November 3rd, 2008

The statement Tristan made in class last Wednesday, that for the first time in his life he felt he could honestly tell his kids that they can be anything they want to be and not feel like it is a lie, summarized for me what this election has been all about. In trying to make sense of what happened last Tuesday, I looked to the radical humanist perspective presented in the readings. The radical humanist perspective focuses on using immanent critique to bring awareness to contradictions between ideals and practice and in this country for most of its history there has been a sharp contrast between what the constitutiion says and what has been true for millions of African Americans. Barack Obama's election to the highest office in the land signals a change in this reality. Now, there is no ceiling on what an African American can achieve in this country. It also opens the way for the first woman president, the first Hispanic-American president, and so on.

My only concern with this change in the politics of this country is that there are other contradictions that still remain and that may now be swept under the surface until the next election. For example, in the celebration of Obama's win a lot of people ignored the fact that in California a vote took place to take away the rights of gay couples who have had the right to marry for some time. The idea of one group achieving greater rights while another has their rights taken away points to the continuing contradictions in our society. This is more surprising in light of a report I recently heard on NPR that stated that one of the groups with the strongest support for proposition 8 in California were African Americans. It saddens me that despite all of the good things that happened this week, Americans are still looking at rights as something that can be applied on a group by group basis rather than as an abstract concept that just exists as part of natural law.

In terms of the challenges that will be faced by the president-elect, one important one will be how to get a bureaucracy that is used to working as a machine bureaucracy to accept that a more adhocratic approach may be needed to solve the current economic crisis. A reason for the need to adopt a more adhocratoc approach is that currently there is a decoupling (to use the language introduced in the readings) between economic and political power. While political power is national in scope and involves the competition of various groups for access to limited resources in the form of government funds, economic power is global in scope and complex in its organization as the result of the influence of multinational corporations.