The Meaning of Obama’s Second Inaugural

Four years ago Barak Obama took office amid the gathering clouds of economic crisis. His inaugural address, defined by its iconic phrase The Winter in Which Only Hope and Virtue Can Endure, was somber and represented the first call by a US President for a turn away from consumerism and towards hard work and a serious engagement with potentially intractable civilizational challenges since Carter’s poorly received “Culture of Narcissism” speech.  Now, four years later, the immediate economic crisis has past and a decade of war seems finally to be nearing an end.  The Democratic Party has fought back, albeit with significant losses, the anticivilizational Tea Party offensive of 2010 and there are real questions about whether or not the Republican Party can re-establish itself as a credible party of government.  Along the way Obama enacted a dramatic if imperfect overall of our health care system, addressing one of the major threats to the long term economic viability of the United States. Overall, it is an impressive record.  Spring, one would think, will now follow winter.

If this is spring, though, it is a rather chilly one. And the reason for this is not difficult to find. While the economy has improved somewhat and the United States has withdrawn from its disastrous civilizational conflict with Dar-al-Islam, the main elements of a broad civilizational crisis remain:

• climate change and peak oil,
• demographic inversion and resistance to the principal way of ameliorating this problem (more open immigration laws),
• the declining value of labor power and of the rate of profit (and thus declining demand and difficulties in capital formation) in the face of technological progress and globalization,
• a domestic political structure which over-represents economically backward extractive/rural regions and blocs the formation of a progressive consensus, even when a majority for such a consensus actually exists,
• a global system which pits democracy against effective global governance, and
• a crisis of the secular ideals on which our civilization is founded which makes effective leadership all but impossible.

And while the anticivilizational Tea Party offensive has been beaten back, there is lingering resistance to the profound changes which will be required if we are to address the developing civilizational crisis. While some of this resistance is at the ideological level –people clinging either to positivistic secularisms which promise technological solutions to everything or religious fundamentalisms which argue that all will be well if only we submit to the sovereignty of God, much of it is also rooted in resistance to the basic realities of life in globalized industrial/information economy. We have all become so radically interdependent on each other that “going it alone” is at best a luxury retirement option for a fortunate if eccentric few and at worst simply madness.

It is this contradiction –between the world as it is and the world as we want it be—that Obama chose to engage in his second inaugural. If the resulting speech was, perhaps, less inspiring (if also less dark) that the first, it is because its principal message was neither a prophetic vision nor a prophetic indictment, but something more like a reality check. Reality checks, however important, are rarely inspiring. And the reality to which our attention was being called is this. The scope and complexity of problems facing our civilization can only be addressed through collective action, action involving the state and taxation and regulation, not because these are values in themselves because we can no longer realistically do without them.

This said, there was a broader civic religious, liturgical context and political theological narrative in which this message was set. In accord with Obama’s core identity, which is neither that of republican sacral monarch nor prophet calling in the wilderness, but rather “organizer in chief,” the public liturgy of the inauguration said less about him that about the movement which elected him. The symbolism was first and foremost that of the African American liberation movement now positioned, however, not as outsider but rather as conservator and interpreter of the larger American ideal. The invocation was given by a civil rights leader, the music dominated by the Battle Hymn of the republic, and Obama’s speech structured in such a way as to weave elements from the second inaugural addresses of several of his predecessors into a rhetorical fabric drawn from the African American homiletic tradition generally and from the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. in particular.  The complexity of this narrative is marked by the identification of the key points in American history as “Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall” in a liturgy in which the invocation was offered “in Jesus’ name,” a practice which is (rightly) anathema in progressive interfaith settings, but still the norm in the African American Church.

The result was a public liturgy and inaugural speech which commentators have seen as marking a “left” turn. And in a certain sense it may. The right has been defeated and to some degree marginalized and a new definition of what it means to be American is gradually becoming hegemonic.  But do not imagine that Obama’s second term will be dominated by civil rights style freedom struggles. The agenda, rather, is the civilizational challenges identified above: climate change, energy, demographics, immigration, and global and domestic governance. The language of civil rights and the broad progressive coalition which Obama has organized will now be deployed to build support –at least in part through the new national formation, Organizing for America—for engaging these challenges, reaching over, around, and underneath what is like to still be an obstructionist House or Representatives.

When all is said and done, therefore, it is still winter, and still only at the beginning. Obama’s victories represent modest early winter warm spells; the Tea Party a very bad winter storm. Most of the winter is yet to come. And yet the thaw reminds us that spring is still possible. For now, though, it is still mostly a matter of clearing snow and finding fuel and staying alive while we figure out how to get there.