Spirit in Action
The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective
Gary Dorrien is author of The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective, in which he looks at Barack Obama, the man & his history, and his policies, to see whether they pass muster from a progressive political & theological perspective. Gary is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is the author of 14 books and around 250 articles on a range of topics.
- Broadcast on:
- 09 Apr 2012
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - I imagine you realize that Spirit in Action is all about values and doing good in the world, but it is, in general, not about politics. This is true in spite of the fact that politics strongly influenced, for better or worse, how we are able to live out our values in public. Today for Spirit in Action, we're going to walk a bit closer to the political realm as we interview Gary Dorian, author of "The Obama Question," a progressive perspective. A few factors influenced my decision to take on this topic. One is that this is not a case of criticizing the other side, because mainly this book is about a progressive evaluating a progressive. A second factor that predisposed me to interview Gary Dorian about his book is that he is a professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary. And not only do I value theological critiques in general, UTS is also Alma Mater to David Huber, a friend of mine and convener for the Northern Spirit Radio Board, now forming. Finally, I believe that racism is very tender and central issue involved in this presidency. So it's an issue that needs our vigilance. One of the things "The Obama Question," a progressive perspective helps us scrutinize. All told, you can look forward to important insights into both moral and political questions as Gary Dorian now joins us on the phone. Gary, I'm so pleased you joined me today for "Spirit in Action." - Thanks, Mark. It's a delight to be with you. - You're over at Union Theological Seminary and at Columbia University. How do you split your time between them? What's your roles at those two places? - My primary responsibility is at Union Seminary. And at Columbia, I don't do any undergrad students. It's all just at the graduate level. There are three of us who have appointments at both places and it's something of an experiment between the two institutions to see if they could get more cooperation than they had historically. So we're kind of an experiment. - One of the things I note is that your appointment at Union Theologicalist, Ronald Neiber, professor of social ethics. What does that mean? - Well, social ethics is a field that was invented in the 1880s. The social gospel movement that really gave birth to not just the social ethics, but to the whole modern concern with social issues in the churches. Since it's not coincidentally, this is the same time which sociology itself is a field is invented and it's for a similar reason. As I said, discover it, there's such a thing a social structure that groups or institutions have characteristics that don't just break down to their constitutive parts, but which have characteristics themselves that need to be sort of studied and dealt with and the like. And so one way that that affected the study of religion was just the idea that if there's such a thing a social structure, then we really have to reconceive what it means for anything to be saving or redeeming or good or part of the social mission of taking faith seriously. So that's the root of it anyway. It's sort of an offshoot of the social gospel movement. Of course, the social gospel movement, it could have been called the third grade awakening. I mean, there was one in the middle of the 18th century. That's the Jonathan Edwards one. And then there was what was often called the second grade awakening. That ran all through the 1820s and a little bit before. If you think in terms of sort of these great awakenings of kind of religious awareness of revival or whatever, the social gospel in a way could be understood as kind of a third massive social awakening. Virtually all of the peace and justice ministries and fellowships that exist in the liberal churches today, they're all products of the social gospel movement. There was a black church version of it. And that's the wealth frame of the civil rights movement. People like Reverty Ransom and Benjamin Mays and Mordecai Johnson, these were the teachers, the mentors, the trailblazers from Martin Luther King in that generation. - Well, your recent book is the Obama question, a progressive perspective. And so it's about your estimation of Barack Obama's past and his measure from a progressive perspective. What in your words is a progressive? - Well, the whole issue about progressive and liberal is mostly, I think that the word progressive is wider and deeper, it takes in more possibilities and has better historical resonance in the term liberal. And yet, what these terms really mean to you, how one feels better or more inclusive, more progressive than the other, has largely to do with what generation you are and which part of the country you live in and how you relate to the whole past 200 years of American progressive or social justice movements in this country. For my generation, the word liberal was simply ruined by Linda Johnson. You know, he was a liberal. Well, if that's what liberalism was, someone who dragged us into Vietnam and put 500,000 troops there and just destroyed the hopes of a whole generation, well, you know, we needed to run from that term. And then, of course, the right to stigmatize the term liberal. I mean, made it, turned it into some sneer word, something that you denigrated. So that got to the point that no liberal actually said, I'm a liberal and running for office anymore, the term was sort of ruined. And through the kind of confluence or zig and zag of those two things, it's kind of a left reaction to liberalism and then a just ferocious right attack on the term. People who are in social justice movements have tended over the past generation to gravitate to a word that doesn't have all those connotations. So if you track this out on a 150 year basis, you see that there's a sort of musical chairs pattern that goes on because liberal will fall out of this favor and then progressive will replace it and then the other way around. I don't think there's any question today that progressive has a much better ring, has a better array of connotations to more people than liberal. There are people for whom when they heard the word progressive, they think that sounds squishy. They think liberal is really mean something and progressive sounds like some kind of a sell out or so on. So, you know, it can easily turn the other way around as well. The