The Four Great Transformations Driving Obama's Victory

Can it happen? Are the Bush years going to end with the election of a cerebral, liberal black man born to a Muslim goat-herd from Kenya and an atheist farm-girl from Kansas? Will we witness it in less than 48 hours? Whisper it: yes we can. At the midnight hour tomorrow night - unless opinion polls are wrong; more wrong than they have ever been - the era of President Barack Obama will begin.

It's hard to see what this will mean for the world yet. Obama himself has written: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." But we can already map out the four tectonic shifts rumbling beneath this election. They all began before Obama - but his cool stride has brought them into history sooner than many of us thought possible.

Transformation One: The Transcending of Race. Just forty years after Martin Luther King had a dream of a post-racial America, a coalition of white workers in Pennsylvania, retired Jews in Florida, and bilingual Hispanics in New Mexico is poised to put a black man in the White House. If the polls are right, Obama will be the first Democrat to win a majority of white votes since 1964.

This hints at one of the reasons why so many of us love the US, even as we hate some of its actions. The country is capable of many crimes - but it is also open and free enough to produce the antibodies that begin to put them right. It gives us Dick Cheney, but also Noam Chomsky. It gives us Jim Crow, but also Barack Obama. Is there any better symbol of how the American Revolution can correct itself than the realisation that the first 26 Presidents of the US could have owned the 44th President as a piece of property?

This shift will only accelerate. By 2040, white people will be a minority in America, part of a patchwork of ethnic minorities. The US will look more and more like a universal nation of peoples from everywhere, united behind the constitution. Young Americans are strikingly relaxed about this: for under-30s, Obama has a 47 percent lead. Not a 47 percent vote - a 47 percent lead.

Yet the US state is still riddled with racist outcomes. To give just one example: the American Civil Liberties Union found in 2006 that although the races use drugs at the same rate, black Americans - who comprise 12 percent of the population - make up 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Obama could very easily have slipped into this vortex when, as a young man, he occasionally snorted coke. If he had been arrested and jailed for it like one in five black men, he wouldn't be President; he wouldn't even be able to vote. This election shows a desire by American people to move beyond the sterile stupidities of racism, but it is the middle of the story, not the end.

Transformation Two: The Death of Reaganism. For a generation, American Presidents have pledged to roll back the state and let the market rip. Even Democrats bowed to this orthodoxy: it was Bill Clinton was said "the era of big government is over" and began deregulating the banks. The result was the financial collapse and the worst inequality since the 1920s. Today, the top one percent of Americans own 21 percent of all income - while the bottom 50 percent own just 13 percent. Obama, by contrast, ran mocking "the idea we can give more and more to the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down," and argued for the state to "spread the wealth around". The era of limp, passive government is over - at precisely the moment when we need athletic government to prevent a depression and stop global warming.

Transformation Three: The Palin' of the Culture War. For decades now, the American right has successfully disguised its help-the-rich, slap-the-rest ideology by presenting Democrats as out-of-touch elitists on the social issues: God, guns and gays. This election, the trick stopped working. Sarah Palin made the base gurgle, but her cultural wedgies repelled everyone else. The real elite have been laid bare on Wall Street; shrieks of "elitism!" from their deregulators and defenders now sound absurd. We have been here before: the 1920s was a culture war decade, with bitter moral crusades for Prohibition and against Catholics. In the 1930s, it all died off in the dust bowl.

Transformation Four: The End of the Unipolar Fantasy. The Bush administration believed that, as the last remaining super-power, it could impose its will on the world with force. It made little effort to compromise with - or even listen to - a world it wanted to bring to heel. It boasted of the need to maintain "full spectrum dominance" over the planet, and to have more firepower than all their potential rivals combined. It trashed treaties, scorned the UN, and refused to talk to anybody they disagreed with. It was always doomed to failure, because very few international problems can be handled with force. You can't fire cruise missiles at an unravelling climate or a tricky peace process or bird flu.

But what now? A man with a background among the colonized has never before become the head of the world's largest empire. Obama's grandfather was detained in a British Guantanomo for six months during the bloody occupation of Kenya. As a child, Obama watched helpless as the CIA armed and funded the crazed dictator Suharto to commit mass murder of civilians. Yet how much has this informed Obama's policies, as a pragmatic politician working within a system riddled with undemocratic pressures?

