America: From Christ into the Void

Response to a letter speculating on America’s drift from Christian faith

Dear … :

I agree with some of your analysis of the why here. At least in immediate terms. You evoke a shift away from the faith that’s occurred over the past couple generations--reaching, say, back to the 1980s. And it works. But only to a degree.

My own framework is different. For me the shift not so much a matter of the choices of younger Americans against older, recently dominant generations.

Yes, it sure looks like what we have in America is the mass of the population making a conscious, informed choice for freedom and self-determination against the religious strictures and judgmentalism of the 1950s. But I don’t think masses in general make really “conscious, informed choices.” I think rather they are molded by the Zeitgeist, which gives them justifications for the worldview they adopt. This is true in every culture, and it’s true for ours. It’s true for both educated and uneducated. Among the highly educated only a very small minority will ever challenge currently fashionable thinking.

So we in America assume we are following our desires and that those desires are self-chosen, but the truth is we’ve absorbed most of our desires from others. In this respect consumer behavior (the burning desire for some new fashion or product for example) is a microcosm of human behavior in general. Even including our choice of “beliefs” or ideological positions. For most of us, we don't so much choose our beliefs as mimic the beliefs of people we admire. We are monkeys.

The question for me, then, is somewhat different. What social forces led younger generations to "choose" as they did? The answer to that is complicated, and I'll hardly be able to address it in one email. But I can give some hints as to how I see this "choice."

When the writers cited in that Substack post underline that the West has replaced Christianity with a Void, what they mean is that our culture has made the Desiring Self the origin of all values. “Woe to you if you offend my Desiring Self!” This may well stand as one of the Ten Commandments of our new national religion.

You point out that "everyone worships something," but the problem with the Desiring Self is that it can’t be a sane object of worship--or rather, the circularity of such worship means the culture is bowing down to a Void. Worshipping oneself is an illness, not a civilizational model.

We Americans believe we champion freedom, and we do, but what has happened beginning in the last century is that our concept of freedom has shifted radically. The Founders of the 18th century, and really all of the historical West, would look at our way of talking about freedom and immediately see a glaring problem.

Notice that we don’t use the word “liberty” so much anymore. We use “freedom” to mean the same thing. But what we mean is something different. The shift in terminology here is a tell.

Most ancient philosophers and most thinkers up through yesterday would look at our contemporary, “supremely free” Americans and insist: “No, you are not free.”

Why not? Because almost all thinkers from the western past recognized that one can be enslaved in multiple ways. One particularly destructive kind of enslavement was to be slave to one’s own desires. Thus liberty, in the original formulation, is only posessed by the person who doesn't allow his whims and desires to lead him around by the nose. An adult who self-defines by what he desires or what gives him kicks (whether money, or sexual behavior, or fame) is not free.

You say the mid-20th century largely invented “the teenage years,” or rather made a big thing of them. Note that it also quickly extended them. I’d say, more or less, that we extended adolescence first to age 22, then to age 26, and now indefinitely. Why not be a 30-something teenager? It’s called Sex and the City. Why not be a 60-something teenager? Who can criticize you? “I have a right to fulfill my desires. If you say otherwise, you are OPPRESSIVE. You are HARMING me.”

Our culture is everywhere therapeutic in orientation, much of this arising in the wake of Freud. We equate health with being liberated from the harmful “repression” that civilization imposed on us. Civilization is the problem we must be cured of. We believe this without being conscious of it, which is to say that it's now axiomatic. It's a belief inculcated in us through education, film, music, pop psychology. Since it underpins everything, it need no longer be explicitly taught.

But what nobody seems to notice here is that this Freudian axiom ultimately means that barbarism is identical to health. And since we can't avoid enculturation, i.e. civilization, we are in a double bind that's making our whole culture ill.

Although most people now reject Freud on most things, and don't read him anymore, we still live in the house he built. We're haunted by a grandfather of sorts, who's set us walking in therapeutic circles.

Of course our invention and then extension of the teenage years is also a luxury, possible only because of our stellar economic power following WW II. But if you look back at my point about freedom vs. liberty, you will see the cost. There is everywhere a kind of enslavement. To what? Not to the Christian God, not to the Nation, not to the Family Clan, but to one’s own circular round of frantic desiring.

