The hate-filled opinions of Pastor Wright are an expression of a new political ideology that is gaining influence
in the academy, media and politics: ‘post-leftism’ (a term coined by
Andy Markovits and Gabe Brahm writing in Democratiya). The post-leftist Noam Chomsky says ‘America is the greatest terrorist state’. Pastor Wright preaches that ‘America is the number one killer in the world.’
Post-leftist
Joe Faegin, a former president of the American Sociological
Association, calls America ‘a total racist society’ and believes ‘the
white-racist mind is the basic problem on campus and in society’.
Pastor Wright preaches against the ‘US of KKKA’ and claims that America
‘believes in white supremacy and black inferiority … more than we
believe in God.’
After 9/11 the post-leftists said the US ‘had it coming’. Wright agreed that ‘America’s chickens are coming home to roost.’
Post-leftism
has its roots in the interwar decades of the last century when the old
left’s belief in a future socialist society first began to drain away.
It grew, as the late Lionel Trilling put it, in the form of an
‘adversary culture’ – a comprehensive opposition to ‘bourgeois’ society
ungrounded in a positive alternative. The post-left has radicalised
this inchoate hostility until ‘Amerika’ is the satanic principle in the
world.
The post-left luxuriates (is there a better word to
describe what Pastor Wright was doing?) in anti-Americanism,
anti-Westernism, anti-Zionism, anti-capitalism, and anti-liberalism.
The postmodern academic tells students that the human condition has
been blighted by
‘western-patriarchal-racist-homophobic-logocentric-capitalist-imperialism’
and talks of the ‘multitude’ that resist this new ‘empire.’ Judith Butler,
a professor at Berkeley, defends Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘part of the
global left’. The Afro-centric pastor uses his own idiom when he preaches that 9/11 showed that ‘people of color had not gone away, faded into
the woodwork or just “disappeared” as the “Great White West” went on
its merry way of ignoring black concerns.’
Wright claims ‘The
government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide
against people of colour’. Mad, of course, but any worse than the
post-leftist ‘9/11 Truth’ movement?
How on earth did the left
end up here? When Barack Obama points out that ‘Reverend Wright is a
child of the 60s’ he shows the artistic insight that made his
autobiography Dreams From My Father a genuine work of literature, and the political insight that suggests he could be the antidote to the post-left.
Obama
understands that the sixties had two souls. The optimistic movements of
the early 1960s extended the pursuit of happiness to the excluded and
challenged America to honour the promissory note issued by the founding
fathers. The nihilist movements of the late 1960s denounced ‘Amerika’
and the ‘Great White West’.
Obama’s campaign has called
people back to the optimism of the early 1960s: ‘yes we can!’ offering
his own remarkable ‘American story’ as proof, Obama invites us to walk
together again towards Walt Whitman’s democratic vistas. Rejecting the
post-left’s notion of ‘Amerika’, Obama embraces America as the only
country on Earth in which his story was possible.
Obama’s recent speech in Philadelphia was about race, for sure. But, less noticed, it was also a critique of the post-left in the name of a decent left.
Wright, he said, had ‘expressed a profoundly distorted view of this
country’ and his claims ‘simplify and stereotype and amplify the
negative to the point that it distorts reality.’ Wright’s ‘profound
mistake’ had been to speak ‘as if our society was static …
irrevocably bound to a tragic past’.
In Philadelphia Obama
issued a promissory note of his own, pledging to lead the American
progressive tradition back into a 221-year old story begun by a ‘band
of patriots who signed that document in Philadelphia’. His warning to
progressives was this: only as part of that hopeful story, not the
post-left nightmare about ‘Amerika’, can the work of perfecting the
union be continued.