He certainly disagrees with many of the vicious extremes of Bush, from Iraq to torture. His plans for a massive investment in renewable energy to wean the US slowly off its addiction to oil will have transform the country's foreign policy, ending its need for the Saudi tyranny and bursts of war in Mesopotamia.

But in the medium-term, it seems Obama will be a conventional Democratic multilateralist leaving in place many of the ugly aspects of US foreign policy - from the crowbar-policies of the International Monetary Fund to unwavering support for the thuggish governments of Egypt, Colombia and Israel. The democratic antibodies of opposition aren't strong enough to overturn the Big Money or hard geopolitics that demand these policies. So there will still be plenty to oppose in Obama's foreign policy - but when a giant shuffles just a few steps to the left, the ants below feel a great pressure lifting from them.

But then the fear comes: what if the American people are too addled by the race-fear, and turn to McCain at the last moment? At the Democratic convention, Obama said to his fellow Americans: "We are better people than the last eight years." The ghosts of the drowned children of New Orleans and the burned children of Baghdad may have stared down sceptically - but I believe he was right. The tidal force of these four transformations is too great. And yet, and yet... I won't be sure until I watch Obama's acceptance speech through salty tears - and I hear the Statue of Liberty let out a slow sigh of relief.

Johann Hari writes for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his articles, click here.

If you haven't volunteered for Obama yet, it's not too late: this is the most crucial time to get involved. Click here to find out how.

Comments

[argeec]

This post is more honest and insightful than most.

[Womponnim]

2nd that. Beautiful line. I certainly agree Obama will not be a messiah for the left - but even the abolitionists that helped elect Lincoln were disappointed with his plodding pragmatism.

[woodnthrifty]

Great piece.

[sonomarc]

Johann, very inciteful post. Thanks for writing it.

[Decipherer]

I'd say "insightful," but that's just me.

[WmC]

But then if it incites people to vote, the incorrect spelling may have been insightful.

[ohioan73]

I love your articles. Your writing is the perfect balance of information and passion. I'm so emotionally affected by this election, I'm holding onto my tears, my happiness, my hope. Holding on till the 5th. Waiting to see if democracy is true. Waiting to see a glimpse of the world my children will grow up in full of hope and opportunity instead of fear and disappointment. I don't dare take it for granted, either.

[eXcommunicate]

The Roman Empire's greatest emperors were not even Romans! Look up Emperor Hadrian and Emperor Trajan.

[Decipherer]

What's your point? Barack Obama is a native born American like I am, and perhaps you are as well.

[Decipherer]

And before I forget, being a "Roman" during the Roman Empire was essentially being a citizen, which could occur either by birth as in "Italia" or having that considerable homor (and advantage) being conferred upon you in recognition of some contribution to the empire such as distinguished military service or if you could pay for it.

In Rome, therefore, you could be a Roman without having been born on the Italian peninsula.

Emperors Trajan, Hadrian and others were Romans, period.

[PaHairO]

um, I think you mean Muslim goat-herd"ER" ... in the opening sentences ?

Seems unlikely that Barack was born to a goat herd. Not even the Republican smear machine has gone there ...

[LanceJetson]

Ever heard the term "shepherd?" Same dif

[Decipherer]

Umm, that's because "shepherds" herd sheep, goatherds herd, well, goats. Not many sheep in Kenya, last time I checked.

If the job description is true, then as is oft-repeated, ad nauseam, "it is what it is."

[priscianusjr]

Also swineherds and cowherds.

[renatam]

As the son of a member of the community, that would be the African term. Native Americans in the US have similar (non-derrogatory) terms. There is NOTHING derrogatory in the term -- as defined by the African culture. As an AA descendant of slaves, I envy Barack Obama's knowledge of his heritage and lineage. That is totally absent from the experience of descendants of American slaves.

[DarthVector]

"But what now? A man with a background among the colonized has never before become the head of the world's largest empire."

Trajan was the first Roman Emperor born in the provinces. He was one of two great Emperors in the Nervan-Antonian dynasty who were born outside Italia. The other was Hadrian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian

While Trajan was definitely Roman, Hadrian may have been Hispanic. Both were highly respected members of a golden era of Roman accomplishment.

The first undoubtedly non-Roman emperor was Septimius Severus, who was born in Africa to Roman/Berber parents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septimius_Severus

Originally a soldier, Severus was not popular; he was a militaristic strongman and expanded military engagement and spending. By this stage in Roman history, strong men such as Severus were as good as it got.

