Some of these comments about Michele Obama are probably correct. The black community is strongly maternalistic, with typically strong maternal figures, whereas its men tend to be weaker personalities. The stereotype of young black men on street corners dealing drugs while black women mind the kids alone is sadly quite apt. And to a great extent, it is well-intentioned liberal welfare programs such as AFDC that caused this black community behavior. Some "benign neglect", to use Daniel Patrick Moynihan's phrase, would have produced more felicitous results for the black community in this country.
In any case, Glenn Loury is so correct that Barack Obama really blew a golden opportunity to have offered the country major progress on race. Instead, he caved to black "leaders" such as Sharpton and Jackson in a quest for black votes. What a waste, what a shame.
Obama was nothing more than a high tech, well coreographed minstrel show more suited to the Apollo theater than to any serious pretense of effective governance.
Completely out of line comment. This is the kind of rhetoric that makes it difficult for blacks to interact in spaces like this. It appears this behavior persists even on the public spaces of "the black guys on bloggingheads.tv".
I think Glenn sets the bar too high here for Obama. Though he was uniquely positioned to do so, to expect Obama (or anyone) to have admonished black people on a national stage as the riots are happening is not a politically smart position to take for Obama. The optics of Obama taking a "pull your socks up" stance during the riots would have been counter productive. The only people that would have seen that as a positive are the right leaning never-Obama voters. For better or worse (mostly worse) Obama has a responsibility to the party's agenda. That said, he should have surrounded himself with more conservative black voices and distanced himself from people like Coates and Sharpton. He could have supported law and order in back channels to quell things in Baltimore.
And of course Michelle Obama's children are safe. Is she supposed to say we are too elite to be black and at risk anymore but I can imagine what that would be like? We understand that these kids are insulated.
Too many people expected Obama to be some kind of Messiah especially for black people. To quote Glenn, "Racism is not the first or the second or the third issue confronting us." It would not be politically intelligent for Obama to have said so. As a former president, he should be saying so now.
That’s ridiculous. A century ago was the 1920s. Jim Crow was in full effect. 80% of Black Americans lived below the poverty line. Lynchings were not unusual.
He may not have then the “race healer” Prez some hoped for, but that kind of hyperbole is unproductive and undermines the credibility of anyone who asserts that.
So Obama was beholden to his party....? Sounds like a great party.
He gave a speech in his run up to President I believe or shortly after winning. In this speech he said that on the point of racism we were 90% there, he wanted to help close the gap more. Well he lied or he he's not as smart as people think.
As pointed out by Glen, he made statements that no President ever has made. Until Obama, when has a President waded into a local police matter (Trayvon). He instead chose to inject himself into that situation and racialize it.
Obama's own Justice Department with Holder in charge found that the officer acted within bounds (Brown) yet peeps from them about it.
To this day Obamas speak this garbage that only serves to separate and they do not have an election in thier future.
He/She made a choice and it was one based on integrity and truth snd not because he was beholden to his party.
No. Both parties suck and every President in recent memory has acted in accordance with the party's agenda.
Lied in his speech? That's the bar? "Read my lips. No new taxes" "We have a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare" "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction"
So he lied because he DOESN'T want to close the gap more? Hard to prove what he wanted, but OK.
Waded into a local police matter. You got me there. There were "very fine people on both sides"
The garbage the Obamas and their party spew is divisive to be sure. The Trump administration really brought us all together though.
Integrity and truth has been lacking in politics, even more so the last 4 years. This isn't just an Obama flaw, it's political par for the course.
I agree that both parties suck. My point is that Obama was uniquely qualified to smash the "racism" problem. Instead he and his wife threw gas on the fire.
Agreed. Only he could have moved the needle substancially on race, but it turns out he only wanted to be a regular party guy. Just because he isn't Jesus doesn't mean he's Satan. No angels to be found on either side of the aisle.
