After America полностью

But he doesn’t, not really: it’s hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He is, as John Bolton says, post-American.²¹ In his own book on the president, Dinesh D’Souza argues that Obama is defined by his father’s anti-colonialism.²² Speaking as an old-school imperialist, I find him exactly the opposite: in his attitude to America, Obama comes across as a snooty viceregal grandee passing through some tedious colonial outpost. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job—that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along. When he lectures America on the Ground Zero mosque or immigration, he does not speak to his people as one of them.

When he addresses the monde, he speaks as a citoyen du for whom the United States has no greater or lesser purchase on him than Papua or Peru.

There is an absence of feeling for America—as in his offhand remark to Bob Woodward that the United States can “absorb” another 9/11.²³ During the long Northern Irish “Troubles,” cynical British officials used to talk off-the-record about holding casualties down to “an acceptable level of violence,” but it’s eerie to hear the head of state take the same view—and about a far higher number of fatalities.²⁴ Ask the 3,000 families who had a huge gaping hole blown in their lives whether another 9/11 is something you want to “absorb” rather than prevent.

But why be surprised at the thin line between Obama’s cool and his coldness? Jeremiah Wright (his race-baiting pastor), Van Jones (his Communist “green jobs” czar), William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (his hippie-terrorist patrons) are not exactly stirred by love of country, either.

Nor, to be honest, are America’s desiccated media—although they know enough to understand that you have to genuflect in that direction once in a while: Would it kill you to wear the stupid flag pin? The rubes’ll lap it up.

Hence, the commentariat’s subsequent panic at Obama’s indifference even to faking feeling.

With hindsight, this is what drove both the birthers and the countering cries of racism. Detractors and supporters alike were trying to explain something that was at first vaguely palpable and then became embarrass-ingly obvious: it’s not so much that he’s foreign to America, but that America is foreign to him. Outside the cloisters of Hyde Park and a few other enclaves, he doesn’t seem to get America. Not because he was born in Kenya or wherever, but because he’s the first president to be marinated his entire life in a post-modern, post-American cultural relativism. What’s worrying about Obama is not that he’s weird but that he’s so typical of much of the Eloi; in that sense, his post-Americanness is all too American.

In both Chicago’s Ward Four, where the Obamas lived, and Ward Five, where they worked, 95 percent of electors voted Democrat in 2004.²⁵ You would be hard put to find another constituency so committed to celebrating lack of diversity. Like most professional multiculturalists, Obama has passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world. The aforementioned Michael Ignatieff, who actually has viewed the world, gets close to the psychology in his response to criticisms of him for spending so much time abroad. Deploring such “provincialism,” he replied: “They say it makes me less of a Canadian. It makes me more of a Canadian.”²⁶

Well, yes, you can see what he’s getting at. Today, to be an educated citizen of a mature western democracy—Canada or Germany, England or Sweden—is not to feel Canadian or German, English or Swedish, heaven forbid, but rather to regard oneself as a citoyen du monde, like Obama in Berlin. Obviously, if being “more Canadian” requires one actually to be a Harvard professor or a BBC TV host or an essayist for The Guardian, then very few actual Canadians would pass the test. They would be condemned to be eternally “less Canadian.” What Ignatieff really means is that in a post-nationalist west, the definition of “Canadian” (and Dutch and Belgian and Irish) is how multicultural and globalized you feel. The UN, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Bono: these are the colors a progressive worldly westerner nails to his mast. You don’t need to go anywhere, or do anything: you just have to pick up the general groove, which you can do very easily at almost any college campus.