The view from the back row + The Real Obama
Journalist and photographer Chris Arnade discusses a country divided by meaning, morality, education, and economics.
In 2016, pundits speculated endlessly on that mysterious place called Trump Country. To many in the Beltway, much of America was a foreign country, to be analyzed statistically rather than in person. Chris Arnade, on the other hand, was determined to escape his coastal bubble. Arnade got into his old van, and has spent the last several years traveling hundreds of thousands of miles, interviewing people all over the country, discovering their joys, sorrows, discontents, and aspirations. In the process he has produced a set of photographs and stories, depicting the everyday Americans who are left out of the media’s understandings of the country, and who feel left out of the 21st century economy. Arnade spoke to Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson about what he has learned in his travels.
NR: You’ve traveled over 100,000 miles across America talking to people from all stripes of life. What are some of the misconceptions that people have about the country they live in? What are some things people think they know about America that are totally wrong?
CA: Everyone knows we’re a divided country, but I don’t think people understand exactly how deep that division is, and what the true nature of it is. I was a banker for 20 years. I lived in Brooklyn Heights, I sent my kids to private school. I was paid well; I had a Ph.D. in physics. I was kind of the New York neoliberal elite who valued science, valued rationality. And that elite built a world over the last 30 years that is massively unequal. I think everybody knows statistically that we have massive wealth inequality and continued racial inequality. But we kind of pat ourselves on the back and say we’re an egalitarian society in other ways. We’ve given equal legal status to gender, sexuality, and race. And so we kind of think we’ve addressed many of the issues. But when you go out in the country, you realize that we’re massively unequal, and we’re unequal beyond economics. We’re unequal in terms of the way we live, how we choose to live, unequal in our valuation framework, what we view as moral, what we view as right and wrong, what we view as the goals. And beyond the obvious racial differences, which are huge-I spent, as much time in poor minority neighborhoods as I did in poor white working class neighborhoods-the most salient division I see beyond race is education.
NR: Yes, you’ve described this framework for thinking about educational inequality, what you call the “front row kids” versus the “back row kids.” The kids who did well in school and advanced to the top of the economic ranks, and the kids who were sort of left behind, and the differences that creates in their worldview. Could you talk a little bit about that framework and what that division in worldview really is?
CA: Right, the front row kids and the back row kids. Now within that there are some divisions and complexities obviously. But the most salient thing about it is that it’s not about political party. It’s non-partisan. “Front row kids” means both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. The front row is anybody who comes from an elite school, Princeton, Harvard, the Ivies or has a postgraduate degree, Ph.D. They’re mobile, global, and well-educated. Their primary social network is via college and career. That’s how they define themselves, through their job. And within that world intellect is primary. They view the world through a framework of numbers and rational arguments. Faith is irrational, and they see themselves as beyond gender. You can describe this using other frameworks, like “the Acela corridor” types.
On the Democratic side, you can think of the Matt Yglesias types in the media, these kinds of global technocrats, policy wonks. Their framework is: “Give me a problem and I’ll devise a maximally optimal solution using my data.” Most importantly, though, they view their lives as having been better than their parents, and they think their children’s lives will be better than their own. And for them, that’s still true.
The front row kids have won. They’re in charge of things. They are the donor class in politics, they’re the analysts and specialists who scream every time someone has a policy difference they disagree with. “You can’t do X, you’re going to cause a global world war.” Or “You can’t get rid of NAFTA,” “you can’t do Brexit.”
NR: What about the “back row kids,” then? What is that segment of society, and what is the difference in its worldview?
CA: It encompasses a lot of types of people, but it’s defined by its difference with the front row. It’s not just the “white working class,” it includes minorities, black kids who are stuck in east Buffalo or central Cleveland or Bronx in New York. Mostly they don’t have an education beyond high school degree and if they do it’s kind of cobbled together through trade schools and community colleges and smaller state schools. Their primary social network is via institutions beyond work such as family. And their community is defined geographically, meaning they generally don’t leave where they grew up. They might leave for 5-6 years to go to the military, take jobs that bring them to Alaska for a few years, but they’ll come back.
And they have different kinds of worldviews and values. They find meaning and morality through faith, which is also a form of community. And if you read the work of [Harvard sociologist] Michèle Lamont, she writes about the ethos of the decency of hard work. It’s the idea that you don’t necessarily use your brain to advance, you use your strength and you use your commitment. You’re going to play by the rules, you’re going to break a few rocks, you’re going to work hard. It’s also, and here’s where I’ll sweep a lot under the rug, a kind of traditional view of race and gender.
This group of people views their life as worse than their parents, and they think their children’s lives will be worse than theirs. And that’s rational, from their perspective. After all, they’ve lost. Their kind of worldview has been devalued, because it’s the front row kids that have been in charge: the globalized, rational meritocracy versus the more traditional concepts of morality.
NR: You mention rationality. One of the things that seems to puzzle elites as they try to understand these other parts of society is that they feel the grievances there are genuinely irrational. From their perspective, free trade has been good for everybody, it’s made everybody better off than the alternative. And so they don’t understand these kinds of populist backlashes in the form of the support for Trump (or Bernie Sanders), because they feel like the rage and the desire to destroy the elite is a failure to recognize their own self-interest. After all, why would you vote for someone whose economic policies are irrational, or who, like Trump, might destroy the universe? It just doesn’t make sense. They don’t know why people hate experts, since experts have expertise, and expertise is good!
CA: Well, let me approach it this way. I think that when you talk about any group’s failings as being atavistic, because of laziness, because of weakness, because of some other failing, you’re doing it wrong as a progressive. So when we progressives look at poor minorities and, from a sociological perspective, the frustrations and deviances that are there, and when conservatives say “Hey, there’s more crime in black neighborhoods because they’re more violent” or “There’s higher unemployment because they’re lazier,” we liberals rightly push back. We say “Whoah, let’s look at the structural issues here. Let’s look at the structural racism that denies them access to jobs. Let’s look at the structural inequalities in the educational system which provide a harder route for them to leave.”
And I’d say you have to do that for all groups, instead of dismissing them as irrational. And that includes the white working class. You have to look at the context of what they’re facing. So from their perspective, knocking over the system probably makes sense because their worldview is being devalued. It’s being devalued monthly, has been devalued for 25 years.
Now, some of that devaluation I agree with; I believe the idea that you should get supremacy from being white and male should be devalued. But regardless of what you disagree with, that devaluation is happening. And they’re also being devalued economically. And then, even further, their whole worldview, their sense of place and meaning, is being eroded.
So let’s talk about NAFTA, you alluded to NAFTA and free trade. Mathematically it works, because the winners win more than the losers lose. So on a net basis, you say: “Hey look! The data says everybody wins.” There are three fundamental problems with that. One is that winners never share with the losers, that just doesn’t happen. Secondly, what you’re measuring is a very narrow framework of what’s valuable; you’re making the assumption that everybody wants more stuff, having more stuff is what meaning’s about. But the back row finds meaning through their connections, their community, through their structure. When they lose, they’ve lost everything. When the factories go, the town and community fall apart. Their churches hollow out. Their families start facing problems with drugs. So when your sense of meaning and place and valuation comes from your community, and your community gets eroded, that’s it. Game over.
NR: And this something quite real, it’s not an illusion, it’s not just on paper. You’ve traveled all over, and there really are communities like that, that have just been hollowed out. And you’ve extensively covered the drug epidemic.
CA: I didn’t get into this because I wanted to write about politics. I got into this because I was writing about drugs. And I always kind of glibly say that wherever I went to find drugs, I found hope leaving. And where I found hope leaving I saw Trump entering, if it was a white community. Drugs don’t just go into a place because people are lazy; drugs go into a place because drugs work and help. They’re a get-meaning-quick scheme. So is fascism, so is populism. Both these things give a sense of meaning. People use drugs because they think their life is stuck. It’s a form of suicide, and for them, it’s a way of finding some relief from something that seems like it’s not working. That they’re humiliated and devalued, and they want to find a way to fight back against that. And drugs are just one way to do that, with another way being fascism and populism.
NR: So the rise of Trump is definitely some kind of response to despair and hopelessness, then.
CA: Oh, hell yeah. But I would go even further. First, just because I say I’m not surprised this happened, doesn’t mean I’m justifying it. But what I’m saying is: if you want to put a recipe together to create populist fascist white identity politics, we’ve done it over the past 20-30 years. We’ve created a system that’s immensely unequal, created a ruling class, which is educated and uses their education to elevate themselves and demean anybody else. And we’ve rendered it not simply economic, but cultural as well. These divisions are massive. You can blindfold me and put me in any town in the United States and I can tell you within five minutes if it has a college in it or not.
There are these marches across the country that are taking place against Trump. And they’re great. I approve. I don’t like Trump. But there’s a meme that’s going around now that says: “Look it’s all across America. It’s even happening in Texas! And Arkansas! But it’s happening on a goddamn college campus in Texas and Arkansas. I spent a week and a half in two towns, Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, Michigan, separated by 35 miles. One has a college, one doesn’t. Which one do you think voted for Trump? First time they ever voted for a Republican.
To go back to the question of the rationale for being “irrational”: you have to put people, the way they think, in context. When people are faced with constraints, or when they view the world as having a different goal from themselves, from their perspective they make the right choices. So in my mind, voting for Trump, they felt like they had limited options. They’re backed into a corner, and they’re looking at the system that they feel like is devaluing them every year so they’re just going take a hammer and break it.
NR: Which is actually a kind of rational thing to do in that situation, given the set of values they hold.