one thing I'd say about that, because the word progressive is so much in the ascendancy now and liberal has fallen back. The one thing I say to people who don't have any real historical consciousness about this and don't, you know, they've just latched on with it 'cause it sounds better to them, I'm inclined to just make people aware that the word progressive, the one thing that is definitely dead in the whole social justice space from the past century. The one thing that we definitely don't believe in is the progressive notion that history is just progressive, you know, that everything will just get better if we just leave things alone. And I think, no, virtually all of us recognize now that fear and social justice movement, history and social justice are about struggle. They're not just about some progress that's going to happen. Whereas previous generations of progressives really did believe that. That was the heart of progressivism, that the world is getting better and we just need to allow its betterness to take hold. - Well, this show is spirit in action. So my hope is to do some estimation of President Obama as a spirit in action. To what degree does he measure up to that goal? How would you go about determining that? - Well, I think the whole gestalt of the person, firstly, the spirit, what he stands for, what the way that he appeals to people, his capacity for empathy, his largeness of vision. First thing he does as President goes to Cairo, he thinks it matters that the image of the United States just went down dramatically on the watch of the previous President and he is a kind of restore, repair of the breach, wants to make a difference so that people work together. And his own work started out as a community organizer and community organizers, they go around, they do their every member canvas, they say, okay, what are the needs in this community? And then they're always using that account of the needs to try to get people to pull together and to work together. And I think those qualities of Obama, though I think in some ways they've been to his detriment as President, those are beautiful qualities, they're deep in him. His mother was someone who spent most of her life trying to get access to credit for poor people in third world situations and the likes. She was a community organizer before he was. So I think those skills and that temperament and the goodwill spirit that Obama has, it often seems like people don't see it or don't even recognize it. He's had so much vituperation sort of poured on him and so much legitimate criticism, I think, from people who worked very hard to get him elected. But I do believe this is about this compelling in him and being as we could ever see elected as a President, I think. - I guess it goes without saying that you don't believe he's a secret Muslim. - You know, you know, there's been so much ridiculous attack on him with various scurrilous accusations. - That was the one part of this book I wasn't quite ready for. I mean, once I decided to write it, I keep up on this policy stuff all the time anyway. So I had no trouble just sitting down and writing chapters about saving capitalism from itself and the healthcare issue and foreign policy and all that sort of thing. But I had only really tasted the conspiracy literature before and I didn't have a sense of just how much of it there is and how many of these books are best sellers and how much of it feeds this just constant vituperation and talk radio around the country that this is just a huge industry. And that part of it was very chastening just to see the sheer enmity that informs it and it's kind of frightening. - You know, when you were explaining, Gary, the post you have, the Rinald Newberg Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, you didn't explain the Reinhold-Nieber part of that. Could you explain so that people know this perspective you're bringing to this analysis? - Reinhold-Nieber was the most famous social ethicist this country has produced and was really the most famous and important American theologian of the 20th century. He taught at Union Seminary. For many years when people would ask the question, you know, what is social ethics? Often, you know, one of the stock answers is, well, that's what Reinhold-Nieber does at Union Theological Seminary. I mean, whatever social ethics is, I mean, it's sort of thing he does. And it's certainly the sort of thing that I do too. It's only one half of my work. The other half of my work deals with issues in modern religious and philosophical thought, going back for like 200 years. And I have a new book of that sort out right now called "Contean Reason and Hegelian Spirit." But the other half of my work deals with social ethics. And this is where you're dealing with social theory, Christian ethics, politics, anything that has to do with the common good, with the struggle for social justice. And Reinhold-Nieber was a towering figure. He zigged and zagged his politics changed several times over the course of the 20th century. So people relate to him in different ways. I mean, he had a period when he was an idealistic and a pacifist, and then he turned on that with a vengeance. And he developed a particular kind of just war theory. And later on, he became one of the chief theorists of the Cold War, Cold War militarism. But then he turned against that in the late 1950s, felt that the Cold War is being overly militarized and idealized, came out early against the Vietnam War. There's a considerable zig and zag in Nieber's own politics. But what you always have with him is a deep passion for answering the question, what kind of politics best and most realistically serves the struggle for social justice? And what gains toward social justice are actually attainable? So it's always in strong emphasis on political reality and just what ways we're constrained by realism. And realism was one of his almost a god term to him. So that's Reinhold-Nieber. And so in looking at Barack Obama, I imagine that you would say that there's a very good fit. I mean, do we have a Nieber protege in the White House? Well, Obama says that Nieber is the chief intellectual influences on his thought. It's clear that he's read a fair amount of Nieber. Nieber has this sort of dialectical way of proceeding where he sort of sets something out some possibility. And then he contrasts it with something else that's a possibility. Sometimes it's opposite. And then he'll sort of work back and forth between these two things. And often not to give you some synthesis, not some resolution of what was in between the two things he was holding. But instead holding these two things together in some kind of creative tension without believing that we have really solved problems in history. We just sort of hold