The Sociology of President Barack Hussein Obama - Part 1

Everything you believe is an Okey Doke invented by Russia, flyover man! The scotch-irish Black man with a funny name and calm Hawaiian exterior is about to persuade you.

This post is about uncovering the views of influential public figures in American life without recourse to primitive symbols loaded with negative emotional content. At the end of the day, our leadership are comprised of people who, like everyone else, haphazardly rationalize their views, listen to policy proposals, and relish pawning the work off on somebody else while simultaneously taking credit. Indeed, you’d be surprised at how easy it is to find yourself in front of an Obama-type proposing a policy. People are individually accessible and reasonable, just as Obama himself discusses below.

Progressive Paranoia

Myopic Eeyore commented on my previous article on progressive paranoia that I was being uncharitable in equating Birchers with Wallace-style leftists. My sympathies lie with the Birchers when it comes to the individualism and localism they defended (at an abstract level) and their concerns about globalization. I also sympathize with them because of a core difference between Birchers and progressive conspiracy theorists like former Vice President Wallace: Birchers were by comparison a disempowered, grassroots movement. However, I also side with Parsons when it comes to his sociological method and diagnosis of the symbol-driven extremism of his New Right, which includes the Birchers.

Much like modern progressive/leftist conspiracy theorists of “renazification,” Wallace had no excuse for recoiling into primitive symbolic reasoning. Whereas Birchers could partially be forgiven because of their remoteness from power and influence, and the cynicism and abstraction that follows from such remoteness, progressive/leftist conspiracy theorists cannot. This goes to Curtis Yarvin’s persistent observation that the progressive is always the underdog while he’s winning. As we’ve already seen, this mentality is core to the antifa-journalist social policing mindset, but it’s also essential to President Obama’s sociology.

While Wallace’s worldview was integrated into a political movement that influenced public offices like the Vice Presidency, corporations/finance, the press, organized labor, and academia, Bircherism was not so integrated. Bircherism’s closest connection to real power was through its association with (mostly retired) and isolated flyover magnates like Welch. The Society seems to have boasted a substantial plurality of white ethnic Catholics but also saw contributions from ostracized academic schools like Austrian Economics (Ludwig von Mises was an editor for American Opinion) and had segregated Black chapters in the south and integrated chapters in the north. This calls to mind the eclectic Trumpian coalition of disaffected uneducated whites, retired generals, evangelicals, traditionalist Catholics, fringe academic schools, white nationalists, pillow magnates, self-made IT billionaires, Zionists etc., and underscores the largely organic-democratic nature of populism in contrast with the manufactured and superstructural nature of leftist, progressive, and centrist activism.

President Obama’s sociology is a useful example of the current state of Wallace-style paranoid progressivism, to the extent his sociology can be divined from the protective editorial coverage the media affords him. Below, I’ll survey an article on Obama before turning in a subsequent post to a critical appraisal of Mencius Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin’s post-mortem on Obama’s 2008 election.

The Sociology of President Obama

In November of 2016, David Remnick published an election post-mortem in the New Yorker that featured a behind-the-scenes look at Obama’s transition from power. Many of the Obama quotes in the article are ambiguous and Remnick supplements them with his own projections and those of Obama’s inner circle. This is typical of Obama content in general. To paraphrase Brett Easton Ellis, there’s an idea of Obama but he’s simply not there, ideologically speaking. Nonetheless, I think the article is sufficient for divining a contemporary version of the elite sociology harbored by Talcott Parsons and Strobe Talbott, which I discussed here and here.

As a refresher, Parsons and Talbott espouse a circular form of reasoning that says parochial and local concerns are confused reactions to necessary policy changes catalyzed by things about the world that just seem to be happening – specifically, globalization and the policy changes introduced to address the parasitic effects of industrial and finance capitalism – which are themselves, these authors concede, the result of prior necessary policy changes.

This circular reasoning is mostly persuasive because the problems that are caused by necessary policy changes are often seen as extremely urgent or cataclysmic, in part because every problem for these people is necessarily global. The more economically integrated the globe, and the more technology permits global power projection, the more cataclysmic ordinary problems become.

But their reasoning is also buttressed by a moral position that seeks the liberation of individual human beings from the oppressive restraints of traditional ascriptive ties like ethnic group, religion, and national citizenship. This is the normative justification for asserting the necessity of the original policy changes that caused the new problems requiring still more necessary policy changes. Thus, both pragmatic necessity and moral idealism necessitate global government and the destruction, or at least extreme marginalization, of reactionary or localist political movements.

