Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
13 November 2008
opinion
In a broad discussion of the political circumstances behind Barack Obama's election victory, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza argues that the US has finally grown up.
This is maturing both in the sense of witnessing the election of an individual of African descent and in ending the forty-year Republican neoliberal hegemony, and is a development reflective in no small part of the Democrats' ability to articulate a campaign true to contemporary socio-political conditions in the US. For while many challenges will face the administration-in-waiting, Obama's ability to appeal to a diverse range of voters, Zeleza contends, represents an invaluable means of satisfying cosmopolitan Americans' desire for renewed global respect.
America and the world have witnessed a historic victory in a historic election by a historic candidate. It was an amazing night, exhilarating in its significance and symbolism, electrifying in its sheer pleasure and possibilities, a rare moment when pure joy seemed to transcend, if only fleetingly, the cruel hierarchies and schisms of race, class, gender, and nationality that have stalked and scarred this vast, bounteous land of unfulfilled promises called the United States of America. I was there at Grant Park in downtown Chicago, when the young first-term senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, accompanied by his beautiful family, ascended the stage before an ecstatic crowd of a quarter-million people gathered to bear witness to the rewriting of American history, overwhelmed and empowered by the once implausible and dizzying rendezvous with America's future.
Obama won a landslide victory, and his long coattails carried the Democratic Party to undivided power in Washington. In January the Democrats will control the White House, the Senate - to which they added six seats (4 Senate seats are yet to be declared as I write and if the Democrats win all four they will enjoy a filibuster proof majority) - bringing their total to 56. They also captured 20 House of Representatives seats raising their total to 255 against 173 for the Republicans (the results for seven seats are still pending). Following their traumatic defeat the infighting that had already started within the McCain-Palin campaign in the waning days of the election fuelled in part by angry defections by some leading conservative intellectuals appalled at Palin's selection is sure to erupt into a virtual civil war for the soul of the now rudderless Republican Party.
As I walked to the park with friends, the city roared with excitement I had not seen since I relocated here almost two years ago, car horns honked with musical abandon, the crammed streets danced with history, strangers greeted each other with screams of Obama, vendors briskly sold Obama t-shirts and memorabilia, giddy Obama smiles seemed to be everywhere, together with tears of incredulity. In the park Jesse Jackson cried, Oprah Winfrey cried, and many others cried with happiness unknown for years and decades and centuries since this country was founded as an imperfect union of European masters and African slaves. Elsewhere Condoleeza Rice, the current Secretary of State and her predecessor, Colin Powell, choked with tears, too. Now, a black man was about to speak as the president-elect. It was awe-inspiring indeed.
President-Elect Obama's striking presence and splendid speech seemed to lift the spirits and imaginations of an audience and a nation and a world hungry for change, exhausted from the ravages of the Bush years, indeed the legacies of the destructive divisions spawned by the original sin of slavery and the aggressive reflexes of unbridled capitalism and imperialism at home and abroad. 'It has been a long time coming', the newly elected president declared. And the crowds chanted, 'Yes, we can!' America had, at last, shattered the racial ceiling to the country's highest office and appeared ready to grow up and return to the world chastened by the calamities in the treacherous theatres of unwinnable wars fomented by misguided unilateralism.
The victory of President-Elect Obama is historic because he is the first African-American to scale to the pinnacle of power in the world's richest and most powerful country. Since the 1960s African-Americans have been breaking one barrier after another in fields ranging from sports to entertainment, academia to the arts, business to politics as mayors, members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and governors, but the presidency seemed impregnable, a fortified zone for white males, certainly not open to a junior black senator with an exotic name who began his improbable quest twenty-two months ago just a few years after bursting onto the national scene with an inspiring speech at the 2004 Democratic Party convention. His vision of the indivisibility of the so-called blue states and red states - a metaphor for the need for both political and racial reconciliation - struck an instant and powerful chord.