things together and to create resolutions that then generate their own sort of antithesis. And then you work on that one. If you read the Audacity of Hope, that's exactly how Obama lays out all of his arguments. There's one hand on the other hand and then a kind of dialectical potion poll at both ends. And the other thing, the thing for which Nieber is probably most famous. There are lots of people who haven't actually read Nieber 'cause he is hard. But they have this idea that is true. That the key to Nieber is that this is the guy who one way or another, he's always sort of dealing with this question of how do you hold together the moral implications of a fairly idealistic ethic. That is Christian ethics. Love your enemies, do good to those who persecute you, term the other cheek, resist not evil and all of that. How do you hold together a Christian ethic with a realistic understanding of politics and what politics is, which is just a struggle for power towards certain ends. Nieber is always dealing with that issue. I mean, that's always one way or another in his various books. That is always the fundamental issue that he is struggling with and whatever the question is. Jimmy Carter said that his great regret was that he never met Reinhold Nieber 'cause Nieber was the cardard by a fair amount of Nieber and Nieber was a symbol to him of someone who at least tried to hold together the idealistic and idealism and realism. And it's pretty clear that that's the case for Obama too, that that's what Nieber represents for him. And there's now a whole little industry of literature about people writing about how good Nieberian is he and so on 'cause because Nieber is this totemic figure in social ethics and social theory. - The two examples we have for Obama and Jimmy Carter, they're searching for that middle ground, they're trying to hold the two ends together. Doesn't it look like it's a complete failure in Obama's part because I blame it on the right, but there's just no way to bring them anywhere towards the middle, there is no middle. Right now we have such strong contention. - Yeah, well, I wouldn't say it's been a complete failure. I mean, the house was on fire when he came in and there are tens of millions of people in the house while it's burning. And he did manage to put the fire out. Now it's where the stimulus, it's only half as big as it needed to be, but they got as much as they thought they could get through Congress. They gotta get 60 votes in the Senate. Whatever you're trying is just dead without it. And they said they thought they got as much as they could. I've got all kinds of criticisms of how that went down and what they did, but it's certainly not a total failure to have saved the economy from going to an outright crash. That really lives 1933 all over again. And even with the healthcare, although I have all kinds of criticisms about how he did it and when he did it and the way he went about it and what we got and so on, nonetheless for all of that went wrong and that wasn't good about it, he's gonna have gotten 34 million people covered who weren't covered before. We're not gonna have the same burden on emergency rooms where the emergency room is just the only site of care for tens of millions of people. He did deal with the preexisting conditions and with people losing their healthcare coverage for all manner of bad reasons. Or even just for allowing people to be able to put their 23-year-old on their healthcare. And he was motivated to do it because of that very thing, because in the 2008 campaign, he's meeting people day after day who are telling him their stories. They've been screwed over by the healthcare system and what it meant to them. He didn't have that much passion about healthcare when he started the campaign. It was Hillary had all the passion on this and he criticized her for having the mandate. And yet by the end of the campaign, he's running against McCain, he is passionate about healthcare. That's because the suffering of real people got to him. So it was so much the case that barely a couple months later, when he's president, he puts it right up to the top. He says, "Okay, now we're doing healthcare next." He had one person on his entire team who wanted to do it. The rest of them are all against it. But for better and for worse, he cared enough to whisk his entire presidency in order to get more people covered. - The thing that I was saying was a complete failure is to bring the sides together. And that I don't think I've ever seen a more acrimonious political environment in my life. And I guess I fault him maybe. And a certainly a number of people have that he's tried to compromise and compromise and he's bent over backwards to reach the other side, given up nine tenths from his side to get one tenth and then they don't give him a vote anyhow. So is this striving towards the middle a useless thing? Maybe he should have taken the same approach that Scott Walker took in Wisconsin and said, "Okay, we've got enough votes to pass it. "We'll ignore completely what 49% of the population want "and we're gonna push through because we've got 51%. "Is that a fair criticism or is that a stupid criticism "or what is that?" - That's a very good summary of what happened a lot last summer. He got caught in a hostage situation that was part of his making and then just suffered for it. We got caught in that situation because the previous December, December 2010 after the midterm election, the Bush tax cuts are running out and it's a major campaign promise that he would let the Bush tax cuts expire for the upper end. So here he is betraying a major campaign promise because they've got him by the short hairs. They say, "Well, we're gonna let the whole thing go "if you don't give us what we want." And of course he wanted to extend the tax cuts to the middle class. So they had him, but he could have. I mean, Geitner's own team is saying if we're gonna break a major campaign promise on the Bush tax cuts, let's at least say right now the quid pro quo for that is we're gonna deal with the debt ceiling right now. We're not gonna let that destroy the rest of this term with what they could do to us. And Obama incredibly says, "Oh no, we shouldn't do, "we can't do that, we must trust that the Republicans "will do the responsible thing when that comes along." Which was, of course, spectacularly not to be. So, you know, he ended up making that bet. But that was largely still that sort of goodwill of his, that thinking that sooner or later people are gonna recognize on the other side of the fence that I have all this goodwill and I wanna work with people and so on. It took three years of getting beaten up by the most obstructionist Congress we've ever seen to get the picture. And it took that long for him because