Obama exhibits an updated and modified version of this view. I can’t say whether his view is rooted in an intellectual genealogy, the effects of his socioeconomic environment, or both, but I’ll speculate in the next article on the historical perspective of Curtis Yarvin.

Obama’s two-faced democratic liberalism

Despite heroic hermeneutic efforts by Remnick, Obama comes off as politically all over the place in the 2016 article. For example, sometimes he’s just “Scotch-Irish, man!”, while other times he’s a black man with a funny name or a man with a “calm Hawaiian exterior.”

This kind of identitarian chameleonism is reflected in Obama’s political attitudes toward the American electorate. Throughout the article he makes declarations of his democratic optimism by, for instance, stating

“I have complete confidence in the American people—that if I can have a conversation with them they’ll choose what’s right. At an emotional level, they want to do the right thing if they have the information.”

He insists this optimism is the essence of his political career:

“The thing that I have always been convinced of,” he said, “the running thread through my career, has been this notion that when ordinary people get engaged, pay attention, learn about the forces that affect their lives and are able to join up with others, good stuff happens.”

But this optimism is juxtaposed to an enormous paranoia about the information and rhetoric to which people are exposed and cynicism about the average voter’s capacity to critically appraise such information and rhetoric. Indeed, Obama’s primary concern arising from the 2016 election is that people were exposed to information and rhetoric from which they otherwise would’ve been firewalled by traditional media and the GOP in prior elections.

This means that Obama believes the electorate to be incapable of accurately appraising the political situation without information curation by an institutional elite. This conviction has caused progressives to gravitate around the symbols of Comey, Russia and Wikileaks, which has led to strategic lying and reticence and successively into paranoia, conspiracy theories, and ultimately the promulgation of mis- and disinformation by progressive elements in the Executive Branch both during and after Obama’s tenure.

Recall that Wallace style progressive conspiracy theorists were enormously paranoid even as they enjoyed a client-patron relationship with the Soviet Union. In the Obama era we see this paranoia reversed, with the prospect of Russia controlling the Trumpright haunting their dreams:

“But Putin may also think of himself as the chief ideologist of the illiberal world, a counter to what he sees as the hypocritical and blundering West. He has always shown support for nativist leaders such as Marine Le Pen, in France; now he had a potential ally in the White House. Suddenly, Germany, led by Angela Merkel, was the lonely bulwark of Europe and Atlanticism. And even she faced a strong nativist challenge, for the sin of admitting thousands of Syrian refugees into the country.”

This paranoia was proved unfounded, of course. To the extent Russian information operations in the U.S. can be demonstrated, they most often involved the subsidization of movements that embody modern progressivism, like Black Lives Matter.

Obama’s paranoia and indulgence of the Russia conspiracy motivated civil servants and ordinary citizens to engage in illegal activity, like leaking classified and confidential information out of the IRS, Treasury, and NSA, and perpetrating a mass shooting and political assassination attempt at a baseball game. And of course most recently, the hypocritical disdain exhibited by Obama and Remnick for Comey’s provision of true information about Clinton to the electorate during the 2016 election led to Obama allies’ suppression of true information about the Bidens during the 2020 election.

We see paranoia and rationalizations at the domestic policy level as well. Obama struggles in the article to reconcile his cynicism about voter capacity with the fact that so many Trump voters (close to 10 million) voted for him in 2008. His rationale is again all over the place here but reflects some of the analyses we saw in Parsons.

First, Obama asserts that his ’08 success reflected his own ability to access white voters without the interference of an alternative media ecosystem that included outlets like Breitbart and mis- and disinformation from the internet. (In one alarming section of the article about a Buzzfeed article covering a Macedonian disinformation farm, Remnick suggests that Obama and his directors were receiving information about this ecosystem from the media itself, meaning the media was generating the intelligence upon which the President was operating.)

Obama’s team was apparently incapable of finding and communicating with Trump voters:

“They spoke to the networks and the major cable outlets, the major papers and the mainstream Web sites, and, in an attempt to find people “where they are,” forums such as Bill Maher’s and Samantha Bee’s late-night cable shows, and Marc Maron’s podcast. But they would never reach the collective readerships of Breitbart News, the Drudge Report, WND, Newsmax, InfoWars, and lesser-knowns like Western Journalism—not to mention the closed loop of peer-to-peer right-wing rumor-mongering.”

