The text is a transcription of a debate held on June 4th in Istanbul, during the Istanbul Seminars organised by Resetdoc. Andrew Arato is a Dorothy Hirshon Professor in Political and Social Theory at the Graduate Faculty, New School University, and also the editor of Constellations. Benjamin Barber is the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society at University of Maryland, a former advisor to President Clinton and author of “Jihad vs. McWorld” and “Consumed”. Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale and the author of “Liberal Racism”. The forum was coordinated by Daniele Castellani Perelli, Online Editor for Resetdoc.org.
Daniele Castellani Perelli: What do you think the main issues of the presidential campaign will be, those both sides will try to use?
Jim Sleeper: Let me start with a powerful issue. I think that two myths converge in Obama’s campaign which make it very fateful for the United States, they involve race and immigration. The first myth is the famous American self-conception that we are a nation of immigrants and of course he embodies it by the fact of his birth. The second myth that converges in him is one that he actively chose, specifically wishing to make it converge, and that is of course the fact of race. In America, unlike all the other countries that make universal claims, we abducted and plunged into our midst these millions of Africans and ex nihilo they had to create an identity. The only reason I mention these things is because I do think he is the first presidential candidate to both embody and choose to enact some kind of convergence or resolution of those myths. Usually, a nation of immigrants consisted in white people uniting against you-know-who, and blacks were not immigrants. Here he is, having chosen actively to re-engage the black community that he was not part of, he is not descended from abducted slaves.
Of course I think this is worth mentioning depending on the audience, because here he now goes carrying this into the general campaign, and I think we all know – and that is the last thing I will say on this subject – that the enduring and unresolved racism in America makes me believe that his victory, if he wins, will be a close call. I am one of those who does not believe in polls, what will happen nobody knows, and more than anything it just depends on what will be the endurance and obduracy of the racism that is not going where he is trying to take us. I think that is pretty fateful because of how well he has done in trying in his own life, and in his messages, to re-enact this and he has obviously done that beautifully for a large segment of Americans, and commanded a lot of respect. But as we know, it is going to be tough. So that is my one observation about him versus McCain, is that that is a fateful and will see.
Benjamin Barber: Let me comment on that, because I think Jim was right to say that obviously race will be at the very centre of this campaign, although always as a nominal background issue. That is to say that nobody is going to talk too directly about it, but in fact that is the issue. Let me put it a little differently. We want to remember something people often forget, and Jim just said that very clearly: Obama is strictly speaking not a black candidate in the model of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, or any of the blacks who have run. And many have run, some of them actually have been on the national ballot. People often forget that. People like Shirley Chisholm a long time ago, who when she ran interestingly said it was harder to be a woman than black.
Actually I would call him the first multicultural candidate we have had. You know, we are talking about a son of Africa and Kansas, who also spent three years in Indonesia, so we have generally a reflection of America’s new multicultural status more than what has seemed more obvious, that we had a black American. But on the other hand he is black and African-American.
As for the second thesis, I want to come back to the Reverend Wright argument, because that captures, I think, the fundamental distinction between indigenous children of the slaves, the heirs of slavery, who I think on the whole agree with Reverend Wright. A lot of all the rest of us agree with the Reverend Wright that for black Americans who have descended from slavery much of what Wright says if in a very polemical, overstated, way represents a kind of truth for a country that is still racist. The fact that you are fundamentally disadvantaged if you are born with black skin and the opportunities are not there, that no male black man can never ascend to the highest reaches of power, and Obama, is in effect contesting that and saying ‘No, in a certain way that is over, it is done, we are in a new era, we are in a era in that we can finally put that behind us’.
And one reason I think Obama was so disturbed by Reverend Wright is not that reverend Wright was dead wrong on what he said, but that the Reverend Wright was advancing the old and well-established notion of American politics in which race is absolutely central and a barrier to victory for blacks above a certain place. Obama’s entire campaign rested on his belief that we are in a place where we can perhaps move beyond that. In that sense, interestingly, the election itself is a referendum on not Reverend Wright but on Reverend Wright’s view of America: if Obama loses, presumably that proves Wright is right and correct in saying that we are not beyond it yet and that this race, finally, in the secrecy of the balloting room becomes a crucial issue, and there are people who instead say ‘Yes, he would be a good president’ vote against him.
If he wins, Obama will actually make the case successfully that we are beyond the Reverend Wright’s view of America, so in that sense I think Jim was exactly right to put his finger where he does and this will be a background issue and might be the most important issue, because a victory will mean Obama’s vision is right. A defeat will mean probably not that Obama is wrong, but the Reverend Wright, who everybody is condemning, actually continues to have a better grip on the American reality than Obama himself.
Andrew Arato: But there are two questions about whether Obama is a post-race candidate or whether race is no longer that kind of issue in America. I think the first issue, the first claim unfortunately turns out to be wrong, even though he advanced himself initially as a candidate beyond race, beyond that kind of division. The way the campaign developed, in a way surprisingly, made him black.
Jim Sleeper: Not his campaign.