he is a likable type who, this has always worked for him. I mean, it's not just a shtick. He believes in it, his whole career has been based on being a likable person who could bring people together. And it's this sort of personal magnetism that has always drawn people to him. Well, of course, he believed in it. He really thought that he could extend it across the aisle and could work with Republicans in Congress. What a terrible joke that was. But he did believe it. And I think he believed it way right up to about August 1st of last year. And now he knows better. - Is this a practical failing or a moral failing of his? Because he should have seen that they were gonna be unreasonable or he should have believed that they would be as contentious or politically motivated or is from a niberian point of view, he should have chosen the practical solution. And was he bad at that? - This is a tricky business because it's not like he didn't know. When he was just deciding to run, I mean, we're getting pretty close to running, goes to Tom Harkin's fake fry there that they have in Indianapolis, Iowa every summer, shows up to it gets a vast throng. We're just huge numbers come out to meet him and he'll just wanna be around him and so on. And he gave a pretty blistering talk at that stake fry describing how, you know, the Republican Party has virtually no concept of a common good. It really doesn't believe in using government as an instrumentality to help people. Though Republican Party is all about ripping apart whatever we have in order to help lift people up or to give people some kind of security or simply to make us a better nation together. The Republican ideology is all about saying, no, we don't owe responsibilities to each other. It's all just predatory cutthroat individualism in which what we want to do is get rid of all of this stuff that in any way is a kind of outgrowth of believing that we owe obligations to each other in this society. I mean, he went right down the list of just naming the issues, all the ways in which that shows and then he came right back to his thesis at the end of this. It would be hard to exaggerate the degree that this is true, that just this basic predisposition underlies virtually everything that the Republican Party does. He decided he'd not stood there and watched it. Well, I mean, there it was. It's all laid out. It's not like he didn't believe it. He stopped giving that kind of speech once he became president because, one, he needs to, you know, he's trying to get Republicans not to behave that way, you know. He keeps telling him, I expect you to behave differently, you know, let's work together for the common good. But it's not like he didn't get this before. And there is also this sort of political aspect to it. Every president, finally, is elected by the independents in the middle. All elections are about getting to that five to 10% of independents in the middle who are going to spend one way or another. And they like this. I mean, this is one of the things about Obama that, you know, got him elected to begin with, saying, I can do this. I believe in operating that way. So you've got to at least give some kind of lip service to it. - So I come back to the same question. Is this a practical or a moral failing of his that he ignored what he had already given speech on? He recognized it evidently. Why didn't he live up to that? And I'm assuming that the charge from the left is that this is actually a moral failing. He was selling us out. - Well, I will get there. But, you know, firstly, there's just always the political constraint. The first issue was the stimulus, right? His own people, Christina Romer and Larry Summers, that we've got it, 1.2 trillion is not too much. In fact, there's no such thing that would be too much given this enormous crisis that we're in. We've got to get as much as we can. So it was strictly a political calculus, what they could get through. They knew it wasn't enough. So the amount that they got through, I think, did an awful lot of good. I think there was a huge mistake next. He needed to stay focused on that issue. I mean, that's what people are suffering from the most, more than anything else. Just an economy that's just not working for people. They needed to keep his eye on that ball and do what was necessary to get the economy working for everyone. Instead, he went for health care. Now, as I said, there are all kinds of problems with the way he went about health care. But even there, you know, I do give him credit for a moral disposition, a moral concern that made him risk everything for health care. But there is a question about a sort of a deeper, moral passion here. I mean, is he driven by kind of outrage against social injustice that would say, I'm willing to risk all of it for the sake of an objective that is so worthy on its own terms morally, that that's where I'm going to plant the flag. And I'm going to fight for this. Obviously, he never did that. I think that is the great failing of his first term, that there's just not on any of these really big issues that he ever just put a marker down and say, this is what we've got to have. Otherwise, a half a loaf is just not worth it. I think this quality was lacking, and it marks him off from someone like Roosevelt. I mean, here's Franklin Roosevelt willing to say, you know, the economic royalists, they hate me, and I welcome their hatred as a badge of honor. You know, they should. I'm probably not doing my job if I don't make them uncomfortable. Obama, on the other hand, meeting with the bankers two months into his presidency, stands there and says, I'm the only thing standing between you and the pitchfork, right? So we need to all be in this together, so we'll get through it together. Yeah, well, they got together and opposed virtually everything in the financial reform bill. And now they're trying to get rid of what parts did get through. - We're speaking with Gary Dorian. He is Rinald Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, and he's Professor of Religion at Columbia University. And he's author of a recent book, The Obama Question, A Progressive Perspective. And Gary, one of the questions I have right now is you certainly have a lot of criticism for Obama and his presidency. Were there points along the way where you either did or came very close to, giving up any hope of his presidency? - Well, when I was writing this book last summer, there were times when I just had to push it away and thought, "Oh, I can't go through with this." I mean, that in a way, that was the worst time to be trying to assemble a case for him when it was just so dreadful. But there are always three things that got me to hang in there. One is that first, this is a historic presidency. This presidency is in some