CA: I even put it in mathematical terms for people, because I used to be a Ph.D. in math. I can give you the economic framework for it. If you look at their probability outcomes, their downside is limited, the upside is not limited. So you break the system, you want volatility.
Now you can ask the question, what about the black working class? Why aren’t they doing it? Well, there’s some huge differences there. One is the front row kids have made a very valiant attempt to elevate minority communities, and that’s great. I applaud that. So blacks, minorities know who butters their bread and they say, “Ok, I’m gonna go for that.” But in addition, if you look at this election, one of the things I wish I had written more about: I spent time in black working class neighborhoods, and I didn’t hear a lot of enthusiasm for Hillary. I heard a lot more distaste for Trump on college campuses than I did in poor black communities. They rendered their frustration, not by voting for Trump, it was by not voting. Or by a mute cynicism. They’ve been so, so eroded for such a long time that there has been pressure to just kind of throw their hands up, and give up on the political process. The black back row is frustrated, but they’ve been frustrated for 80-100 years.
NR: So there’s class divide in non-white communities, too, and the front-row/back-row framework isn’t just about the white working class versus a kind of racially diverse elite. And perhaps the difference in expectations makes a difference to the amount of rage there is.
CA: And their lives are getting marginally better. Marginally. If you look at the rate of change, it’s going up from a very low base. In many cases, that’s what matters.
But if I had to kind of get one point across about the elite, it’s this: they speak a different language. They don’t know how different their worldview is. They have no clue. And it took me 3 ½ years to figure it out.
NR: You’ve suggested that that is actually going to prevent them from understanding when Trump is succeeding and failing, because what he does will send different messages to different groups of people.
CA: Yeah. So, for example, right now, this immigration action, from the measure of the front row, has been a disaster. But measured from the other valuation framework, not so much. He’s doing what he said he was going to do. The outrage is not shared everywhere. They like that Trump drives the media and the elites crazy. Trump is a genius at knowing how to find that gap and exploit it.
NR: There’s actually a quote from him where he says something like: “There are two audiences. There’s New York society bullshit, and I don’t care what they think because they’ve always hated me. And then there’s America, and America has always loved Donald Trump.” So that’s what he says.
CA: Think about this: what does he spend his life doing? He spends his life selling cheap meaning to people, people who feel meaningless or humiliated. The biggest buzzword I would use to describe what I’ve found in Trump country is “humiliation.” And a desire for pride.
NR: You wrote a piece suggesting that “respect” was the big thing that they all cited as wanting.
CA: At our core, everybody wants to feel valued as a part of something larger. And right now the front row has that. At least up until this election, they had that. They generally can look at their lives and say: “I’m an adjunct professor of Greek History at Bumblefuck University…” Uh, don’t use Bumblefuck.
NR: We can change it.
CA: At Cornell. Anyway, they have a source of pride. But that person has a lot more in common with a bond trader than a truck driver.
NR: Liberal professors definitely don’t think they have more in common with bond traders…
CA: Well, that’s my whole frustration. That was the revelation I had over the last 2½ years. You have to view it from a framework of valuation and morality. And also culture, it’s not about economics. You have to use the old framework of is something banal or sacred? Is it profane or is it sacred?
I often use my favorite example, which is McDonald’s. I grew up in a white working-class town, so for me, it’s kind of rediscovering what I already knew. But McDonald’s, which is viewed with contempt, is actually a center of community, it’s where people gather. McDonald’s is not a joke.
And actually, I can link this back to Trump and explain how he exploits this. Remember when he sends his VP to eat in Chili’s in Times Square? The front row kids went ballistic. Fast food is profane, it’s low culture, it’s banal. It’s without meaning. And they went insane. But viewed from the back row’s perspective, McDonald’s and Chili’s and Applebee’s and Wal-Marts are a central part of the community.
NR: I seem to remember there was a moment during the campaign when Trump said something like “Oh, Melania is a great cook, she makes the most wonderful meatloaf.” And then people said “That’s not being a chef! Anyone can make that.”
CA: He does that intentionally. Because he knows getting the front row to scream will cause them to do what they do when they get mad. They’ll use scorn and derision. They’ll mock. Because that’s what you do when you’re an educated person. To engage with someone, to even bother to argue with them is beneath you. So they mock. Look at Jon Stewart. Look at all the fucking Comedy Central people. You mock the opponent because to engage with them is beneath you. Now when you’re at the bottom, in the back row, your form of engagement is anger, is bitterness, is violence. Because the people above you refuse to engage, what are you going to do?
NR: Well, if you’re not mocking them you’re fact-checking them. That’s the other weapon.
CA: Right, because that’s your valuation framework. Let me give you another example. I was a banker. I liked TARP. For however many fucking years of my life, I supported TARP. I supported all the goddamn neoliberal acronyms: NAFTA, TARP, TPP, all of it. So I can have an argument with a macro person. I go into town to McDonald’s, because I hang out in churches and McDonald’s when I go into town. So if I go in there and I say “Well, TARP will help.” They’ll say, “Yeah, but why are you giving 20 billion dollars to Wall Street?” And I can say, “Well, actually, the money was used to buy assets, and the assets increased in value, and then we got paid back.” And they’d say: “Well, what the fuck? Look at that factory over there: that’s been, kind of sitting there.” And you look out the window and there’s a factory that’s all rusted and boarded up. “That used to employ lots of people. Where was our bailout?” And you have those conversations 30 times and you say: “Maybe I should stop saying ‘Well, actually.’” Maybe I should listen. It’s always a “Well, actually.” And these are clever arguments, but ultimately they just benefit you.
NR: That’s how I feel about a lot of these arguments for why things like the TPP benefit people in the statistical aggregate. Because even if that’s the case, you’re still not really granting people their humanity, because you’re treating them as numbers on a balance sheet, and you’re the one who is in charge of moving the numbers around and doing what’s best for them, and you don’t care if they understand, they’re just supposed to be grateful.
CA: Again, you’re judging things within a framework that benefits you, a data framework. This mentality says: “We want data geeks. We’re rational people, so we want to do two things: We want to maximize GDP, and we want to do it efficiently.” That’s the neoliberal mantra, which is Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton. And when you take that worldview, and you take that framework, the natural thing to do is to hand that power to businesses, to deregulate, because that’s how you can maximize GDP and be most efficient. Let’s give industry whatever it wants. And you maximize GDP but you steamroll everything in the process, forgetting about the consequences. Forgetting that that may not be what everybody wants. People don’t just necessarily want uber-efficiency and more stuff. They might think meaning comes from having a community, having a network. Being valued, not just having 5 iPods, but having one iPod and four friends!
NR: I saw something similar in the way some Democrats were frustrated that people didn’t appreciate Obamacare enough. “You’ve all been made better off, I don’t see why you’re upset.” But if it’s complicated to use, and it’s policy being made from afar, and people aren’t being engaged in politics or included, they can get better off in the narrow statistical aggregate, and still not appreciate it, for a very rational reason.
CA: One thing elites don’t get about the working class-and there are differences, but in the aggregate-is that they don’t want handouts from above. They would much rather have good jobs than handouts. And both conservatives and liberals have misused this notion. But it’s true that people want things that give them a role, that respect them. Obamacare is complicated. It did get a bad rap, because this tribal division in the U.S. means things can get knocked just because they have the wrong label attached. But I’m on Obamacare, and it’s a nightmare to use. I can’t tell you how much I just want to kill myself every time I have engage with it. It’s not easy to use.
NR: I think about the difference between the way that policies look on paper, versus the way that people actually experience them. One of the major problem with a kind of technocratic attitude is that it’s not sympathetic to the real-life frustrations that people have, because these are often things that are never going to show up in the numbers. So unemployment rates might be going down, and that’s great, but the kind of jobs there are might be qualitatively worse.
Anyway, your writings are not particularly hopeful about the prospects for the divide. And post-election, you don’t seem to have much hope that the media is going to help. Their realization seems to have been “Oh, we should have visited more parts of the country,” but there’s not really a change in how well they understand people different from them, just a sort of recognition that there is another America and it’s powerful and angry. And so you don’t think the front row has much hope.
CA: Nope, not much, and also, just to make this clear, I don’t have much hope the back row is going to understand the front row either. It’s a two-way street. I happen to believe the front row is in power so there’s more of an obligation for them to understand the back row. Although currently, the back row has gained power for a short period here.
NR: Well, they’ve sort of gained power. They elected Trump, but Trump isn’t exactly “back row.” I mean, elite Democrats are furious. But all the people that Trump appoints, and all the people that are going to be running the country, they’re not necessarily people from the angry working class.
CA: I do think he is going to burn the very people that voted for him, not so much because he doesn’t have intentions of working for them as because he’s just incompetent himself. But I also disagree because, despite the people that he has around him, I think his overall arc is towards his supporters’ valuation framework more than it is towards the front row valuation framework. I just think he’s personally corrupt, and he’s incompetent, and he’ll get taken advantage of by the people around him.
NR: Also he doesn’t actually care about people.
CA: Oh no, he doesn’t. I mean, this whole thing is just another scam. He’s been doing that all his life. But he’s certainly not helping the front row with his policies, and he has no intention of doing that. He may help his buddies, some front row people might be smart enough to glom onto him and sell out and be corrupt. But overall 8 years of a Trump administration is not going to do the front row well. It will do the back row better than the front row, I would speculate, if he wasn’t incompetent.
But I think ultimately the division we have is close to unsolvable. There’s no policy that’s going to address it, because I think it is so social and cultural. It requires almost a national kumbaya, the front row going back and living in different communities and opening their mind, and it requires the back row to drop a little bit of their anger. I just don’t see that happening in either case.
