Barack Obama has been the best president of my lifetime. Trouble is, that isn’t saying much. If his time in office bears a lesson for the future, it is the need to move toward what you might call “realistic idealism.”
Obama’s calm could not compensate for gridlock to which he deferred and injustice he had to tolerate. And that is because the sort of idealism he represented has already reached its limits and begun to be replaced.
In this special issue of The Chronicle Review, we turn our attention to the accomplishments and disappointments of the past eight years. See the whole issue here.
On the night he was first elected, Obama explained that his victory was “not the change we seek. It [was] only the chance to make that change.” But by and large, the chance was missed. Allergic to all but rhetorical mobilization, he put too much stock in supposedly postpolitical expertise. Outside of election time and mourning for national tragedies, Obama rarely tried to connect to his voters, squandering the hope he famously elicited, except for an occasional rhetorical high that weakened each time.
A couple of years ago, for another magazine, I guessed that “Obama’s primary legacy is his destruction of political idealism for the foreseeable future.” Given that the Bernie Sanders candidacy took the country by storm soon after, it was a premature claim, to say the least. Even though he was bitterly criticized as a dreamy idealist himself, Sanders actually showed a different tendency at work.
The tide of hope for Obama in 2008 was different from the swell of enthusiasm for Sanders in 2016. The former was far larger, but it worked like a daydream: It provided lovely escape.
Obama has taught many of his followers to rethink what sort of hope they want.
By contrast, Sanders’s idealism took the form of a partisan jeremiad. Sanders did not imply a quick fix or suggest that everyone really agreed if only politicians would stop misleading them. Imperfectly but better than any other candidate, Sanders addressed the core concerns of Black Lives Matter, without forgetting the undereducated whites whose class agony has misled so many into supporting Donald Trump and scapegoating other victims rather than participating in a transracial majority that would advance their interests.
Sanders’s remedies were also a kind of realistic idealism: The solutions called not for easy unification of the American people but, in the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt, forcing the rich into a collective venture in the society they currently rule from on high and as if from outside.
Such idealism is riskier. It calls for more, not less, division, refusing to offer false rhetorical healing. It does not promise to overcome difference with words but to undo it with policy.
People will differ about whether they want a realistic idealism. Some people prefer the purity of abstract promise, whether for their lives in this world or the next. But Obama’s true significance is that he has taught many of his followers to rethink what sort of hope they want. It can be beautiful but diversionary and evanescent, or it can be divisive and uncertain but real.