ways a response to, and has some relationship to 246 years of shadow slavery and 100 years of just vicious racial segregation in this country and the aftermath of all of that. This historic breakthrough has to be seen firstly in relationship to all that. Secondly, even last summer, even at the very worst that I thought, it is just too soon to say the things we hoped for in 2008, none of them can come true. It's too soon to give up on the hope that the Reagan era is actually gonna end here sometime soon. Clearly it hasn't yet, but it's way too soon to just say, "Oh, well, it can't happen. "We're just gonna live out even stranger forms "of the Reagan era." And that gets me to point three, the negative point, which is that if Obama doesn't get in the second term, we're gonna have a presidency that is gonna be obligated to enact the strangest, craziest, most unhinged right-wing policies we have ever seen. Even if it's a personality like Mitt Romney doing it, every day on the campaign trail, he's having to insist over and over again, that yeah, he's serious about giving the rich and the corporations yet another whopping tax cut. And the only way you can do that and have anything remotely like fiscal sanity is just to cut savagely. Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and all the rest of it, and they've all got the plans lined up to do it. So we have never seen in our lifetime an election in which so much is going to be at stake and in which there are gonna be tremendous differences between the two candidates regarding whether you even believe in tax fairness, whether we're gonna be able to deal with the Social Security tax to raise the cap on it or not, whether you even believe in investing for a clean energy economy. All that is in play here. - Could you give us a little snapshot of your background, your identity? Clearly you're a progressive political person and theologically I'm guessing the same, but how'd you grow up, where'd you move to? - Well, I grew up in a lower-class area, where poor, rural, kind of trailer parkish in the middle of Michigan. A fourth of my family tree is Native American. I didn't know anybody who talked about going to college or having a career or anything like that. I mean, I'm just the sort of middle-class world of families on television was just very foreign to me. And it didn't grow up with much religious background either. My family was nominally Catholic, but very nominal. But I always did have something of a mystical streak. And I got to mass just enough to be very struck by the iconography in Catholic churches, but the crucifix especially. I did have some sort of sense of the sort of theology of the cross, of a God figure who suffers for the sake of other people. And then when I was in high school, I made a very strong connection between that and the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was the first figure, really sort of broke through my lower-class world of the next game, 'cause I'm a jock, so I was always in sports, but you know, the next game and the season and so on, the first real sort of figure of transcendence, or broke through that for me was King in the movement. That was pretty much the extent of my religious worldview when I did go off to college, mostly to play sports. But I would say it's still my bedrock. And then in college, I discovered all kinds of amazing things, which is, you know, that school could be interesting and that I could actually understand play to an Aristotle and that it was all quite fascinating. All of that college did, I mean, my just being splurged into deep pools of sort of intellectualism and then making the connection from that to social justice issues put me on a very unlikely path. But it always still took me years, many years before I ever joined the church. Since I've always been involved in social justice organizing, in the early '80s, I was a public speaker for two Latin American solidarity organizations. It ended up making a difference that so much, I would say most of the work that I did in raising medical aid money for Nicaraguan are being involved in resistance stuff, anti-imperialist politics, most of it was taking place within religious communities, in churches. And then I was one of the founders of Witness for Peace and that, you know, that's largely, that's a church movement that in effect created a preemptive anti-war movement that I think did have a role in holding off the Reagan administration from just outright invading Nicaragua. All of that was germane to that kind of religious sensibility that I developed. - And does that mean that you actually joined a church? - I did eventually join a church. Yeah, I finally, I joined in the Episcopal church and, you know, why that one instead of any of a dozen others. There were two factors. One, there was the fact that I, you know, it was raised Catholic that I did have some, just enough of that kind of sacramental sensibility, the icons and the like, that's in me deep enough that I probably just didn't wanna be totally without it. But more importantly, at the time, I was reading a great deal of William Temple during those years. It's just a great, brilliant philosophical theologian, Neil Hegelian, one of the strongest and best, most creative theorists of economic democracy from the 1930s and 40s. And so Temple was an influence on me for me in various ways. And just, you know, the fact that he was an Anglican priest and bishop, that helped me to sort of make the decision that, well, if I'm gonna join something, I think I'll join that group. But I've always thought of myself as identifying more with the broadly ecumenical progressive Christianity and, you know, they're just various sort of, various outposts of expressions of it. - Well, let's go back to the Obama question, a progressive perspective. Again, I would like to determine, as best we can, to what degree Barack Obama is a spirit in action or whatever the contrary part of that is. Let's put him in different categories. What items in his presidency and how he actually worked things out, speak strongly in favor of him being a shining light in terms of spirit in action. - Firstly, I think what's in Obama himself, he has this remarkable mother who had, you know, I mean, her life in some ways is just a mess and he was lucky that he had these grandparents. And yet she's also a spirit. I mean, she burns brightly. She could never join any one religious group because that would make her feel like she's cut off from sort of larger sort of worlds of meaning. So she's a searcher seeking her whole life and reaching out to others and making, trying to draw people together. I think that is deeply in him. That outward reaching, caring, somewhat, you know, looking on life as an observer. I mean, there is a certain