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According to political analysts, journalists, aspiring intellectuals and online ideologues, Pres. Barack Obama is America's greatest neo-conservative socialist - a limp-wristed war hawk with a predilection for low-key grandiosity.
He is all things to all people who won't accept anything but that which mirrors their world views. He is their ideological Svengali, capable of the most liberal and most conservative feats all at once.
Obama has never - nor Americans have never permitted him to - define himself in his own terms. At the end of the Bush Administration, the nation had not faced such a dispirited list of challenges since the Great Depression. Every morning, Americans awoke to more news that further reminded them that the American Century had most certainly ended. Our high standard of living met declining wages, enormous debt, crimped access to credit, layoffs, and home foreclosures. Overseas the roundly unpopular Iraq War challenged foreign relations and American credibility abroad.
Obama, himself a multi-racial figure with a complex personal story, became a new symbol around which Americans gathered. No longer did the face of the predictable white male suffice when so much had seemed to go so wrong. Every nuanced layer of Obama became an American's dream for the particular hurt or hurts he or she was experiencing: that needed job, those out of control credit cards, that lost house, or that needless war in Iraq.
Obama became the mirror into which so many reflected so much during the campaign. The messages that Obama spoke in return did not depend on strict political ideology, but on "what works" - a pragmatism that challenged the political tyranny of red versus blue, us versus them, urban versus rural. Many Americans responded with their votes.
For more than thirty years, American politics has been trapped in the discursive battles between two organized ideological institutions. Their mutual goals have been to separate the wheat from the chaff, telling those who were willing to listen which symbols to reject and which to idolize with keenly analyzed talking points.
Americans have grown to accept this hegemonic structure as simply "the way things are" in politics. The quickly inflated media atmosphere provided multiple avenues through which ideologues could communicate with their followers. Sunday political talk shows, not too distinct from sporting events aired the same day, became arenas in which the followers could check in for that week's "winning" talking points.
Obama defies this culture. His presidency during this tumultuous era is a transcendent moment, and arguably a necessary one. Staunch political idealism has controlled American political discourse for far too long, and the result has been a mish-mash of unworkable ideas that have done nothing but foment discord between the two competing party ideologies, with those in the middle left wanting.
Pragmatism, however, has its critics. Some social observers see pragmatism as weak-kneed and far too compromising. In an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor, Fulbright Scholar and law student Jacob Bronsther writes:
"Philosophical pragmatists are anti-intellectual philosophers. They shiver at the thought of Descartes poking his fire, wondering if life is all a dream. They believe there are no answers to purely theoretical questions (such as whether we have free will), because there exists no pure realm of reason. There is only the external world where people flourish and suffer every day. As such, a philosophical or ethical theory's validity depends entirely upon its impact on human conduct and experience."
Bronsther's "realm" must be quite narrow. No where, in this nation's society, have ideals met their end. Reason governs pragmatism, and never does it deny the existence of the abstract and theoretical. Obama's pragmatism is one that borrows - as postmodernism borrows from modernity - those solutions that best fit the problems at hand from the world of theory. No solution is perfect, but Obama is not one to strive for perfection. He will, however, strive to perfect the best solution.
Nor is pragmatism anti-intellectual. In no other frame of thought are intellectuals required the most but in pragmatic policy-making. Solutions come from the clashing of intellectual dreams, as J.S. Mill explains, but this is not what the political ideologues of today wish to see. Rather, they wish to see intellectual domination - a complete effacing of the other side's ideas. This is the well-rooted weed that Obama's pragmatism tills.
As ideologues clamor to define Obama's symbolism, those in the middle writhe in disgust over the ill-begotten tea parties and self-righteous rants a la Bill Maher. Obama will not become an ideological warrior for the left or for the right. He will, however, make the best choices he can in his role as president.
And if, by 2012, the ideologues achieve their goal of defining him as the political persona non grata, don't expect him to hem and haw at his rejection. Expect him to return to Illinois, his head down and Michelle at his side, wishing he had more chances to accomplish a few more goals, ideologies be damned.
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