NR: Well, we’ll leave it on that somewhat hopeless, discouraging note.
CA: I hope that wasn’t too negative.
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What the president does in retirement will reveal his true self…
The best thing about being an ex-president is that you can do whatever you want. Do you want to retire to the countryside to build henhouses and tootle around in your amphibious car? You can do that. Do you want to teach Sunday school and build houses for poor people, and maybe broker an occasional international peace agreement? You can do that also. Do you want to spend your days painting pictures of your dogs, your feet, and the soldiers you caused to be maimed? It’s an option! The retirement activities of presidents offer useful insights into their natures, because they are finally freed of all political constraints on their action. At liberty to pursue activities of their choosing, we get a sense for what they actually enjoy, and who they actually are.
During his two terms in office, Barack Obama’s most zealous devotees tended to explain away apparent failures or complacencies by referring to the constraints high office places on anyone who ascends to it. Even some critics on the left may have suspected that the deeds of Obama’s administration were out of sync with his natural instincts, that Obama was a man of high conscience weighed down or blunted by Washington’s leviathan bureaucracy, or frustrated by the exigencies of an unstable world.
Obama’s retirement should therefore finally give us meaningful insight into who he really is or, to put it another way, who he has been all along. The albatross of office finally lifted from his neck, America’s 44th president is now free to do anything and everything he desires without impediment. He can be the person he has always wanted to be, the person whom he has had to keep hidden away. Who, then, is the real Obama?
Well, it turns out the real Obama is quite like the one we knew already. And what he most wants to do is nestle himself cozily within the bosom of the global elite, and earn millions from behind a thinly-veiled philanthropic facade.
In January, Obama launched his post-presidential foundation with a board that consists of private equity executives, lobbyists, and an Uber advisor, tasking it to implement the world’s most meaningless mandate (“to inspire people globally to show up for the most important office in any democracy, that of citizen”). Able to choose his friends from out of anyone in the world, Obama has been seen kitesurfing with venture capital magnate Richard Branson (worth more than $5 billion) and brunching with Bono. (You can usually judge a person pretty well by their friends, and nobody who voluntarily spends his free time with Bono should be trusted.)
Obama’s recent forays into politics have also confirmed him as a friend to the elite. He used his last weeks in office to personally help derail the candidacy of left-wing congressman Keith Ellison for DNC chair. After Ellison became an early favorite in the race, Obama used his influence to recruit and boost the more centrist and less controversial Tom Perez, who won after a series of vile smears were launched against Ellison by influential party donors.
Obama also extended his influence overseas. Ahead of the first round of voting, he effectively endorsed French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker who “wants to roll back state intervention in the economy, cut public-sector jobs, and reduce taxes on business and the ultra-rich.” (Macron also once responded to a union worker who needled him over his fancy suits by declaring that fancy suits accrue to those who work the hardest, an assertion that is manifestly false.)
Then there were the speeches. In December, conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan, asked what Obama should do with his post-presidency, had jokingly pleaded: “No speeches at Goldman Sachs, please.” After all, Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street speeches had become the ultimate symbol of Democratic hypocrisy, a clear demonstration of how those who profess to oppose inequality will happily reap financial benefits from it. For Sullivan, it was laughable to think that a man like Obama, who maintained a public image characterized by modesty and personal integrity, would instantly lapse into the tawdry and unscrupulous Clinton practice of cashing in.
But then Obama cashed in. Mere weeks after leaving 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue he signed on with the Harry Walker Agency (the very same outfit through which the Clintons have jointly pocketed a virtually incomprehensible $158 million on the speaker’s circuit). It was then revealed that he had been paid a whopping $400,000 fee by Cantor Fitzgerald - a bond firm which deals in credit default swaps, the inscrutable instruments of financial alchemy that helped cause the 2008 financial meltdown. (After that came news of another $400,000 speaking fee.)
At the first sign of backlash against Obama’s pursuit of riches, media and political elites unleashed a torrent of toadyism in his defense.After expressing faint concern about Obama’s speaking fees, Amanda Marcotte chastised “people who’ve never had money worries” for casting judgement on “those who have,” elsewhere complaining: “The obsession with speaking fees is politics version of begrudging athlete salaries while ignoring owner profits” (an analogy that only holds up if Obama literally works for Wall Street). The Boston Globe’s Michael Cohen added: “If someone wants to pay Barack Obama $400,000 to give a speech I can’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t take it…Obama is not doing anything wrong. He’s giving a speech. Nothing to apologize for.” It seemed that American liberalism’s eight year journey from “Change We Can Believe In” to “Everybody Grifts…” was finally complete. (There is a fun game one can play with ideologically-committed Democrats that we might call “Rationalize That Injustice.” See if there are any right-wing policies that they won’t justify if told that Obama did them.)
Certain defenses of Obama opted for an explicitly racial framework. The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah exclaimed “So the first black president must also be the first one to not take money afterwards? Fuck that, and fuck you!” April Reign, creator of the viral hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, equated Obama’s critics with defenders of the slave trade. Attorney Imani Gandy, who litigated foreclosure cases on behalf of J.P. Morgan before becoming a prominent social justice activist on Twitter, seized upon the controversy to call antipathy towards Wall Street “the whitest shit I’ve ever heard.” This particular line of argumentation almost defied credulity, especially since critics of Obama’s speaking fees were simply extending a criticism originally applied to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
But while certain rationalizations of Obama’s conduct have ventured into burlesque satire, it is worth taking Michael Cohen’s question seriously: what’s so wrong with Obama doing a speech for money? He speaks, they pay, nobody gets hurt. What’s the actual harm? Since Obama isn’t actually in a position to give Wall Street any political favors, and since he’s a private citizen, why should it matter? Indeed, Debbie Wasserman Schultz told those who might be upset by the speech to “mind their own business.”
Well, first, there are some basic issues of personal ethics involved in post-presidential buckraking. There is something tawdry about immediately leaving office to go and make piles of money in any way you can, and it’s a short hop from doing your inspirational speaking schtick for corporate events to doing it in television commercials or at birthday parties for investment bankers’ teenage children. That’s why Harry Truman famously refused to serve on corporate boards, declaring that doing so would be undignified. (“I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency.”) And those who think Obama is being held to an impossible standard (that impossible “do good things rather than simply lucrative things” standard) should remember that Jimmy Carter has spent a productive and comparatively modest retirement writing, campaigning for the basic dignity of Palestinians, and quite regularly intervening to criticize American policy at home and abroad.
Some have said that as a “private citizen,” Obama’s choices of how to make money should be beyond moral scrutiny. But it’s private citizens who could use a lot more moral scrutiny. Obama’s choosing to become a mansion-dwelling millionaire is not wrong because he used to be the president, but because being exorbitantly rich in a time of great global poverty is heinously immoral. Moreover it defies credulity to suggest, as some have in earnest, that Obama needs to take money from this particular source. He is already guaranteed a lavish annual pension of more than $200,000 in addition to expenses and almost $400,000 in further pension money accrued from his time as an Illinois State Senator. He and the former First Lady have just signed the most sumptuous post-presidential book deal in history (worth $65 million, or almost 1500 times the median personal income) and will assuredly spend the next several decades enjoying a standard of material comfort few Americans have ever known, Wall Street speaking fees notwithstanding.
Finally, there’s the political hypocrisy. On the very same day as the infamous speech, Obama was elsewhere decrying the pernicious political influence of wealth, somberly declaring that “because of money and politics, special interests dominate the debates in Washington in ways that don’t match up with what the broad majority of Americans feel.” Obama’s public posture has always been that he resents the political influence of special interests and financial elites, yet as both a political candidate and a private citizen they have showered him with money he has been only too happy to accept.
Yet Michael Cohen is also partially right: the speech itself is not actually terribly important. It’s a mistake to focus on the personal ethics of Obama’s actual decision, and if we frame the relevant question as “Should Obama have taken the money?” then it’s easy to lapse into something of a shrug. So the guy wants to get rich. Fine. He’s no worse than every other member of the 1%. They’re all indefensible, and as long as nobody continues to maintain the illusion that Obama is any different from any other politician, there’s no reason to single him out as uniquely wicked. (One suspects, however, that some people do still maintain the illusion that Obama is different from other wealthy denizens of the political class.)
The most important aspect of the story is not that Obama accepted Cantor Fitzgerald’s offer, but that the offer was made in the first place. Indeed, it’s hard to escape the impression that certain powerful interests are now rewarding the former president with a gracious thanks for a job well done. Rather than asking whether Obama should have turned down the gig, we can ask: if his administration had taken aggressive legal and regulatory action against Wall Street firms following the financial crisis, would they be clamouring for him to speak and offering lucrative compensation mere weeks after his leaving office? It’s hard to think they would, and if a Democratic president has done their job properly, nobody on Wall Street should want to pay them a red cent in retirement. Obama’s decision to take Cantor Fitzgerald’s cash isn’t, therefore, some pivotal moment in which he betrayed his principles in the pursuit of lucre. It’s simply additional confirmation he has never posed a serious challenge to Wall Street’s outsized economic power.
In fact, we’ve known that for as long as we’ve known Obama. He was popular on Wall Street back when he first ran for president. According to Politico, he “raised more money from Wall Street through the Democratic National Committee and his campaign account than any politician in American history,” and in just one year “raked in more cash from bank employees, hedge fund managers and financial services companies than all Republican candidates combined.”