quality of detachment that she had since she was an anthropologist and that he has as well, looking in often perspective. That's requisite to, you know, growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii and never really being home and never really living in a black community till he moves to Chicago and all that. But I think this is a seeking, questing, you know, meaning seeker type of human being who asks big questions, who in the time that he's a community organizer in Chicago, you know, he's working in churches mostly in doing this community organizing and asking himself, what's missing in my own life here? I mean, am I missing something by virtue of always standing a little bit outside of any particular, you know, religious commitment, spiritual commitment? Would I be a deeper spiritual person if I committed to something? And that really was the issue for him because his mother's life was ruthless. She's a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, right? The fundamentally decision he makes for his life is, no, I mean, I respect that. I had a certain integrity, but he's drawn into the black church tradition 'cause he sees that it could give him a depth, a rootedness, that he can get deeper spiritually just being a grounded person, more if he claims a name, an identity, a community, someone he's accountable to. I think that need to sort of root his moral spiritual request in something, in the idioms of the black church was very important to him. And it shows up in his speeches. That speech he gave after David Giffords was shot. You had the use of black church repetition of the saying of a phrase over and over. You had whipped in the black church context, it's called a close, although he had an Obama Senate close before that, but he had a close, the image of little child, you know, playing in heaven and this sort of, what they call, in the black church, it's called a take-home message. The elements of a sort of black church, sort of preaching and idioms and the like are very much in him. And he hasn't had that many opportunities as president to sort of speak in that pastoral voice. And mostly he's just worried about how am I going to get the 60th vote out of the Senate when he's accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. He got those secular Swedes on their feet cheering and fins, on their feet cheering for him. When he talks about the divine spark that's in every human soul, now that's what makes it all worthwhile is to allow that spark to flourish and that we need to be true to it. - So I think that this is all in him. - Well then, what things would you list on the opposite side, things that say, he's not a very good spirit in action, not a very bright light for us? - Well, it just grieves me that, that he doubled down in Afghanistan and committed all his blood and treasure for what. He has to know that the people he loves to, you know, the site that Martin Luther King and Benjamin May's and people like that, they're all against him on that. I get why he went that way. You know, it played very well in the campaign to be able to say, I'm not just in any war type, you know, right now we've got a good war going and a bad one and we need to get out of the bad one, but we need to do more where our safety really was at stake. So I get why that played for him politically, but I do wish he could have reached a deeper place in himself to have seen that committing more blood, more American lives and more treasure to a war that he stumbles all over himself just to even be able to say what it is that's gonna make any of this worth it. I think that is a deep failing and that sits when I grieve over. - You do address the question of moral empire and liberal war in one of your chapters. I'm particularly interested in your take on just war. I'm not sure anyone really cares about it in the outer world. Obama, liberals, conservatives, who cares about just war? - Well, well, all men are paradoxes about this though. You know, the early Christian church was pacifist. Love your enemies, do good to those who persecute you during the other cheek and all that. They didn't have any trouble interpreting what that meant. But in the fourth century, of course, this starts to turn the other way. And the political line, the political story, of course, is that Christianity became first it was tolerated in the empire and then by in 311 and then by 381, it's actually official religion of the empire. And so you just have a vast sea change and the politics of the situation where it becomes a kind of department of state and has some responsibility for conducting war morally or not. And yet that's not the theological line. Just war comes theologically, the argument, is the one that Augustine makes. Faced with the fact of attacks upon the innocent, the command not to kill must give way to the command of love, interpreted as the duty to protect the innocent. So that's the basis of so-called just war theory. It's Augustine's principle that the command of love compels us to prevent the slaughter of innocence. All that casual history that builds up over the centuries afterwards about what the principles are and how they relate to each other and so on, that's all just sort of superstructure on an argument about what it means to take seriously the command of love. I mean, Augustine himself still didn't believe that self-defense passed muster. If it's just self-defense, well, you know, no, you can't claim that as a moral warrant for slaying someone else. But he does take very seriously the moral responsibility to protect people who are innocent, vulnerable, poor and the like. And so the whole just war theory comes out of that. It starts with the presumption that on Christian lines, it's almost impossible to justify going to war. I mean, the gospel is just overwhelming in its predisposition against violence. But if the Augustinian principle is in play and no, we do have a moral responsibility to the vulnerable, then you have larger sort of considerations about, well, then what would they be and what would it take and what are the circumstances on which something truly is a last resort or is a proportional response or is declared by a legitimate authority, et cetera. So you get all these principles that come down. And incidentally, they apply to the decision to go into war and then there's another whole parallel set. It's the same principles that apply differently to now to the conduct of war. The terrible paradox about this is that, you know, just for a theory, if you actually read it, it's a very stringent, very well thought out theory of tests that delegitimizes, you know, virtually all going to war. John Howard Yoder wrote a book, the great American Mennonite pacifist theologian wrote a book called "When War is Unjust." And