Optimistic to a fault
by digby
Jamelle Bouie looks back at President Obama's famous speech on race during campaign 2008 and comes to a profound conclusion:
Now, on the eve of his farewell address, 10 days before the inauguration of Donald Trump, the most celebrated speech of Obama’s career hits the ears a little differently, as does the sermon that necessitated it. What the Jeremiah Wright of “God Damn America” lacked in admiration for the country, he made up for in clarity about its nature and its sins. He refused to look away from the dark corners of American history, or treat them as mere “zags” on the road to progress. He was clear-eyed about racism as a motive force in American life. He knew we cannot escape our history.
Had Obama absorbed those lessons, he would have been better prepared for the backlash that will be the undoing of his legacy. Had Obama not been so quick to explain away Wright’s pessimism, he would have seen the dangers that lay ahead. But then he likely wouldn’t have been Barack Obama, president of the United States. This is the great irony of the moment: The optimism that helped Obama reach this office—the same faith in our ever-perfecting union—is wholly inadequate in the face of the revanchist rage that gave us President Trump.
Most Americans are, by nature, optimists. As a nation we've had a charmed existence, unsullied by foreign invasion and gifted with bounteous resources. Our original sins of native genocide and slavery are our enduring shame but we continue to believe that we are making progress. And we do,slowly and in fits and starts. The Obama election was one of the high points, a moment when even the more skeptical among us thought that maybe we'd definitively crossed into new territory. It felt liberating to those of who care about that. Apparently, it outraged many of us so deeply, and created such a burning cauldron of resentment, that the backlash is going to be very harsh this time. Black people and Latinos and Muslims and Jews along with uppity women and egg-headed liberals are going to be taught a lesson we won't soon forget. Again.
For the time being it looks as though many of the targets of this rage will be re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic but hopefully, at some point, we'll focus on what's happened, and figure out a way to contain the damage and fight back.
Until then, all we can do is heed Lincoln's sage words in 1860:
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.
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