Counterpunch | A New York Times article on May 30 entitled “How Trump’s Election Shook Obama: ‘What if We Were Wrong?’”
provided an opportunity to indulge in this sordid pastime. According to
one of his aides, after the election Obama speculated that the
cosmopolitan internationalism of enlightened intellectuals like him had
been responsible for the stunning outcome. “Maybe we pushed too far,” he
said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” In other
words, we were too noble and forward-thinking for the benighted masses,
who want nothing more than to remain submerged in their comforting
provincial identities. We were too ambitious and idealistic for our
flawed compatriots.
“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” Obama
sighed. The country hadn’t been ready for the first black president and
his lofty post-racial vision.
These quotations are all the evidence one needs to understand what goes on in the mind of someone like Barack Obama.
In fact, the last quotation is revealing enough in itself: it alone
suggests the stupefying dimensions of Obama’s megalomania. It is hardly
news that Obama is a megalomaniac, but what is moderately more
interesting is the contemptible and deluded nature of his megalomania.
(In some cases, after all, egomania might be justified. I could forgive
Noam Chomsky for being an egomaniac—if he were one, which his
self-effacing humility shows is far from the case.) Obama clearly sees
himself as the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement—he who
participated in no sit-ins, no Freedom Rides, no boycotts or harrowing
marches in the Deep South, who suffered no police brutality or nights in
jail, who attended Harvard Law and has enjoyed an easy and privileged
adulthood near or in the corridors of power. This man who has apparently
never taken a courageous and unpopular moral stand in his life decided
long ago that it was his historic role to bring the struggles of SNCC
and the SCLC, of Ella Baker and Bob Moses, of A. Philip Randolph and
Martin Luther King, Jr. to their fruition—by sailing into the Oval
Office on the wave of millions of idealistic supporters, tireless and
selfless organizers. With his accession to power, and that of such moral
visionaries as Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Timothy Geithner,
Eric Holder, Arne Duncan, Robert Gates, and Samantha Power, MLK’s dream
was at last realized.
Obama was continuing in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists when his administration deported more than three million undocumented immigrants and broke up tens of thousands of immigrant families. He was being an inspiring idealist when he permittedarms shipments to Israel in July and August 2014 in the midst of the Gaza slaughter—because, as he said
with characteristic eloquence and moral insight, “Israel has a right to
defend itself” (against children and families consigned to desperate
poverty in an open-air prison).
He was being far ahead of his time, a hero of both civil rights and enlightened globalism, when he presided over
“the greatest disintegration of black wealth in recent memory” by doing
nothing to halt the foreclosure crisis or hold anyone accountable for
the damage it caused. Surely it was only irrational traditions of
tribalism that got Trump elected, and not, say, the fact that Obama’s
administration was far more friendly to the banking sector than George H. W. Bush’s was, as shown for instance by the (blatantly corrupt) hiring of financial firms’ representatives to top positions in the Justice Department.
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