This is the Void they are writing about. And if it's dangerous for us as individuals, it's also dangerous for us as a civilization.

Our cultural industries are happy to keep dangling ersatz fulfilments in front of this Void, whether in the form of lifestyle upgrades, sexual identities, political posturing, etc. From The Atlantic to pop music trends to "vibes"-based campaigns for the presidency, all of it has the same tedious character.

Some of it is sophisticated. Certainly many of the cultural producers in question have high levels of “education.” But to the extent they continue to believe in ever-expanding self-definition, they’re shallow. They’re not asking the meaning of human being, the meaning of our being here, but rather planning the Next Thing. Because they take it for granted that we are actually heading somewhere, toward greater self-autonomy and justice and “liberation.” It’s a hollow utopianism too frantically busy to question itself. A narcissist on a merry-go-round in a hall of mirrors.

These points might clarify what I meant at the beginning by my different framework. I’m not looking at a shift of generations that have made "choices" so much as a wider historical malaise that's resulted from dominant cultural trends. What I see is the unfolding of a certain perversion in western ideas of what our liberty is, or what it’s for.

Some argue that this perversion was already baked into the cake of our 18th century Enlightenment project, i.e. it’s already there in our Founding. I’m not so sure about that. I think most of the problem stems from a warping of what used to be the western left, and the rise of this new warped leftism to the status of dominant faith. But these are complicated questions.

You ask what Christianity has to offer young people facing these major shifts. I’d say what it offers is what it has always offered. I notice that you mostly seem to define Christianity in terms of those things in the sexual revolution to which it said No. This makes sense, but then again, you will understand that this only makes sense in the present, a present that lives under a different religious dispensation, the religion of the Desiring Self. Of course the thing we will first notice about Christianity is that it says No to some key part of this new religion.

“Christianity is obsessed with sex!” we say.

Imagine a tribe that lives by pig farming coming to a Jewish village. “These people--their religion is all about pork! They’re obsessed with it!”

That’s what the accusation looks like to me. A culture that worships the Desiring Self and generates constant new niche sexual identities, making these identities the center of individual meaning--this culture accuses Christians of being obsessed with sex?

I must admit, however, that if Christianity is viewed this way by current generations, it likely isn’t only because of their new religion. The particular kind of Protestantism that dominated mid-20th century America shares some of the blame. That Protestantism had jettisoned much in Christianity and ended up with an easy-peasy bourgeois version of the faith that managed to make sexual sins the only sins one should condemn. This was not all American Protestants, of course, but was a defining tendency of the national faith.

Perhaps there’s little surprise in such a development. Though pride is the primal Christian sin, pride and greed were endemic to America during those years of expansion. In our capitalist culture, they were even touted as virtues.

But that American Protestantism was only one iteration of Christianity. It was recognizably Christian, yes, but rather hypocritical, no? The tragedy is that because of the flaws and manias of that version, the whole has been rejected. Baby thrown out with bathwater.

I have much more I could write about, sure. But I hope this gets at some of how I see the new American religion vs. what came before. I don’t at all think we’re getting closer to the truth, nor do I think we’re flourishing as a culture. Quite the contrary. We are sick. We are lost and groping in a Void. Because the Desiring Self is not the meaning of the universe.

Best,

Eric

Lefties: Why the NPC Meme doesn’t faze them

Mid-March Elon Musk rocked the Twitter styrofoam raft by posting a recent version of the NPC meme:

Myself I think it’s good to have Elon around: a national figure who says what he thinks rather than spreads wokeisms.

And I like the NPC meme, though I find it toothless given where we're at. Since this is a serious article, I’ll explain myself via pro wrestling. Yup, serious. A post I saw today. Someone wrote:

Remember when everyone knew pro wrestling was fake and they finally admitted it and the fans continued to watch it anyway?

We’re almost there with politics and the media.

“We’re not almost there,” I replied. “We’re already there, and have been for years. Worse, this fakery is not a bug, but a feature.”

