Barack Obama's Chicago-Style Politics

Barack Obama recently implored a crowd of supporters to engage their friends, relatives, and neighbors who are Republicans and Independents and persuade them that he should be our next president.

And if this were all that he beseeched them to do, all would be fine and good. Yet during this very same speech, in the very next sentence, the presidential hopeful made it abundantly clear how he expected the members of the audience to engage others: “I want you to get in their faces!”

Whether Obama has attempted to explain his words, I don’t know. It is possible, I suppose, that all that he meant was that since it is nothing less than the good of the country that is at stake, his supporters should be unafraid of expressing their convictions and affirming their values.

Regardless, his selection of words is telling.

An Uncivil Proposal
From the beginning of this election season (way back when), Obama has styled himself the unifier, the one and only person willing and able to transcend “politics as usual” and reconcile Democrat and Republican, “Blue State” and “Red State,” conservative and liberal, radical and reactionary, saint and sinner. With Obama at the vanguard, he promised, America could finally overcome the plethora of “divisions” that have traditionally characterized her and forge a new destiny in which its long quest for wholeness would finally be complete, the “union” of its constituent parts finally “perfected.”

For a variety of reasons, this has always been the garbage for which anyone with an IQ above two should have recognized. Yet if there were any lingering doubts, Obama’s latest call to confrontation should have decisively dispelled them. Peaceful co-existence, to say nothing of genuine “unity,” necessarily presupposes civility. In a society such as our own where individuality is prized, there will always be disagreements, often fierce, between citizens. It is precisely in order to preserve this freedom, along with the order (without which it will, before long, collapse into chaos) that such conflicts be articulated civilly. “Jumping into the faces” of those with whom one disagrees is emphatically uncivil. Indeed, it is barbarous.

Chicago-Style Politics
Such uncivil, barbarous conduct, far from being an assertion of the individuality of the barbarian who attempts to intimidate his target into voting for Obama, reveals what happens when individuality has been transformed into a “doctrine” of “individualism.” “Individualism” is the doctrine that all countervailing considerations must be subordinated to the claims of the “sovereign individual.”

In beckoning his supporters to appropriate confrontational, Chicago-style, “community organizing” tactics, Obama has proven himself thoroughly unworthy to be even the mayor of a small town (like Wasilla, Alaska), let alone president of the United States of America. Furthermore, he has proven himself to be fundamentally no different from the violence-prone, anti-American sixties radicals toward whom he has gravitated all of his adult life.

A More Accurate Campaign Message
If Obama is in the market for a new campaign slogan, I have one that I would like to offer to him. He should appreciate it, for its inspiration is none other than that quintessential sixties figure for whom Obama has explicitly and enthusiastically expressed admiration, a person who he admits influenced him in no small measure and whose autobiography he says resonated with him on a personal level.

The person to whom I refer is, of course, Malcolm X, a one-time minister for “The Nation of Islam” and avowed Black Nationalist until his assassination at the hands of members of the very black supremacist organization toward whose prominence he contributed so much. Malcolm X had famously said that “black liberation” is a goal worth fighting for “by whichever means necessary.”

Considering that an appeal to “black liberation” will not exactly endear him to most of the residents of the land he aspires to govern, Obama knows better than to invoke it. Instead, he should assume the mantra:

“Unity! By Whichever Means Necessary!”