President-Elect Obama enjoys other less momentous but significant firsts. He is the first northern liberal Democratic President since John F. Kennedy; Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were southerners. He won the biggest mandates in the popular vote and electoral vote since President Johnson. Educated at the Ivy League schools of Columbia and Harvard, and a former law professor at the renowned University of Chicago, Obama is an accomplished writer and sharp thinker, a man who exemplifies public intelligence in his preference for mature dialogue with the electorate in a political culture that was becoming dangerously captivated by the blissful anti-intellectualism of a George W. Bush and the banality of a Sarah Palin (who if the post-election Republican bloodletting is to be believed apparently didn't even know Africa was a continent!). And Obama is going to be the first post-baby boomer president, who was only a child when the cultural wars that have wrecked American political discourse and civility broke out, and whose unproductive polarisations he seems to disdain.
This has been a historic election because it represents a potential realignment in American politics, a reversal of the Republicanisation of America, which I wrote about on this site immediately after the 2004 elections. The Republican Party's anti-civil rights southern strategy and political stranglehold over national affairs has suffered a major, maybe even historic, defeat. President Johnson clearly understood that with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which finally enfranchised African-Americans, the Democratic Party would lose the South for a generation. If the Republican era emerged in the late 1960s out of the fragmentation of the liberal Democratic coalition, which had been dominant since the catastrophe of the Great Depression, this election has been a referendum on the modern Republican era, and may usher a new epoch in American politics. The victory of President-Elect Obama and the Democratic Party represents a repudiation of this period in modern American history, the demise of the Republican agenda that has held sway for four decades, notwithstanding brief interludes under the Democratic administrations of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
The Republican political and electoral hegemony - the marriage between neoliberalism and neoconservatism - created under Richard Nixon, consolidated under Ronald Reagan and crushed under George W. Bush reached its destructive apotheosis. The Republican dream of creating a permanent electoral majority collapsed under the onerous weight of hubris, lies, incompetence, and crisis. The Bush administration, arguably one of the worst in American history, squandered any superior Republican claims as custodians of the economy, national security, and moral values. The economy slowed as budget surpluses left by the Clinton administration turned into huge deficits, national debt doubled to $10 trillion, the rate of job creation declined while the ranks of those without health insurance increased, and wealth was distributed upwards with regressive tax policies that widened the gap between the rich and the rest. The economy finally cratered in the Wall Street meltdown of last September, which accelerated the slide towards recession and unleashed fears of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Suddenly, bankers and other high priests of capitalism became converts to the virtues of state intervention as they stretched their greedy hands for a public bailout of nearly $1 trillion.
In the meantime, the overstretched military was bogged down in two major wars including the long, costly and bungled war in Iraq launched under false pretences. Unilateralism, combined with the shameful scandals of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, had left the United States more despised than feared, more vulnerable to terrorist assault and global censure and irrelevance than ever before. Compassionate conservatism was buried in the wrath of Hurricane Katrina that showed the gross incompetence of the administration, the callousness of the roosting chickens of neoliberalism, and the explosive mix of race and class. Personal and political shenanigans including corruption, cronyism, and contempt for the law exposed the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of many a Republican leader, and their party's cynical manipulation of social issues from abortion to gay rights as divisive wedges in the unfinished cultural wars of the 1960s.
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reply to Kevin G Africa as a continent might be backward,but many Africans are not backward,and are better informed and better educated than many people from Europe,Asia and the Americas. You might want to do a web search on the writer of the article you are responding to and use that in testing my contention as well as measure yourself against his accomplishments.
America grows up wow just b/c America elected a black president and he happens to be of African descent has nothing to do with being grown up........ American politics is definately not run from Europe or anywhere else in the world but by Americans. I am sorry to burst your bubble but Obama is not the complete solution to America's problems or the worlds. We had problems before him and we will have problems after him. Obama is not the savior of the world and trust me Africa his focus will be on the US economy and so that… [Read Full Text]
America Finally Grows Up? This coming from the most backward, most ignorant continent on the planet?