I think there is also an argument to be made that Obama actually believed he was doing the "right" thing. It wasn't about choosing to be a regular party guy instead of Jesus. Rather, it is common to respond to tragic circumstances by emotionally aligning yourself with the victim. It can come from a genuinely empathetic place, of trying to bring attention to someone's suffering. I think from Obama's vantage point, he is uniquely positioned to draw attention to the message of black suffering. And that is what he did. However, whenever you take the position of emotional alignment, there is the very real unintended consequence of then flattening and reifying that suffering, because it reinforces a traumatic worldview in which there is little goodness. In Obama's case, it also undid the massive corrective symbolism of his presidency. Instead of the Obama presidency being evidence of how much our nation has overcome, it became used as cynical evidence for how our nation can never overcome; throwing away any remaining shreds of national unity. And in the absence of national unity, we're stuck in the cult of the self-serving, just pick your flavor of left or right.
It's important to remember that although revered today, MLK had a 75% disapproval rating during his day. He was respected more than Malcolm X but he was not popular outside of the most liberal of whites. Any attempt to ascend to MLK status would have resulted in a Romney presidency in my opinion. I'm not sure how to ascend to the Presidency without personal ambition. Obama was deeply entrenched into the party's agenda once he accepted all the money and support as he eclipsed Hillary in the polls. If he wasn't willing to play ball they would have hamstringed him just like Bernie. It does feel good that more integrity and trustworthiness is expected of the first black president. The soft bigotry of HIGH expectations has a nice ring to it.
Having only read the transcript: Glenn, yes, as always your insights are incomparable! There is this saying in intervention-based treatment for interpersonal trauma and self-harm, which is, "Would you rather be right, or would you rather be effective?" This question gets at the duality between validating narrative pain (regardless of the origin of that pain) versus reclaiming agency. Interestingly, a lot of people going to therapy for a history of interpersonal trauma, unwittingly end up with a therapist who only knows how to validate suffering and is unable to challenge the patient to also overcome that suffering. Further, challenging a victimized patient to overcome suffering--in a way that is hopeful, supportive, and skill-based--is one of the most difficult things a therapist can do, because it requires paradoxical thinking, tough love, therapist-accountability, active skill-building, and navigating the patient's anger with you for challenging said pain, cognitive distortions, coping mechanisms, and secondary gain. It is an excruciating effort to walk that tightrope, one wrong step and you could fall into dismissive victim-blaming. It’s much more reassuring to charge $180/hr and sit there being a buddy and nodding your head, tsk-tsking, telling the patient how terribly they’ve been treated, and generally go along with their trauma-skewed and even paranoid vision of the world. Traumatic narratives, no matter how devastating and originating in truth, have a way of becoming a homeostatic strange-loop in which the victim self-sabotages in order to become a living memorial to the tragic memory. The patient fears overcoming their suffering, as though any goodness in life might prove that the terrible thing never happened. And many therapists get pulled into this homeostasis and become complicit in reinforcing this strange-loop. An effective trauma therapist will validate the painful history, but nevertheless deftly challenge the patient to get out of that strange-loop and find goodness. In so many ways, with the notion of the Audacity of Hope, Obama could have been the great tough love therapist our country needed to move toward effective self-agency in a complex plural society with a traumatic history, because of his brilliance and compassion alongside the symbolic significance of his own personal history. He could have validated the emotions and our multidimensional tragic history without validating self-destructive behaviors nor eschewing personal responsibility. And the real sadness, which you speak to Glenn, is that this tough love could have helped so many Americans regardless of demographics. There are traumatic histories and self-destructive behaviors among Americans of all identities and politics. I believe that when Obama embraced strange-loop validation instead of tough love, he gave the supremest of blessings to politicized narrative control over reality. I think, similar to many therapists, it came from a well-intentioned place of not wanting to walk that tightrope. Unfortunately, this fully opened the window for anti-agentic ideology en masse, with opposing sides having their own cherry-picked reality. By Obama himself rejecting the goodness and hopefulness of the world inherent in the corrective symbolism of his presidency, that took the wind out of the sails. A missed opportunity to say the least. On all sides, in all institutions, we have a crisis of self-aggrandizement being conflated with self-agency. Trumpism and Wokeism are equal partners in that drama.
Tried listening to this but Dave Rubin is just awful and disingenuous. There was a time when I just disagreed with him but over the last few years his show has become nothing but red meat.
