The Anatomy of Failure: Barack Obama and the Sephardim
David Shasha
The Anatomy of Failure: Barack Obama and the Sephardim
A few years ago, I wrote an essay called “Sephardi Typologies” which outlined the ways in which Sephardim have turned their backs on their ancestral traditions and cultural heritage. The “typological” turn betrays a self-loathing that has been correctly described by the militant African-American leader Malcolm X in his classic articulation of the “House Negro.” Beyond “Negro” identity, slaves who worked inside the homes of White people took on a pathological identification with their masters. Malcolm X contrasted the “House Negro” to the “Field Negro” who persisted to harbor a deep loathing of the Master as it was the “Field Negro” who continued to do the backbreaking tasks of farming the land and tending to the cattle. The “House Negro” created an African-American typology by robbing the Slaves of their innate moral sense; the “House Negro” lost his own identity and adopted that of the Master.
Sephardim have absorbed their own occlusion at the hands of the Ashkenazim who regard them as invisible and less than truly Jewish.
Within this occlusion is a dual failure:
On the one hand, an inbred racial bias has consumed the Jewish community. Sephardim have the distinct disadvantage of harboring an Arab identity which, since the advent of Zionism and the State of Israel, has become the inverse of the Jewish. Harboring both the Jewish religious identity as well as the Arab cultural identity, Sephardim have ironically undergone a harsh process of assimilation to Ashkenazi Jewish norms at the very moment that Ashkenazim have forcefully asserted their own parochial ethnic identity in quite forceful terms.
On the other hand, Jewish culture has been robbed of its most substantial historical component. Over the many centuries of Diaspora Judaism, Sephardim were able to develop a brilliant and vibrant culture that was successful in fusing normative Jewish tradition with the cultures of the many lands in which they lived. Ashkenazi culture was inbred and parochial; it was a culture that had great difficulty dealing with the process of pluralism and multiple identities.
It was the Sephardic culture that was able to successfully integrate the emerging Arabic synthesis of Greco-Roman civilization into a monotheistic framework. This synthesis reflects the values of Religious Humanism; a moral system which successfully integrated the demands of Jewish tradition and the truths of science and philosophy. Religious Humanism at its core preserved the primacy of the Golden Mean; the form of philosophical moderation articulated in the Aristotelian system.
Sephardim are now a pathetic object of derision and scorn. This degeneration has, as I have said, robbed the larger Jewish identity of its richness and texture, leaving it fractured and at odds with itself. Ashkenazi Jews can be counted prominently as part of differing groups – capitalist and communist, Zionist and anti-Zionist, fundamentalist and atheist – that are often at war with one another. Judaism has now become a polarized entity without a true center. Like the Ashkenazim, Sephardim today have become extreme in their ideological affiliations. They have turned their backs on the precious values of the Religious Humanism of their progenitors in order to better fit into a Jewish world run by Ashkenazim.
Typological thinking robs the individual of their organic identity. Beyond this, it engenders a self-loathing that leads to a process of reintegration and assimilation that forces the typological specimen to embody the very things that have sought to destroy that organic integrity.
In looking at the current failures of Barack Obama, I was struck by how similar the Sephardi issue is to that of his presidency.
Enfeebled and weakened by a Republican enemy that is totally united and committed to undermining his every policy initiative, Obama has floundered at the very moment when the American people need him most.
Like the Sephardim, Obama comes with a fine pedigree. He is a wise, sensitive and endearing man. He looks out for the other guy and is at pains to make sure that fairness rules every situation. He has nobly struggled to rise from humble circumstances to become the leader of the most powerful nation on earth.
Like the Sephardim, Obama is almost completely oblivious to the malignant nature of his enemy.
Taking office after two terms of George W. Bush’s presidency, an administration that mismanaged every one of its tasks in caring for the American masses, Obama adopted a losing strategy from the very start. Recalibrating the leadership style of his predecessor, Obama has been blindsided by the pretzel logic that now permeates the American political system. Lacking a truly insightful sense of recent American political history, Obama has failed to learn the lesson of Ronald Reagan and the radical Conservative revolution.
