Obama, Avatar of the Gilded Age

David Samuels on the writer-President.

A Tablet article by David Samuels, in which he interviews historian David Garrow, has been appearing in right-wing-adjacent twitter since its publication last week, with commentary to the effect of it being the most important thing written about our current political order: The Obama Factor. Having finally read it to the end, I find the commentary appropriate. The virtue of the article lies in comments Samuels offers to his interviewee toward the bottom end, which I will highlight here without substantial contribution on my part (because none is needed), merely to make Samuels’ remarks more accessible (by removing so much ancillary commentary).

I should remark that Samuels’ montage-essay from 2020, The Happiest Place on Earth, is a masterwork and was an inspiration for my series on the Holocaust. If anything, my series could be called a parody of the more plausible examination of the links between Jewish identity and the American civic religion offered by Samuels (a parody in service of exploring the religious nature of the gentile, secular West’s new cults). I could have added an entire installment devoted to quoting his essay in dialogue.

The insights regarding Obama’s heralding of a globalist oligarchy offered by Samuels in the interview may be mere harbingers of a more complete treatment which he will go on to offer of the topic; but in present form they are already vital.

Structure of the article

Samuels begins by revealing why his interview with Garrow regarding America’s first and only Black president belong in a magazine on Jewish affairs; Garrow’s biography of Obama is almost the only presentation of the testimony of Jewish ex-girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager in the press to counter the version of their break-up portrayed in Dreams of My Father. (Meanwhile once the interview begins, Samuels focuses on Garrow’s contrast between MLK, Jr. and Obama in terms of identity and persona.)

While media indifference to Jager is part of a running theme of the media’s kid-gloves approach to Obama throughout the article and interview, it delays the moments when Samuels explains to Garrow and the reader how he sees Obama’s presidency in relation to a transformation in American politics and culture.

At the same time, the introduction continues by offering Samuels’ provocative suggestion that Obama is directing at least our current foreign policy, if not other elements of the Biden administration, from his home in DC. However, from here I will simply dive to the quotes illuminating our gilded age’s avatar.

The first foundation president

Throughout the interview, Samuels prods Garrow to comment on the rootless and self-invented nature of Obama’s identity. He lives his life in private and public as a character he has invented. It is thus not only his articulate mannerisms that explain his political ascendancy but his lack of connection to any local human networks. He is a “community organizer” without a community; as such he represents the new, cosmopolitan/corporate/globalist elite that needs to formalize its aristocratic status with a divinely/democratically-mandated monarch.

[Samuels] I go back to the first chapter of your [Garrow’s] book, about these steel workers and all these mills closing down in Chicago and then Obama sort of deciding, “Well, we know here at the Joyce Foundation,” where he was then hanging out, “that nothing can be done to help these people. The solutions are on a national level.” At first I was, like, “Okay, whatever that means.”

But then it struck me in your telling that in fact, the place where he finds a home is not in community organizing. It’s in foundation-land, the place where foundations, foundation executives, very rich people, and politics meet. He was well spoken, Black yet white-coded, a credentialed academic, yet had some street cred because he’d been an organizer for that crucial year plus whatever, the way kids today start an NGO in order to get into Harvard.

So if Obama is the first U.S. president from the periphery of empire, he’s also the first president from the billionaire-foundation-NGO complex, which makes him the perfect mediating figure between the progressive part of the party, the billionaires, and the security state.

I will add a few comments here. The foundation, of course, is an ecological apex parasite for cosmopolitanism. It turns everything that is still local, particular, and imperfect in the managerial economy into a prop for ambitious managers to arrange aesthetically, mostly to sort each other for networking fitness. Saints and masochists hand soup to actual vagrants; people with bright futures successfully arrange charity dinners.

Obama’s presidency follows and renders universal the vulgar paratrooper-localism of (Senatow fwom New Yowk!) Hillary Clinton. The Clintons’ political cynicism and grifting are brought up in Samuels’ article at various points, and further quoted below. For my own part, the only thing that I would say makes Obama the more fit and eventually ascendent avatar of the Foundation Presidency, vs. Clinton, is his physical charisma in contrast to her graceless aging. That we had a Black president before a woman is merely biological reality refusing to be irrelevant.

Obama and elite hostility to Jews; more on the new American oligarchy

Emphasis or speaker-labelling in bold added.

[S] But historically speaking, Jews are not, or were not, a particularly American obsession, except among some morons and leather fetishists on the right. But they are a major obsession on the periphery of the American empire, where envy and fear of the mythic role that Jews supposedly play in Washington, because of Israel, are defining emotions, regardless of the facts.

So how do you talk all this foundation-land, community-organizer shit and then preside over the transformation of the country into a Gilded Age oligarchy? Maybe I just answered my own question: Obama is the Magic Negro of the billionaire industrial complex. And targeting Jews as outsiders and pushing them outside the circle was the way that the Gilded Age oligarchy consolidated itself in America, back then and also now.

[G] Another thing we haven’t touched on at all, and I mean, I’ve certainly said this in the press any number of times in years past, but I’ve always found [the Obamas’] need to hang out with celebrities bizarre. Because the people they both were, all the way up through at least 2000, would’ve had no desire to do that. It wouldn’t have crossed their minds to be with Beyoncé and Jay-Z or Richard Branson, or you name it.

Black people in Chicago, everyone, Jerry Wright, Hermene Hartman, they’re not surprised that Barack turned into someone else. But they can’t explain why Michelle turned into someone else. I think this is clear in the book. Michelle, for years, thought that all this talk about “I’m going to be president—”

[S] Was nonsense.

[G] Yeah. She listened to 13 years of that. And then, oh, my fucking God, it happened!

