There was one bit of Obama’s acceptance speech at the DNC that I found particularly striking:
“…Because we understand that this democracy is ours.
We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.
As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government.
So you see, the election four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you. My fellow citizens – you were the change.
…
If you turn away now – if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible…well, change will not happen. If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void: lobbyists and special interests; the people with the $10 million checks who are trying to buy this election and those who are making it harder for you to vote; Washington politicians who want to decide who you can marry, or control health care choices that women should make for themselves.
Only you can make sure that doesn’t happen. Only you have the power to move us forward.”
This conceptualization of American
politics is so at odds with how electoral politics is presented to us that it
was actually shocking to hear. Typically candidates materialize on our TVs and
appeal to us as prospective employees or contractors, asking us for our
business and making promises in return. Unlike contracts, however, Presidents
cannot be sued and their contracts rarely expire in less than four years,
regardless of the promises they break. Their promises therefore are quickly forgotten,
and government in turn mostly seems monolithic, unresponsive, hegemonic, and inaccessible.
Obama is suggesting shift the very
core of how we’ve grown to feel about government. Self-government, he’s telling
us, means the actions of the State are our actions. Obamacare wasn’t passed “at
us,” or even “for us.” It was passed “by us.” Ditto with providing student loans,
ending the global gag rule, and, I guess, the debt crisis and drone strikes. But,
that aside, this is all a very new and, dare I say, empowering notion of politics.
It is so new that it seems almost bizarre in our political landscape. It’s
enough to make a million liberals’ eyes sparkle.
My point is that this: shouldn’t
this be self-evident already? Why is it such a novelty to think of our government
in these terms? Why is it so weird to think about the world this way?
“Self-government” is a crucial part
of the leap forward that was marked by the American and French revolutions. Well,
maybe not all the governed were participating, and participation was often
marginal, but at least it wasn’t just the king anymore. As suffrage has been
extended and the obstacles for participation have been knocked down, this
self-governance thing should be felt more and more by ordinary people. If we, the People, really are the government,
shouldn’t we feel more like every representative is acting because we gave them
the okay, and that every public servant is there because we wanted them there? Shouldn’t
we be celebrate progress together, and sharing responsibility for failures?
Shouldn’t it be no big thing for us to stand up and say, “this is not what we
wanted, and it’s going to stop now.”? Why don’t we just implicitly feel this
way?
To me, this is simply evidence that
the whole self-government thing is a sham. Government is a monster that does some
of what it is bid by those who have the power to control it (not us) and it is
this feeling that dominates our view of politics. Conservatives want to shackle
it and keep it from affecting their lives as much as possible; liberals want to
change it. No one feels like we come together every four years to figure out
the best way forward. People come together to bicker over who to blame and who
we mistrust the least. The contradiction between what people feel about government
and what Obama has correctly claimed we should feel is proof that we are not
participating in a grand experiment in self-governance. Instead we are
participating in a hoax.
It isn’t just a party thing,
either. We don’t all come together to decided what to do, but even partisan don’t
feel like they themselves are responsible for the actions of their
representatives. I haven’t met an Obama voter that feel like yeah, Obamacare
was their idea. People root for their guy
and their guy’s ideas; there doesn’t
seem any room to root for ourselves.
I think deep down everyone knows
this. Some are even happy about it; I’ve heard both conservatives and liberals
speak about “those people” who are too stupid to be trusted with a vote, much
less a true role in governing our society. I’ve even heard some people remind
us that “we do not live in a democracy; we live in a republic” as if people
weren’t implicitly aware of this already. The trouble is, we should be living in a democracy, and that
is what most everyone wants. Obama is a smart man—he knows this. And he
exploited not just this desire in his speech, but the very fact that it is not
at all how we feel about the way things are. He wants us to “hope” once again,
but this time hope for a deeper shift, one that leads not to just a new kind of
politics but a new kind of democracy.
I’m guessing we’ll be left hoping
by the end of his second term.
But it is good news that this
contradiction was so eloquently pointed out. People taking their lives and
their communities into their own hands, taking personal responsibility for the
course of history—this is the stuff that real change movements are made of. As people
continue to become active through outlets like Occupy, and become more and more
convinced that their voices are irrelevant to mainstream politics and
government, the closer we get to real fissures and real changes.