In a sense, Obama and his directors seem to be reacting to the spatial change effected by the internet and other changes brought about by American globalism, a phenomenon I analyzed in detail here.

Second, Obama and his directors see a failure of the GOP and elites to curtail incivility and rhetoric beyond the pale of what our civil religion tolerates. Obama’s political director David Simas opines on the failure of Moldbugg’s Cathedral in 2016:

“Until recently, religious institutions, academia, and media set out the parameters of acceptable discourse, and it ranged from the unthinkable to the radical to the acceptable to policy,” Simas said. “The continuum has changed. Had Donald Trump said the things he said during the campaign eight years ago—about banning Muslims, about Mexicans, about the disabled, about women—his Republican opponents, faith leaders, academia would have denounced him and there would be no way around those voices. Now, through Facebook and Twitter, you can get around them. There is social permission for this kind of discourse. Plus, through the same social media, you can find people who agree with you, who validate these thoughts and opinions. This creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once thought unthinkable. This is a foundational change.”

Like Wallace, the Obama camp are therefore concerned about the ability of shadowy interests to exploit the parochial prejudices of flyover voters. However, they’re also concerned that Trump tapped into legitimate, if misguided, concerns, much like Parsons worried that the strains caused by the necessary changes of the New Deal and globalism were being exploited by McCarthyism and Bircherism:

“For tens of millions of Americans, Trump was unthinkable as President. It came to be conceded that he had “tuned into something”: the frequencies of white rural life, the disaffection of people who felt overwhelmed by the forces of globalization, who felt unheard and condescended to by the coastal establishment. Yet Trump himself, by liberal consensus, was a huckster mogul of the social-media age, selling magic potions laced with poison. How could he possibly win?”

Obama and his directors have other theories as well. Simas, for example, suggests there was nothing ideological about Trump voters:

“The base of the Republican Party is also different from what we thought. For movement conservatives, the assumption is that Democratic or Republican voters are ideological on issues. The Trump candidacy shows otherwise. They rally around the team and the antipathy to Secretary Clinton.”

Obama offers yet another suggestion beyond legitimate working class concerns and team-based antipathy, suggesting instead that Trump was popular for purely anarchic reasons, meaning Trump was the candidate of disorder and chaos:

“Obama was convinced, accordingly, that Trump won less as a champion of working people than as an anti-establishment insurgent. “The President-elect, I think, was able to make an argument that he would blow this place up,” he said.

Trump was also, for Obama, the candidate of resentment:

“But, obviously, he tapped into something. He’s able to distill the anger and resentment and the sense of aggrievement. And he is skillful at challenging the conventions in a way that makes people feel something and that gives them some satisfaction.”

This means that Trump is a shrewd, self-aggrandizing manipulator:

“Trump was shrewd enough to perform his fellow-feeling in blunt terms. “I love the poorly educated!” he told the crowd after winning the Nevada caucus. “We’re the smartest people, we’re the most loyal people!”

So the 2016 election is explained by a scattershot collection of causes revolving around David Simas’s Cathedral’s inability to control information and rhetoric, parochial voter instincts and emotions that have been inflamed by globalism, and cynical bad actors like Russia and Trump exploiting these phenomena.

These explanations might be more persuasive if the Obama camp didn’t itself engage in exactly the same kind of cynical behavior of which they accuse the Trump camp.

Honest lying

This leads us to another interesting aspect of the article. Everyone in the article is very open about the necessity of misleading the electorate.

For instance, Remnick talks of how scared Trump made LGBTQ people despite his campaigning in favor of gay liberation and marriage. In contrast, we all know that Obama campaigned against gay marriage in 2008, and yet this didn’t scare the LGBTQ community. Perhaps it didn’t scare the community because everybody knows it’s okay to lie to the electorate to secure power.

We saw this same trend with Obama’s “move to the right” on race, which culminated in controversy over his suggestion that black men might share personal responsibility for some of the negative issues that affect them. The Obama “blogosphere” was quick to assure everyone that this nod to our civil religion was just a disingenuous, strategic shift to acquire power.

