Mother of All Cultural Battles

After listening to these autobiographical excerpts from Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, read out loud by Obama himself, I’m left with the conviction that, in the 2008 election we are facing the mother of all cultural battles. E.J. Dionne thinks the political culture wars are over. Well, I’ve been rebutting "end of the culture wars" declarations for eight years. They always prove out wrong. If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, we’re certain to see a huge cultural battle in 2008. But it’s now evident that even a Hillary campaign would be tame by comparison to the cultural confrontation flowing from an Obama nomination. The transformation of the 2008 campaign into a full-fledged cultural battle is what is really emerging from the Jeremiah Wright flap.

A president who identifies with Malcolm X? A man who grew up alienated from ordinary American life and determined to avoid becoming a "sellout" by hanging with Marxist professors and radical feminists? In his commentary, Mark Steyn highlights Obama’s alienation — the fact that even his many radical gestures never felt quite satisfying. Yet it’s important to emphasize that Obama’s inability to feel fully satisfied by radicalism wasn’t overcome by rejecting radicalism. On the contrary, when Jeremiah Wright came along and offered himself as a substitute father figure, Obama overcame his alienation and embraced leftist organizing and Wright’s radical sermons in earnest. Obama finally grew up when he threw away his alienated radical pose and embraced the real radical thing instead.