Recently, I was talking with Kay Dilday – a contributing editor of openUSA – about the rise of Barack Obama. She said she still could not believe that he would make it. I said I thought he could and in part because he was an expression of the normalisation of America in the aftermath of its shaping control over globalisation. Now, it was becoming a country – still a very considerable one of course – like others. It was joining the world. Kay objected that on the contrary, no other country could make someone like Obama its leader. Implicitly, she was suggesting that were he to make it, it would be evidence of American exceptionalism.
I’m not holding Kay to her argument. I’m reproducing it because I guess lots of people think on these lines and it made me question why I think differently.
Of course, it is true that no other white country would make a black man its leader at the moment. But what other white democracies countries have had such significant numbers of blacks as part of their historic population? Isn’t the exception that the US had slavery and then Jim Crow? When its Nobel Laureate for literature and finest living writer is a black woman (Toni Morrison), its Secretary of State is black (Condoleezza Rice), and its previous Secretary of State (Colin Powell) was not only black, he had also been a hugely admired head of the armed forces – then what are we seeing??
I’m not trying to diminish the importance of an Obama presidency, or even his selection as the Democratic candidate. I’m trying to look at whether it means the US is out on a limb or getting closer to the trunk of humanity.
Certainly, America is uniquely open to talent while also having a strong class and social system – and the world is becoming more like America in this respect (and where it isn’t, it needs to). But other democracies have opened their leadership to talent. Let's leave the example of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom aside and look at the Americas. Isn’t the rise of Obama part of the same wave of changes that brought Lula to the presidency of Brazil, Evo Morales in Boliva, and Michelle Bachalet in Chile?
Perhaps Lula is the closest comparison. Though not black, his rise to power from very humble roots scaled unprecedented heights in highly-stratified Brazil; a non-elite native, in other words, with Fernando Henrique Cardoso playing the role of Bill Clinton. This does not make Obama especially left-wing. But his election might make the United States more of like the rest of the world, rather than more unlike it.