[S] So maybe my husband is Jesus Christ, after all.

Then again, they’re all like that now. Think of the Clintons. The man from Hope [in the pre-2000s perception and performance]. And Hillary, the great defender of children and the poor. And then its like, “Wait a minute. Did they just amass $3 billion in a private foundation, plus a private fortune of $300 or $400 million within three or four years after leaving the White House?” It’s not just the Obamas. The whole system is sick.

Obama, Puritan guilt, and worsening American race relations

Here the interview dovetails with my own view on Obama’s triggering of the reversal of the racial détente that took hold in the 1990s, when American whites and Blacks made peace with certain systemic inequalities, and aggressive and media-tolerated police and incarceration practices brought relief from urban crime.

While, in a way, Samuels makes Obama’s election seem like the trivial appointment of a Foundation-darling by the ascendent billionaire elite, for the latently guilty Northern and coastal whites as well as the downtrodden Blacks left in the cold by globalization, 2008 radically expanded the horizon of what could be imagined as attainable justice in human affairs. When that justice failed to materialize, despite six years of America’s Black emperor having “a pen and a phone,” resentment, animus, and purity-purges were the only possible outcomes.

[G] Allison [Davis, the head of the Chicago law firm that first employed Obama out of law school] said it to me, or maybe Allison said it to Jodi Kantor, that Barack once said to him that the only two things he wanted were a valet and an airplane.

Everybody, especially white folks, thought that having a Black family in the White House would be cure for the legacy of American racism. Now there’s no question in anybody’s mind that on that score, that scale, the presidency was a total failure. But why are race relations, at least as people perceive them or imagine them, ostensibly well worsetoday post-Floyd than they were in 2008?

[S] It’s a great question. So many say, “Oh, well, Trump brought his white nationalism and his racism and his birtherism, and he divided people.” Which is true, except the point where race relations in America turned sour wasn’t with George Floyd in 2020; it was with BLM in 2014, and that’s squarely during Obama’s second term—well before anyone is thinking about Donald Trump coming anywhere near the White House. For 20 years before that, things had actually been better.

I think there was something corrosive about Obama’s public disengagement from the race issues that many voters, white and Black, looked to him to solve, or absolve them from. His answer was, don’t put that stuff on me. Put it back on you. Which, again, is a fine answer—except for the fact that he was president of the United States.

[G] I never paid much attention to birtherism for a large chunk of time, but I know I thought that they were making a mistake by not putting the actual birth certificate out there. And I think, in retrospect, there’s no question that it was horrific political malpractice not to put the birth certificate out there ASAP.

[S] Why didn’t they?

[G] Because Barack was so deeply contemptuous. It is comical; it is bizarrely comical to imagine he was born anywhere other than Kapi’olani Hospital.

[S] Birtherism was a classic Trump move because it found a really quick way to encapsulate a feeling that people had, even if the facts weren’t true. The literal accusation—”Oh, he was born in Kenya, and his birth certificate is a fake”—was false, and it made Obama really mad. The word they kept using was racist. But I was like, “Did anyone ever suggest that Jesse Jackson or Lebron James was born anywhere besides the United States?” It was not about racism, I think—at least not primarily. It was about foreignness, un-American-ness. I think that what Obama feared was that showing the birth certificate would make his Hawaiian-Kenyan-Indonesian outsiderness even more plain. […]

[G] If we go back to ‘08, initially, there’s all that Black ambivalence about Barack as a presidential candidate, which, in his crude way, Jesse gives voice to. And certainly pre-South Carolina, I think there’s a lot of perception, as there was back in Chicago—I mean, Carol Harwell said this so well: “Barack’s not Black. Barack’s not from here. Barack hasn’t had the experiences my husband had growing up.”

So, I think it’s inescapable that Barack’s success in ‘08 is rooted in white people seeing him as an easy ticket toward racial absolution. It’s a need that white people in this country have. And what we’re still seeing week after week now for these past two or three years, especially with places like the Times and the Post, is that this white need for absolution was not cured by the Obama presidency. I frankly don’t understand it.

[S] I think that it’s culturally and intellectually part of the New England DNA, which Obama—the president of the Harvard Law Review—taps into. To me, the most profound thing that was ever written about the New England Puritans was written by Perry Miller, whose thesis was that the Puritans go to New England with the goal of redeeming old Europe by building a shining city on a hill whose example will put an end to all the wars in Europe. Except, of course, the example of the New England colonies has no impact on Europe whatsoever. Nobody in Prague or Vienna gives a shit about Narragansett.

At which point, the Puritans have to explain why this great vision that they have sacrificed for and died for, having essentially traveled off the map of the civilized world and gone to the 17th-century equivalent of Mars, didn’t quite go as planned. And at that point, you have the American turn into self-absorption and narcissism. The fault is in us, you see. We must turn inwards and scour our souls for sin, because God is punishing us. And this is the link between both the deep narcissism and the redemptive impulse of New Englanders, which I think has been a constant in that region and in its impact on American history ever since.

[G] But we still have, in the present-day world, we have these millions of white folks who are still actively seeking absolution. And I presume that has to be grounded in an inner fear of asking themselves, “Am I unconsciously racist?” That’s never been a part of me.

[S] The protagonists of the grand drama of race in America are the cultural and actual descendants of the Puritans, not Black people—who, as Americans, mainly desire the same things that other Americans do, like safe streets and decent jobs and health care and not to die prematurely from heart disease. White Puritans have more elevated concerns.

[G] Exactly. For them, 200-year-old statues are more important than five-year-old Black children.

This concludes my homage. All of the quotes above are more cogent and compelling if the article is read beginning-to-end; but, I wished to yank them from their conversational context to bring them to the reader’s attention.

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