this was sort of a plea on his part, as someone who belongs to a peace church pacifist tradition saying, and the argument was to lay out to an audience beyond his normal audience, to sort of amplify how stringent the tests are of just war. Basically, the argument was that he wished that the churches that claimed they followed just theory, just war theory, actually did. You know, if they did, all of history would be different. But the fact is, it so often doesn't work that way. Just the mere fact that there is such a thing, such a thing as just war, people invoke it, people who've never actually read it, or allow it to judge them. They just sort of invoke it as some sort of blessing for the next war they want to go off and fight. That is the terrible paradox and really tragedy of this whole subject. - You're listening to "Spirit in Action." And Mark helps me, your host, for "Spirit in Action," which is a Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website is northernspiritradio.org. On the site, you'll find our archives of the past six and a half, coming up on seven years. You'll find links to our guests, like Gary Dorian, who's our guest today for "Spirit in Action." You'll also find a place to make donations, to leave comments. You'll find a lot of good things out there. So please visit northernspiritradio.org. We are speaking with Gary Dorian, author of "The Obama Question, Progressive Perspective." You were just talking, Gary, about just war. And one of the things that, I'm sure it twists a lot of people's minds around, was Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Of course, it was awarded just after he's become president. It seems tainted by the time he actually receives the prize. Do you think they would have awarded it to him, had they been considering the question six months later? Well, that's a good question. Perhaps not, although the coming of Obama was so welcome to those Northern Europeans. I mean, they were just so desperate for it. And he is still, he is wildly popular there. I mean, they are not gonna get it. I hear this, and I don't wanna, I'm there, that they hold him in such high regard as a liberal internationalist, as someone who believes and are working together, someone who's explicitly sort of broken from the unilateralist, unipolarist, sort of chauvinist approach of the Bush administration. So that just meant so much to those Northern Europeans that they were not embarrassed about jumping the gun, even though to his credit, Obama himself was deeply embarrassed. They were flabbergasted when they heard it. In fact, it threw them in the crisis at first. It was like, "Oh my goodness, what are we even gonna say?" I mean, what are we even gonna come up with to say, "Thank you for this award that I can't possibly deserve." I mean, they got it that here the Europeans are now projecting their fondest hopes onto them as well. And that very day that he got that award, he's meeting with General McChrystal, trying to map out which of the big increases they're gonna ask for. The Pentagon gave him the usual Henry Kissinger choice where you give him three options, but two of them really aren't acceptable at all 'cause one is wildly optimistic and the other one is kind of ridiculous at the other end. So you just ask for the one, you go for the one in the middle that you really want. That very day he had that meeting. He felt the full absurdity of it. And he said it even when he went there. He came right out, so of course, I don't belong anywhere near the company of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela or even General Marshall. He said, "Then some of your other winners, "all I can do is accept it for my country "as something that I see as aspirational "if you want, hoping that I will deserve a turn, "I'll work into it." And then he spent most of the time through twisting and turning on what it means for him to be as idealistic as he claim he still was. But nonetheless, he is the commander and chief of the most godawful military empire the world has ever seen and is not gonna be shy about using American military power to the contrary. I mean, Obama is the one who has just hammered Al-Qaeda. He immediately doubled the drone strikes in Pakistan, went out through Al-Qaeda in a way that would not true of Bush at all. So he certainly has made a strong claim on that part of his presidency. I mean, Republicans will still end up saying he's soft on defense, but I don't think they're gonna get much hay out of that. - I have some of my relatives and some close friends who are very much on the other side of political fence from where I live. And they can't seem to find anything good to say about Obama. Well, of course he got bin Laden, but that was really Bush's. - There's a navy seal. - Oh, yeah, et cetera, and as you mentioned, all those things that from my point of view, my religious pacifism are not acceptable. Although it seems like they should be making all these arguments in his favor, but-- - Right, but they never will. - Why is it so contentious? Why can't that side see and embrace them? I saw Democrats who were on the conservative end of the democratic scale actually saying, "Well, I can't stand those Republicans, but this Reagan gets things right because he is tough against the USSR, et cetera." It doesn't seem to happen in the Republican fold. - No, well, first, you know, they hated Clinton too. And in some ways, the things they made up about Clinton were even worse. I mean, they really went hard for criminality fantasies, you know, with Clinton, that he murdered Vince Foster and he was a drug runner and he raped all these women and so on. So it was very bad at that time as well, but for all that, this is worse and it has been from the outset. I do think a good part of this is white supremacist and being threatened that this country is changing. It's racially and culturally, increasingly a very different kind of country. If you take white supremacist seriously, especially if you take it so unconsciously, that is if you just assume a structure of power based on privilege that presumes to define, you know, define what's normal and you feel that all slipping away, that your whiteness just isn't normative as it used to be. That I think is terribly threatening for many people. It just makes Obama just the perfect symbol of everything that just rings their alarm. And that clearly explains a great deal of the Tea Party movement. In the Tea Party, formally its position starts out as a position against the stimulus, right? But that's an absurd position. I mean, it just couldn't be more absurd than that the Obama stimulus was anti-American subversus and you know, whatever else. What is behind even that absurd position and the way they hold to it with such passion, God, I think take