There's Martin Luther King's dream. Then there's his American reality principle

Martin Luther King's finest hour may have come when he took a stand against the Vietnam War, breaking with the president with whom he'd partnered to pass epochal civil rights legislation.

Returning to the speech in which King took that stand, I find myself taking a weird kind of solace in his clearheaded denunciation of the violence that tore at two societies. It's a reminder, in the Trump era, that American betrayal of American ideals is continual, that backlash is continual, that mass violence inflicted on foreign populations is continual, and systemic injustice inflicted on minorities at home is continuous.

Why does that reminder offer solace?  Because along with the failure, success has also been continual: we have recovered from, and partially redressed, so many past self-inflicted wounds. Somehow, this account of how the triumphs of the civil rights movement turned to ashes reminds also that there was a residue of progress -- and also some lessons learned from Vietnam that held in some measure for 20-30 years.

Here is the core indictment in King's speech against the war delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967:

LBJ before Selma: wait -- no, go

After seeing Ava DuVernay' Selma a few weeks ago, I bought Nick Kotz's Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Laws that Changed America (2005). It's a digest of LBJ and King's interactions, beginning in fruitful if sometimes tense collaboration and ending in tragic enmity.  I can't say how central a source this book itself was for the movie, but the encounters it records indicate that those who claim that Johnson was more supportive of the voting rights campaign than their early encounter in the movie implies and those who claim that the scene is an accurate depiction of a pre-Selma encounter are both right.

LBJ and King had exquisitely attuned political antennae -- King with a genius for staging and calibrating confrontations to move public opinion, Johnson for how and when to move Congress. In the early stage of Johnson's presidency, sometimes their antennae were attuned, and sometimes they were in tension. Following his landslide reelection in November 1964, LBJ did ask King to ease up on the voting rights campaign so he could first get his antipoverty program passed. But within a few weeks, he began to think that the time might also be ripe for voting rights legislation, and he alternately tapped the gas and brake as the campaign gained momentum.

LBJ met King alone a week after King had been awarded the Nobel Prize, on December 18, 1964 -- less than three months before the first march on Selma on March 7, 1965 and LBJ's speech introducing the Voting Rights Act to a joint session of Congress on March 15. The upshot, as described in Judgment Days, is the basis of the LBJ-King White House meeting dramatized in Selma:

How to love America, by Barack Obama

Obama gave another great speech on race today, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the 50th Anniversary of "Bloody Sunday. He told a story of America that he's always told, but he expanded its range and spoke with a steely urgency that bespoke battles fought and still to come.

He echoed Lincoln, as he likes to do, and he answered his stupidest critics as he defined in his own way what it means to love America, and he sought to recommit his fellow citizens to fulfill the promise of the nation's founding documents, reiterating his favorite theme: faith in the power of democracy to continuously create a more perfect, never perfected union. He laid out his most inclusive vision ever of who built America and who America is for and who America is.

He echoed and updated Lincoln in (at least) three ways. He borrowed Lincoln's diction of dedication at Gettysburg while explicitly extending the concept of devotion to heroes of peace -- and in particular, of nonviolent resistance -- as well as to heroes of war. And as he always does, channeling Lincoln, he cast that heroism as a devotion to fulfilling the ideals expressed in the nation's founding documents. And as Lincoln did at Gettysburg, he sought to inspire those listening to emulate those commemorated in their devotion to extending the promise of freedom and opportunity to all.

Here is the expanded concept of heroism:

Obama's seductive love for America

The irony in this "Obama doesn't love America" crap is that Obama got himself elected by holding up  to Americans a flattering mirror that was suited to the moment.

The national narrative that Obama put forward in 2007/8 had two salient points (okay, may it had three or four or five, but two come to mind here). It was, first, a bid to move the political center to the left -- to cast American history as a progression in which Americans at various crux points demanded and obtained new common investments in shared shared prosperity and new extensions of equal opportunity to an ever-widening and more inclusive circle -- African Americans, women, gays. In Obama's telling, the nation had veered off-course for eight or thirty years, but democratic self-correction was also part of the long historical pattern and would come with him.

