Some months ago I expressed my skepticism about Dinesh D’Souza’s thesis that the best way to understand Barack Obama involves seeing him as trying to fulfill his father’s anti-colonialist vision.
I argued that mainstream American liberalism, especially its hothouse academic forms, were more than sufficient to explain Obama’s statements and policies.
But that was based on a Forbes magazine article, which served as a precis for a book that was soon published, The Roots of Obama’s Rage. Now, with the relative leisure of the holiday season, I’ve finally had time to read the book.
Has D’Souza’s full argument convinced me? No. In fact, after reading the book I’ve became more convinced than ever that my original take on Obama is correct. Not only do we not need to go to Kenya to find the sources of his worldview (the Ivy League will do just fine), but in fact the very realistic and at times cold-blooded sentiments of post-colonial Africans who wrested their futures out of the hands of their European masters cuts against the magical thinking the characterizes the sort of liberalism that the Obama White House represents.
For example, D’Souza writes: “From a very young age and throughout his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global dominance and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument for neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that the free market is a code word for economic plunder.”
Accurate or not as a description of our president’s intellectual development, I want to point out that Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, and a whole raft of Vietnam era baby-boomers thought the same thing (and passed it on to their kids)—and yet none had Kenyan fathers.
More decisive still, I think, is a passage that D’Souza quotes from Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father. In this passage Obama is talking about his undergraduate experience reading Joseph Conrad’s famous novella about white imperialism in Africa, The Heart of Darkness. Obama recalls, “I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.”
Learn to hate! I cannot imagine that Barack Obama, Sr., a man formed in the crucible of the Kenyan struggle for independence, would have ever entertained the facile notion that human beings are inherently good, and only hate because they are socialized into negative worldviews. The sad fact of the matter is that we hate quite naturally. We need to learn decency, to say nothing of the ideal of loving one’s enemies.
When I finished I found myself thinking that Dinesh D’Souza’s book is not just unpersuasive; it is positively misleading. Obama is very much a man formed by American culture. He is, in fact, our first therapeutic president. He doesn’t some much have beliefs as critical perspectives, not convictions but instead expertise. He doesn’t confront our enemies, but rather tries to understand them, empathize, and gain their trust—perhaps in order to help overcome their fears and learn how not to hate . . .
Philip Rieff announced the triumph of the therapeutic nearly 50 years ago, so in a way it’s surprising that it took so long for us to have a president like Obama. But now we do, and it does us no good at all to imagine that his mentality comes from alien shores, as D’Souza’s book suggests. On the contrary, Barack Obama strikes me as an intelligent, ambitious, and fully committed representative of the therapeutic American liberalism of our day.
At it’s worst it’s a smug liberalism that refuses to see itself as an ideology but instead postures as our national (and global!) guidance counselor, which explains why Obama can push for liberal policies while insisting that he is nonpartisan. The therapist, after all, has no “interests,” only “understanding.”
Far from having sources in the Third World, I’m willing to bet that the therapeutic liberalism that Obama represents gives most anti-colonial African nationalists the creeps.
January 4th, 2011 | 12:53 pm
“Barack Obama strikes me as an intelligent, ambitious, and fully committed representative of the therapeutic American liberalism of our day”.
I’d say yes to all, except the word “Intelligent”. Whatever it may mean in Obama’s case, it has lost a lot of its currency since he first got elected.
January 4th, 2011 | 2:21 pm
He doesn’t some much have beliefs as critical perspectives, not convictions but instead expertise.
The President’s general intelligence is more than adequate. What he lacks is, in fact, expertise and experience.
January 4th, 2011 | 4:11 pm
Art Deco – the evidence for the former is soft. Not nonexistent, but soft. He has the mannerisms of the Ivies, which is not quite the same thing.
I like D’Souza, but I think Reno is closer to the mark here. I might grant that Obama has the beliefs that American liberalism thinks that anticolonialists have, or should have. That is a considerable filter, though.
January 5th, 2011 | 8:12 am
[...] Faint praise for Mr Obama. [...]
January 5th, 2011 | 8:13 am
[...] Faint praise for Mr Obama. [...]
January 5th, 2011 | 5:54 pm
Yeah, Dr. Reno’s closer to the mark than Dinesh.
FWIW, I still don’t know why Obama doesn’t release his birth certificate information. Nothing to hide, so give it up.
January 6th, 2011 | 8:02 am
[...] that Dinesh D’Souza’s book is not just unpersuasive; it is positively misleading.”—R.R. Reno of First Things, on the most intellectually dishonest book of 2010. David Sessions is the [...]
January 6th, 2011 | 10:36 am
I agree with your comments re: Obama. Is D’Souza a birther? I would probably not have read this book anyway, but thanks for your summary / critique. As others have commented, I would challenge your definition of “intelligent.” :-) Fully commited, yes, but intelligent…?
I’m not a hater, but I find little to appreciate about Mr. Obama.