All around us fake news is known to be fake but still touted as news. And oddly, it’s our “educated” who are most aggressively touting it. This didn’t use to be so. So how did we get here?

It's the universities, stupid.

In classrooms and seminars across the country, academics have for decades been teaching that “there is no truth, only narratives". I won’t go into the intellectual background of the doctrine. But starting in the 1980s, our left took it and ran with it.

"No truth, only narratives" has since trickled down and oozed beyond the campuses. It's seeped into every corner of American culture. And it's changed the way Americans process reality. As follows: A huge swath of the citizenry now watches news not to find out what is really happening, but only to find out what Today's Narrative is. For millions, what is really happening is tacitly assumed to be beside the point.

It’s hard for a lot of us on the right to grasp this. But we need to grasp it, because this is the country we now live in.

We call them NPCs and think they're dumb sheep--but by doing so we ignore what they're about. Because for them, to be sheep, sheep out to trample all others into silence, is the very meaning of being educated. It’s what their whole education has taught them to do and what all their peers do 24/7.

Which is what makes the NPC meme toothless. At least to them. Because it’s not that our NPCs are especially dumb, but rather that they're deeply indifferent to the facts underlying the social realities in question. They are entirely creatures of the Narrative, they know they are, and they're even proud to be so because they assume the Narrative tends to "the right side of history”.

This doctrine of the "right side of history" is perhaps the only truth our lefties still subscribe to: they believe in Progress religiously.

And here, if you’re paying attention, you’ll maybe see that we’ve caught them in deep self-contradiction, because the claim that progress is inevitable, that it’s somehow built in to history, is a truth claim. Here, in other words, is where our lefties truly are dumb.

But good luck trying to get that point across. The Enlightenment myth of progress is so deeply embedded in the modern world that almost no one recognizes it as a myth. Especially not our lefties, who breathe it through their cloth masks as their very air.

We've now tens of millions of these people. They're scaling the ladders in every corporation and instution. Since the point for them is to enact the Narrative, calling them NPCs carries no sting. As you may have noticed. They'll just bleat at you--Baaahhh--and move on. Because as they see it, it’s you who are backward to stick to that outmoded concept truth. To stick to things like evidence, law, constitutions, transparent elections.

This is also, by the way, why it’s become impossible to debate our leftists, as you also may have noticed. If there’s no truth, and if it’s virtuous to believe there isn’t, what weight will be given to “evidence” or “reasoned debate” or “analysis” or “statistics”? Our lefties officially don’t care about such things. Debating them is wasted time, and has been since about 2010. They won’t recognize defeat, because they never recognized the validity of reasoned argument to begin with.

So if our politics and media now seem to have no more reality than pro wrestling, and if the mainstream “virtuous” voices keep cheering ever louder, you can blame our fallen universities. They made it possible. And the triumphal march of that key claim "there is no truth" was made all the easier because it played off the Deadly Sin called sloth. Anyone who spends time around our academies can attest it: sheer laziness has played an enormous role in our cognitive decline. Because whether you're an academic or a student, it’s much easier to enact narratives than to dig for truth. It’s also much easier to bend to the Narrative than to defend any truth that is unpopular. And since the postmodernism that rules our universities gives our lefties “intellectual” cover for being lazy in just this way, why not just go with it? All the kids at the cool table are.

Calling them NPCs is accurate, sure. But the malaise runs deeper than just dumbness + conformity. It derives from a systemic discrediting of truth in favor of narrative. Where we go from here is a more difficult question, but that we’re dealing with a large and now dominant “post-truth” culture is a brutal fact we must face. I'd say the best use of our energies is in building an alternative education system, whether through homeschooling or classical schools.

More on how we got here:

The Left is a Religion

Fakes upon Fakes: Why the Left has Become so Completely Daft

So They Want to Destroy Churches Because of … SLAVERY?

To listen to our leftists, to hear the open calls to burn churches, to see them now burning Bibles in Portland, it’s clear they blame slavery, if not the whole history of racism, on Christianity. Which is a howler, really. If these people weren’t leftists, we might expect them to have historical evidence for this particular Christian guilt. Sure, they’ve seen Christians negatively portrayed in decades of Hollywood movies, but I’m talking about actual "evidence" here, not cheap postmodern prejudice.