I just had a good and close friend call me a mean spirited jerk who becoming a radicalized conservative for listening to this show. This friend moved to Scotland because the United States is so terrible, and the argument was me trying to strike up a conversation about Thomas Sowell, the Roman invasion of Britain, and how that led to the development of English as a written language. This friend googled Thomas Sowell and saw in related searches Ben Shapiro, and just assumed he was evil. Wasn’t even interested in the context of the video, or what I was trying to talk about. I’m not perfect, and I can be caddy. This one was hard to take. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
That is the biggest problem to me. People and it seems to be predominantly left have been brainwashed so much that they are not even willing to have a conversation.
Sowell is definitely not left, but he used to be. Through his life experiences and education he changed. He was willing to have conversations and still is, but those conversations changed his mind.
I think that is what many Democrats fear honestly. They have been conditioned to believe that Republicans are the parry of racists, so the idea of agreeing with anything they say means they are a racist.
This is of course completely false, but psychological conditioning, becuase that's what it is, takes time to undo. It's basically a large cult that people need to be freed from.
I have been a lot happier since I got out of it, I can tell you that. I don’t think this will last forever. I’m almost 30 and I was saying all of this woke stuff five years ago. It will take time, and difficult conversations like the one I had with my friend. I just hope it doesn’t ruin the friendship, but I also feel secure enough to know who my real friends are. They don’t judge me for admiring Thomas Sowell.
Sorry - this time I had to turn it off half way through. I always enjoy what Glenn has to say but Dave Rubin has an agenda and it's "let's bash liberals". I guess for people who enjoy this type of thing it was rewarding.
Michelle Obama is the 'anger, hate & defeat' that propelled her husband's inaction. Yes, Michelle is an angry woman and she repeatedly confirms this. "Pick up your dirty socks & underwear Barack". Michelle wears the pants in the house.
There is is no essential problem with anger or hatred. It is how we direct and process our anger and hatred that can be bad. And it is perfectly okay for women to wear pants.
Some of these comments about Michele Obama are probably correct. The black community is strongly maternalistic, with typically strong maternal figures, whereas its men tend to be weaker personalities. The stereotype of young black men on street corners dealing drugs while black women mind the kids alone is sadly quite apt. And to a great extent, it is well-intentioned liberal welfare programs such as AFDC that caused this black community behavior. Some "benign neglect", to use Daniel Patrick Moynihan's phrase, would have produced more felicitous results for the black community in this country.
In any case, Glenn Loury is so correct that Barack Obama really blew a golden opportunity to have offered the country major progress on race. Instead, he caved to black "leaders" such as Sharpton and Jackson in a quest for black votes. What a waste, what a shame.
Obama was nothing more than a high tech, well coreographed minstrel show more suited to the Apollo theater than to any serious pretense of effective governance.
Completely out of line comment. This is the kind of rhetoric that makes it difficult for blacks to interact in spaces like this. It appears this behavior persists even on the public spaces of "the black guys on bloggingheads.tv".
I think Glenn sets the bar too high here for Obama. Though he was uniquely positioned to do so, to expect Obama (or anyone) to have admonished black people on a national stage as the riots are happening is not a politically smart position to take for Obama. The optics of Obama taking a "pull your socks up" stance during the riots would have been counter productive. The only people that would have seen that as a positive are the right leaning never-Obama voters. For better or worse (mostly worse) Obama has a responsibility to the party's agenda. That said, he should have surrounded himself with more conservative black voices and distanced himself from people like Coates and Sharpton. He could have supported law and order in back channels to quell things in Baltimore.
And of course Michelle Obama's children are safe. Is she supposed to say we are too elite to be black and at risk anymore but I can imagine what that would be like? We understand that these kids are insulated.
Too many people expected Obama to be some kind of Messiah especially for black people. To quote Glenn, "Racism is not the first or the second or the third issue confronting us." It would not be politically intelligent for Obama to have said so. As a former president, he should be saying so now.
You're totally wrong on that. Obama set race relations back a hundred years or more.
That’s ridiculous. A century ago was the 1920s. Jim Crow was in full effect. 80% of Black Americans lived below the poverty line. Lynchings were not unusual.
He may not have then the “race healer” Prez some hoped for, but that kind of hyperbole is unproductive and undermines the credibility of anyone who asserts that.
So Obama was beholden to his party....? Sounds like a great party.
