Obama's bid to bend the arc back toward justice | Andre Sprung - xpostfactoid

Forever ago, back in 2008, James Fallows tipped me off to Andrew Sprung's excellent analyses of Obama's rhetoric.  Fallows' praise - as a former Presidential speech writer himself caught my attention.  Sprung morphed into careful analyses of the Affordable Care Act.  So it's good to see he has gotten back to his analyses of the art of persuasion formally known as Rhetoric.
Obama's bid to bend the arc back toward justice | xpostfactoid
by Andrew Sprung

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In 2013, I marveled as pundits expressed surprised when Obama said what he'd always said about the economic case for a fairer distribution of wealth. I wondered, Will we hear Obama in retrospect?

The answer now appears to be yes, evident in the outpouring of love and longing in reaction to his virtual commencement speeches for graduates of historical black colleges and universities and all high school graduates. But not in the way I'd anticipated.

Obama's core pitch, as candidate and president, was for a recommitment to shared prosperity -- public investment, income redistribution -- after decades of steadily encroaching plutocracy. He encased this pitch in a seductive narrative of American history in which this commitment to the common good was renewed and extended at intervals: the nation might err, but its long-term course was to approach ever nearer to fulfilling its founding principles of equal rights and shared opportunity. Democracy, embodied in bottom-up demand for justice, enabled periodic course correction: American history followed the arc that bends toward justice.

Further, the expressed will of the people would generate consensus: the political center, knocked rightward by Reagan, would shift leftward as Republicans were forced to recognize Obama's own exquisite reasonableness. He would enable this in part by reaching out to them, recognizing publicly that "the other side may sometimes have a point." That meant, in large part, recognizing budget constraints, which Obama cared about on the merits: he said during the 2008 transition that the then-ballooning deficit was thing the that kept him up at night. In his 2010 State of the Union address, with unemployment at 9.7%, he called for a bipartisan commission to reduce the deficit and a 3-year freeze on government spending. Surely those measures would reduce Republican opposition to the pending Affordable Care Act, which, according to Congressional Budget Office decree, would also reduce the deficit over time?

The election of Trump and the swift conversion of the Republican party into a fascist rubber stamp have shown key elements of Obama's core pitch to have been, if not wrong, at best very, very early. The arc of American history is bending toward plutocracy and fascism; whether we retain the democratic capacity for course correction that Obama loved to cite, as Trump demands criminalization on trumped-up charges of Biden and Obama himself, remains very much in doubt. As for the Republican "fever break" that Obama promised if he were reelected... the fever's now 105°. And it's hard to see how democracy can survive when one of two parties in a two-party system and echoes a nonstop stream of lies and smears while countenancing and abetting naked corruption and outright treason. Perhaps a cycle of serial electoral defeat will bring about peaceful party reform. But will Republicans, holding the reins, will countenance electoral defeat?

So, with democracy and the rule of law hanging in the balance, Obama delivered two addresses to the next generation. He reprised old themes: 1) The world will get better, the country will get better, and it's up to you. To the high school grads:

First, don’t be afraid. America’s gone through tough times before — slavery, civil war, famine, disease, the Great Depression and 9/11. And each time we came out stronger, usually because a new generation, young people like you, learned from past mistakes and figured out how to make things better.  

2)  The only true prosperity is shared prosperity. To the HBCU grads:
KEEP READING