Fact is, our leftists don’t feel they need actual historical evidence. They don’t know the history of slavery, any more than they know how the West overcame slavery. Their narrative is a lie, but they couldn’t care less.

Much that is now written on slavery is historically myopic in the extreme. Weaponized as a matter of course, such writing seeks from the get-go to demonize either the West, or Christians, or both. But like nearly everything that comes from our left, this anti-Christian narrative is a case of sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.

We must always remember: Slavery arose on every continent where agriculture arose. Slavery was in some respects, at least for agriculturally developed societies, a human universal. Humanity--white, brown, black, yellow--enslaved. Slavery was practiced on every major continent for millennia: Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas.

The claim that this or that group now owes “reparations” for slavery is absurd. Slavery was abolished many generations ago. The current demands for reparations are nothing but cynical politicking and race-baiting. Such demands, coupled with the left's anti-Christian narrative, are also deeply ironic.

The first major world civilization to articulate slavery's immorality was Western Christian civilization. As everyone who studies the history knows, if it weren't for Christian abolitionists in Europe, Russia and the Americas, slavery would likely still exist as a global norm.

Further: If it weren't for the "all are one in Christ Jesus” doctrine articulated by the Apostle Paul (in Galatians, one of the earliest New Testament writings) slavery would have remained uncontested in the West too.

It was the encounter with Christ, and the insight that encounter awoke, that allowed humanity to overcome slavery.

Yes, it took our Christian civilization a long time to put that insight into political practice, but again: it was only the West that had such an insight to begin with--namely, that there is a fundamental equality and dignity in all human beings, beyond sex, race, or class.

Attacking Christian culture, effacing or burning churches in revenge for humanity’s collective past practice of slavery, is inane. Again, whether these people know it or not, they’re sawing off the branch they sit on.

Why? If our fellow humans are not inherently precious because created in God’s image, then they are, to borrow a phrase, “just clumps of cells”. We saw this logic played out in the previous century. Every last human is a “clump of cells” expendable in the quest for Utopia. And Utopia will never arrive in history, because, as we Christians know, we are all flawed by sin. Any political order will allow greed, disorder, evil to find an outlet.

How did our lefties manage to miss the 20th century? Every single radical project to remake society ended in horrific suffering. But Utopia is what our left still dreams of. This is why they believe a modern society can survive without police. This is why they believe justice can begin with the burning of churches. It is infantile stuff.

No just society can ever be grounded in such thinking. I suspect most of our lefties secretly know this too, but don’t care. They’re not really interested in justice. They’re interested in revenge, in playing Che Guevara, in throwing dirt at all the Daddies.

Our left has serious, serious Daddy issues. They’re letting a private, extended-teenage rage drive them. It would be laughable if there weren’t so many of these spoiled, pissy kids now rampaging about.

And their leaders! Shame on the attention hound Shaun King; shame on the rabid anti-Western ideologues spouting their lies in our now usurped universities; shame on our illiterate SJWs who gulp down this Kool-Aid.

Sane Americans see your your agenda. You seek revenge for wrongs you yourselves never suffered. You use historical wrongs to raise yourself up, to vent your desire for destruction because "things are not right". What is right for you is whatever allows your ego to assert itself, to gain attention. You have allowed yourselves to fill with hate, as this is the easiest route to self-assertion and "action".

Sane Americans see through you. Many of us pray for your conversion, or that you will begin to see your rage for what it is. Still, sane Americans will not sit by and let you destroy a civilization just because you read 100 pages of Marxist dribble in college and are now using it to throw a hissy fit.

Here is the Apostle Paul, writing one of the texts in that now maligned Bible, writing almost two-thousand years ago on how we are actually united. Search history all you like, you will not find any earlier statement of fundamental human dignity.

