Richard Yeselson responds to John Judis' TNR essay, "American Adam":
I think Judis has written a brilliantly productive misreading of Obama. Rather than escape the past, Obama wishes, as, the critic and literary historian Van Wyck Brooks put it in 1918, to find a "usable past" in American ideals of equality, justice, and fraternity. These ideals are encompassed in the America of 2008, an America that could elect as president a mixed-race man named Barack Hussein Obama. Judis misconstrues Obama's plaintive redemption of the hoary promise of America as an Emersonian paean to a nation untethered to history.Read the rest (and comment) here.
It's a subtle distinction. Obama's exclusion from the classic African American narrative does not mean that he believes he has freed himself from any and all American narratives. Rather, his narrative is emblematic of an argument from Todd Gitlin's The Twilight of American Dreams: Gitlin writes that the United States, albeit imperfectly, is the national expression of Enlightenment universalism—that every particularity of race, ethnicity, gender, and class is subsumed within the quiet grandeur of the Constitution’s opening phrase: "We the People…." While Judis sees Obama exemplifying an American ethos that paradoxically reinvents its ahistoricism periodically, what Obama is really doing, I think, is more interesting and more powerful: He is preaching an inclusive civic nationalism—an American ideology with deep roots in post-Civil War America onward—and juxtaposing it to a discredited ethnic or racial nationalism that sees blood and race and the entitlement they bring as constitutive of national creed.
--The Editors
