Martin LeFevre: Barack Provides Insight

For those who could didn’t fall asleep during Barack Obama’s often somnolescent news conference after the 20 Richest Nations (aka G-20) summit in London, he provided insight into his views on capitalism, on American leadership, and on his de facto presidency of the world.

The world is on fire, but Michelle Obama’s outfits competed, at least in the American and British press, with reports regarding the high level talks of the world’s MIP’s (Most Important People). Not that Barack minds—to him, everything is going according to hoyle. We just need to be patient and let these collective adjustments kick in.

Obama’s teachable moments came during a news conference with “foreign” journalists (catching himself, he said, “I’m the foreigner”). He was a study in the political art of nuancing contradictions and having it both ways.

At the core of Obama’s thesis is his belief in capitalism and in American leadership, as exemplified by himself.

He cleverly made no distinction between the market and capitalism, saying, “The market is the most effective mechanism for creating wealth and distributing resources to produce goods and services that history has ever known, but that it goes off the rail sometimes.”

Translation? ‘The collapsed American model of the world’s capitalistic system is still fundamentally sound (John McCain’s ridiculed claim). No, the world’s economic system isn’t rotten to the core; it has simply ‘gone off the rails,’ as it periodically does. Not to worry; we’re putting things back on track.’

The flaw in this view is not only that it conflates and confuses the market with American style capitalism. It is that it fails to recognize that at every level (economic, political, philosophical, psychological, and spiritual), the global crisis we’re all experiencing is historically unprecedented.

The other contradiction Obama tried his best to blur is the inherent conflict between the interests of a nation-state (in this case, a shrinking superpower), and the interests of humankind as a whole. “I don’t buy into the notion that America can’t lead the world,” Barack said in one of his more emphatic moments.

What Barack didn’t say, and apparently does not yet realize, is that not only is it no longer a world with “Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” sketching out an international architecture; it’s no longer a world in which nation-states are supreme.

As he droned on (one of the few times he came to life was teasing an Indian journalist for being an obvious supporter of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh), you could almost hear the hot air of hope going out of America’s balloon. It wasn’t that Obama was stumbling; he made no rhetorical mistakes. It was that though he asserted the primacy of America’s leadership, he’s clearly not leading the world anywhere, but is obviously stuck in the past.

Obama proposes American leadership within a partnership of nations, a ‘first amongst equals’ relationship between America and the rest of the world’s states. He declaimed, quite clearly: “I'm the president of the United States. I'm not the President of China, I'm not the president of Japan, [I’m not the president of the world].”

But in fact that’s the way he’s being viewed, and he very well knows it. If you’ve already been elected to the most powerful office in the world, you don’t need to remind all the other nearly 200 nations that line up below--I mean around—the table to appoint you the leader of the whole un-free world.

The dissonance came with his delivery. At the end of his carefully calibrated mini-speeches on these themes, his voice trailed off, as if he knows at a core level that the circle cannot be squared, that a president who serves American interests cannot speak for humanity.

“I will be judged by effectiveness in meeting American’s needs and concerns,” he said. Abraham Lincoln, who Obama reveres and hopes to emulate, would have disagreed. Lincoln felt he served a higher purpose in the crucible of the presidency of the United States during the Civil War, at a time when the fate of individual nations mattered.

Both because the fate of individual nations no longer matters to human history, and because Barack serves no higher purpose, his attempt to nuance the contradictions came off flat, even boring.

Barack Obama is, by design, a perfect Rorschach upon which Americans, and millions in other lands apparently, project their most wishful thinking. For example, the mystical spiritual force that the special character of the American people has imbued Barack Obama is expressed in an essay entitled, “The Spiritual Dimensions of Obama's Leadership” by Gordon Davidson and Corinne McLaughlin, well-known leaders purportedly bridging the spiritual-political chasm.

“Obama signifies more than the emergence of an inspired, gifted leader,” they say; “He is like a catalyst dropped into a supersaturated solution, that builds a crystalline structure around itself based on its innate pattern, and then transforms the whole solution.”

Until this week I wondered if Obama supporters had gone off the deep end like the Republicans. Now it’s clear; they have.

What do I hope for? That Barack Obama is a decent man who believes in the premises he’s promoting, and isn’t just calculating and controlling the whole show. He did say some excellent things, such as “…we have to be concerned with the education of all children, not just our children.”

At best, Barack Obama is necessary but not sufficient. Though he’s wrong about American capitalism and wrong about American leadership, if he’s a good man and sincerely believes the things he says, he’ll let go of his premises when their falseness becomes incontrovertible, and there is a superseding, workable, and complementary alternative to American power.

The slow-motion collapse of the old world order has produced a vacuum. Obama wants to step into it, but he actually represents the vacuum at the heart of all politics to this point, as well as the latest historical source of man’s seemingly limitless capacity to foul the earth and our own societies.

It isn’t anti-American to point this out, unless telling the truth continues to be, even after Bush/Cheney, anti-American.

America, the former engine of the world economic and political system, has become the caboose. And a personality cult dedicated to Barack and Michelle, however domestically and internationally widespread, cannot and will not put the same old train back on the same old tracks.

That doesn’t mean things are hopeless. But it does mean that before history kicks out the last strut of Barack Obama, world citizens urgently need to begin to erect a new political framework for the global society, flowing from a revolutionary psychological orientation.

That in turn means going beyond the supposedly immutable law of self-interest, and not just “providing Americans insight on how their self-interest is tied up with yours.”

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net . The author welcomes comments.

© Scoop Media