Serious economic progressives did not become disillusioned with Obama when he accepted $400,000 for a speech, but when he arrived in office at the apex of the financial crisis and immediately stuffed his cabinet and advisory team with a coterie of alumni from Goldman Sachs (a top donor to this campaign in 2008). At the height of the worst financial catastrophe since the Great Depression, during a time of unique (and completely warranted) antipathy towards rapacious corporate interests, Obama had been elected with the single greatest mandate to implement sweeping change in recent political history. Given the same extraordinary kind of political demand, FDR took the opportunity to proclaim that “The old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering…they are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred.”
But when Obama was faced with a similar moment of calamity and possibility, he opted instead for the avenues of brokerage and appeasement. He chose not to push for criminal prosecutions of financial executives whose greed and negligence caused the 2008 economic crash. In 1999, Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, had proposed the concept of “collateral consequences” (colloquially known as “too big to jail”), whereby “the state could pursue non-criminal alternatives for companies if they believed prosecuting them might result in too much ‘collateral’ damage” to the economy. Thus, when banking giant HSBC was revealed to be laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and groups linked to al-Qaeda, Obama’s Justice Department allowed the bank to escape with a fine and no criminal charges, on the grounds that a prosecution might damage HSBC too much and have wider effects on the economy. Top prosecutors had evidence of serious wrongdoing by HSBC, but Holder prevented them from proceeding. A report prepared for the House Financial Services Committee concluded that Holder “overruled an internal recommendation by DOJ’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section to prosecute HSBC because of DOJ leadership’s concern that prosecuting the bank would have serious adverse consequences on the financial system.” Yet Holder later falsely suggested that the decision was made by the prosecutors rather than himself. (“Do you think that these very aggressive US attorneys I was proud to serve with would have not brought these cases if they had the ability?”) One should note just how unjust the “collateral consequences” idea is: it explicitly creates separate systems of justice for rich and poor, because there will always be more economic consequences to prosecuting major banking institutions than individual poor people. The same crime will therefore carry two different sets of consequences depending on how much you matter to the economy.
Holder also institutionalized the practice of extrajudicial settlements, under which “there was no longer any opportunity for judges or anyone else to check the power of the executive branch to hand out financial indulgences” to corporate offenders. Thus even as guilty pleas were extracted from banks and financiers for crimes ranging from fraud, manipulation, and bribery to money laundering and tax evasion, not a single malefactor from Wall Street ended up behind bars. (Meanwhile, America’s prisons remained full of less economically consequential people who had been convicted of the same crimes.)
Obama’s politics were the same when it came to policy-making. After several years of sustained corporate pushback, aided by both the White House and Congress, the much-touted Dodd-Frank law was whittled down to the status of a mild and extremely tenuous reform. A similar pattern inflected Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the now-precarious Affordable Care Act. While undoubtedly improving on the horrific status quo in American health care, Obamacare was notably soft on the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, both of which were extensively consulted during its composition. Far from being the Stalinist caricature of Tea Party fever dreams, Obamacare was based on plan put in place by a Republican governor and sketched out by the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s. No matter how much the American right may distort the record, Obamacare was essentially a massive corporate giveaway (after all, it mandated that millions of people become new insurance customers), and it manifestly failed to tackle the crux of the problem with US healthcare, which is that market actors are involved in the provision of health insurance to begin with. Obama arguably had the votes to create a public option that would have ameliorated matters somewhat, even without his having made any serious attempt at exerting political pressure in favor of one. But instead, he opted to needlessly compromise with the very corporate actors who stand between Americans and the guarantee of healthcare as a right.
This consistently pro-business approach has ensured that Obama isn’t the only administration official that corporate America has showered with gratitude. For plenty of Obama’s top lieutenants, the revolving door between Wall Street and the corridors of the US government has kept spinning continuously. David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and former senior advisor, now works for Uber. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is executive vice-president at McDonalds, lobbying hard against raising the minimum wage. Eric Holder, who had left the white-collar defense outfit Covington & Burling to become attorney general, returned in 2015 to once again represent many of the same banks and financial firms he had ostensibly been charged with regulating and prosecuting while in office. (Covington had literally been keeping Holder’s office waiting for him. “This is home for me,” Holder said of the corporate firm.) And having presided over massive bailouts during his tenure running the US Treasury, Timothy Geithner headed to Wall Street to take up a lucrative gig at private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
This is why Matthew Yglesias was wrong to characterize Barack Obama’s speaking fee as a betrayal of “everything [he] believes in.” In fact, it was the exact opposite: totally consistent with everything he has always stood for. The point isn’t that he’s “sold out.” It’s that, when the soaring cadences and luminous rhetoric are stripped away, Obama never offered any transformative change to begin with. Thus his $400,000 speech matters, not because it represents a deviation from the norm, or a venal lapse in personal ethics, but because it conveniently demonstrates a pattern that has been there all along.
In the Obama presidency, many liberals found the embodiment of their political ideal: an administration of capable, apparently well-intentioned people with impeccable Ivy League credentials, fronted by a person of undeniable charisma and charm, and with a beautiful and photogenic family to boot.
But examining Obama seriously requires acknowledging the fundamental limits of his brand of politics: a liberalism that continues to trade in the language of social concern while remaining invested in the very institutions undergirding the poverty and injustice it tells us it exists to fight; see, e.g., the upper-middle-class liberals who decry educational inequities while sending their own children to private schools. Like the Davos billionaires who “fret about inequality over vintage wine and canapés,” Obama denounces money in politics but can’t keep himself from taking it. And because he’s such a part of the very elite system whose effects he abhors, “Obamaism” was always destined to be a fundamentally empty and insincere philosophy.
Matt Taibbi issued a prescient assessment of Obama all the way back in 2007, when it was still unclear who would win the Democratic presidential primary:
“The Illinois Senator is the ultimate modern media creature-he’s a good-looking, youthful, smooth-talking, buttery-warm personality with an aw-shucks demeanor who exudes a seemingly impenetrable air of Harvard-crafted moral neutrality… His entire political persona is an ingeniously crafted human cipher, a man without race, ideology, geographic allegiances, or, indeed, sharp edges of any kind…[He appears] as a sort of ideological Universalist, one who spends a great deal of rhetorical energy showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view…His political ideal is basically a rehash of the Blair-Clinton “third way” deal, an amalgam of Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and the New Deal; he is aiming for the middle of the middle of the middle….In short, Obama is a creature perfectly in tune with the awesome corporate strivings of Hollywood, Madison avenue and the Beltway-he tries, and often succeeds, at selling a politics of seeking out the very center of where we already are, the very couch where we’ve been sitting all this time, as an exciting, revolutionary journey into the unknown.”
The real tragedy of the Obama story is that in 2008, millions of desperate Americans cast votes for a presidential candidate they believed would fight for meaningful change. He successfully marketed “hope” and “change” to a country that was reeling from a horrific financial collapse (his 2008 presidential run even won a “Marketing Campaign of the Year” award from the ad industry, beating out Apple and Zappos). But beneath it all was no serious vision of change; the grand speeches, paid and unpaid, turn out to contain little more than well-crafted platitudes. (Christopher Hitchens once pointed out that while everyone considered Obama a powerful and memorable speaker, nobody could ever seem to remember a single specific line from any of his orations, a good sign he’d in fact said nothing at all.) And as Obama biographer David Garrow concludes, “while the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core.”
But Obama’s weaknesses are not the product of some unique personal pathology. He is simply the most charismatic and successful practitioner of an ideology shared by many contemporary Democrats: a kind of Beltway liberalism that sacrifices nearly all real political ambition, espousing a rhetoric of compassion and transformation while rationalizing every form of amorality and capitulation as a pragmatic necessity. In a moment when militancy and moral urgency are needed most, it seeks only innocuous, technocratic change and claims with the smuggest certitude that this represents the best grown adults can aspire to. In a world of spiralling inequality and ascendant corporate tyranny, it insists on weighting equally the interests of all sides and deems the result a respectable democratic consensus. Bearing witness to entrenched human misery, it wryly declares it was ever thus and delights in lazily dismissing critics with scornful refrains like “That will never get through Congress…” Confronted with risk or danger, it willingly retreats to ever more conservative ground and calls the sum total of these maneuvers “incrementalism.” In place of a coherent vision or a clear program of reform, the best it can offer is the hollow sensation of progress stripped of all its necessary conflicts and their corresponding discomforts.
On could see, in the defenses of Obama’s Wall Street speech, just how far this ideology narrows our sense of the possible: it tells us it is unrealistic and unfair to conceive of a president who does not shamelessly use the office to enrich himself. What passes for pragmatism is in fact the most dispiriting kind of capitalist pessimism: this is your world, you’re stuck with it, and it’s madness to dream of anything better. There Is No Alternative.
We can almost respect Hillary Clinton for embracing this idea openly, and barely even pretending to represent our most elevated selves rather than our most acquisitive ones. The cruelty Obama perpetrated was to encourage people to believe in something better, then give them nothing but a stylized status quo. At least now that he’s windsurfing with billionaires and doing the Wall Street speaking tour, there’s no longer any reason to keep believing that underneath it all, he was a true idealist whose innermost desires were thwarted by crushing political realities. All along, his innermost desire was to meet Bono over eggs benedict.
The Obama of 2008 was to be this century’s FDR, signifying a moment of lasting realignment and transcendent progress - rather than one of growing alienation and despair culminating in the election of Donald Trump. But the liberalism of 21st century America, it turns out, is ill-equipped to achieve the transformative change it once so loftily promised: not because it made a noble attempt and failed but because it never really sought this change to begin with.
While Obama may not have been sincere, a great many of his voters were, and the millions who embraced his message revealed a genuine hunger for transformative change.
Now all we need is a political movement that actually seeks it out.
by CURRENT AFFAIRS | by LUKE SAVAGE & NATHAN J. ROBINSON
OP note: Insightful, interesting articles! Would recommend reading them.