That's a kind of "whig history" for America, and it resonated in the wake of a disastrous conservative presidency.  It was also a message essentially common to all Democrats and would have worked for almost any Democrat.

The real contest in 2008 was in the Democratic primary, and perhaps Obama beat Hillary by making this whig history sing, tapping a deep American mysticism previously tapped by Lincoln and -- somewhat more caustically -- by Martin Luther King. This second element was captured by Obama's "more perfect union" trope.  That is: America's founding documents expressed principles for the best ordering of human society, and while the nation has never lived up to these ideals, its democratic engine draws it ever closer -- ever more perfect, never perfected. Those ever-widening circles of inclusive opportunity are bending the arc of history toward justice. Martin Luther's famous "check" of equal opportunity, returned for insufficient funds, is being paid on a very long mortgage schedule.

Love vs. reason, or Martin Luther King vs. Steven Pinker

[reposted, in honor of Martin Luther King Day]

To read the shorter Steven Pinker -- one of the many compressed versions of the ideas developed over 800 pages in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined that he has published in newspapers and magazines or offered in interviews -- you might think that the driving force behind the dramatic reduction in violence over the course of human history was an expansion of empathy, the ability to enter into the feelings and sufferings of other. And so it is, to a degree. Pinker attributes the growth of empathy in large part to the development of commerce, which requires interaction, and printing, which helped expand the circle of literacy and, ultimately, the range of human experience that the literate absorb.

But fairly late in his argument, Pinker subordinates empathy to reason as a driver of the "rights revolution" -- the growing expansion of categories of people (and to a degree, now, animals) whom it becomes taboo to subject to violence of various kinds, including second class citizenship. It's reason that expands the circle:

What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights--a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated...abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome  the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need (Location 13,110). 

"Empathy, like love..." But empathy is not love, not as theologians and moral philosophers -- for example, Martin Luther King -- have defined the latter. Love is bigger than empathy. In King's formulation, it encompasses something like the reason that Pinker places higher on the (social) evolutionary scale.

Obama's national narrative is a bit less triumphal these days

It's hard to wax lyrical about Obama waxing lyrical when he seems on the point of launching an attack on another country with no clear end and to advance no clear U.S. interest. 

But I did think that his speech at the Lincoln Memorial on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington was a good one, better than the Twitter chatter on my feed would lead you to believe. It was familiar: the always perfecting/never perfected frame, offsetting progress made with challenges yet unmet -- but this time with an edge, an emphasis on the lack of economic progress, for the middle class generally and African Americans specifically, over the last fifty years.

I was moved by his account of the ordinary people who drove major social change, though I've heard it before. And I found his account of the political forces militating against opportunity and shared prosperity satisfyingly meaty:

Reason vs. love, or Steven Pinker vs. Martin Luther King

To read the shorter Steven Pinker -- one of the many compressed versions of the ideas developed over 800 pages in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined that he has published in newspapers and magazines or offered in interviews -- you might think that the driving force behind the dramatic reduction in violence over the course of human history was an expansion of empathy, the ability to enter into the feelings and sufferings of other. And so it is, to a degree. Pinker attributes the growth of empathy in large part to the development of commerce, which requires interaction, and printing, which helped expand the circle of literacy and, ultimately, the range of human experience that the literate absorb.

But fairly late in his argument, Pinker subordinates empathy to reason as a driver of the "rights revolution" -- the growing expansion of categories of people (and to a degree, now, animals) whom it becomes taboo to subject to violence of various kinds, including second class citizenship. It's reason that expands the circle:

What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights--a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated...abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome  the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need (Location 13,110). 

"Empathy, like love..." But empathy is not love, not as theologians and moral philosophers -- for example, Martin Luther King -- have defined the latter. Love is bigger than empathy. In King's formulation, it encompasses something like the reason that Pinker places higher on the (social) evolutionary scale.

