“The Avatar of a New Generation of Progressives"? Not by a Long Shot

In all of my nearly 36 years there have been at most a handful of occasions on which I bothered to peruse an edition of Time, and if I hadn’t been trapped with nothing else to read at a hospital the other day while waiting for the staff to prepare a room for my brother, I never would have become aware of this article. I’m glad that I did stumble upon it, for it’s worthy of comment.

The May 12 edition of Time contains an article by Joe Klein [which was originally published online April 30] entitled “Exit Wright.” According to Klein, Obama is “the avatar of a new generation of progressives,” for when the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee “divorced himself from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright…he stepped away from 40 years of liberal self-laceration” (my emphasis). The Wright controversy, he says, is “this year’s edition of a problem that has hurt the Democratic Party since the Vietnam era, a fixation on the (often spectacular) deficiencies of superpower governance while slighting this nation’s incredible strengths.”

Although he never specifies with any degree of exactness what he means by “liberal self-laceration” or “liberal masochism,” it is reasonably clear that Klein refers to the characteristically liberal disposition to show excessive sympathy for the United States’ most unabashed critics -- no matter how outrageous and unjustified their charges. This is why it has often been described by its opponents as “anti-American.” Since this moral posture has been most extravagant when those critics are racial minorities, it has also been associated with the label “white guilt.” Klein nowhere in his article uses the terms “anti-American” and “white guilt,” but given the context of the discussion, I fail to see the grounds on which he could accuse me of unfairly labeling the disposition whose death he presumably welcomes.

Regardless of what name it is given, and Klein’s assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, neither Obama nor any of his ideological brethren have taken so much as a baby step away from this “anachronistic liberal masochism.”

Although members of the punditry class, both “liberal” and “conservative,” insist on it, Obama never “divorced” or “renounced” Wright. The former “divorced” or “renounced” those of the latter’s comments that threatened Obama’s presidential prospects, but as I mentioned in a previous column, there is all of the difference in the world between renouncing some of a person’s utterances and/or actions, on the one hand, and, on the other, renouncing the person him or herself. Similarly, as I wrote just last week, there is a difference in kind between criticism aimed at some aspect or other of the United States, and the United States itself. Good people, like good nations, can do bad things, but because the actors are good, we don’t renounce them, but their deeds. Listen or read carefully Obama’s speech. At no time does he reject Wright the man.

That Obama never “divorced himself from the Reverend Wright” alone suffices to establish that neither has he rejected “40 years of liberal self-laceration.” But there is more to consider.

The disposition to self-immolation that Klein believes is now becoming a thing of the past finds expression in -- indeed, is constituted by -- a distinct vocabulary and set of policy prescriptions that remain as ensconced as ever in the liberal psyche. It is the political left that ceases at nothing to decry “the social injustice” in which it thinks its country is mired, the “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” and “classism,” that permeates the framework of institutions that compose American life. This vision of America gives rise to and justifies the left’s support of so-called affirmative action, for racial minorities as well as women, massive third-world immigration, a staggering assortment of redistributive policies, a graduated income-tax system, “same-sex marriage,” abortion on demand, a criminal justice system patterned on a “rehabilitation-oriented” model, and numerous other policies designed with the implicit purpose of “redeeming” America of her historical “sins.”