In 2016, pundits speculated endlessly on that mysterious place called Trump Country. To many in the Beltway, much of America was a foreign country, to be analyzed statistically rather than in person. Chris Arnade, on the other hand, was determined to escape his coastal bubble. Arnade got into his old van, and has spent the last several years traveling hundreds of thousands of miles, interviewing people all over the country, discovering their joys, sorrows, discontents, and aspirations. In the process he has produced a set of photographs and stories, depicting the everyday Americans who are left out of the media’s understandings of the country, and who feel left out of the 21st century economy. Arnade spoke to Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson about what he has learned in his travels.
NR: You’ve traveled over 100,000 miles across America talking to people from all stripes of life. What are some of the misconceptions that people have about the country they live in? What are some things people think they know about America that are totally wrong?
CA: Everyone knows we’re a divided country, but I don’t think people understand exactly how deep that division is, and what the true nature of it is. I was a banker for 20 years. I lived in Brooklyn Heights, I sent my kids to private school. I was paid well; I had a Ph.D. in physics. I was kind of the New York neoliberal elite who valued science, valued rationality. And that elite built a world over the last 30 years that is massively unequal. I think everybody knows statistically that we have massive wealth inequality and continued racial inequality. But we kind of pat ourselves on the back and say we’re an egalitarian society in other ways. We’ve given equal legal status to gender, sexuality, and race. And so we kind of think we’ve addressed many of the issues. But when you go out in the country, you realize that we’re massively unequal, and we’re unequal beyond economics. We’re unequal in terms of the way we live, how we choose to live, unequal in our valuation framework, what we view as moral, what we view as right and wrong, what we view as the goals. And beyond the obvious racial differences, which are huge-I spent, as much time in poor minority neighborhoods as I did in poor white working class neighborhoods-the most salient division I see beyond race is education.
NR: Yes, you’ve described this framework for thinking about educational inequality, what you call the “front row kids” versus the “back row kids.” The kids who did well in school and advanced to the top of the economic ranks, and the kids who were sort of left behind, and the differences that creates in their worldview. Could you talk a little bit about that framework and what that division in worldview really is?
CA: Right, the front row kids and the back row kids. Now within that there are some divisions and complexities obviously. But the most salient thing about it is that it’s not about political party. It’s non-partisan. “Front row kids” means both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. The front row is anybody who comes from an elite school, Princeton, Harvard, the Ivies or has a postgraduate degree, Ph.D. They’re mobile, global, and well-educated. Their primary social network is via college and career. That’s how they define themselves, through their job. And within that world intellect is primary. They view the world through a framework of numbers and rational arguments. Faith is irrational, and they see themselves as beyond gender. You can describe this using other frameworks, like “the Acela corridor” types.
On the Democratic side, you can think of the Matt Yglesias types in the media, these kinds of global technocrats, policy wonks. Their framework is: “Give me a problem and I’ll devise a maximally optimal solution using my data.” Most importantly, though, they view their lives as having been better than their parents, and they think their children’s lives will be better than their own. And for them, that’s still true.
The front row kids have won. They’re in charge of things. They are the donor class in politics, they’re the analysts and specialists who scream every time someone has a policy difference they disagree with. “You can’t do X, you’re going to cause a global world war.” Or “You can’t get rid of NAFTA,” “you can’t do Brexit.”
NR: What about the “back row kids,” then? What is that segment of society, and what is the difference in its worldview?
CA: It encompasses a lot of types of people, but it’s defined by its difference with the front row. It’s not just the “white working class,” it includes minorities, black kids who are stuck in east Buffalo or central Cleveland or Bronx in New York. Mostly they don’t have an education beyond high school degree and if they do it’s kind of cobbled together through trade schools and community colleges and smaller state schools. Their primary social network is via institutions beyond work such as family. And their community is defined geographically, meaning they generally don’t leave where they grew up. They might leave for 5-6 years to go to the military, take jobs that bring them to Alaska for a few years, but they’ll come back.
And they have different kinds of worldviews and values. They find meaning and morality through faith, which is also a form of community. And if you read the work of [Harvard sociologist] Michèle Lamont, she writes about the ethos of the decency of hard work. It’s the idea that you don’t necessarily use your brain to advance, you use your strength and you use your commitment. You’re going to play by the rules, you’re going to break a few rocks, you’re going to work hard. It’s also, and here’s where I’ll sweep a lot under the rug, a kind of traditional view of race and gender.
This group of people views their life as worse than their parents, and they think their children’s lives will be worse than theirs. And that’s rational, from their perspective. After all, they’ve lost. Their kind of worldview has been devalued, because it’s the front row kids that have been in charge: the globalized, rational meritocracy versus the more traditional concepts of morality.
NR: You mention rationality. One of the things that seems to puzzle elites as they try to understand these other parts of society is that they feel the grievances there are genuinely irrational. From their perspective, free trade has been good for everybody, it’s made everybody better off than the alternative. And so they don’t understand these kinds of populist backlashes in the form of the support for Trump (or Bernie Sanders), because they feel like the rage and the desire to destroy the elite is a failure to recognize their own self-interest. After all, why would you vote for someone whose economic policies are irrational, or who, like Trump, might destroy the universe? It just doesn’t make sense. They don’t know why people hate experts, since experts have expertise, and expertise is good!
CA: Well, let me approach it this way. I think that when you talk about any group’s failings as being atavistic, because of laziness, because of weakness, because of some other failing, you’re doing it wrong as a progressive. So when we progressives look at poor minorities and, from a sociological perspective, the frustrations and deviances that are there, and when conservatives say “Hey, there’s more crime in black neighborhoods because they’re more violent” or “There’s higher unemployment because they’re lazier,” we liberals rightly push back. We say “Whoah, let’s look at the structural issues here. Let’s look at the structural racism that denies them access to jobs. Let’s look at the structural inequalities in the educational system which provide a harder route for them to leave.”
And I’d say you have to do that for all groups, instead of dismissing them as irrational. And that includes the white working class. You have to look at the context of what they’re facing. So from their perspective, knocking over the system probably makes sense because their worldview is being devalued. It’s being devalued monthly, has been devalued for 25 years.
Now, some of that devaluation I agree with; I believe the idea that you should get supremacy from being white and male should be devalued. But regardless of what you disagree with, that devaluation is happening. And they’re also being devalued economically. And then, even further, their whole worldview, their sense of place and meaning, is being eroded.
So let’s talk about NAFTA, you alluded to NAFTA and free trade. Mathematically it works, because the winners win more than the losers lose. So on a net basis, you say: “Hey look! The data says everybody wins.” There are three fundamental problems with that. One is that winners never share with the losers, that just doesn’t happen. Secondly, what you’re measuring is a very narrow framework of what’s valuable; you’re making the assumption that everybody wants more stuff, having more stuff is what meaning’s about. But the back row finds meaning through their connections, their community, through their structure. When they lose, they’ve lost everything. When the factories go, the town and community fall apart. Their churches hollow out. Their families start facing problems with drugs. So when your sense of meaning and place and valuation comes from your community, and your community gets eroded, that’s it. Game over.
NR: And this something quite real, it’s not an illusion, it’s not just on paper. You’ve traveled all over, and there really are communities like that, that have just been hollowed out. And you’ve extensively covered the drug epidemic.
CA: I didn’t get into this because I wanted to write about politics. I got into this because I was writing about drugs. And I always kind of glibly say that wherever I went to find drugs, I found hope leaving. And where I found hope leaving I saw Trump entering, if it was a white community. Drugs don’t just go into a place because people are lazy; drugs go into a place because drugs work and help. They’re a get-meaning-quick scheme. So is fascism, so is populism. Both these things give a sense of meaning. People use drugs because they think their life is stuck. It’s a form of suicide, and for them, it’s a way of finding some relief from something that seems like it’s not working. That they’re humiliated and devalued, and they want to find a way to fight back against that. And drugs are just one way to do that, with another way being fascism and populism.
NR: So the rise of Trump is definitely some kind of response to despair and hopelessness, then.
CA: Oh, hell yeah. But I would go even further. First, just because I say I’m not surprised this happened, doesn’t mean I’m justifying it. But what I’m saying is: if you want to put a recipe together to create populist fascist white identity politics, we’ve done it over the past 20-30 years. We’ve created a system that’s immensely unequal, created a ruling class, which is educated and uses their education to elevate themselves and demean anybody else. And we’ve rendered it not simply economic, but cultural as well. These divisions are massive. You can blindfold me and put me in any town in the United States and I can tell you within five minutes if it has a college in it or not.
There are these marches across the country that are taking place against Trump. And they’re great. I approve. I don’t like Trump. But there’s a meme that’s going around now that says: “Look it’s all across America. It’s even happening in Texas! And Arkansas! But it’s happening on a goddamn college campus in Texas and Arkansas. I spent a week and a half in two towns, Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, Michigan, separated by 35 miles. One has a college, one doesn’t. Which one do you think voted for Trump? First time they ever voted for a Republican.
To go back to the question of the rationale for being “irrational”: you have to put people, the way they think, in context. When people are faced with constraints, or when they view the world as having a different goal from themselves, from their perspective they make the right choices. So in my mind, voting for Trump, they felt like they had limited options. They’re backed into a corner, and they’re looking at the system that they feel like is devaluing them every year so they’re just going take a hammer and break it.
NR: Which is actually a kind of rational thing to do in that situation, given the set of values they hold.
CA: I even put it in mathematical terms for people, because I used to be a Ph.D. in math. I can give you the economic framework for it. If you look at their probability outcomes, their downside is limited, the upside is not limited. So you break the system, you want volatility.
