One difference lies in the way they talk about America. Obama consistently acknowledged America’s racist history. He would never have declared, as George W. Bush did in his second inaugural that, “From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this Earth has rights and dignity and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of heaven and Earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave.” I suspect Obama would have gagged on the words. [...]
Ocasio-Cortez does not. She depicts American history less as an arc of progress than as a circle, in which America repeats—rather than rises above—its past. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE’s) treatment of people of color, she told The Intercept, continues an American tradition: “The very first immigration policy law passed in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1800s, and so the very bedrock of U.S. immigration policy, the very beginning of it was a policy based on racial exclusion.” She told New York magazine that, “child separation is a barbaric new iteration of what is going on, but for a very long time.” [...]
What explains the change? One obvious answer is Donald Trump. When Obama spoke about American history as a narrative of unfolding progress, his own election served as Exhibit A. And while he acknowledged the conservative backlash it sparked, he described that backlash as temporary, a “fever” that would eventually “break.” But Trump shows that, far from breaking, the fever has intensified. Which raises the possibility that the real historical aberration was not the racist reaction to Obama’s presidency, but his presidency itself. [...]
In different ways, Obama and Bush both spoke about America as embodying a set of ideas. Now neither Republicans nor Democrats are as likely to do so. Donald Trump doesn’t care about human rights. For him, America isn’t an idea; it’s a nation. And when it pursues universal ideals—by admitting refugees, eschewing torture, agreeing to environmental norms or aiding other nations—it gets ripped off. For Ocasio-Cortez, human rights matter intensely, but the United States has no special claim to embodying them. It’s hard to imagine her saying, as Obama often did, that “in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
No comments:
Post a Comment