Some comparisons are obvious...

of course, of course. But still, this echo gave me a bit of a chill.  One passage in my rebuttal of Drew Westen's attack on Obama bounced around the web quite a bit, e.g., in the LA Times online:

Sprung, blogging at Xpostfactoid, compared Obama's challengers on the left to Martin Luther King Jr.'s critics during the civil rights era. "Let's not forget that many African Americans at times regarded King as an appeasing sellout, much as many progressives now see Obama as one," Sprung wrote. "The Panthers and the Nation of Islam were more satisfying to many. King called out his adversaries, but he never shrank from engaging with them. Neither has Obama — though the results have not always been what his base could have wished."

Obama, of course, quotes King all the time, and is not shy about identifying with him or Lincoln (and damn the obvious "Mr Obama, you're no..." rejoinders).  As in Iowa yesterday:

"I think that we forget when [Martin Luther King Jr.] was alive there was nobody who was more vilified, nobody who was more controversial, nobody who was more despairing at times. There was a decade that followed the great successes of Birmingham and Selma in which he was just struggling, fighting the good fight, and scorned, and many folks angry.  But what he understood, what kept him going, was that the arc of moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.  But it doesn’t bend on its own.  It bends because all of us are putting our hand on the arc and we are bending it in that direction.  And it takes time.  And it's hard work.  And there are frustrations."

Obama's Inaugural: dark skies, stark challenges

Obama's tone in his acceptance speech on Nov. 4 was somber. Today, it was almost apocalyptic -- the dangers evoked tonally overshadowing strong assertions of "yes we can" confidence. Early on, after the by-now-familiar litany of formidable challenges, he raised a stark specter:

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

That's painting it a bit dark, isn't it? Obama's long been saying that the American dream feels like it's slipping away, but I would have thought 'decline' a rather Carteresqe third rail.

Of course there was Obama's signature counterpoint of confidence:

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

But at the end, again, Obama framed "our common dangers" in the starkest terms:

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

"Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."

America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

Whoa. We are facing a deeply alarming economic seize-up. But we're not exactly bleeding in the snow. Does Obama know something we don't?

In the 'yes we can' vein, there was perhaps an echo of Martin Luther King in a compressed version of Obama's familiar historical argument: that we shall overcome because we have overcome in the past, that 'courage is having been there before':

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

The perfect tense here -- "we have tasted the bitter swill...and emerged stronger" -- holds the mirror up to King looking forward from the Lincoln Memorial in 1963:

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

Obama always presents our quest for a more perfect union as being in mid-course: much injustice still to overcome, much already overcome. Here, he affirms that we have got at least some of that bitter swill digested -- leaving him free to extend King's dream of a nation free from prejudice and tribalism from the U.S. to the world.

There was also a deep confidence underlying Obama's unequivocal rejection of the Bush Administration's malign perversions of executive authority - torture, suspension of habeas, kangaroo courts -- coupled with a message to the entire world that as we reject these abuses we will reassert our leadership:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Finally, to match his raising of the threat level, Obama raised his call "change our politics" to the level of Biblical injunction:

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

We elected an adult. In the primary, Obama made the Clintons look small; in the general election, he made McCain look small. Now, he's calling on all to follow his example -- of magnanimity to opponents, focus on substantive issues, and disinterested pursuit of policies likely to work. And he's warning us: the consequences will be dire if we don't.

From Emancipation Proclamation to Achievement Gap

Reading Doris Kearns' Goodwin's Team of Rivals, I was struck by a stray moment of insight from a slaveholding unionist during the deliberations of Lincoln's cabinet over the likely fallout from the Emancipation Proclamation. Members recognized fully that they were likely unleashing, in Gideon Welles' words, "a revolution of the social, civil and industrial habits and condition of society in the slave states." Most did not want integration and equality; Lincoln himself still clung to the dream of colonizing freed slaves in another country.

Attorney General Edward Bates, a Missouri slaveholder, favored forced resettlement; he believed that "amalgamation" would bring "degradation and demoralization of the white race." There was an absurdist loop in his thinking: he thought that whites would be degraded by contact with blacks because they had degraded blacks. But he recognized the the full force of his society's assault on their slaves' humanity. There's a rather extraordinary sociological insight (or was it common amongst slaveholders?) at the core of his Catch-22:

Although he conceded that 'among our colored people who have been long free, there are many who are intelligent and well advanced in arts and knowledge,' he could not imagine former slaves, 'fresh from the plantations of the South, where they have been long degraded by the total abolition of the family relation, shrouded in artificial darkness, and studiously kept in ignorance,' living on an equal footing with whites (p. 466; my emphasis).

