be a let down. On the other hand, they also tell us that Obama has been a spectacularly successful President, “delivering” health care, financial reform, and saving us from a Great Depression. In either case “we” – the disappointed Obama supporters, in a word, the left – are subtly reproached for our immaturity, our lack of realism; their’s is a sort of: “thank-you-very-much-for-your-help-in-the-campaign-but-lets-leave-things-to-the-grown-ups-until-the-next-campaign” approach.

There is a deeper way to understand the Obama malaise, however, one that frees us from focusing on the man, and helps us to see our society. That way is to situate the campaign, and the Presidency, historically. In this regard no context is more important than the one that remains the deepest, most important and most unmastered part of our collective history and imagination – the 1960s. For the Obama Presidency was inconceivable without the sixties, and it is precisely the sixties that Obama has repudiated.

Let us start with this: electing a black President in a country founded in slavery, and still segregated a few decades ago is a miracle, and anything that has a whiff of the miraculous about it descends from the sixties, because that is what the sixties meant – the ability to re-imagine society, to open infinitely new possibilities, in the context of the stasis of cold war Eisenhower America. Obama’s election also echoed the sixties in that he was able to displace Hillary Clinton, the wife of the man who claimed to finally put the sixties to rest by “reaching out” to the bubbas, casting out the Sister Souljahs from the party (all the while acting out in public a seventies style marital drama involving sexual intrigues and husband-wife power struggles). The very vagueness and generality of Obama’s campaign slogans – “hope” “change” – echoes the sixties refusal to produce a limited “program” since then as in 2008 the core insight was that EVERYTHING had to change. Perhaps most importantly, Obama’s refusal to allow himself to be defined in terms of his race or skin color echoes the sixties, since the main thrust of sixties politics was to disidentify with one’s social group, in other words not to come into politics as a worker, or a woman, or a Jew, but rather to discover in the course of struggle deeper levels of solidarity than those permitted by the official classifications.

I doubt that Axelrod and the other figures who designed the Obama campaign knew how much of the image they were creating they owed to the sixties militants and activists. On the contrary as creative people – advertising men – they dug deep down into their unconscious and came up with images and slogans that corresponded to American’s deep longing for change. But it was nothing but a sales job. For everything that Obama has stood for since his campaign is exactly what the sixties is against. What are these things?

First, the primacy of the economic. The idea that our economy is something that we measure statistically rather than a set of obligations that we have to one another. Second, the reliance on experts. The framing of health care in terms of “results-oriented” research which will supposedly improve health care as it cuts costs, whereas anyone who remembers the sixties knows that the way to improve health care is to empower doctors, nurses, paraprofessionals and to go up against insurance companies, drug companies, food industries, and polluters. Third, the militarism: the big lie that insists that America is a victim whereas America spreads violence like a flame thrower everywhere that weak regimes cannot protect themselves. Finally, the calls for “patience,” the likening of social change to the turning of a great tanker, the absurd promises of a transformative Presidency in the second term, the condescension toward the hopeful young people and older leftists who brought the Presidency into existence.

The Obama Presidency, then, shows us both that the ideas of the 1960s, and especially its spirit, are not – as Obama so often tells us – “outmoded ideologies.” And it equally tells us that the “new” reign of experts and managers and economists that Obama believes in is as empty now as it was in 1960. If we see both sides of this contradiction, we can see past Obama and overcome our malaise.


Bookmark and Share