Beginning in 1980, the many decades of New Deal Democrat rule over the US government was gradually ended. Ronald Reagan is underestimated by many Democrats as an unthinking dunce, but his actual impact as president is truly incalculable. Reversing decades of liberal policies that led to economic growth and a vibrant Middle Class, Reagan’s aim was to take back the country from that Middle Class and give it over to the wealthy. For this he instituted massive tax cuts which in the end caused massive debt for the US treasury and had to be rescinded. It was George H.W. Bush who ended up having to pay the price for the folly of “Voodoo Economics” when he was ousted after a single term in the White House.
After a partial return to New Deal-style liberalism under Bill Clinton who was, it is true, guilty of his own free-market sins, the election of George W. Bush brought back the kamikaze capitalism and crony corporatism of the Reagan era. Greed was back and government deregulation the main order of the day. As the political thinker Naomi Klein has called it, the Bush administration made use of the “Shock Doctrine”; seeking to take advantage of a calamitous international situation led by the blowback of many years of Middle East follies – the price of cheap oil – in order to institute a complex web of financial cronyism that served to profit a slender margin of the American upper classes.
A state of perpetual war free of any diplomatic engagement or moral rules permitted the creation of an economic regime allied to what Bush called the “War on Terror” that served many in the Bush administration quite nicely. With a cadre of Texas oilmen and insiders from entities like the shadowy Carlyle Group and Halliburton, Bush and his administration – particularly the repugnant Dick Cheney – sought to create an opaque shadow-government with a penchant for secrecy unseen since the age of the disgraced Richard Nixon.
Parallel to this war cabinet that was cynically created prior to the 9/11 attacks under the aegis of Neo-Conservatives in a group called “The Project for a New American Century,” was a generous giveback to Wall Street in the form of massive government deregulations that took up where Ronald Reagan had left off. As if the movie projector was re-running the Oliver Stone film “Wall Street,” the new Bush economic policies left the roosters in charge of the hen-house.
In the 8 years of the Bush presidency the ability of banks and other financial institutions to merge and create monolithic entities was staggering. The pumped-up institutions developed new and dangerous financial instruments that maximized profits by generating a level of risk to which the government was oblivious. Corporatization gone mad was the order of the day and it was in the Health Care sector – beyond the Military-Industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower once warned about – that the new principles were best realized. Health care has become one-sixth of the American economy and along with the pharmaceutical companies has flexed the sort of muscle hitherto possible only by the Wall Street titans like Goldman Sachs.
When President Obama was sworn in, he was taking over a jacked-up executive branch that had basically bankrupted the country and kept it in a state, as I said before, of perpetual war in thrall to the monied interests of an oligarchical corporate elite.
The American people, once bamboozled and bewitched by the affable Bush, had just about had it. The banking system was at near collapse and the American manufacturing base – already broken from the time of Reagan who started the process of corporate exile that took jobs and financial control off-shore where they could avoid the taxman and the prying eyes of government regulation – a shadow of its former self.
Americans voted for Barack Obama in the hope that he would restore economic security and extricate the country from the state of perpetual war that Bush and his cronies had imposed.
In a sense, the Obama conundrum and that of the Sephardim are connected. In the new state of perpetual war with the Muslim world could be seen the huge influence of Zionism and Jewish interests in Washington; the very internal Jewish elements that helped to eliminate Sephardim and Sephardic culture from Jewish life. In the area of the financial industry, we saw the prominence of Ashkenazi Jews like Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Bob Rubin who would continue to play important roles in the bank bailout (TARP) and the reconstruction of a broken financial system in ways that continue to stymie progress and resolution of the concerns of most Americans.
Ashkenazi Jews proclaim themselves, as David Brooks has recently argued in his New York Times op-ed column “The Tel Aviv Cluster,” superior to others. They see their success in the context of personal merit based on genetic and cultural superiority. As Sephardim, we have heard this all too many times before. Just as the Jewish immigrants from Arab countries who came to Israel were told that they were “primitive” and “barbaric” by their Ashkenazi overlords, so too do we see political functionaries in positions of authority asserting that they know what the rest of us do not. We have entities that are “too big to fail” and systems that cannot be reformed. Health care cannot be brought into line with systems like those of the other Western democracies like England, France and Canada which have had single-payer systems for decades. The entrenched powers have taken on the patina of invincibility. Nothing can control the rapaciousness of these monolithic institutions.