Andrew Arato: But that is the way the campaign developed. I think that one part of it, one can blame on the strategy of the Clintons and I think that they have had an unfortunate part in that. But there was also one thing which one really could not anticipate, and I could anticipate, namely the embrace of Obama by the black community.
Jim Sleeper: Ninety per cent.
Andrew Arato: That was amazing, because one would have thought Clinton was a very popular president in the black community and even Hillary Clinton was popular though not as popular as Bill… One would have thought that it would be perhaps not fifty-fifty maybe but fifty-forty, some kind of split, and indeed the politicians’ endorsements initially kind of split. She had some very powerful black politician endorsements, and so on some level they were splitting, but somehow the community embraced him, and the votes really went with him, and then the Clintons began to do some things wrong.
Jim Sleeper: That is right. One reason why that happened is an important thing that I have always seen and others have said this. Blacks actually always give their highest support to those black candidates who are doing well with whites. There is no question that after Obama won the Iowa white caucuses and his speeches were so transcendent, that was the point at which lot of blacks started getting on board.
Benjamin Barber: I think this is what Arato is saying – Obama was saying ‘I am the candidate of all Americans, at which point the black community said: ‘Yes, and you are our candidate because you are the candidate of all’ (laughs). And that changed what he said and his claim that he was the candidate of all Americans and to the extent there were racist and there were suspicious elements. The fact that more than 90 percent of blacks were supporting him made it easier for some whites to believe that he was the candidate of the blacks.
Andrew Arato: But symbolically, for example, if you have a family and you have a black young kid, it is so important to see him.
Benjamin Barber: It is not a conspiracy. It is the simple fact that with single candidate who actually had a chance to win…the black community moved en masse over to him and in doing so inadvertently made it difficult for the candidate to claim ‘I am not just the candidate of blacks’.
Andrew Arato: So now you cannot truly say that race is not on the table, it is part of it and it is not going to disappear. McCain will not use it, he will not touch it….
Jim Sleeper: He will have to.
Andrew Arato: …but you see, others will, others will do it. They will find all kind of euphemistic ways of doing it, and the voter knows it, and hence the voter going into the booth knows it.
Jim Sleeper: McCain from the evidence of things is going to be a blundering idiot of a candidate (laughs), I mean he will, come on guys, he might be a father figure, but he is going to make some stupid mistakes and as far as Obama still losing to him is concerned, I think it can’t happen.
Daniele Castellani Perelli: Other issues of the campaign could be elitism and patriotism. Is this a card McCain is going to play against Obama?
Jim Sleeper: Look, we have long talked about this. This has become a replay supposedly of the 60s’ black liberal coalition, which I believe somehow was described as more elitist than it was, and he still suffers from that, and he has not shown that he is anything other than a Harvard neo-liberal….
Andrew Arato: On the other hand the Americans have a funny definition of élite, right? Because here is McCain, who of course comes from a really élite military family, his father was Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, this is a real élite, right? You can’t just become that so easily because he is white, he is really a multi-multi-millionaire. Obama comes from a poor family, and had to work his way up. He and his wife went to the best schools basically on their own efforts. This is élite or elitist according to American vocabulary?
Benjamin Barber: Obama is a candidate who says: ‘We Americans define ourselves not by where we came from but by our aspirations’, and if that applies to race, which Obama is claiming it does (‘I am not simply a black candidate son of Kansas and Kenya, I am an American’), it also applies to this: ‘Yes, I went to Harvard, and yes, I have a certain background. But I am what I aspire to be, I represent all Americans’. So, I think the power of his claim and the inspirational character of his campaign comes from the fact that he is defined by the fact that he was at Harvard and by the fact that yes, he has certainly a racial mixed background, but in reality what he is saying to Americans, like all groups of Americans, like all ordinary Americans, like all of you, ‘I am defined by that which I aspire to, not that which made me who I am or where I came from’. And I think that is the power, and again this may be to some degree a referendum on that, just as it is a race-crucial referendum . Is the unified America he aspires to crucial? Is the elitism which some people claim he has crucial? Or is his saying ‘I stand for all Americans’ crucial? And that again would be a referendum on that. I mean, Ronald Reagan, after all, was in a way a very elitist character, who claimed and won election after election because Americans believed he somehow represented all of them, whereas you can’t imagine a more distant figure from the real American….
Andrew Arato: John Kerry was élite and George W. Bush somehow was not, but sociologically it is ridiculous.
Benjamin Barber: But in fact this comes back to what my Harvard teacher Louis Hartz said: ‘There is no socialism in America because there is no feudalism’. Trying to define people by class and elitism doesn’t finally work, because again the mythology is ‘we are all middle class’. When we do a sociological survey, rich and poor alike self-identify into the middle class. And European sociologists or American sociologists with a European Marxist background, always have had a very hard time trying to introduce class, even if descriptively in terms of the income disparities, education disparities, in a class analysis. Americans just refuse to see themselves that way and people and politicians know it, which is why the class card never seems to work as a political point.
Part Two of the Forum here.