Exacerbated by 100 further years of brutal discrimination, that "total abolition of the family relation" still takes its toll. What Stanton and his ilk did not foresee was the remarkable extent to which African Americans would embrace core American ideals and repeatedly hold the country to its founding promises (Lincoln, a fact-driven leader if there ever was one, did later get some inkling through his encounters with Fredrick Douglas and other black leaders). To revel for a moment in the obvious, here's the thread of that black buy-in/black indictment from Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King and Barack Obama:

Frederick Douglass, Rochester New York, July 4, 1852:

Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?....

I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?

Martin Luther King, Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963:

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now.

Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18, 2008:

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

Lincoln, as Garry Wills shows in Lincoln at Gettysburg, was a leader in casting the Declaration of Independence's "We hold these truths..." credo as a blueprint for a work in progress, an ideal always to be aspired to and progressively fulfilled. He didn't invent this conception --indeed, it's there in Douglass' 1852 speech above -- but he framed it memorably, and repeatedly, and committed the nation to it in blood, and so recast the country's self-conception. And so the threads still run parallel: black leaders continue to hold us to that ideal, and black families struggle with the brutal sabotage of it acknowledged by Stanton.

Audacity of Obama: Embracing Wright and Grandma

Obama's speech on race and Wright will go down in history, beside Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech, as a defining moment in America's conception of itself. Its organizing trope is the oxymoron in the preamble of the Constitution -- the aim to create a "more perfect" union. Obama's overarching vision is of an America that's a work in progress. He embraces the commitment to "perfecting" while portraying the instruments -- Wright, his own grandmother-- as flawed but but fundamentally to be embraced as instruments of progress.

With regard to Wright, he repudiated the words but not the man. He set Wright's anger in full historical and cultural context and explained precisely how his own thought differs:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made, as if this country– a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Talk about audacity -- in affirming what he gained from Wright, even as he repudiated his bitter and paranoid view of America, he paired Wright's role in his development and affections with those of his own grandmother. Without self-aggrandizement, he effectively identified himself as the locus of the unity he wants the nation to strive for:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

That is absolut Obama. He demonstrates the strength of his commitment through criticism. He pairs Wright and has grandmother as parts of his, and our, identity to be embraced.

The speech was anything but narrowly personal; it addressed the predicaments and attitudes of the entire nation. It included compressed and accurate capsule portraits of the disabling force of racism on blacks and the anger against race-based privilege in whites being whipsawed by the eroding power of workers in the U.S. Obama acknowledged the legitimacy of anger on both sides and challenged both to move beyond. He identified forces -- larger than individuals but products of human agency too -- that he invited all of us to recognize as the true adversaries:

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

Obama's signature mental and rhetorical move is to double back. One of his favorite grammatical structures is "just as." He consistently recognizes at least a core of legitimacy in points of view he seeks to rebut or transcend. And so, while 'black anger' and 'white resentment' are presented as forces to transcend, there's this acknowledgment:

And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama issues a challenge to all who would make their religious belief a basis of teaching to make it universal - to appeal to those outside the faith not on the basis of the authority of the scriptures but on the evident rightness of the values you take away. So, here, his call for national unity boils down to the simplest scriptural precepts, which Obama is at pains to convince us are universal:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

Obama has put the ball in our court. No one in his right mind could listen to this speech and come away believing that Obama secretly harbors racial resentments or anti-American sentiments. He has delved into his own identity, and our national identity, and called on us to acknowledge that we are all wounded, we are all flawed, and all part of an unending project to form 'a more perfect union.'

Related posts:
Audacity of Respect: What Obama Owes to Reagan II
Obama's Metapolitics
Obama gets down to tax brass
Obama brings it back to earth in Virginia
Feb. 5: Hillary's Speech was Better than Obama's
Truth and Transformation
Obama Praises Clinton, and Buries Him
Obama: Man, those Clinton Kids are Something