Obama's Promise of Change Comes Wrapped in Red, White and Blue

By Ira Chernus, AlterNet. Posted January 21, 2009.

But even on these favored issues, his positions will never move too far leftward; he won't ask for more than the political traffic can bear. The careful wording of the inaugural address -- though it sounded to insiders like "a break from decades of Washington leadership" -- suggests that the break will be slow, gradual and cautious at best.

The overarching theme of the speech was simple: In a time of crisis, the only way to move toward a better future is to step back into a perfect American past, to live again by the high ideals that once made our nation great, ideals that "still light the world."

Of course, that City on the Hill is mostly an illusion. If you don't believe in an idealized version of the nation's past, key portions of the speech made significantly less sense.

Many of the ideals the president praised could be comfortably embraced by conservatives. In his opening sentence, he recalled "the sacrifices borne by our ancestors." The sentence highlighted by his aides in the advance publicity said bluntly: "What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties." What kind of duties? Obama invoked "the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job" -- as if a worker should have to choose between one and the other.

On the foreign front, he sounded as tough as George W. Bush at times. He invoked all-powerful terrorist networks, promising: "You cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you." And he praised "the risk-takers, the doers … who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom. … For us, they fought and died, in places like … Khe Sanh" -- as if the Vietnam War had been some noble crusade for a freedom.

This language wasn't directed at the pundits, or the "centrist" elites. It's directed to a much larger audience: the many millions of average Americans who sense that we're in a deep crisis but are afraid of genuine change.

It's not that they are afraid of progressive policies. Polls suggest that most Americans will approve a host of progressive policy changes, if each new policy is explained to them separately, one by one, out of any political context.

But once progressive policies are bundled together into a single platform, most Americans stop focusing on the individual policies and begin to see an image of radical change that they fear would tear apart the remaining shreds of cultural stability, leaving American society with no foundation at all.

Obama understands this perfectly well. He has talked sympathetically about the voters' longing for "a sense of continuity and stability that is unavailable in [their] economic life. … Because Democrats haven't met them halfway on cultural issues, we've not been able to communicate to them effectively an economic agenda that would help broaden our coalition." He knows that some cope with change by clinging to God, guns, etc. But those folks, and many more who are not so socially conservative, all seek continuity and stability by believing in a tightly knit package of enduring American values that they can count on to hold society together no matter what.

The Republicans would love to tar Obama as a threat to whatever is left of the unraveling social fabric. That's probably the only way they can hope to defeat him on the economic issues central to his agenda. He doesn't plan to let that happen, especially when it is so easy to avoid defeat by mobilizing the language of traditional values -- "hard work and honesty … loyalty and patriotism," and conquering every enemy -- which is music to so many American ears.

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Ira Chernus is professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.

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