He gave a speech in his run up to President I believe or shortly after winning. In this speech he said that on the point of racism we were 90% there, he wanted to help close the gap more. Well he lied or he he's not as smart as people think.
As pointed out by Glen, he made statements that no President ever has made. Until Obama, when has a President waded into a local police matter (Trayvon). He instead chose to inject himself into that situation and racialize it.
Obama's own Justice Department with Holder in charge found that the officer acted within bounds (Brown) yet peeps from them about it.
To this day Obamas speak this garbage that only serves to separate and they do not have an election in thier future.
He/She made a choice and it was one based on integrity and truth snd not because he was beholden to his party.
No. Both parties suck and every President in recent memory has acted in accordance with the party's agenda.
Lied in his speech? That's the bar? "Read my lips. No new taxes" "We have a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare" "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction"
So he lied because he DOESN'T want to close the gap more? Hard to prove what he wanted, but OK.
Waded into a local police matter. You got me there. There were "very fine people on both sides"
The garbage the Obamas and their party spew is divisive to be sure. The Trump administration really brought us all together though.
Integrity and truth has been lacking in politics, even more so the last 4 years. This isn't just an Obama flaw, it's political par for the course.
I agree that both parties suck. My point is that Obama was uniquely qualified to smash the "racism" problem. Instead he and his wife threw gas on the fire.
Today his party fans that flame.
Agreed. Only he could have moved the needle substancially on race, but it turns out he only wanted to be a regular party guy. Just because he isn't Jesus doesn't mean he's Satan. No angels to be found on either side of the aisle.
I think there is also an argument to be made that Obama actually believed he was doing the "right" thing. It wasn't about choosing to be a regular party guy instead of Jesus. Rather, it is common to respond to tragic circumstances by emotionally aligning yourself with the victim. It can come from a genuinely empathetic place, of trying to bring attention to someone's suffering. I think from Obama's vantage point, he is uniquely positioned to draw attention to the message of black suffering. And that is what he did. However, whenever you take the position of emotional alignment, there is the very real unintended consequence of then flattening and reifying that suffering, because it reinforces a traumatic worldview in which there is little goodness. In Obama's case, it also undid the massive corrective symbolism of his presidency. Instead of the Obama presidency being evidence of how much our nation has overcome, it became used as cynical evidence for how our nation can never overcome; throwing away any remaining shreds of national unity. And in the absence of national unity, we're stuck in the cult of the self-serving, just pick your flavor of left or right.
It's important to remember that although revered today, MLK had a 75% disapproval rating during his day. He was respected more than Malcolm X but he was not popular outside of the most liberal of whites. Any attempt to ascend to MLK status would have resulted in a Romney presidency in my opinion. I'm not sure how to ascend to the Presidency without personal ambition. Obama was deeply entrenched into the party's agenda once he accepted all the money and support as he eclipsed Hillary in the polls. If he wasn't willing to play ball they would have hamstringed him just like Bernie. It does feel good that more integrity and trustworthiness is expected of the first black president. The soft bigotry of HIGH expectations has a nice ring to it.