In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:26-8)

Paul's theological concept of our union in Christ was eventually universalized in the Christian West into what is now the global concept "human rights". For me, as a Christian, the concept remains theological. But for our left? Any notion of "human rights" our left asserts is, unknown to them, ultimately rooted in Christian thought. Thus our left's whole discourse on human rights, especially when it turns to Christianity as somehow the enemy, is deeply incoherent. When forms of slavery reappear, as they well might and as they in fact did under communist regimes in the 20th century, it will be because the concept "human rights" has been cut from its theological root.

It is the encounter with Christ that allowed us to see what unites us. It was this encounter that allowed us to overcome racism, slavery, systemic injustice. Against what unites us, what does our left have? They have hate, race-baiting, division. We must reject them.

Check out my Heretic Days. Writing from the margins of Christianity.

Notes from a Slow Learner

With Prof. Afaa M. Weaver, 2006.
Fifty now, for most of my adult life I've been an active supporter of the progressive wing of the American left. Given my university studies in Comp Lit and languages, attentiveness to cultural difference, as well as a careful respect for dialogue, have always been crucial to me. I’ve had close Muslim and Buddhist friends, atheist friends, feminist friends, gay and lesbian friends, black, Asian and Jewish friends. Needless to say, I’ve learned things from all of them.

But that was then, back in the old days. I’d like to say--back in the last century, because this new century is something quite different.

I'm thinking the American atmosphere shifted decisively around 2010; a dark spark of some sort shot through the ether wind. Actually I’m ashamed I didn’t notice it when it happened. But now I get it. Because myself, now in 2017--white, male, Catholic--my progressive friends and acquaintances have made it clear: My presence isn't welcome.

I should have realized it sooner, in 2012 say. It would have saved us all a lot of trouble. I’m a slow learner.

For the feminists around me, our 21st-century feminists, maleness itself is the root of all evil. So although I’ve long believed women and men are equal (that quaint old 20th-century notion!) it makes no difference. I’m guilty as charged. And always will be.

For our SJWs, Europe and Western cultural traditions are to be denigrated and fought at every turn. Though I recognize the West is also guilty of some of history's most systematic abuses, I study and cherish European culture, and the American culture that stems from it. But the important thing about Europe now is no longer its humanistic learning, its concepts of rights and law, its philosophy and literature--no, it’s the abstract evil called “whiteness”. Again: I’m guilty as charged.

For the New Atheists and the many secularist keeners who mimic their soundbites, progress means openly and loudly mocking people of faith because, well, religions are silly, outdated, and oppressive--especially, of course, Christianity. This crowd has been setting the tone for more and more young Americans and Brits. Well, here you find me again: Catholic, I'm guilty as charged.

I've always sought out dialogue, almost to an obsessive degree, especially dialogue with people who disagree with me. Such a thing hardly exists now. If I’m around American women, and attempt to clarify or discuss some point, I’m “mansplaining”. Online, if I point out how Barack Obama’s pro-Wall Street, pro-corporate policies undermined his legacy, I’m “supporting white supremacists” (as I just learned today, from a friend of many years, a prominent black poet and professor, who informed me of this, then summarily unfriended and blocked me on Facebook). Never mind that I voted for Obama twice, as my friend well knows; never mind that I blogged for years in Obama's favor; never mind that I've heard this friend himself criticize Obama ("He's doing nothing for us, but we'll still vote for him")--no, being white, I’m racist for daring to criticize Obama’s policy record after the fact.

This friend, now ex-friend, would he unfriend black Obama critic Cornel West? I don’t know. Maybe he already has. You know: Cornel West--self-hating black man.

Dares to criticize a black president on policy? Check. Guilty as charged.

Then there’s the LGBT crowd, which has really changed in recent years. I was an ally in the late 1980s and 90s, even heading into this new century. I've always treated gays and lesbians with respect, have gay friends I openly admire, gay and lesbian writers I recognize as geniuses, but this matters nothing now. If I disagree with one point on their ever-growing list of rainbow dogmas, I’m a “bigot” who must be run out of the public arena, a hater who deserves to lose his career, if not worse.

And that's not idle talk. I know very well that if I were still living and teaching in the States rather than overseas, the zealots in this movement likely both would and could destroy my career because of my position on marriage and the excesses of the trans movement. Which fact is, at the very least, a sad commentary on what has become of our civil liberties.

