Toward the end of his presidency, it became fashionable in some quarters to contest Barack Obama\u2019s privileged, almost saint-like standing among mainstream liberals as an embodiment of cool-headed grace, dignity, morality, etc\u2026 Often, the criticism concerned immigration (deporting undocumented immigrants at record rates) or his foreign policy (arming Saudi Arabia, extralegal drone killings, etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a devotee of Obama I found myself resisting these critiques on two levels. I dismissed them as flippantly made by those looking to take on a superficially subversive aesthetic. But the deeper resistance was more personal. I\u2019d invested in Obama as a man of clear-eyed ethical realism and a deep appreciation for complexity, for the moderating pressures of his office, and for the long view.<\/a> My opinion was largely aligned with that expressed by Marilyn Robinson in her book of essays, What Are We Doing Here<\/em>? when she writes that Obama \u201chad little help from certain of his friends, who think it is becoming in them to express disillusionment, to condemn drone warfare or the encroachments of national security, never proposing better options than these painful choices, which, by comparison with others on offer, clearly spare lives.\u201d Like Robinson, I believed that Obama was surely aware of his moral compromises. But there were layers to these compromises\u2014the matters wouldn\u2019t have reached his desk if there were not\u2014and I trusted that, while he may not have always made the right choice, he approached his fraught decisions with a value system in line with my own. He was dealing with difficult questions, and I was content to have him be the one answering them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then I read a review of Robinson\u2019s book in Dissent<\/em><\/a>, which dismissed such a trusting sentiment as nostalgic, in fitting with the kind of clean metaphysical decorum we might expect to find in dogmatic interpretations of revealed religion, instead of the messy imperatives of our actual political life. Leonard writes that Robinson is \u201ctotally unable to deal with [Obama] as someone with power, and whose hands are therefore dirty as hell.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I first read Leonard\u2019s essay at a time when, having interned at one left-wing magazine, and looking to move on to another (Dissent!)<\/em>, I found my political attitudes swirling, my allegiances aligning ever more with those who tended to gussy up cleanly spaces, to shit on my aesthetic contrivances. Leonard\u2019s critique increased the pace of this political reimagining largely because it caught me so squarely and personally in my own naked, often fairly weird sentimentality (my eyes, I recalled, welled with tears at the news that hero Robert Mueller indicted villain Paul Manafort: you arrogantly defile American political institutions, you face justice<\/em>!) <\/p>\n\n\n\n In particular, I was struck by Leonard\u2019s use of the phrase, \u201cHands are dirty.\u201d The idiom tends to have a pejorative slant, suggesting nefarious complicity, double-crossed morals. But it is not clear that Leonard means her point to be taken in such a straightforwardly normative sense. Dirty hands may well play an essential role in the alternative ethic she advocates, wherein shallow, but clean aesthetics of \u201ccivil\u201d and high-minded democracy get rattled\u2014in a manner very much in line with the more subversive aspects of the western philosophical tradition\u2014by dissenters and protesters as a matter of course. After all, the organized action whose dissonance she applauds, is by most theories, itself a form of power, implicated, like Obama, by a reality messier than anyone committed to keeping their hands clean could ever hope to accommodate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A relevant insight into a standard liberal instinct on this matter emerged a few months back, when Current Affairs <\/em>ran a <\/a>critical review of Pete Buttigieg\u2019s memoir, arguing that his book betrays the self-centered outlook undergirding his eclectic and impressive-seeming resume. At one point, the reviewer notes, Buttigieg writes of \u201cstriding past\u201d\u2014it not appearing to occur to him that joining <\/em>was a possibility\u2014the \u201csocial justice warriors\u201d protesting the low wages of university janitors and food workers, and then Buttigieg writes about his eventual realization that the biggest near-term agents of change at Harvard were not the protesters, but the \u201cmostly apolitical geeks quietly at work in Kirkland House\u201d like Mark Zuckerberg. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Buttigieg\u2019s apparent instinct to dismiss the protesters is endemic to the liberal mainstream, a powerful, self-righteous, and frequently un-self-critical cultural subgroup that regards any and all substantial disturbances of its peace\u2014literal, aesthetic, or metaphysical\u2014with reactionary suspicion. Looking back, I feel some genuine shame for harboring the same sort of suspicion myself toward some of my college\u2019s activist groups, particularly given my outlook as a student journalist, too willing to accept administration\u2019s implicit rhetorical line that running an institution is complicated and that protesters advocating divestment, or more equitable admissions standards, for example\u2014who spoke to some very real and deeply rooted institutional problems\u2014had a reductive worldview, and basically weren\u2019t to be taken too seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tendency to romanticize certain identity-affirming power structures and dismiss those who question them stems from a human desire for meaning, and is sometimes totally legitimate and pleasant in a personal sense, but it is politically insidious in literally every context, and particularly when the given powerful subject or structure is hegemonic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That power should be regarded with skepticism, no matter how benevolent it may seem, is on a certain level, a premise of the American press, whose best practitioners strive to carry the banner of \u201ccomforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,\u201d which, while perhaps a little romantic itself, is a mandate premised on an ethic of dissent if there ever was one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Fully realized in storytelling form, this dissenting ethic would involve resisting the temptation to romanticize government institutions, as I did in conceiving of Mueller in such heroic terms. These sort of implicitly patriotic indulgences almost always pair with an uncritical submission to the grand narratives, themselves borne of an ostensibly liberal tradition which has, in actuality, under the cover of this righteous teleology privileged countless human lives over others in a grotesque and sordid history the sober appraisal of which quakes the foundations that support these narratives in the first place (critical appraisals which, at their best, clear space such that new and often more interesting stories<\/a> can emerge.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, the grand patriotic narrative is ascendant in mainstream liberal discourse. The New York Times completed its editorial endorsing impeachment<\/a> by imploring \u201cthe institutions of American governance\u2026 in historic rebuke, to demonstrate the majesty of representative democracy.\u201d The New Yorker<\/em>, calling Nancy Pelosi an \u201cextremely stable genius,\u201d<\/a> casts the American political moment in explicitly dramatic terms: and \u201cinto this reality has stepped, if belatedly, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, Speaker of the House.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n That both \u201cinstitutions of American governance\u201d and Pelosi have, by dint of their power\u2014and regardless of how well they\u2019ve wielded it\u2014extraordinarily dirty hands of their own is lost amidst such elevated rhetoric, which trades not on sober and substantive analysis of a subject\u2019s performance, but rather on a form of restorative nostalgia, which galvanizes a secular liberal readership eager for meaning and redemption in the historical structures of governmental power whose stars, under Trump, have dimmed considerably. It is an instinct with which I can identify. I get it both ways. Sometimes it\u2019s nice, and even essential, to rest, to settle into a clean metaphysics, to draw up a wall and hunker in cozy. It is a privilege too many can ill afford. \u25a9<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Toward the end of his presidency, it became fashionable in some quarters to contest Barack Obama\u2019s privileged, almost saint-like standing among mainstream liberals as an embodiment of cool-headed grace, dignity, morality, etc\u2026 Often, the criticism concerned immigration (deporting undocumented immigrants at record rates) or his foreign policy (arming Saudi Arabia, extralegal drone killings, etc.) As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3535,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"contributors":[489],"seasons":[480],"class_list":["post-3534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","contributors-andrew-schwartz","seasons-480"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n