Now you can ask the question, what about the black working class? Why aren’t they doing it? Well, there’s some huge differences there. One is the front row kids have made a very valiant attempt to elevate minority communities, and that’s great. I applaud that. So blacks, minorities know who butters their bread and they say, “Ok, I’m gonna go for that.” But in addition, if you look at this election, one of the things I wish I had written more about: I spent time in black working class neighborhoods, and I didn’t hear a lot of enthusiasm for Hillary. I heard a lot more distaste for Trump on college campuses than I did in poor black communities. They rendered their frustration, not by voting for Trump, it was by not voting. Or by a mute cynicism. They’ve been so, so eroded for such a long time that there has been pressure to just kind of throw their hands up, and give up on the political process. The black back row is frustrated, but they’ve been frustrated for 80-100 years.
NR: So there’s class divide in non-white communities, too, and the front-row/back-row framework isn’t just about the white working class versus a kind of racially diverse elite. And perhaps the difference in expectations makes a difference to the amount of rage there is.
CA: And their lives are getting marginally better. Marginally. If you look at the rate of change, it’s going up from a very low base. In many cases, that’s what matters.
But if I had to kind of get one point across about the elite, it’s this: they speak a different language. They don’t know how different their worldview is. They have no clue. And it took me 3 ½ years to figure it out.
NR: You’ve suggested that that is actually going to prevent them from understanding when Trump is succeeding and failing, because what he does will send different messages to different groups of people.
CA: Yeah. So, for example, right now, this immigration action, from the measure of the front row, has been a disaster. But measured from the other valuation framework, not so much. He’s doing what he said he was going to do. The outrage is not shared everywhere. They like that Trump drives the media and the elites crazy. Trump is a genius at knowing how to find that gap and exploit it.
NR: There’s actually a quote from him where he says something like: “There are two audiences. There’s New York society bullshit, and I don’t care what they think because they’ve always hated me. And then there’s America, and America has always loved Donald Trump.” So that’s what he says.
CA: Think about this: what does he spend his life doing? He spends his life selling cheap meaning to people, people who feel meaningless or humiliated. The biggest buzzword I would use to describe what I’ve found in Trump country is “humiliation.” And a desire for pride.
NR: You wrote a piece suggesting that “respect” was the big thing that they all cited as wanting.
CA: At our core, everybody wants to feel valued as a part of something larger. And right now the front row has that. At least up until this election, they had that. They generally can look at their lives and say: “I’m an adjunct professor of Greek History at Bumblefuck University…” Uh, don’t use Bumblefuck.
NR: We can change it.
CA: At Cornell. Anyway, they have a source of pride. But that person has a lot more in common with a bond trader than a truck driver.
NR: Liberal professors definitely don’t think they have more in common with bond traders…
CA: Well, that’s my whole frustration. That was the revelation I had over the last 2½ years. You have to view it from a framework of valuation and morality. And also culture, it’s not about economics. You have to use the old framework of is something banal or sacred? Is it profane or is it sacred?
I often use my favorite example, which is McDonald’s. I grew up in a white working-class town, so for me, it’s kind of rediscovering what I already knew. But McDonald’s, which is viewed with contempt, is actually a center of community, it’s where people gather. McDonald’s is not a joke.
And actually, I can link this back to Trump and explain how he exploits this. Remember when he sends his VP to eat in Chili’s in Times Square? The front row kids went ballistic. Fast food is profane, it’s low culture, it’s banal. It’s without meaning. And they went insane. But viewed from the back row’s perspective, McDonald’s and Chili’s and Applebee’s and Wal-Marts are a central part of the community.
NR: I seem to remember there was a moment during the campaign when Trump said something like “Oh, Melania is a great cook, she makes the most wonderful meatloaf.” And then people said “That’s not being a chef! Anyone can make that.”
CA: He does that intentionally. Because he knows getting the front row to scream will cause them to do what they do when they get mad. They’ll use scorn and derision. They’ll mock. Because that’s what you do when you’re an educated person. To engage with someone, to even bother to argue with them is beneath you. So they mock. Look at Jon Stewart. Look at all the fucking Comedy Central people. You mock the opponent because to engage with them is beneath you. Now when you’re at the bottom, in the back row, your form of engagement is anger, is bitterness, is violence. Because the people above you refuse to engage, what are you going to do?
NR: Well, if you’re not mocking them you’re fact-checking them. That’s the other weapon.
CA: Right, because that’s your valuation framework. Let me give you another example. I was a banker. I liked TARP. For however many fucking years of my life, I supported TARP. I supported all the goddamn neoliberal acronyms: NAFTA, TARP, TPP, all of it. So I can have an argument with a macro person. I go into town to McDonald’s, because I hang out in churches and McDonald’s when I go into town. So if I go in there and I say “Well, TARP will help.” They’ll say, “Yeah, but why are you giving 20 billion dollars to Wall Street?” And I can say, “Well, actually, the money was used to buy assets, and the assets increased in value, and then we got paid back.” And they’d say: “Well, what the fuck? Look at that factory over there: that’s been, kind of sitting there.” And you look out the window and there’s a factory that’s all rusted and boarded up. “That used to employ lots of people. Where was our bailout?” And you have those conversations 30 times and you say: “Maybe I should stop saying ‘Well, actually.’” Maybe I should listen. It’s always a “Well, actually.” And these are clever arguments, but ultimately they just benefit you.
NR: That’s how I feel about a lot of these arguments for why things like the TPP benefit people in the statistical aggregate. Because even if that’s the case, you’re still not really granting people their humanity, because you’re treating them as numbers on a balance sheet, and you’re the one who is in charge of moving the numbers around and doing what’s best for them, and you don’t care if they understand, they’re just supposed to be grateful.
CA: Again, you’re judging things within a framework that benefits you, a data framework. This mentality says: “We want data geeks. We’re rational people, so we want to do two things: We want to maximize GDP, and we want to do it efficiently.” That’s the neoliberal mantra, which is Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton. And when you take that worldview, and you take that framework, the natural thing to do is to hand that power to businesses, to deregulate, because that’s how you can maximize GDP and be most efficient. Let’s give industry whatever it wants. And you maximize GDP but you steamroll everything in the process, forgetting about the consequences. Forgetting that that may not be what everybody wants. People don’t just necessarily want uber-efficiency and more stuff. They might think meaning comes from having a community, having a network. Being valued, not just having 5 iPods, but having one iPod and four friends!
NR: I saw something similar in the way some Democrats were frustrated that people didn’t appreciate Obamacare enough. “You’ve all been made better off, I don’t see why you’re upset.” But if it’s complicated to use, and it’s policy being made from afar, and people aren’t being engaged in politics or included, they can get better off in the narrow statistical aggregate, and still not appreciate it, for a very rational reason.
CA: One thing elites don’t get about the working class-and there are differences, but in the aggregate-is that they don’t want handouts from above. They would much rather have good jobs than handouts. And both conservatives and liberals have misused this notion. But it’s true that people want things that give them a role, that respect them. Obamacare is complicated. It did get a bad rap, because this tribal division in the U.S. means things can get knocked just because they have the wrong label attached. But I’m on Obamacare, and it’s a nightmare to use. I can’t tell you how much I just want to kill myself every time I have engage with it. It’s not easy to use.
NR: I think about the difference between the way that policies look on paper, versus the way that people actually experience them. One of the major problem with a kind of technocratic attitude is that it’s not sympathetic to the real-life frustrations that people have, because these are often things that are never going to show up in the numbers. So unemployment rates might be going down, and that’s great, but the kind of jobs there are might be qualitatively worse.
Anyway, your writings are not particularly hopeful about the prospects for the divide. And post-election, you don’t seem to have much hope that the media is going to help. Their realization seems to have been “Oh, we should have visited more parts of the country,” but there’s not really a change in how well they understand people different from them, just a sort of recognition that there is another America and it’s powerful and angry. And so you don’t think the front row has much hope.
CA: Nope, not much, and also, just to make this clear, I don’t have much hope the back row is going to understand the front row either. It’s a two-way street. I happen to believe the front row is in power so there’s more of an obligation for them to understand the back row. Although currently, the back row has gained power for a short period here.
NR: Well, they’ve sort of gained power. They elected Trump, but Trump isn’t exactly “back row.” I mean, elite Democrats are furious. But all the people that Trump appoints, and all the people that are going to be running the country, they’re not necessarily people from the angry working class.
CA: I do think he is going to burn the very people that voted for him, not so much because he doesn’t have intentions of working for them as because he’s just incompetent himself. But I also disagree because, despite the people that he has around him, I think his overall arc is towards his supporters’ valuation framework more than it is towards the front row valuation framework. I just think he’s personally corrupt, and he’s incompetent, and he’ll get taken advantage of by the people around him.
NR: Also he doesn’t actually care about people.
CA: Oh no, he doesn’t. I mean, this whole thing is just another scam. He’s been doing that all his life. But he’s certainly not helping the front row with his policies, and he has no intention of doing that. He may help his buddies, some front row people might be smart enough to glom onto him and sell out and be corrupt. But overall 8 years of a Trump administration is not going to do the front row well. It will do the back row better than the front row, I would speculate, if he wasn’t incompetent.
But I think ultimately the division we have is close to unsolvable. There’s no policy that’s going to address it, because I think it is so social and cultural. It requires almost a national kumbaya, the front row going back and living in different communities and opening their mind, and it requires the back row to drop a little bit of their anger. I just don’t see that happening in either case.
NR: Well, we’ll leave it on that somewhat hopeless, discouraging note.