Having only read the transcript: Glenn, yes, as always your insights are incomparable! There is this saying in intervention-based treatment for interpersonal trauma and self-harm, which is, "Would you rather be right, or would you rather be effective?" This question gets at the duality between validating narrative pain (regardless of the origin of that pain) versus reclaiming agency. Interestingly, a lot of people going to therapy for a history of interpersonal trauma, unwittingly end up with a therapist who only knows how to validate suffering and is unable to challenge the patient to also overcome that suffering. Further, challenging a victimized patient to overcome suffering--in a way that is hopeful, supportive, and skill-based--is one of the most difficult things a therapist can do, because it requires paradoxical thinking, tough love, therapist-accountability, active skill-building, and navigating the patient's anger with you for challenging said pain, cognitive distortions, coping mechanisms, and secondary gain. It is an excruciating effort to walk that tightrope, one wrong step and you could fall into dismissive victim-blaming. It’s much more reassuring to charge $180/hr and sit there being a buddy and nodding your head, tsk-tsking, telling the patient how terribly they’ve been treated, and generally go along with their trauma-skewed and even paranoid vision of the world. Traumatic narratives, no matter how devastating and originating in truth, have a way of becoming a homeostatic strange-loop in which the victim self-sabotages in order to become a living memorial to the tragic memory. The patient fears overcoming their suffering, as though any goodness in life might prove that the terrible thing never happened. And many therapists get pulled into this homeostasis and become complicit in reinforcing this strange-loop. An effective trauma therapist will validate the painful history, but nevertheless deftly challenge the patient to get out of that strange-loop and find goodness. In so many ways, with the notion of the Audacity of Hope, Obama could have been the great tough love therapist our country needed to move toward effective self-agency in a complex plural society with a traumatic history, because of his brilliance and compassion alongside the symbolic significance of his own personal history. He could have validated the emotions and our multidimensional tragic history without validating self-destructive behaviors nor eschewing personal responsibility. And the real sadness, which you speak to Glenn, is that this tough love could have helped so many Americans regardless of demographics. There are traumatic histories and self-destructive behaviors among Americans of all identities and politics. I believe that when Obama embraced strange-loop validation instead of tough love, he gave the supremest of blessings to politicized narrative control over reality. I think, similar to many therapists, it came from a well-intentioned place of not wanting to walk that tightrope. Unfortunately, this fully opened the window for anti-agentic ideology en masse, with opposing sides having their own cherry-picked reality. By Obama himself rejecting the goodness and hopefulness of the world inherent in the corrective symbolism of his presidency, that took the wind out of the sails. A missed opportunity to say the least. On all sides, in all institutions, we have a crisis of self-aggrandizement being conflated with self-agency. Trumpism and Wokeism are equal partners in that drama.
So profound. So brilliantly insightful. Thank you for these insights, Suoj. You've changed the way I look at the world!
Word.
Tried listening to this but Dave Rubin is just awful and disingenuous. There was a time when I just disagreed with him but over the last few years his show has become nothing but red meat.
I just had a good and close friend call me a mean spirited jerk who becoming a radicalized conservative for listening to this show. This friend moved to Scotland because the United States is so terrible, and the argument was me trying to strike up a conversation about Thomas Sowell, the Roman invasion of Britain, and how that led to the development of English as a written language. This friend googled Thomas Sowell and saw in related searches Ben Shapiro, and just assumed he was evil. Wasn’t even interested in the context of the video, or what I was trying to talk about. I’m not perfect, and I can be caddy. This one was hard to take. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
That is the biggest problem to me. People and it seems to be predominantly left have been brainwashed so much that they are not even willing to have a conversation.
Sowell is definitely not left, but he used to be. Through his life experiences and education he changed. He was willing to have conversations and still is, but those conversations changed his mind.
I think that is what many Democrats fear honestly. They have been conditioned to believe that Republicans are the parry of racists, so the idea of agreeing with anything they say means they are a racist.
This is of course completely false, but psychological conditioning, becuase that's what it is, takes time to undo. It's basically a large cult that people need to be freed from.
I have been a lot happier since I got out of it, I can tell you that. I don’t think this will last forever. I’m almost 30 and I was saying all of this woke stuff five years ago. It will take time, and difficult conversations like the one I had with my friend. I just hope it doesn’t ruin the friendship, but I also feel secure enough to know who my real friends are. They don’t judge me for admiring Thomas Sowell.
Sorry - this time I had to turn it off half way through. I always enjoy what Glenn has to say but Dave Rubin has an agenda and it's "let's bash liberals". I guess for people who enjoy this type of thing it was rewarding.
Dave said almost nothing, at least in the transcript here. Sounds like the issue is at least partly yours.
Do you identity as a "liberal"?
I want a Nobel Prize too Glenn. If it weren't for racism, those Swedes would have created a Nobel Prize in Philosophy just for me.
Thank you.
Michelle Obama is the 'anger, hate & defeat' that propelled her husband's inaction. Yes, Michelle is an angry woman and she repeatedly confirms this. "Pick up your dirty socks & underwear Barack". Michelle wears the pants in the house.
There is is no essential problem with anger or hatred. It is how we direct and process our anger and hatred that can be bad. And it is perfectly okay for women to wear pants.
The Econometric Society, as well as Harvard, Brown and Boston universities apparently disagree with your assessment