Against Paranoia

As we are critical of the paranoid style of politics, as I am concerned that the worst elements of the American populism and demagoguery are being mainstreamed in our political life, I recall that this is a reaction to a major trend that many of us have experienced directly and meaningfully, including me.

Even as we are bombarded by crazy assertions that the American President is not an American citizen and that he is a secret Muslim, we need to recall that this sort of paranoia is reactionary.  It’s a response to an American triumph, the American people elected an African American, Barack Hussein Obama, to be President of the United States.  Even as his popularity waxes and wanes, he is our President.  We elected him by not succumbing to fears and hatreds, revealing our better selves.  This triumph goes beyond our evaluation of President Obama’s job performance.  It stands as a challenge to those who work to revive a politics of fear of the different.  It challenges those who speak about “taking their country back.”

I came to know the dimensions of the triumph, along with my fellow citizens, on the night of the Iowa Caucuses and the day after.  Obama won in an overwhelmingly white state.  The previously excluded was chosen, and the seriousness of Obama’s candidacy was clearly revealed.

The next day when I went for a swim at the Theodore Young Community Center (link), I saw how my African American friends, the whole gang, but especially the center of the social circle, Beverly McCoy, finally came to believe that I wasn’t crazy in thinking that Obama had a chance.  In our community center, we started thinking differently about our country.  I stopped being the naïve Jewish Professor.  Perhaps, I was instead a realist.  Together, we realized that we may live in a better country than we had imagined the day before.   I think that we started looking at each other differently.  We more openly spoke about race, about our fears and hopes, about being black and white, Jewish and Christian, in America.  During the past two years, we have talked about lots of troubling developments, but we talked about it in ways that were not possible before Americans revealed that they could act beyond fear and hatred.

I realized the breadth and depth of the achievement when talking to my mother by phone on the night of the caucuses.  She was very happy, as was all of my extended family.  And then she said to me in tears: “You know Jeffrey, maybe a Jewish person can become President.”  This may seem strange if you think about America exclusively in black and white.  But what my mother perceived was that the election of Obama was a triumph of the previously excluded, of all who were not “typical Americans,” a victory of understanding over suspicion. Suddenly she sensed that we were more fully American citizens, more insiders than outsiders, we, along with blacks and browns, Asians and Latinos, women as well as men, gays as well as straights.

My mother is not a person particularly engaged in politics and political analysis, not even a news junky, but she understood that the paranoia of race was defeated in Iowa, and later in the general election.  A different America appeared, or at least the potential of a different America.  A significant battle was won, that night and the night of Obama’s election.  Now the crazies are fighting back. But I don’t think that they will get to take the country back.