Keep On Pushing

July 27, 2024 1:59 PM

The Cynic felt that way once, and he would like to feel that way again. Instead, all he hears is a dozen clocks ticking, ticking down against the survival of things long thought undying, against the golden dream of an orderly progress toward genuine human liberty. The Cynic cannot find much stubborn righteousness in himself anymore, so he warms himself like a hobo in a train yard, huddling around figures of the past, and around those figures of the present moment who seem to have preserved the warmth of that hope against the long, cold winds that seek always to extinguish it.

The Cynic and the Two Nations, by Charlie Pierce: It’s been twenty years since then–state senator Obama assured us there was not a liberal America and a conservative America. In that time, a new country has been building with fearful momentum. Can anything be done to stop it?

Obama's keynote address at the 2004 DNC [transcript], which was covered previously (and presciently) on MeFi

See also: 10 years since Obama's 2008 Iowa caucus win

Other essays in Pierce's long-running, elegiac series on the moral and political arc of the last two decades, as bent around Barack Obama:

The Cynic and Senator Obama [June 2008] - Obama says that cynics believe they are smarter than everyone else. The cynic thinks he's wrong. The cynic doesn't think he's wiser or more clever or more politically attuned than anyone else. It's just that he fears that, every morning, he'll discover that his country has done something to deface itself further, that something else he thought solid will tremble and quake and fall to ruin, that his fellow citizens will sell more of their birthright for some silver that they can forge into shackles. He has come to believe that the worst thing a citizen of the United States of America can believe is that his country will not do something simply because it's wrong.

The Cynic and President Obama [November 2012] - Perhaps all our best presidents are the ambiguous ones, the ones hardest to figure out, because they force us to take more of the obligations of citizenship on ourselves, and not to look for some Great Man to lead us. [...] Of all the possible presidents in 2012, Barack Obama was the best of them. But that wasn't the point anymore. The country needed more than a president. The country always had needed more than a president.

For Obama, the Clock's Running in His Own Head Now [November 2012] - If he loses, there will be a powerful movement to render him, and these rallies, as footnotes. If he wins, he will be president again, and it will be a dusty, grinding job for as long as the calendar allows him to do it. [...] Ever since he came upon the scene, he has been a candidate who has had to rein himself in, someone who could sing Al Green, but just a line, someone who can dance, in front of an adoring crowd, but just one step, and then gone again. On the press riser, his senior staff was watching him do it, and they all smiled, and the sunset fell across their faces.

The Greatness of Barack Obama Is Our Great Project [November 2012] - The long creative project of America has been to engage all its citizens in that work. That is the history that he wears so well, and that he wields so subtly. That is the truth that he represents. That is the great silent thing that has been there through all the debates, and the ads, and all of that preposterous money. We are working on ourselves. We are incomplete. We are never finished.

The Cynic and the Lame Duck President [January 2015] - There's one thing about the president that took the cynic a long time to understand, and he didn't truly understand it until he heard the president refer to "the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government." Put simply, in so many areas, the president is putting the responsibility of governing—of leadership—on us, which is where it should be. We shouldn't need a president to start a conversation on race. We should start it ourselves, in thousands of town halls and church basements and radio talk shows. But as a self-governing democracy, we are too cowardly to do it honestly, because it rubs up against the comfortable myth of American exceptionalism. We have surrendered the basic, questioning courage it takes to run a self-governing political commonwealth for the anesthetic lassitude of national self-esteem. That is the bluff this president has called.

Charlie Pierce's masterful political commentary, previously

[Speaking of history, one person of particular note was at Obama's 2007 campaign announcement, and soon got to work organizing exactly the same sort of grassroots phonebanks (or these days, Zoom calls) that are now lighting up Democratic politics on her behalf today -- support that the Obamas have now gladly repaid.]

posted by Rhaomi (19 comments total)

This is one of the finest MeFi posts in a long while.
posted by hankmajor at 2:43 PM on July 27 [5 favorites]

In my opinion, Charles Pierce is one of the best political writers around today. It might have helped that he was a sports writer for years before switching topics. And… every Friday he includes Dinosaur News ("Is it a good day for dinsaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!").

Worth reading every weekday.
posted by jabo at 3:06 PM on July 27 [5 favorites]

It is devastatingly sad, but also strangely cathartic, to read someone recounting in eloquent detail the past twenty years of political history exactly the way I remember them happening.
posted by biogeo at 3:42 PM on July 27 [21 favorites]

Faced with the last 30 years, it's definitely easy to be cynical. But I'm not sure it's cynical to merely recognize that Obama was aspirational but wrong. It's just facts.

What would be cynical is to focus on all the horrors of the past 30 years without recognizing that there's also been tremendous progress. That, in fact, the progress is what is invigorating the backlash. Women have more agency than they ever had before in the history of this country. LGBTQIA+ folx are more legally recognized and culturally accepted than ever before. There is outrage about unjustifiable state-sponsored violence (outrage that couldn't be sustained enough to build an effective movement, but enough to get people out in the streets). The Patriarchs are scared. They see the status quo shifting under their feet, so they gin up all the fear and hate they can muster. They lost the culture war, so they are trying a last desperate gambit to destroy democracy.