Indeed, Obama in general feels aggrieved by racial issues, but mostly because they can cause such wild shifts in the polls. He suggests that the infamous Beer Summit was one of his major errors. However, this didn’t stop him from milking ethnonarcissistic insecurity in the days leading up to the election:

“All the progress that we’ve made these last eight years,” he said, “goes out the window if we don’t win this election!” He revived some of his early tropes, cautioning the crowd not to be “bamboozled” by the G.O.P.—an echo from Malcolm X—and recited the litany of Trump’s acts of disrespect toward blacks, women, Muslims, the disabled, Gold Star parents.”

Late in the article, Obama reveals this messaging strategy to be a “shrewd calculation” of his own when he makes an about-face on his apocalyptic Trump rhetoric. When asked if he really believed his portents, Obama responds negatively and echoes Yarvin’s fatalism about the power of the Federal Government:

“Now that the election is over, no, I don’t believe it,” he said with a sharp, dark laugh. “Not because I was over-hyping it. I think that the possibility of everything being out the window exists. But, as a practical matter, what I’ve been saying to people, including my own staff, is that the federal government is an aircraft carrier, it’s not a speedboat.”

(This is a common bureaucratic rationalization, by the way. Be on the lookout for an official saying “this is an aircraft carrier; this is a supertanker” to justify a lack of discipline, inconsistent policies, or some other failure).

Elsewhere in the article you see predictions that Trump might not accomplish much. In other words, Obama was misinforming the electorate.

At the same time, Obama doesn’t want people to think he’s curating the information he gives to the public.

“Look, by dint of biography, by dint of experience, the basic optimism that I articulate and present publicly as President is real,” he told me. “It’s what I teach my daughters. It is how I interact with my friends and with strangers. I genuinely do not assume the worst, because I’ve seen the best so often. So it is a mistake that I think people have sometimes made to think that I’m just constantly biting my tongue and there’s this sort of roiling anger underneath the calm Hawaiian exterior.

The humble Obama who strategically bites his tongue and misinforms the electorate is in fact the bearer of optimism and civility. This self-delusion is reinforced when Obama first asks, “what if the roles were reversed!”

“I mean, imagine if in 2008 I had said any of the things that this man said. Imagine if I had behaved in the way this man behaved. Imagine what Republicans would have said! Imagine what the press would have said!”

Obama of course concludes the article by saying something far more controversial and outrageous than anything Trump said during his campaign or Presidency:

“Setting aside the results of this election, Democrats are well positioned to keep winning Presidential elections just by appealing to the base. And, each year, the demographic improves.”

Remnick helpfully expands upon this point for the former President:

“To put it more bluntly than Obama did, the nonwhite percentage of the population will continue to increase.”

To put it in blunter terms, the white population will decrease, and that’s a good thing. What an enormously optimistic and civil attitude!

Obama’s Sociology

“He never loses his capacity to be the scholar of his own predicament, a gently quizzical ethnographer of his own country, of its best and worst qualities.”

Oh, what an ethnographer!

So we’ve seen that Obama echoes some of Parsons’s 1955-62 assessments of the New Right.

He’s also very concerned that people can be persuaded by messaging strategies over which he lacks control. What this means is that everyone needs to agree with Obama on first premises:

“Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that’s what ninety-nine per cent of scientists tell us,” he said. “And then we would have a debate about how to fix it.”

Obama the democratic optimist who believes in the ability for open discussion to persuade voters is actually beholden to a highly deterministic view of human nature. I think his determinism ties back to the rise of social psychology which I surveyed here. The social psychology of Obama’s friend Cass Sunstein is essentially the human biodiversity of the left. We can see a glimpse of this determinism in his assessments of Trump’s effectiveness:

“What I’m suggesting is that the lens through which people understand politics and politicians is extraordinarily powerful. And Trump understands the new ecosystem, in which facts and truth don’t matter. You attract attention, rouse emotions, and then move on. You can surf those emotions. I’ve said it before, but if I watched Fox I wouldn’t vote for me!”

People are not conscious rational actors but machines whose outputs are to be controlled through condescending, manipulative, and cynical inputs. Politics turns into “biology and chemistry” for Obama:

“How did he speak with his two daughters about the election results, about the post-election reports of racial incidents? “What I say to them is that people are complicated,” Obama told me. “Societies and cultures are really complicated. . . . This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding. And you should anticipate that at any given moment there’s going to be flare-ups of bigotry that you may have to confront, or may be inside you and you have to vanquish. And it doesn’t stop. . . . You don’t get into a fetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say, O.K., where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward.”

