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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.