The Postmodern Presidency

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama's "truths"

Given thirty years of postmodern relativism in our universities, we were bound to get a postmodern president at some point.

Postmodernism is a fancy word — in terms of culture, nihilist; in terms of politics, an equality of result and the ends justifying the means —...

Try health care. By traditional standards, Obama prevaricates on most of the main issues revolving health care reform — from the fundamental about its costs and effects, to the more superficial such as airing the entire process on C-SPAN or promising not to push through a major bill like this on narrow majoritism. And recall the blatant bribes for votes to politicians from Nebraska to Louisiana. Look also at the enormous borrowing and cuts from Medicare that will be involved.

Well, those were not misstatements or misdeeds at all. You, children of privilege, only think they are, since you use antiquated norms like “abstract” truth to adjudicate the discomforting efforts of a progressive president.

He, on the other hand, is trying to force the privileged at last to account for their past oppressions (insurance companies that gouge, surgeons that lop off legs or tear out tonsils for profit, investors who private jet to the Super Bowl, or the lesser but equally selfish Joe the Plumber types who do not wish to “spread the wealth”) by extending care to the underprivileged. Your “Truth” about his past statements is something reactionaries evoke to thwart such progressive change; in fact, the constructed truth of Obama’s is that a child will now have regular check-ups. All the other “gotcha” games about abstract truth and falsehood are just semantics.

Mean Speech for Thee, But not for Me

Look at supposed hate speech. An empiricist would ignore Obama’s recent warnings about the new wave of right-wing tough talk from Limbaugh and Beck, and determine instead whether the president remembers the novel Checkpoint, or the award-winning film about killing George Bush, or the venom of a Michael Moore or Keith Olbermann.

That is, a traditional inquirer would weigh the furor of the right against left, in ascertaining whether hate speech is at all partisan or simply politics of all stripes. And he would remind the president that it was Barack Obama himself who asked of his supporters to “get in their face”and bragged “if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” and who used graphic examples in damning his opponents (cf. the taunt to Hannity (“he’ll tear him up”).

But you see, all this is not so. The postmodernist constructs a different reality. A person of color who is striving to level the playing field against oppressive interests speaks the “truth” to power. Of course, from time to time he draws on emotive language to drive home his points — quite unlike the cool, detached, and deliberate attack narratives of those seeking to protect corporate or entrenched interests....

Race is the same. A person of color can hardly, given the history of oppression accorded to non-whites, himself be guilty of dividing people by race.

So if Obama says “typical white person,” or entitles his book from the sloganeering of a racist preacher he courted for 20 years, or stereotypes rural Pennsylvanians, or dubs police as acting “stupidly” in matters of supposed racial confrontation, or has an attorney general who damns the country as “cowards” on race, or appoints a Supreme Court judge who thinks a “wise Latina” by virtue of race and gender has superior wisdom, or recruits a Van Jones who characterizes everyone from polluters to mass murderers by race (I could go on), well, all this is not at all racial stereotyping with an intent to deprecate.

Why? Because constructs of language, expression, and reality hinge on status and class. Obama is seeking to dethrone traditional nexuses of power. So when he, from time to time, muses on real racial inequality, reactionaries retreat to “objective” “standards” of reciprocity to thwart his proposed changes. ...

Consider the trumped-up crisis with Iran. We hold Ahmadinejad to our artificially constructed standards of “civil” discourse and “fair” play — forgetting (but not Obama) the 1953 Western-inspired coup, the profit-mongering of the global oil companies, and the neo-imperialist role of the United States in the Gulf.
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I could go on, but you get the picture of our first postmodern presidency. For 14 months we have tried to use abstract benchmarks like “did Obama contradict himself?,” “did Obama break another promise?,” “did Obama really think borrowing another $2 trillion won’t help to bankrupt us?,” “did Obama indeed think another entitlement ’saves’ money?,” “did Obama snub another ally and court another enemy?,” “did Obama apologize again?” — when, in fact, such linear thinking, such artificially constructed “norms,” such “facts” are nothing of the sort at all. To Obama, our first postmodern president, such facts and truth are mere signatures of privilege, and so he is offering us another — a postmodern — way of looking at the world.