Willing to acknowledge the LGBTQwerty movement has fallen into shrill demagoguery? Yup. Guilty as charged.

What all these so-called progressives now praise as “diversity” is not diversity at all. It’s a dogmatic new groupthink. It’s a creeping (and really not-so-creeping) authoritarianism. What they mean when they say this word "diversity", in this new climate, is something like: “Agree with us on everything, or you’re not diverse enough. And if you're not diverse enough, we will ruin you.”

Well, here I am. Officially Out. Guilty as charged. Bring it on, bitches.

I believe in pluralism, the deeper pluralism that recognizes possible intellectual or cultural disagreements at the most fundamental levels--but that still insists on reasoned dialogue and the right to free speech. I believe in cultural and intellectual pluralism, not this ersatz replacement concept called "diversity", a word that now virtually sickens me whenever I hear it.

Diversity, given the way our SJW left theorizes it, wins the ribbon as the most transparently hypocritical social concept now in circulation. Although the tendency to abuse language was already evident in the 1980s, the new climate is markedly worse. Again, I pick 2010 as the year critical mass was reached.

After years now of this hard-edged double standard on full display, the faith in tolerance and pluralism that many like myself have long held to is starting to appear, well, naive. Can you blame us? Civil discourse with this new identity politics "left" is impossible. Because the only game they play is identity politics, and they play it zero sum. Bizarrely, this has become their whole idea of the left. For every one article in the progressive press on economic justice or the depredations of neoliberalism, there are now nine or ten about some lame identity spat. This new left has almost zero connection to the bread-and-butter politics of the 20th century left. And besides, it's clear their identity obsessions are only making things worse for everyone, themselves included. To judge from what I've seen in recent months, they haven’t learned a thing from Donald Trump’s election: why it happened; how they are implicated in it; how they are in no small part responsible for the counter-reaction their behavior has provoked.

Who’s going to tell them what they’re bringing about?

Here’s what I’d tell them, if I had any hope they’d listen:

If it’s hardball identity politics you want, then hardball identity politics you’ll get.

Do you hear that? Do you understand?

I know you, and even those of you capable of grasping my point, you won’t heed the warning; you won't desist from your demonization of those you suppose are oppressing you: whether it's white people, Christians, or daft abstractions like "heteronormativity" or "the Patriarchy", you won't desist. You'll keep up your jargon-laden rants against these largely imaginary oppressors because you've constructed a self that depends on their existence.

Sad thing is--this new century, perversely, may well end up delivering just the demons you've conjured. Funny how that works, isn't? I think Hegel would have something to say on it.

It's depressing to see dialogue die, over and over, and to be forced to write off so many friends because they can't accept actual difference when they encounter it. It's depressing also to have to leave the left, but leave it I will, because it is now an utterly fake left, rotten to the core. Your politics has nothing to offer America but polarization and speech codes, thought police and inter-racial hate. Me, I'm interested in possible communities.

Obama: The Sad Relevance of Race

The president as a young man, about 1980.
Though he's repeatedly been called a "radical" or "Marxist" by Tea Partiers, anyone who studies Barack Obama's policy initiatives these past years would have to conclude that our president is actually a centrist. The fact is that Obama has done nothing out of the ordinary for a mainstream leader of a modern Western nation. In Europe, he would even be considered well right of center. American conservatives who now bitterly attack Obama for his "leftist agenda" would, I believe, have to start scratching their heads in confusion if they were forced to read actual leftist writers on Obama. Take political thinker Thomas Frank for instance. Interviewed last month in Salon, Frank communicated clearly the befuddled sense of despair progressives now feel when they survey Obama's repeated failure to push leftward. In particular, they say, the president has had many opportunities to hold Wall Street accountable for our economic woes, could have garnered enormous public support for a stricter regime of regulation on the financiers, but never did so. He never even clearly told the American public the true story of what happened--how their whole way of life had been nearly shattered by the deregulatory idiocy of the American right. In 2009 and '10 our president could have pointed fingers, named names, called for prosecutions, laid out a new and saner financial order. Most Americans would have been behind him. But he did none of these things, instead choosing to waste his substantial political capital trying to reach across the aisle to a party dedicated--as was obvious from the start--to nothing but his destruction. As the disgruntled Frank puts it: "What Barack Obama has saved is a bankrupt elite that by all means should have met its end back in 2009. He came to the White House amid circumstances similar to 1933, but proceeded to rule like Herbert Hoover." Frank further points out that many of Obama's policies have in large measure been continuations of Bush policies. "Marxist radical" indeed.