The mealy-mouthed structure of this quote reflects the paradoxical moral element of establishment sociology. Even as they adopt cynical determinism, Obama progressives remain deeply concerned with being perceived as bearers of the civil religion, albeit in the more ethnonarcissistic form that we saw in Parsons and Robert Bellah:

“Obama is a patriot and an optimist of a particular kind. He hoped to be the liberal Reagan, a progressive of consequence, but there are crucial differences. For one thing, Obama does not believe in the simplistic form of American exceptionalism which insists that Americans are more talented and virtuous than everyone else, that they are blessed by a patriotic God with a special mission. America is a country that was established on the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers and improved upon not merely by legislation but also by social movements: this, to Obama, is the real nature of its exceptionalism. Last year, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, he stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, and defined American exceptionalism as embodied by its heroes, its freedom fighters: Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, John Lewis, the “gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York”; its Tuskegee Airmen and Navajo code-talkers, its 9/11 volunteers and G.I.s, and its immigrants—Holocaust survivors, Lost Boys of Sudan, and the “hopeful strivers who cross the Rio Grande.”

This calls to mind Bellah’s worry that the civil religion without private religion ceases to function. For Obama, the civil religion is the mechanistic materialism of Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu and not the idealism of national chosenness by a deistic god. It’s Athens and not Israel.

Instead, for Obama progressives, and as with Sohrab Ahmari, certain groups are chosen to perfect the enlightenment on a global scale by the injustices perpetrated by bad people:

“A President who looked like me was inevitable at some point in American history,” he said.

Obama’s concerns about the practical policies demanded by necessary changes, which is discussed more below, are therefore wedded to a moral framework. In a speech in Athens shortly following the Remnick article, Obama reveals that, like Parsons, he is concerned about people being born into roles, responsibilities, and statuses that are ascribed to them by virtue of their birth and not the content of their character. Obama adopts the Rawlsian thought experiment to illustrate how increasing the scope of public intervention into private existence actually liberates the individual:

“I’ve often said to young people in the United States, if you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be – you didn’t know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you’d be born, whether you were going to be a man or a woman – if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born you’d choose now.”

You see how this conflicts with his social-psychological attitude toward information and rhetoric. If people can be bamboozled about the way things are, for example by being bamboozled by the pseudo-science of race, then there is no way for this thought experiment to work, because by being born into a different era you would likely be bamboozled into not noticing how bad things are.

Conclusion

So for Obama, the strains felt by Trump voters are the result of necessary policy changes compelled by a deterministic sociological process that produces the necessity for still other policy changes. Those strains are magnified by Trump voters not being properly conditioned to agree with Obama.

For Obama, there is no going back, no isolation, no recoiling into parochial, ascriptive authorities, which in the last analysis just means that there is no possibility for people with a lot of power to permit people without power to develop their own autonomy and pursue happiness:

“The prescription that some offer, which is stop trade, reduce global integration, I don’t think is going to work,” he went on. “If that’s not going to work, then we’re going to have to redesign the social compact in some fairly fundamental ways over the next twenty years. And I know how to build a bridge to that new social compact. It begins with all the things we’ve talked about in the past—early-childhood education, continuous learning, job training, a basic social safety net, expanding the earned-income tax credit, investments in infrastructure—which, by definition, aren’t shipped overseas. All of those things accelerate growth, give you more of a runway. But at some point, when the problem is not just Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to A.I., then we’re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense. Because I can sit in my office, do a bunch of stuff, send it out over the Internet, and suddenly I just made a couple of million bucks, and the person who’s looking after my kid while I’m doing that has no leverage to get paid more than ten bucks an hour.”

In spite of the conflicts between pragmatism and moral idealism, between determinism and democratic choice, and between optimism and cynical paranoia demonstrated by Obama’s worldview, there remains a very persuasive tone to the kind of rhetoric exhibited in the paragraph above. I think the persuasiveness follows from the fact that the rhetoric of people like Parsons, Talbott, and Obama includes something that old New Right and new New Right lack, which Parsons succinctly summarized in his survey of McCarthyism:

“The main contention of these pages has been that McCarthyism is best understood as a symptom of the strains attendant on a deep-seated process of change in our society, rather than a “movement” presenting a policy or set of values for the American people to act on. Its content is overwhelmingly negative, not positive. It advocates “getting rid” of undesirable influences, and has amazingly little to say about what should be done.”

In part 2 I’ll address the lack of positivity in the contemporary New Right in the context of a critical retrospective on Yarvin’s 2008 Obama article.