What is driving the intensity of anti-Obama feeling here is that he is seen as outside the clan. “Fundamentally transforming America” shows disloyalty: it is the kind of criticism you don’t make in public. The commentaries on Chantrill’s blog, very much an insider discussion among self-defined conservatives, go off into a battle over defining the clan boundary. Is Ted Cruz in? Some say yes, because he loves America; some say no, because he was born in Canada. Rubio? A number reject him because of his foreign influences. But Obama! – Obama in this view is not even close, he’s just a concatenation of foreign ties and allegiances. It’s not that he’s Black: that never comes up in the discussion, and my sense is that it’s genuinely not the main issue. It’s that he is proudly multicultural, proudly cosmopolitan, willing to see good things in other countries, willing to criticize the U.S. So he cannot be trusted.
I think I understand that part. What I don’t understand, really, is how it feels from the inside. What is the nature of Chantrill’s passion, as seen in the intense use of the word “love”?:
“... life is not easy for America lovers, and all you lovers know why. It is hard to keep the flames of love burning bright when it is so much easier to burn up with hate. In fact, for most of us, we have to be threatened with the loss of those we love in order to remember how important our loves and our loved ones are to us.
That’s the great contribution that President Obama has made to America. He has reminded us how much we love our country and how important it is for America lovers to elect and have once again a President that loves America.”
This is a very deep feeling. I might say I love America, but Chantrill would no doubt say I don’t. There is indeed something really different about it. I feel that America is my home and that it is in many respects extraordinary, but it’s not everything. Other countries have their virtues: I love French cheeses and Chinese dumplings, and I don’t think we have any writer to match Shakespeare. America also has many flaws and has committed many sins, from slavery at home to support for dictatorships abroad. My feeling for America does have something special about it, a depth and fullness far beyond my feeling for any other nation; yet I would not call myself a “lover.” It’s not absolute. It warms, but it doesn’t burn.
Chantrill thinks, apparently, that because I don’t burn with love I must “burn up with hate”. But I don’t. I don’t fully understand Chantrill, and he doesn’t understand me. I don’t think I can express this difference in a way that Chantrill would find true. It has nothing to do with reasoned argument.
So is understanding hopeless?
One of my favorite jokes is, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.” Chantrill thinks there are two kinds of people; I don’t. And that may be the essential difference that defines us as two kinds of people. Obama is outside the line because he doesn’t see a line. Those of us who think we can bridge any cultural gap can’t bridge that one.
The good news, from my perspective, that there are more people than perhaps ever before in history who embrace multiple loyalties and identities, and thus don’t see a need to divide the world into friends and enemies. The wall-builders, like Trump and Chantrill, are loud and shrill in part because they are on the defensive and in the minority. We may not be able to come to understanding, but the current is not likely to reverse.
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