And they might succeed. We're all scared for good reason. And being scared can make some people do irrational things, like claim both sides are just as bad, or whatever. And because our side values rationality, that sort of stuff drives us batty. But I've pledged not to engage with irrational people on whatever side and work on getting as many people to the polls as possible who will pledge to defeat fascism. The bullies are not the heroes, and we won't go backward without a fight.
posted by rikschell at 4:21 PM on July 27 [35 favorites]

As always, "cynic" is a synonym for "recognizes reality". This just reads as cope from an Obama die-hard who can't deal with the world as it is. It doesn't even make sense, we had a literal Civil War in our past, the idea that our nation can be this deeply divided is some misguided cynicism is beyond ridiculous.
posted by star gentle uterus at 5:11 PM on July 27 [5 favorites]

When the author talks about The Cynic, he is referring to himself.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 5:34 PM on July 27 [11 favorites]

imagine how we wouldn't be at this moment at all if Obama had stood up to the disingenous bad faith bullies then.
posted by kokaku at 6:31 PM on July 27 [5 favorites]

I’m a big fan of Mr. Pierce and have been reading him for a long time. He saw through the hype around Tiger Woods right away, but I have always thought one of his most powerful pieces was this takedown of welfare reform. Alway glad to see him posted here, and I hope that in the next few months both of us can become a little less cynical.
posted by TedW at 7:34 PM on July 27 [5 favorites]

I love Charlie Pierce, and I wish so much of his work wasn't behind a paywall...

So thank you for the Archive link Rhaomi!
posted by suelac at 8:44 PM on July 27 [1 favorite]

such a towering polemicist that even John Adams, that hopeless old fud, was an early admirer.


"...yet with you sir I have my fears, that American Virtue has not yet Reach’d that sublime pitch which is Necessary to Bafle the arts of the Designing, and to Counteract the Weakness of the timid, as well as to Resist the pecuniary temtations And Ambitious Wishes which will arise in the Breasts of More Noble minded and Exalted Individuals, if not Carefully Gaurded."

-To John Adams from Mercy Otis Warren, 10 March 1776
posted by clavdivs at 9:32 PM on July 27 [3 favorites]

Thank you so much!

Flagged as a fantastic post.
posted by Silverstone at 10:11 PM on July 27

The Speech [Chicago Magazine, 2007]

When Barack Obama launched into his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was still an obscure state senator from Illinois. By the time he finished 17 minutes later, he had captured the nation’s attention and opened the way for a run at the presidency. A behind-the-scenes look at the politicking, plotting, and preparation that went into Obama’s breakthrough moment

posted by Rhaomi at 10:37 PM on July 27 [2 favorites]

I'm a bit surprised at the reception here. I found this painfully tedious to read.
posted by reductiondesign at 11:08 PM on July 27 [3 favorites]

Glad that Pierce gets paid for his work, but disappointed that the past stuff is still paywalled.

Thanks for this great post, I love Charlie Pierce on sports or politics.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:25 AM on July 28 [3 favorites]

I gave up on reading Pierce, probably during the '16 election cycle. I love his writing but it was getting too cynical for me. What I really mean is, I had to cut back on outrage bait and his writing had more rage/word than anything else I was consuming and I had to stop.

I will take a look at TFA though. I remember those posts from the Obama days, and I understand them now a lot better than I did then. Pierce was right, and Obama was wrong.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:45 AM on July 29

OK I read the thing. A well-trodden subject, it is not as rage-inducing as Pierce talking about fresh hells and things found under heretofore-unturned rocks. And it is too pessimistic.

One thing I have never seen the Cynic note, is for what a tiny little sliver of time America seriously tried to live up to its own self-image, with respect to democracy. It lasted maybe 10 years, starting around 1970. Prior to that time, though America prided herself on the strength of her representative Government so much that she appointed herself the world's judge of what was a "free and fair election" and what wasn't, there was never a moment when oppressed Americans were not systematically, institutionally denied the vote so that they would not be able to vote against continuing oppression. The America whose destruction he mourns is in no small measure an illusion, I'm suggesting.

Pessimism, like optimism, is a form of epistemological hubris. It is thinking that you know how things are going to come out. And you might have some good guesses! You might have wisdom that knows at a glance, that has never seen this happen without that following. But you do not know that that follows this by natural law, as night follows day. Or if you have seen a string of coincidences. Or if there's something stochastic going on that escapes your notice. Hope is the sane, humble stance to take toward the future right now, I'm suggesting. Not hope that everything will be all right, necessarily. Just hope that the monsters are a lot worse in the imagination than they will be in reality.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:17 AM on July 29 [1 favorite]

TIL Mercy Otis Warren. Charlie, you've been holding your historical crush out on us!

Aarvark Cheeselog: My sister, an early Gen X'er, always says we were living the dream in the 70s and didn't even know it.
posted by whuppy at 5:16 PM on July 29

Aardvark Cheeselog, maybe your comment carried the implicit qualification that you were talking about recent history, but surely Reconstruction is another time when America sincerely tried to live up to its own democratic self-image?

I couldn't have told you the dates off the top of my head, but Wikipedia tells me that that, too, lasted about a decade. I wouldn't have thought before looking up the dates to draw the historical parallel between the presidencies of Hayes and of Reagan, but, now that I come to it, it's an interesting proposition.
posted by It is regrettable that at 6:25 AM on July 31 [1 favorite]

@It is regrettable that:

At first I was like "Good catch. I should have thought of Reconstruction also, and made that observation about two periods of maybe a decade apiece, through all 250 years of American history."

And then I thought about the women, and said "nah."
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:40 AM on July 31 [1 favorite]