Diatribes of Jay: President Obama: Hope versus Fear

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Ex-President Barack Obama spoke out forcefully and directly last week. He did so for the first time since leaving office nearly twenty months ago. Why did he break the recent “tradition” of ex-presidents: keeping silent and letting their successors take the reins and the limelight? Why now?

Last Saturday’s New York Times’ front page suggests that he bent to enormous pressure from Democrats. But he has faced enormous pressure many times before, both while running and while in office.

He faced constant pressure from African-Americans to “be more ‘black,’” i.e., to do more for a worthy group that has suffered oppression for four centuries. But he had a still bigger job to do. He had to convince the other 88% of Americans that a “black” man could govern all of us fairly and well. He did that job beautifully: that’s why he got re-elected, despite the GOP’s diabolically dishonest “chutzpah campaign.”

Obama also faced enormous pressure for greater military involvement in Syria, especially after Assad crossed his “red line” on chemical weapons. Many now criticize his decision not to get involved more deeply. But our two “forever” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are already the longest in our national history. Who’s to say that Obama was wrong in keeping us out of yet a third optional war?

Syria is Russia’s problem now. Someday, the Russian people will come to understand the vile butchery that their president and military are supporting. They will do so just as we Americans are slowly coming to recognize—half a century later—the massive evil that we did in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. When a similar light dawns in Russia, the world will be a more peaceful and a better place. (Despite all its faults—and there are many—the People’s Republic of China has engaged directly in only two foreign wars since its founding in 1949, in Korea and Vietnam. Both were proxy wars, and both involved countries right on China’s border.)

Making such difficult decisions is the province of our president in our constitutional system. You can carp at the results. But no one can deny the care, thought and analysis Obama put into them.

Dick Cheney, who helped get us into our forever war in Iraq in a hurry and on a false premise (that Saddam had or was developing nuclear weapons), accused Obama of “dithering.” But taking time and thought to make decisions that are matters of life and death for millions is not “dithering.” It’s leadership.

We Americans have suffered a vacuum of leadership for over half a century. That’s why Obama is the only president since Ike to have been elected twice, by clear popular majorities both times. (Dubya’s first “election” was anything but clear; the Supreme Court declared him the winner.) Ike left office in 1961.

Our current president has taught us well how racism is still latent in America. Apparently, it was always there for any demagogue to play. Trump plays it like a mighty circus organ. His ghastly fugue only highlights how improbable was the political feat of Obama’s two successive electoral victories. It was Obama’s own brilliant strategizing that made them possible.

So if we are thoughtful and honest with ourselves, we start with the premise that Obama knows what he’s doing. He knows perhaps better than any single pol now living. It’s not the pressure. Obama is immune to that. He keeps his own counsel, ands it’s not about him. His decision to speak out now is a deliberate, careful stratagem, just like everything else in his improbably successful political career.

So we return to the central questions of this essay. Why did he speak up at all? Why now?

The answer, I think, is Obama’s deep insight into the human heart. He knows that, for evolutionary reasons, fear is our strongest emotion.

Fear is powerful. But as the science-fiction writer Frank Herbert brilliantly wrote, “Fear is the mind-killer.” It spurs our adrenal system and our “fight or flight” instinct, but it shuts down our higher mental functions.

Warriors know this. That’s why they strive hard to conquer even the acute fear of imminent, instant death. Fear makes us do silly and stupid things, like wasting money trying to build an impenetrable physical wall along our Mexican border, rather than using smarter and cheaper high-tech means to police it.

Hope is a slower, less acute emotion. But in the long run it may be as powerful as fear. Sarah Palin once ridiculed Obama’s “hopey, changey thing.” But that’s what got him elected, twice. Obama is now a revered ex-president. Many of us would re-elect him in a heartbeat, if our Constitution so permitted. Where is Sarah Palin now?

The GOP has become a master of fear mongering. In my youth, it played the “Commies” or “Reds.” These bogeymen were supposedly going to take us over from within. The GOP could hardly claim a direct assault, after we had just invented nuclear weapons and were the only participant in World War II whose territory, industry and war machinery remained largely intact.

The apogee came with Joe McCarthy, a Wisconsin demagogue who saw imaginary Communists in our State Department and even our Army. But if the truth be told, Joe never strayed far from the mother ship. In 1960, when Richard Nixon lost the presidency by a hair, he had beaten the drum of a so-called “missile gap” between us and the Soviets. JFK’s thin win probably saved humanity from nuclear Armageddon in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

If it wasn’t the Commies, the GOP told us to fear violent crime. That’s been its constant pitch since Richard Nixon’s first failing shot at the presidency in 1960. Fear mongering about crime persisted through Daddy Bush’s infamous but highly effective “Willie Horton” ad, which showed the black face of a convicted criminal who had murdered someone after his release from prison. That kind of fear mongering is now a primary means by which Trump tries to foster enthusiasm in his base.