If Frank is right, and I believe there's much truth behind his despair, we now need to ask: Why indeed did Barack Obama choose the route he did--to bring Wall Street insiders into his administration and let them call the shots, to push for the bailouts without doing the necessary house-cleaning, to let the bankers continue on largely as before?

One of the most depressing facts of being an American during these years has been watching the degree to which race has been used to fire up the Republican agenda. It started early on with birtherism, which many of us assumed would go away after a few months. We were disappointed. Now, years later, the birther nonsense seems strong as ever: even the GOP candidate apparently felt it was acceptable to say that "nobody ever asked me to show my birth certificate." I find this situation not merely disappointing. No, the bland lack of respect these people show for evidence is enough to provoke rage. I still wouldn't say, however, that this is so much a matter of the majority of white Republicans being overtly racist. This crowd was comfortable enough with Herman Cain, weren't they? Rather, what we see in the birther strain is a subtler kind of racism, one harder to call out as such and harder to ascribe to purely racist motives. For many of the wingnuts, I think it is not so much that they can't imagine a black man being president per se. Rather, it is that if an actual black man becomes president and if they disagree with that man's policies, then the racism might come into play in various forms--in this case, in the form of a bizarre willingness to believe (or to pretend to believe) almost any slander told against him. In fact the slanders being spread are beyond ridiculous: the birther slander in itself, for starters; the slander that he is hiding his true religion (Islam); the implication that his education was paid for by an enemy of America and that he is really a kind of sleeper agent now performing a mission to bring the country down. Certainly these slanders can take hold in the paranoid mind because the president is of mixed race and spent part of his youth in a Southeast Asian country. That the slanders flourish, however, should be attributed to the fact that the purveyors can use them as a weapon against the president's (supposedly leftist) policies.

But once racism is kindled, it risks becoming ever more poisonous. And this is obviously what has happened thanks to the willingness of the right to raise these birther-related issues. We can imagine Hillary in the White House pushing the exact same policy initiatives our president has pushed, but we can't imagine the same level of distrust or anger directed against her. Yes, the GOP faithful would have criticized her initiatives, they would have evoked the specter of Bloated Government, but this wouldn't have led to a discourse which painted Hillary as somehow evil, untrustworthy, alien or un-American in essence--a kind of foreign body made to appear ever more foreign and sinister with each passing month. A second Clinton administration wouldn't have led to the crazed fear I see in the right-wingers around me at present--a fear that America is somehow being permanently undone. But since our current president is of mixed race, since he has a partly foreign background, his policies aren't seen as merely the old "tax and spend liberalism"--no, instead they constitute a sneaking crypto-Islamic Marxist plot. Never mind that there is nothing in what he has done to indicate either Marxism or Islam. And never mind, again, that much of what he has done is simply a continuation of policies begun under that noted Islamist communist George W. Bush.

That the GOP's leaders have allowed this to develop as it has is despicable. They should be tarred and feathered for it in our press, but instead it is only noted: "Romney Campaign Goes Birther". That large swaths of the populace fall into such racist hysteria is regrettable, but then it has always been regrettable to me that such large swaths of the populace are uneducated. We have enormous resources of knowledge at our fingertips, we have some of the best universities in the world, but somehow millions still get through our education system while remaining unable to find England, much less Iran, on a map. And being uneducated, they are more likely to feel the world as such, especially non-whites, are somehow essentially other than Americans.

But enough of the sad spectacle of my compatriots drinking the right's racist Koolaid. What concerns me here is rather the question I raised above: namely, why has our president, a man who developed in the progressive crucible of community organizing, a brilliant man besides--why has he not employed more of his progressive fire during his first term?