CA: I hope that wasn’t too negative.
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What the president does in retirement will reveal his true self…
The best thing about being an ex-president is that you can do whatever you want. Do you want to retire to the countryside to build henhouses and tootle around in your amphibious car? You can do that. Do you want to teach Sunday school and build houses for poor people, and maybe broker an occasional international peace agreement? You can do that also. Do you want to spend your days painting pictures of your dogs, your feet, and the soldiers you caused to be maimed? It’s an option! The retirement activities of presidents offer useful insights into their natures, because they are finally freed of all political constraints on their action. At liberty to pursue activities of their choosing, we get a sense for what they actually enjoy, and who they actually are.
During his two terms in office, Barack Obama’s most zealous devotees tended to explain away apparent failures or complacencies by referring to the constraints high office places on anyone who ascends to it. Even some critics on the left may have suspected that the deeds of Obama’s administration were out of sync with his natural instincts, that Obama was a man of high conscience weighed down or blunted by Washington’s leviathan bureaucracy, or frustrated by the exigencies of an unstable world.
Obama’s retirement should therefore finally give us meaningful insight into who he really is or, to put it another way, who he has been all along. The albatross of office finally lifted from his neck, America’s 44th president is now free to do anything and everything he desires without impediment. He can be the person he has always wanted to be, the person whom he has had to keep hidden away. Who, then, is the real Obama?
Well, it turns out the real Obama is quite like the one we knew already. And what he most wants to do is nestle himself cozily within the bosom of the global elite, and earn millions from behind a thinly-veiled philanthropic facade.
In January, Obama launched his post-presidential foundation with a board that consists of private equity executives, lobbyists, and an Uber advisor, tasking it to implement the world’s most meaningless mandate (“to inspire people globally to show up for the most important office in any democracy, that of citizen”). Able to choose his friends from out of anyone in the world, Obama has been seen kitesurfing with venture capital magnate Richard Branson (worth more than $5 billion) and brunching with Bono. (You can usually judge a person pretty well by their friends, and nobody who voluntarily spends his free time with Bono should be trusted.)
Obama’s recent forays into politics have also confirmed him as a friend to the elite. He used his last weeks in office to personally help derail the candidacy of left-wing congressman Keith Ellison for DNC chair. After Ellison became an early favorite in the race, Obama used his influence to recruit and boost the more centrist and less controversial Tom Perez, who won after a series of vile smears were launched against Ellison by influential party donors.
Obama also extended his influence overseas. Ahead of the first round of voting, he effectively endorsed French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker who “wants to roll back state intervention in the economy, cut public-sector jobs, and reduce taxes on business and the ultra-rich.” (Macron also once responded to a union worker who needled him over his fancy suits by declaring that fancy suits accrue to those who work the hardest, an assertion that is manifestly false.)
Then there were the speeches. In December, conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan, asked what Obama should do with his post-presidency, had jokingly pleaded: “No speeches at Goldman Sachs, please.” After all, Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street speeches had become the ultimate symbol of Democratic hypocrisy, a clear demonstration of how those who profess to oppose inequality will happily reap financial benefits from it. For Sullivan, it was laughable to think that a man like Obama, who maintained a public image characterized by modesty and personal integrity, would instantly lapse into the tawdry and unscrupulous Clinton practice of cashing in.
But then Obama cashed in. Mere weeks after leaving 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue he signed on with the Harry Walker Agency (the very same outfit through which the Clintons have jointly pocketed a virtually incomprehensible $158 million on the speaker’s circuit). It was then revealed that he had been paid a whopping $400,000 fee by Cantor Fitzgerald - a bond firm which deals in credit default swaps, the inscrutable instruments of financial alchemy that helped cause the 2008 financial meltdown. (After that came news of another $400,000 speaking fee.)
At the first sign of backlash against Obama’s pursuit of riches, media and political elites unleashed a torrent of toadyism in his defense.After expressing faint concern about Obama’s speaking fees, Amanda Marcotte chastised “people who’ve never had money worries” for casting judgement on “those who have,” elsewhere complaining: “The obsession with speaking fees is politics version of begrudging athlete salaries while ignoring owner profits” (an analogy that only holds up if Obama literally works for Wall Street). The Boston Globe’s Michael Cohen added: “If someone wants to pay Barack Obama $400,000 to give a speech I can’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t take it…Obama is not doing anything wrong. He’s giving a speech. Nothing to apologize for.” It seemed that American liberalism’s eight year journey from “Change We Can Believe In” to “Everybody Grifts…” was finally complete. (There is a fun game one can play with ideologically-committed Democrats that we might call “Rationalize That Injustice.” See if there are any right-wing policies that they won’t justify if told that Obama did them.)
Certain defenses of Obama opted for an explicitly racial framework. The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah exclaimed “So the first black president must also be the first one to not take money afterwards? Fuck that, and fuck you!” April Reign, creator of the viral hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, equated Obama’s critics with defenders of the slave trade. Attorney Imani Gandy, who litigated foreclosure cases on behalf of J.P. Morgan before becoming a prominent social justice activist on Twitter, seized upon the controversy to call antipathy towards Wall Street “the whitest shit I’ve ever heard.” This particular line of argumentation almost defied credulity, especially since critics of Obama’s speaking fees were simply extending a criticism originally applied to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
But while certain rationalizations of Obama’s conduct have ventured into burlesque satire, it is worth taking Michael Cohen’s question seriously: what’s so wrong with Obama doing a speech for money? He speaks, they pay, nobody gets hurt. What’s the actual harm? Since Obama isn’t actually in a position to give Wall Street any political favors, and since he’s a private citizen, why should it matter? Indeed, Debbie Wasserman Schultz told those who might be upset by the speech to “mind their own business.”
Well, first, there are some basic issues of personal ethics involved in post-presidential buckraking. There is something tawdry about immediately leaving office to go and make piles of money in any way you can, and it’s a short hop from doing your inspirational speaking schtick for corporate events to doing it in television commercials or at birthday parties for investment bankers’ teenage children. That’s why Harry Truman famously refused to serve on corporate boards, declaring that doing so would be undignified. (“I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency.”) And those who think Obama is being held to an impossible standard (that impossible “do good things rather than simply lucrative things” standard) should remember that Jimmy Carter has spent a productive and comparatively modest retirement writing, campaigning for the basic dignity of Palestinians, and quite regularly intervening to criticize American policy at home and abroad.
Some have said that as a “private citizen,” Obama’s choices of how to make money should be beyond moral scrutiny. But it’s private citizens who could use a lot more moral scrutiny. Obama’s choosing to become a mansion-dwelling millionaire is not wrong because he used to be the president, but because being exorbitantly rich in a time of great global poverty is heinously immoral. Moreover it defies credulity to suggest, as some have in earnest, that Obama needs to take money from this particular source. He is already guaranteed a lavish annual pension of more than $200,000 in addition to expenses and almost $400,000 in further pension money accrued from his time as an Illinois State Senator. He and the former First Lady have just signed the most sumptuous post-presidential book deal in history (worth $65 million, or almost 1500 times the median personal income) and will assuredly spend the next several decades enjoying a standard of material comfort few Americans have ever known, Wall Street speaking fees notwithstanding.
Finally, there’s the political hypocrisy. On the very same day as the infamous speech, Obama was elsewhere decrying the pernicious political influence of wealth, somberly declaring that “because of money and politics, special interests dominate the debates in Washington in ways that don’t match up with what the broad majority of Americans feel.” Obama’s public posture has always been that he resents the political influence of special interests and financial elites, yet as both a political candidate and a private citizen they have showered him with money he has been only too happy to accept.
Yet Michael Cohen is also partially right: the speech itself is not actually terribly important. It’s a mistake to focus on the personal ethics of Obama’s actual decision, and if we frame the relevant question as “Should Obama have taken the money?” then it’s easy to lapse into something of a shrug. So the guy wants to get rich. Fine. He’s no worse than every other member of the 1%. They’re all indefensible, and as long as nobody continues to maintain the illusion that Obama is any different from any other politician, there’s no reason to single him out as uniquely wicked. (One suspects, however, that some people do still maintain the illusion that Obama is different from other wealthy denizens of the political class.)
The most important aspect of the story is not that Obama accepted Cantor Fitzgerald’s offer, but that the offer was made in the first place. Indeed, it’s hard to escape the impression that certain powerful interests are now rewarding the former president with a gracious thanks for a job well done. Rather than asking whether Obama should have turned down the gig, we can ask: if his administration had taken aggressive legal and regulatory action against Wall Street firms following the financial crisis, would they be clamouring for him to speak and offering lucrative compensation mere weeks after his leaving office? It’s hard to think they would, and if a Democratic president has done their job properly, nobody on Wall Street should want to pay them a red cent in retirement. Obama’s decision to take Cantor Fitzgerald’s cash isn’t, therefore, some pivotal moment in which he betrayed his principles in the pursuit of lucre. It’s simply additional confirmation he has never posed a serious challenge to Wall Street’s outsized economic power.
In fact, we’ve known that for as long as we’ve known Obama. He was popular on Wall Street back when he first ran for president. According to Politico, he “raised more money from Wall Street through the Democratic National Committee and his campaign account than any politician in American history,” and in just one year “raked in more cash from bank employees, hedge fund managers and financial services companies than all Republican candidates combined.”
Serious economic progressives did not become disillusioned with Obama when he accepted $400,000 for a speech, but when he arrived in office at the apex of the financial crisis and immediately stuffed his cabinet and advisory team with a coterie of alumni from Goldman Sachs (a top donor to this campaign in 2008). At the height of the worst financial catastrophe since the Great Depression, during a time of unique (and completely warranted) antipathy towards rapacious corporate interests, Obama had been elected with the single greatest mandate to implement sweeping change in recent political history. Given the same extraordinary kind of political demand, FDR took the opportunity to proclaim that “The old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering…they are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred.”