We did have riots during the tumult of the 1960s, spurred in part by our three terrible assassinations, all within five years, of JFK, MLK and RFK. We had a spike of crime during and after our crack epidemic. But that spike is over. We now have the lowest rates of violent crime in a generation, despite more complete reporting of crimes. Yet the GOP keeps plugging away at fear of crime, trying to convince us that immigrants and minorities are everywhere lying in wait to rob, assault, rape and murder us.

The GOP plays on this fear despite careful studies showing that immigrants commit the same number or fewer crimes than others. The reasons are obvious. Undocumented immigrants balk at doing anything that might get them deported. Both lawful and undocumented immigrants are entirely focused on enjoying and succeeding in a system that, for all its faults, offers them far more freedom and opportunity than the ones they left behind in their home countries.

In the long run, the GOP’s fear mongering just grinds everyone down. It grinds down the duped “majority,” who so fear crime, minorities, and immigrants that they can’t think straight about them or anything else. They vote reliably for their own serfdom, while what “trickles down” is never enough to improve their own lives. The fear grinds down minorities and immigrants themselves, forcing them to keep their heads down lest they be noticed and subjected to yet more bias and discrimination.

This long-exploited fear has helped cause the most salient fact about our democracy in its present state. We let a small minority of zealots govern us. Only about a third of us vote regularly, especially in non-presidential elections, let alone in party primaries. We suffer bad government because we don’t have majority rule.

We don’t have majority rule because most of us simply don’t vote, except in presidential elections. And those who, in large numbers, don’t vote are the very ones who, in theory, have the most to lose from not voting: youth, minorities and members of immigrant families. They don’t vote because they don’t believe their voting will make a difference. They are told every day that they are inferior, dangerous and unworthy.

Hope can break this cycle of fear and despair. It can do so especially for new citizens. Indeed, they are precisely the people whom we want to heal and advance our democracy. Why? Because, unlike many cynical and apathetic natives, they still believe in our system.

They sacrificed to get here. They paid guides and “coyotes” to bring them. Some literally walked over a thousand miles. Almost everyone left family, familiarity and community behind. And now they have to learn to work and live with a new language and in a new culture, and to become parts of a new and strange community. They do all this because they see, better than most, the shining city on a hill that we once were and still can be.

In the midst of all the derogation and stress, immigrant citizens need hope and encouragement to play politics and vote. The same truth holds for minorities. African-Americans have felt fear and despair for four centuries. It was only after they saw the realistic possibility of having a president who looks like them that they came out in droves and even “flipped” Southern states.

Whenever Obama speaks out, he gives new voters hope. He gives minorities hope that someday the ugly stain of white supremacy will be wiped from our politics forever. He gives all of us hope that someday we will have thoughtful, deliberate, rational government again, in which a single old man’s planet-sized ego is not our nation’s lodestar.

The time for hope is especially auspicious just now. One of our fastest-growing minorities is (East) Indians. Many are citizens or becoming ones. Unlike many other immigrants, Indians are fully fluent in English and familiar with democracy and how it works. (By population, India is the world’s largest democracy.) Unlike the Chinese and Eastern European immigrants of earlier years, they are not so spooked by fear of Communism as to allow the GOP to conflate mild democratic socialism with Communism and so lead them to serfdom by fear.

Then there are the recent Puerto Rican immigrants to Florida, refugees from Hurricane Maria. They are American citizens. They can vote at any time. But Trump’s neglect and disparagement of their island territory has driven them to fear and despair. When they see a prominent “black” man—an ex-president!—speaking out for rationality, fairness and justice, they may use their votes. If they do so in Florida, our third most populous state and the key “swing” state in the 2000 presidential election will revert to being “flipped” and blue. (Obama won it both times, but Hillary lost it to Trump).

So, speak out, Mr. (Former) President. Please do. Give more of us new hope and new motivation, especially those who despair to vote. If you can get just half of us, rather than a mere third, to vote in this non-presidential election year, our nation will see a new dawn. We will come much closer to majority rule, and much farther from rule by fear-mongering zealots. Only then can we make America great again.

Footnote: There are also structural reasons why we don’t have majority rule in Congress. For a summary before recent changes in filibuster rules, click here. Links to Popular Recent Posts

Diatribes of Jay

10 September 2018

President Obama: Hope versus Fear

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