On the left many people believe it's because he simply sold out. That once he got in his current high office, he found it more appealing to hobnob with Wall Street criminals than to subpoena them. These criminals, so the argument goes, have an insider professionalism that something in Obama appreciates. Now at the top himself, it is expedient simply to become one of them. I don't espouse this theory of the sell-out.

Still, Obama in some measure remains a mystery--not to the Tea Partiers who think they know him after watching Obama 2016--but rather to us on the left who wonder why he isn't more of the radical he is accused of being. In The Audacity of Hope Obama expressed his strong belief in working together and in compromise, and this no doubt explains much of his non-confrontational manner of governing. But many feel this isn't the only reason, that in itself it can't justify what they see as the president's overly conciliatory cool.

I believe the most compelling explanation for Obama's painstaking centrism may also, sadly, be related to race. Our president knows himself to be in an unprecedented American position: he recognizes he is playing a historical role that has never been played before. He is, after all, the first non-white president; he is the first black president. Thus Barack Obama steps back from the more aggressive reforms he'd otherwise push because he fears that if these reforms fail, the failure will not simply be chalked up to mistaken policy--no, it will be seen as vindication of the racist argument that a black man cannot be trusted in the highest office. His burden is thus unique. If a George W. Bush or a Jimmy Carter makes a mess of his years in office, that is a matter of poor policy or personal failure. If, however, Barack Obama makes a mess of his years in office, it is something else entirely: it has a different historical weight altogether; it will have repercussions for his race, his people.

What's more, Obama's wisdom tells him that given the vicissitudes of the world economy, it wouldn't be necessary for his policies to be wrong to still be judged to have failed. No, under such circumstances as we're now in, circumstances we might call nearly impossible, even the best policies could conceivably "fail"--which is to say, they might not lead to the wealth and success hoped for. Our president knows he is living in a time where the world capitalist system may itself be coming to crisis, and that any year now might see a downturn no one will really "recover" from in the old 20th-century sense of that word. If there is such a meltdown or partial meltdown on his watch, at least an Obama administration that had followed roughly the same policies as other recent US administrations could not be blamed for "doing something radical" and so being "instrumental in the end of the American way of life". This, I think, gives Obama further reason not to push truly leftward.

And so, as we listen to Thomas Frank complain that Obama walks a walk far too similar to that of his right-wing predecessor, we might ask ourselves if he isn't maybe doing this precisely because, as a black man in a unique historical role, he has too heavy a burden on his shoulders to walk in a more forthright way. Because to trip up would only confirm the suspicions of those millions of bigots and half-bigots who, no matter what happens, must never be given any such comfort. Would Hillary have had such a burden as the first woman president? I believe there would have been some of this. But given that the West has already had successful woman heads of state, the pressure not to fail would not have been nearly as great. Is Obama's burden, the sadly persistent burden of race, perhaps the real explanation for our "radical" president's surprising lack of radical initiatives? This to me seems likelier than that the former community organizer has sold out.

I don't want to be misunderstood with these remarks. Though I think Hillary would make a fine president, I am certainly not saying that I wish she'd been nominated instead of Obama. There may be some truth to my suspicion that Obama's unique historical position has hobbled his leftism, causing him to miss striking hard enough when the iron was hot, as it surely was in 2009. But even so, I can see he has accomplished much, and I am giving him my wholehearted support for the coming years. If he wins his second term, as I believe he will, there will be new opportunities to reform our oligarchical tax code and new chances to impose regulatory oversight on Wall Street. I can only hope that he will not waste his energies trying to reach across the aisle to that gaggle of Ayn Randian morons that still dares call itself the "Grand Old Party".

In conclusion, I should point out that I'm somewhat uncomfortable speculating on the sad relevance of race and how it might relate to Obama's centrism. There are others who make academic careers studying race relations in America, and compared to them I'm hardly qualified to write on these things. What's more, I'm a white man from rural Wisconsin, so my life experience can give me little cred on the issue of how a black man might deal with holding the most powerful office in a society long dominated by whites. My words here should be taken with a grain of salt, and I welcome any help in identifying my blind spots.