But when Obama was faced with a similar moment of calamity and possibility, he opted instead for the avenues of brokerage and appeasement. He chose not to push for criminal prosecutions of financial executives whose greed and negligence caused the 2008 economic crash. In 1999, Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, had proposed the concept of “collateral consequences” (colloquially known as “too big to jail”), whereby “the state could pursue non-criminal alternatives for companies if they believed prosecuting them might result in too much ‘collateral’ damage” to the economy. Thus, when banking giant HSBC was revealed to be laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels and groups linked to al-Qaeda, Obama’s Justice Department allowed the bank to escape with a fine and no criminal charges, on the grounds that a prosecution might damage HSBC too much and have wider effects on the economy. Top prosecutors had evidence of serious wrongdoing by HSBC, but Holder prevented them from proceeding. A report prepared for the House Financial Services Committee concluded that Holder “overruled an internal recommendation by DOJ’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section to prosecute HSBC because of DOJ leadership’s concern that prosecuting the bank would have serious adverse consequences on the financial system.” Yet Holder later falsely suggested that the decision was made by the prosecutors rather than himself. (“Do you think that these very aggressive US attorneys I was proud to serve with would have not brought these cases if they had the ability?”) One should note just how unjust the “collateral consequences” idea is: it explicitly creates separate systems of justice for rich and poor, because there will always be more economic consequences to prosecuting major banking institutions than individual poor people. The same crime will therefore carry two different sets of consequences depending on how much you matter to the economy.
Holder also institutionalized the practice of extrajudicial settlements, under which “there was no longer any opportunity for judges or anyone else to check the power of the executive branch to hand out financial indulgences” to corporate offenders. Thus even as guilty pleas were extracted from banks and financiers for crimes ranging from fraud, manipulation, and bribery to money laundering and tax evasion, not a single malefactor from Wall Street ended up behind bars. (Meanwhile, America’s prisons remained full of less economically consequential people who had been convicted of the same crimes.)
Obama’s politics were the same when it came to policy-making. After several years of sustained corporate pushback, aided by both the White House and Congress, the much-touted Dodd-Frank law was whittled down to the status of a mild and extremely tenuous reform. A similar pattern inflected Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the now-precarious Affordable Care Act. While undoubtedly improving on the horrific status quo in American health care, Obamacare was notably soft on the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, both of which were extensively consulted during its composition. Far from being the Stalinist caricature of Tea Party fever dreams, Obamacare was based on plan put in place by a Republican governor and sketched out by the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s. No matter how much the American right may distort the record, Obamacare was essentially a massive corporate giveaway (after all, it mandated that millions of people become new insurance customers), and it manifestly failed to tackle the crux of the problem with US healthcare, which is that market actors are involved in the provision of health insurance to begin with. Obama arguably had the votes to create a public option that would have ameliorated matters somewhat, even without his having made any serious attempt at exerting political pressure in favor of one. But instead, he opted to needlessly compromise with the very corporate actors who stand between Americans and the guarantee of healthcare as a right.
This consistently pro-business approach has ensured that Obama isn’t the only administration official that corporate America has showered with gratitude. For plenty of Obama’s top lieutenants, the revolving door between Wall Street and the corridors of the US government has kept spinning continuously. David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and former senior advisor, now works for Uber. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is executive vice-president at McDonalds, lobbying hard against raising the minimum wage. Eric Holder, who had left the white-collar defense outfit Covington & Burling to become attorney general, returned in 2015 to once again represent many of the same banks and financial firms he had ostensibly been charged with regulating and prosecuting while in office. (Covington had literally been keeping Holder’s office waiting for him. “This is home for me,” Holder said of the corporate firm.) And having presided over massive bailouts during his tenure running the US Treasury, Timothy Geithner headed to Wall Street to take up a lucrative gig at private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
This is why Matthew Yglesias was wrong to characterize Barack Obama’s speaking fee as a betrayal of “everything [he] believes in.” In fact, it was the exact opposite: totally consistent with everything he has always stood for. The point isn’t that he’s “sold out.” It’s that, when the soaring cadences and luminous rhetoric are stripped away, Obama never offered any transformative change to begin with. Thus his $400,000 speech matters, not because it represents a deviation from the norm, or a venal lapse in personal ethics, but because it conveniently demonstrates a pattern that has been there all along.
In the Obama presidency, many liberals found the embodiment of their political ideal: an administration of capable, apparently well-intentioned people with impeccable Ivy League credentials, fronted by a person of undeniable charisma and charm, and with a beautiful and photogenic family to boot.
But examining Obama seriously requires acknowledging the fundamental limits of his brand of politics: a liberalism that continues to trade in the language of social concern while remaining invested in the very institutions undergirding the poverty and injustice it tells us it exists to fight; see, e.g., the upper-middle-class liberals who decry educational inequities while sending their own children to private schools. Like the Davos billionaires who “fret about inequality over vintage wine and canapés,” Obama denounces money in politics but can’t keep himself from taking it. And because he’s such a part of the very elite system whose effects he abhors, “Obamaism” was always destined to be a fundamentally empty and insincere philosophy.
Matt Taibbi issued a prescient assessment of Obama all the way back in 2007, when it was still unclear who would win the Democratic presidential primary:
“The Illinois Senator is the ultimate modern media creature-he’s a good-looking, youthful, smooth-talking, buttery-warm personality with an aw-shucks demeanor who exudes a seemingly impenetrable air of Harvard-crafted moral neutrality… His entire political persona is an ingeniously crafted human cipher, a man without race, ideology, geographic allegiances, or, indeed, sharp edges of any kind…[He appears] as a sort of ideological Universalist, one who spends a great deal of rhetorical energy showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view…His political ideal is basically a rehash of the Blair-Clinton “third way” deal, an amalgam of Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and the New Deal; he is aiming for the middle of the middle of the middle….In short, Obama is a creature perfectly in tune with the awesome corporate strivings of Hollywood, Madison avenue and the Beltway-he tries, and often succeeds, at selling a politics of seeking out the very center of where we already are, the very couch where we’ve been sitting all this time, as an exciting, revolutionary journey into the unknown.”
The real tragedy of the Obama story is that in 2008, millions of desperate Americans cast votes for a presidential candidate they believed would fight for meaningful change. He successfully marketed “hope” and “change” to a country that was reeling from a horrific financial collapse (his 2008 presidential run even won a “Marketing Campaign of the Year” award from the ad industry, beating out Apple and Zappos). But beneath it all was no serious vision of change; the grand speeches, paid and unpaid, turn out to contain little more than well-crafted platitudes. (Christopher Hitchens once pointed out that while everyone considered Obama a powerful and memorable speaker, nobody could ever seem to remember a single specific line from any of his orations, a good sign he’d in fact said nothing at all.) And as Obama biographer David Garrow concludes, “while the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core.”
But Obama’s weaknesses are not the product of some unique personal pathology. He is simply the most charismatic and successful practitioner of an ideology shared by many contemporary Democrats: a kind of Beltway liberalism that sacrifices nearly all real political ambition, espousing a rhetoric of compassion and transformation while rationalizing every form of amorality and capitulation as a pragmatic necessity. In a moment when militancy and moral urgency are needed most, it seeks only innocuous, technocratic change and claims with the smuggest certitude that this represents the best grown adults can aspire to. In a world of spiralling inequality and ascendant corporate tyranny, it insists on weighting equally the interests of all sides and deems the result a respectable democratic consensus. Bearing witness to entrenched human misery, it wryly declares it was ever thus and delights in lazily dismissing critics with scornful refrains like “That will never get through Congress…” Confronted with risk or danger, it willingly retreats to ever more conservative ground and calls the sum total of these maneuvers “incrementalism.” In place of a coherent vision or a clear program of reform, the best it can offer is the hollow sensation of progress stripped of all its necessary conflicts and their corresponding discomforts.
On could see, in the defenses of Obama’s Wall Street speech, just how far this ideology narrows our sense of the possible: it tells us it is unrealistic and unfair to conceive of a president who does not shamelessly use the office to enrich himself. What passes for pragmatism is in fact the most dispiriting kind of capitalist pessimism: this is your world, you’re stuck with it, and it’s madness to dream of anything better. There Is No Alternative.
We can almost respect Hillary Clinton for embracing this idea openly, and barely even pretending to represent our most elevated selves rather than our most acquisitive ones. The cruelty Obama perpetrated was to encourage people to believe in something better, then give them nothing but a stylized status quo. At least now that he’s windsurfing with billionaires and doing the Wall Street speaking tour, there’s no longer any reason to keep believing that underneath it all, he was a true idealist whose innermost desires were thwarted by crushing political realities. All along, his innermost desire was to meet Bono over eggs benedict.
The Obama of 2008 was to be this century’s FDR, signifying a moment of lasting realignment and transcendent progress - rather than one of growing alienation and despair culminating in the election of Donald Trump. But the liberalism of 21st century America, it turns out, is ill-equipped to achieve the transformative change it once so loftily promised: not because it made a noble attempt and failed but because it never really sought this change to begin with.
While Obama may not have been sincere, a great many of his voters were, and the millions who embraced his message revealed a genuine hunger for transformative change.
Now all we need is a political movement that actually seeks it out.
by CURRENT AFFAIRS | by LUKE SAVAGE & NATHAN J. ROBINSON
OP note: Insightful, interesting articles! Would recommend reading them.