seriously that the Tea Party movement is overwhelmingly white. It is overwhelmingly middle class and middle aged or older. That is precisely the group that, at least, you know, a sizable segment of it is just scared to death. What's happening in our country and the social movements and the like and to have a multicultural type who's kind of from Harvard and who taught critical race theory and was a civil rights lawyer and who's black. And now he's our 44th president. It has just wronged every alarm that a lot of people have. And it shows up in the kind of politics we've got. Well, we've got to conclude before too long. I have a couple more questions I want to reach out with. So Gary, at the end of the book, at the end of the Obama question, you ask the question, what kind of country this is going to be? And you oppose two characteristics that some might not imagine are really conflicting visions. Could you explain this tension between liberal and democracy? Well, I meant they're liberal in the classic sense of the term. I mean, that's 18th century level. That's why I said in the classic sense, we're going back to 18th century debates over the conflict between the liberal vision and the democratic one. The liberal vision is it's about individualism, that the good society is simply the one that provides unrestricted liberties for individuals to acquire wealth. And the more democratic vision is the one in which no, the good society is the one that checks that in which democracy itself is valued and is allowed to flourish and to be a check on political, social, and economic power. So you have a sort of conflict between the just allow individuals to get as rich as they want and otherwise we don't owe obligations to each other and a democratic vision which says no, why should only you have access to social power and privilege and wealth that America should belong to everyone? I think these two visions, these two, these arguments about what would define the kind of country we should want to be, they are as old as American history. And I don't mean that, oh, you know, one side is right and the other is wrong because that democratic side is just loaded up with racism and sexism and every kind of xenophobia through much of American history. And sometimes it's the folks on the liberty side who are at least champions of some kind of intellectual freedom at least for an elite. We have this sort of family argument in American history over which of these visions is going to prevail. And they're both kind of pure types, so you never just have one represented by one group and one by the other. There's a fair amount of both conflict and accommodation one way or the other, but they are two distinct things. And I think every presidential election that we have in this country is always about that. You've always got one party just saying, oh, we need to get rid of government, so freedom can reign. And the other party that just, it's hard to even believe that they're serious. What are you talking about? That's not how freedom reigns. You just have a privileged group that has everything and everyone else is being crushed below. So that's the two party, the two vision sort of argument. My argument was that in the past generation, there's just no question that the more purely capitalist vision has prevailed. And our politics, Ronald Reagan convinced Republicans and a great many Democrats that tax cuts just pay for themselves, so don't worry about it. We can just hack away at it and it'll be all right. In fact, we'll be better off. - Well, I think we have to finish this off with some kind of conclusion. So maybe a scale one to 10, he's a spirit in action. He's not. Where does Obama come in your personal evaluation of what he's done and what he aspires to and who he is? How does he ring the bell? - Well, I have no idea how to compare him to just an abstract anyone or everyone. I will say, I think among the presidents we've had, he is way up there. I don't honestly believe we've ever had a president who cares about the right things more deeply than Obama does. This is why I do hold out some, certainly more hope than some progressives do for a second term, 'cause I think he has got it calculated that there are certain kinds of, there are certain issues that just by their nature there's second term issues. You just can't deal with them in your first term. And I don't question at all, this is someone who goes to bed at night, they're wondering, am I getting the most out of this job in order to help, especially the least of these, my brethren, and always, especially, the poor, the vulnerable, the people are put down. And I think he does apply a biblical test to what he's about. That's a hard thing to do, having that job, 'cause that's a terrible job in some ways. You're the commander, the chief of a vast military empire. And you have to make terrible decisions. And virtually every decision you get has terror built into it, because the reason it's reached your desk is that it couldn't be solved further down. You know, if it could have been, it would have been. But any decision that gets you to your desk when you're president, it's because it's worked that far up, and now some gut wrenching choice has to be made, and now I make it, but then you have to swing 60 votes in the Senate in favor of whatever it is you want. That's very hard to do. - And I hope that he's got the moral tenacity to sort of hang in there and get the best that he can. - Well, for our listeners, if you want to get a good read on the broad scope of who he is as president, who was before he's president, who he is growing up. There's a very good picture of him from many perspectives in the Obama question, a progressive perspective by Gary Dorian. Follow the link from northernspiritradio.org. You'll find out more about the book and about Gary. Gary, it's great talking with you. It's great that you brought all this perspective together. A perspective that I share very largely about looking at a political world, which is a very difficult place to apply, deep values. Thank you for doing that hard work and helping digest some of it for us. Thanks for joining me for a spirit in action. - I'm gonna delight being with you, and thank you for your really good work. - The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern spirit radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our evening ♪ ♪ I'm feeling ♪
Gary Dorrien is author of The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective, in which he looks at Barack Obama, the man & his history, and his policies, to see whether they pass muster from a progressive political & theological perspective. Gary is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is the author of 14 books and around 250 articles on a range of topics.