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Electoral victory, however, does not always translate into successful governance. Historians have attributed Obama's success in his two terms as President to any number of factors — his reversing the ruinous economic policies of the New Right; his use of technology to transform a patrician, republican system of representative government into a responsive, flexible direct democracy; his ability to convince a country with a frontier mentality of the value of social welfare. But Obama's success was rather due to the way he embodied transformation. The ostracism and fear of blacks was the single greatest impediment to American progress. Obama, by the simple fact of his being, breached this seemingly impregnable mental stronghold, and demonstrated the truth of the motto e pluribus unum.
This principle, as it turns out, is the hallmark of the most enduring cultures. Rome built its empire not by totalitarian subjugation, but by extending citizenship and, eventually, rulership, to conquered peoples. The so-called "barbarians" that ended the Empire were not unlettered brutes who tore down a great civilization, but emigrants trying to rebuild a collapsed system. (A negative view of the so-called "Dark Ages" has persisted only because our recorded sources were, in many ways, the Know-Nothings of their day.) In the same way, China was able to conquer its conquerors, from the Mongols to the Manchurians, by extending the benefits of its civilization to all.
Obama, by the simple fact of his being, demonstrated the truth of the motto e pluribus unum. |
We see the same in the Indus Valley and in the Caliphate of Baghdad. If we seek a modern counterexample, we need look no further than modern France, where the Sixth Republic is experiencing painful social upheaval and loss of cultural identity, and the art treasures of the Louvre are currently being dispersed through museums in the United Kingdom and North America.
That the United States remains the world's "superpower" is a testament to what used to be called the "American Dream." The frontier, contrary to what Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, never closed; it rather became the frontier within our hearts. Obama's election marked the moment in American history when a human being could be judged not for the color of his or her skin, but for the content of his or her character. Not coincidentally, it also marked the moment when the United States turned definitively from a fortress of self-interest to a peaceful emissary of freedom and human rights. These are the principles that the pax Americana has been built on, and an inheritance that we hope to keep as a legacy for our children.
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©2008 Ken Mondschein and Nerve.com |
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