[DavidNOE]

And I think that if you check, in the second century CE Han China was a bigger empire than Rome...

[larry278]

A word on the use of wikipedia as a sole source; wikipedia, like all encyclpedias, has to correct its errors constantly. Constant revision is essential. Do you have any other sources to prove that your comments are valid? Your comment resembles a sophomoric SWAG, Sophistocated [or Sophist's} Wildly Absurd [aka Wild @$$ed] Guess, Darth.

[scrutiny1]

Wonderful, excellent article. Thank you.

[SangZe]

This is just more wishful thinking. Yeah, yeah, we're all anxious to see Bush go since Pelosi and friends lacked the will to do the right thing after we elected them to act. I'm not going to hold my breath until Obama is actually declared a winner. I'm not certain anymore that it will happen. The trends imply quite the opposite. What we will see is a total repudiation of the polls, which are little more than someone's wishful thinking presented as fact. I think Obama is by far the better choice, but my thoughts don't mean much more than my vote, which I see as so meaningless an artifact that I don't think I'll bother expending it. I've got better things to do.

[LanceJetson]

Well to me it appears as though your vote means MUCH more than your thoughts. Get out and vote!

[caterpol]

I don't know about you, but I'd rather die trying than die curled up in the fetal position.

Despite what happens, it makes me proud that we stand up for what we believe in. Despite the odds, we're on the right side of history.

[Decipherer]

Did you somehow expect that in less than two years Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, nursing the narrowest of majorities in their respective houses of Congress, would magically reverse the Bush disaster on multiple fronts that had set in over the previous eight years?

How naive. It simply is not that easy.

What the election of a slim Democratic majority in Congress in Nov. 2006 actiually did was to stop the Bush administration from doing some even WORSE things to our country.

That has largely happened. Now, with the election of Obama - Biden and a larger Democratic majority in Congress, we can begin to REVERSE the damage, not just stop it.

Your vote for Barack Obama and your congressional Democrats will not be wasted.

[Canuck4Obama]

You should be proud and GRATEFUL that you CAN vote. Apathy and self pity will not get Barack Obama and Joe Biden into the Whitehouse. Votes will. You have better things to do?? Give me a break. You're pathetic.

Johann..Wonderful article , thank you.

[waitforme]

Don't give up. Have faith. Give voting a try. And if you -- we -- are disappointed, after our rage subsides, I think that we might be able to take some comfort in the fact of our society having been forced to go through a crucible of re-interpretation of race in our society. And I don't think this will go backwards.

I've seen people like Chris Matthews run right up against his discomfort with the subject of race and become comfortable, and accepting of it, even able to more easily chat normally with black guests on his show. I think many people, people whom other people watch -- and their viewers, have gone through a crucible in which race attitudes have changed irrevocably for the better.

Obama has good basic values. He will not make all the changes we may want, but he has already introduced the image of a man who can think clearly, speak well, remain graceful and contained and assert good, human values. (This is unusual and rare, certainly in our leaders. It can't be taken away.) I think Obama's candidacy has MADE the fact of racism less of a fact and less of a burden, and inserted more freedom into the mix, into the tension between the races. IF Obama loses it will indeed be a great disappointment, but I think a lot has been served already and cannot be lost.

Don't be so afraid of disappointment. Give voting a chance.

[melpol]

Those that call themselves patriotic Americans and harbor racist views will have a headache when the nation gets its first black president. It is a contradiction to call yourself patriotic when you dislike the skin color of the president . The only mental relief for them would be to enter a reorientation clinic to learn what it means to be an American.

African American fashions and music will become the rage with the new presidency. Some are calling it the second civil rights movement and the end of racism. Old racial prejudices might remain in the hearts of the ignorant. But they will be eliminated as they accept the reality that the first lady in America and her family is black. Racial integration will take on a new meaning as it becomes fashionable to have a black lover or friend. These events will be good news to a world that has been suffering over racial division for centuries.

[ValereP]

... hopefully, it will also usher in a new era of receptivity and compassion toward other cultures and nations. Time to move on from self-absorbed cowboy fundamentalism, get a passport, and explore other ways of looking at things.

[PlantGod72]

"...and I hear the Statue of Liberty let out a slow sigh of relief." Simply SPLENDID!

Thank you for this eloquent and insightful piece.