Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, has a brilliant new piece in the CRB‘s fall issue outlining Barack Obama’s political thought. Kesler explains Obama’s estimation of his ability to change the world:
Eager to find himself by finding a community to which he could belong, he was struck, nonetheless, by the flaws or limits of every race, culture, and country he encountered. Unlike other intelligent human beings who have made the same discovery, Obama did not lower his expectations but decided that, just as he could and did choose to refashion his own identity, communities could do the same, with a little help.
Kesler is especially critical of Obama’s interpretation of the American Founding:
Obama soon makes clear that Jefferson and the other founders were less than faithful to the universal principles they proclaimed. Like a good law professor, he lines up evidence and argument on both sides before concluding that, in fact, the founders probably did not understand those principles as universal but rather as confined to the white race. The “spirit of liberty,” he writes, “didn’t extend, in the minds of the founders, to the slaves who worked their fields, made their beds, and nursed their children.” In the end, then, Obama’s interpretation is the opposite of Lincoln’s, who devoted some of his finest pages to proving that the founders regarded slavery as a moral and political evil because it violated the rights of man.
As it happens, Sen. Obama’s understanding of the Founders’ political thought on the slavery question isn’t entirely unlike another Illinois senator from long ago. And, on the audacity of hope:
Audacity is a curious word with two meanings, which reflect a genuine moral ambiguity. It means both boldness, daring, confidence–and reckless daring, rashness, foolhardiness. It can be a good or a bad thing, a virtue or a vice. Hope, by contrast, is a passion; in the language of the medieval schools, hope aims at a future, arduous, and possible good. It doesn’t always attain that good, however. There is also hope as a theological virtue, but presumably Obama doesn’t mean to offer eternal happiness to his followers. His vision is of earthly happiness, wholeness, and justice. As he explained to Americans in 2004, in his debut at the Democratic National Convention, his name, Barack, means “blessed.”
Kesler also takes a look at Obama’s health care dreams for the day when Americans are able to come together in unity and elect large majorities of Democrats in Congress with a Democratic president. Read the whole thing.