January 6th, 2011 | 2:14 pm
wow.
if obama is not “intelligent,” what does that make george w. bush? most of the time, obama seems an eminently reasonable fellow who is dead wrong on abortion.
now i’m not fond of facile caricatures…. but i’ve listened to plenty of interviews and press conferences over the past few years, including one that juxtaposed tony blair and george w. bush on guantanamo.
all bush could say to the reporters was that “these people are bad people!” tony blair had to come to his rescue….
maybe bush simply didn’t have “ivy league mannerisms?”
January 6th, 2011 | 4:34 pm
Andrew – dead wrong. Bush’s IQ estimates out at about 125, John Kerry’s slightly below that, Obama’s at 119. See Steve Sailer for the data on how those numbers were generated (short answer: SAT’s and officer candidate scores, prep school averages). All of those are more than 1 SD above average, which is sufficient for presidency (You want to be governed by people from 120-140, not those above 140, who are (generally) too affected by being the smartest person in the room and listen less well), but any suggestion that Obama is considerably smarter is based on impression. Especially, he is not good with numbers – his unscripted remarks show repeatedly that he does not have a strong grasp of numerical relationships. (I don’t mean “57 states” or any slips like that, which are probably inconsequential.)
I will seek out the particular interview you refer to, but I am more concerned with the body of work. I doubt, however, that your quote is anything like exact, but only your take-away of his primary argument. And frankly, that is the central argument.
January 6th, 2011 | 5:36 pm
Steven Sailer, who is not a psychometrician, rummaged through the scores that Messrs. Kerry and G.W. Bush received on various instruments that they had taken as prospective students at Yale and as aspirant military officers and offered that estimate. I would not take it all that seriously.
George W. Bush manifested a low-end-of-satisfactory performance at one quite selective college and then earned a graduate degree at the business school of another highly selective institution. His academic performance as an undergraduate was better than that of Albert Gore, John McCain, and (IIRC) John Kerry as well. Albert Gore failed at one attempt at graduate school and abandoned another. Mr. Bush was also, ‘ere going into politics, in a more challenging line of work than either Gore or Kerry. His general intelligence is adequate and likely in line with the norm of the corps of national politicians. The metanarrative which had him stupid was (one may assume) the work of the sort of bourgeois liberals who mistake articulateness for intelligence.
Critics of Obama (e.g. William Dyer) concede his general intelligence, of which his law school performance is an indicator. The problem is that the intelligence is seldom if ever applied to any serious purpose. He worked as a copy editor for a couple of years, but his whole life since has been politics. He is admitted to the bar, but apparently rejects offers of a clerkship and noodles around for two years before getting a job in a firm. He appears to have been a part-time practitioner of a mix of labor and landlord-tenant law for three years, then gets elected to the state legislature and decays from ‘associate’ to ‘of counsel’, before allowing his license to lapse six years later. He lands a job teaching law at the University of Chicago, but he is never admitted to the tenure track, publishes not one scholarly article, and specializes in the teaching of constitutional law (troubling, per Dyer, because in teaching constitutional law you can fake it, which you cannot do teaching tax law).
The President is intelligent. He is also dilletentish.
January 6th, 2011 | 7:08 pm
to assistant village idiot,
thanks for the comments. i did not know about the iq computations, and appearances can be deceiving. in any case, i’d rather be governed by someone who is wise than someone who has a high iq.
see below for the transcript of the press conference i mentioned. i remember being shocked at the phrase “the only thing i know for certain is that these are bad people.”
what kind of “intelligent” person thinks about the world in such simplistic terms? there was a long, awkward pause after bush made this statement…. and if you listen to the entire conference, bush would have floundered badly had tony blair not been there to intervene.
granted, this is only one piece of datum. and intelligence without wisdom is a very dangerous thing.
—————————
Guantanamo Bay Detainees/Andrew Gilligan
Q. I wonder if I could ask you both about one aspect of Iraq and freedom and justice which, as you know, is causing a great deal of concern in Britain and the British Parliament, that is what happens now in Guantanamo Bay to the people detained there, particularly whether there’s any chance that the President will return the British citizens to face British justice, as John Walker Lindh faced regular American justice?
And just on a quick point, could the Prime Minister react to the decision of the Foreign Affairs Committee tonight that the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan is a “unsatisfactory witness?”
President Bush. You probably ought to comment on that one. [Laughter]
Prime Minister Blair. Can I just say to you on the first point, obviously, this is an issue that we will discuss when we begin our talks tonight, and we will put out a statement on that tomorrow for you.
President Bush. We will work with the Blair Government on this issue. And we’re about to—after we finish answering your questions, we’re going to go upstairs and discuss the issue.
Q. Do you have concerns they’re not getting justice, the people detained there?
President Bush. No, the only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people, and we look forward to working closely with the Blair Government to deal with the issue.
Prime Minister Blair. On your other point, Adam, the issue here is very, very simple. The whole debate for weeks revolved around a claim that either I or a member of my staff had effectively inserted intelligence into the dossier we put before the British people against the wishes of the intelligence services. Now, that is a serious charge. It never was true. Everybody now knows that that charge is untrue. And all we are saying is, those who made that charge should simply accept that it is untrue. It’s as simple as that.
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