I’ve said before that I expect Barack Obama to win next week, and that I expect his presidency to be bad for America. I’m afraid we’ll see a major national-security crisis to which he’ll respond ineffectively (especially since Joe Biden essentially predicted as much), a resurgence of the abortion holocaust (and especially among blacks) under one of the most pro-abortion politicians in the country, the return of stagflation with the revival of the redistributionist economic policies that produced it, a Carteresque ineffectiveness in the face of challenges, a crackdown on free speech to stifle criticism of his administration, and the domination of our government by the hard-left wing of the Democratic Party.That said, I think Obama’s going to win, and for all that I don’t think he’ll be a good president, I think it’s important for this country that he win. For one, I do not assume that America deserves to be blessed simply because we’re America; if I’m right that there are hard times ahead, I can’t deny the possibility that we as a nation have them coming to us. As nations go, this is a great one and a good one, but we are far from perfect—and those Christians who object to my saying this because they believe America has a special place in God’s plan should remember that “judgment begins in the house of God.” For another, I believe the church in this country deserves to be judged for its political idolatry; and it seems to me that this judgment must begin with its conservative wing, who must relearn not to put our trust in princes.And perhaps most importantly, I believe that John McWhorter is right: the time is such that an Obama win may well be necessary for its effects on “race” relations in this country. For all my pessimism about an Obama presidency, part of that is that I see tough times ahead regardless, and I think it’s quite likely true that the cost of an Obama defeat would be greater than the benefit. As McWhorter argues,
For 40 years, black America has been misled by a claim that we can only be our best with the total eclipse of racist bias. Few put it in so many words, but the obsession with things like tabulating ever-finer shades of racism and calling for a “national conversation” on race in which whites would listen to blacks talk about racism are based on an assumption: that the descendants of African slaves in the United States are the only group of humans in history whose problems will vanish with a “level playing field,” something no other group has ever supposed could be a reality.The general conversation is drifting slowly away from this Utopianist canard, but nothing could help hustle it into obsolescence more than an Obama presidency, especially for the generation who grew up watching a black man and his family in the White House and had little memory of a time when it would have been considered an impossibility. At the same time, nothing could breathe new life into this gestural pessimism like an Obama loss. It would be the perfect enabler for a good ten years of aggrieved mulling over “the persistence of racism,” which, for all of its cathartic seduction, would make no one less poor, more gainfully employed, or better educated. . . .The grievous result of this fetishization of racism would be that it would put a kibosh on the upsurge in black voters’ political engagement amidst the Obamenon. Newspaper articles would quote blacks disillusioned from getting excited about any future black candidate—e.g. “I thought maybe America was finally getting past racism but it turned out not to be true.” 2009 would be a year of countless panel discussions, quickie books, and celebrated rap couplets wallowing in the notion that the white man wouldn’t let Obama into the Oval Office where he belonged, urgently reminding us that to be black is still to be a victim.
HT: Justin TaylorFor all my pessimism, I think it’s important to remember this, and not to deprecate the very real symbolic value of an Obama victory—or the very real practical benefits of that symbolic value; I also think it’s important to recognize that justice demands something of this sort in partial balance for the national sin of slavery. I could wish it were someone else, a Harold Ford or a Michael Steele, but Barack Obama is clearly the man God has chosen for this moment, for his own purposes; and it remains true that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
I’m basically with you here (not wanting to give the impression that I need to approve or anything). I think that the bare fact of a black president of the United States will take some time to sink in (if he wins, which I also think is likely) and that his defeat could fuel fires of…I’d say an unproductive discussion of race in this country. That is, racism clearly still exists, and its persistent damage will take more than a generation to undo, but teaching any group to be victims does no one any good. I much prefer instigator/resistor to victim myself 🙂
I also hold to the idea that we will have to do what is right and good in spite of the government, not through it, in most cases. The most dangerous idea, for me, in the Obama Movement is that he will fix it for us – so we don’t have to work ourselves (and really, that idea is behind every Presidential campaign)
🙂
Sadly, you’re pretty much right about that being what politicians try to sell us.