Obama’s ‘audacity’

Politics is not the nursery, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt always liked to say. But a glance at today’s retail politics shows this maxim to nontrue, if not exactly untrue. Triangulation – the practice of playing opposing forces against one another lest by any chance one’s own principles be considered “offensive” – is now solidly embedded in political campaigns.\nPoliticians of this mold insist rigorous argument between opposing forces generates “more heat than light.” Denying the natural and necessary fact that politics tends to be such a disagreeable business because people very often disagree, they try to produce a chilling effect against anyone who doesn’t stand squarely in “the center.” The main objection to this must be that in times of conflict, the center cannot hold, and if the best lack all conviction, it gives way – to continue borrowing from William Butler Yeats – to the worst, which are full of passionate intensity. \nEnter Barack Obama, whose autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope,” has become something of a manifesto for “progressives.” As far as I can tell from a cursory reading, Obama shows a tendency – even eagerness – to take positions not conspicuous, let’s say, for their audacity. Perhaps his most prominent position in this regard is his “stand” against genocide in Darfur – a rather superficial one, as I pointed out last week, given the absence of a pro-genocide movement. \nI’ll supply a more substantive example of what I’m talking about. A few weeks back, Obama declared his candidacy for president in the shadow of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill. In his speech, Obama conjured up the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, in which, as he told it, Honest Abe “called on a divided house to stand together.” \nCuriously enough, Lincoln uttered no such thing. What the future Great Emancipator did argue, actually and implicitly, was that the house would “cease to be divided,” which is not quite the same. All previous compromises had laid bare the dangers of complacency. When Lincoln judged that a reckoning was coming no matter what, it was an attack on the moderate government, which, far from being too adversarial, had been complacent about would-be secessionists for too long.\nNot for nothing did the leading historian on this subject, Harry Jaffa, claim that Lincoln represented a “great link in the chain of events that led to secession and civil war.” So rather than Obama’s preference for a common front, it is more in line with common sense to accept, as Lincoln did, that politics is division by definition. \nThe testosterone-free “rising star” of the Democrat party is aiming to make the political arena into a nursery. One hopes this puerile attempt will miss its mark, if only because it has little to recommend it in a time when, with actual enemies presenting themselves against democracy itself, politics in the world’s leading democracy should be a more serious business. Obama’s triangulation politics, in contrast, are meant for show, and they ought to be regarded and treated as such.