New Yorker Magazine: Obama makes the case for liberalism: radical change through practical measures.

[ehrnst]

Liberal-In-Chief: President Obama makes the case for liberalism: radical change through practical measures.

In the interview with Maron, the President, confronting frustrations with the fact that he wasn’t able to alter the world with the wave of a rhetorical wand, offered an alternative view of how big democratic societies work. They are, he said, like ocean liners: you turn the wheel slowly, and the big ship pivots. “Sometimes your job is just to make stuff work,” Obama said. “Sometimes the task of government is to make incremental improvements or try to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south so that, ten years from now, suddenly we’re in a very different place than we were. At the moment, people may feel like we need a fifty-degree turn; we don’t need a two-degree turn. And you say, ‘Well, if I turn fifty degrees, the whole ship turns’ ” over. Note that the President wasn’t saying that big ships aren’t worth turning, just that it takes time. Their very bigness is what makes them turn slowly, but their bigness is also what makes them worth turning.

Beneath this pragmatism lies a deeper understanding that humanity is various, that the changes we work for will never be universally accepted, and the test of our politics is extending sympathy to those who seem to stand in the way. Change “requires more than just speaking out,” the President said, at Howard.:

'It requires listening to those with whom you disagree, and being prepared to compromise. You know, when I was a state senator, I helped pass Illinois’s first racial-profiling law, and one of the first laws in the nation requiring the videotaping of confessions in capital cases. And we were successful because, early on, I engaged law enforcement. I didn’t say to them, “Oh, you guys are so racist, you know you need to do something.” I understood, as many of you do, that the overwhelming majority of police officers are good and honest and courageous. . . . The point is, you need allies in a democracy. That’s just the way it is. It can be frustrating and it can be slow. But history teaches us that the alternative to democracy is always worse.'

Obama’s liberalism is not therapeutic. You don’t listen to others to make them feel better. You listen because without their coöperation, or at least their tacit acceptance of the moral urgency of change, that long arc won’t bend and progress won’t happen. Your opponents have to understand that reform, even if it makes their fixations unsustainable, will not make their lives unlivable. Freedom didn’t happen because your opponents saw the light. It happened because they no longer found it necessary to live in the dark. Their hands may never move toward a candle, but their eyes adjust. Allowing for the adjustment and the time that it takes is part of the intelligence of politics.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/23/president-obama-speaks-his-mind

[underpants]

1. Marking for later read - New Yorker

Thanks