Of course, for those of us who watched George W. Bush and Dick Cheney essentially rip up the US Constitution in order to put into place a system that would better serve their own constituencies – what Bush called “the haves and the have-mores,” all of whom made spectacular gains during the past 8 years at the expense of the rest of their fellow citizens, the ability to set into motion new political and social processes is possible – it only needs our moral and political will.
And here is where typological thinking comes to play a role in both the Obama and Sephardi failures.
Like the Sephardim, Obama is heir to a rich tradition borne of pain and struggle. As the child of an African immigrant and husband to a woman who comes from slaves, Obama represents the full weight of American history. He has himself benefited from the advances made by the Civil Rights struggle and has proven that Black people are just as capable as Whites. He brings to his job a sense of cultural pluralism born of his own mixed racial heritage.
But, like the Sephardim, when pinned into a corner Obama has shown himself to be singularly incapable of adapting his knowledge and talents to create a countermovement that would restore American dignity and the hopes of his fellow citizens against those who would keep the whole pie for themselves.
He has fallen back on the “House Negro” tendencies that served him well in places like Harvard; tendencies that allowed him to fit into the White crowd and pass himself as pliable and unthreatening.
Contrast this to George W. Bush who had no apparent talent but his relentless drive to win. Lacking the hard-won successes of someone like Barack Obama who had to prove himself at every stage of his life, Bush was a lazy malcontent who traded off his family name and connections to make his substantial fortune. Immediately upon becoming president, he brought along his father’s cronies and inserted the volatile Neo-Conservative cadre into his administration. Bush was driven to succeed whatever the cost and would use – as we saw in the 2000 election fiasco that was finally determined by the critical votes of the Supreme Court – whatever resources at his disposal to crush his opponents.
As Jon Stewart – alone among media pundits these days – hammers home each night on his “Daily Show” program, Obama is acting as if he has no power and no resources when it is quite clear that Democrats have numerical majorities that Republicans never had during the Bush years. And yet the Democrats appear paralyzed – by the Republican brushbacks and by their own “Blue Dog” Conservative wing – to the point where all their policy initiatives have been blocked by a Conservative machine just waiting to take back the very government that they seek to cripple and destroy. But the rhetoric of “shrinking the government” is just more emptiness: The Republicans and Conservatives just want the keys to the henhouse again so that they can bleed the country dry once more.
One more connection between Obama and the Sephardim is the difficulty that we all have with the form of moral and legal casuistry known in Hebrew as PILPUL. PILPUL is a form of doublespeak where a thing comes to mean something completely different than what it appears to be. War is peace, debt is profit, etc. The complex nature of the current economic situation is wrapped up in the confusion of PILPUL.
In order to save the financial system, we were told that the money had to go to the banks rather than those in debt. With this bailout money, the bailed-out firms have lavished themselves with bonuses and have continued to conduct business as usual in defiance of any sense of fiscal reform – reform that Wall Street made sure would not be passed into law by those in charge of the government. The system is now run by special interest money which squeezes out the small guy and collects the power which is then given to the wealthiest of the wealthy.
In the end, PILPUL has caused those like Obama to abandon their principles and give up completely. What we now see – beyond the bluff of the Democrat-Republican mock war – is a resolute continuation of many of the most egregious policies of the Bush administration. The banks and Health insurance companies have weathered the storm and are in line to continue making record profits. The wars in the Middle East have ensured the political and economic interests of the Blackwaters and Halliburtons and the Zionist lobby. Peace in Israel is further away from our grasp than it has ever been. Extremists on all sides are getting that much stronger and there is no sign of any real diplomatic initiative coming from the State Department.
Americans continue to be apoplectic over all these issues and see no leadership coming from the president. And for good reason: Like Sephardic students who are looking to learn something – anything – about their history, the leaders are all AWOL. So Americans, like Sephardim, go over to the other side in the vain hope that this will ameliorate the problem.
In Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the union, we just saw a Republican elected to fill the seat of the late Teddy Kennedy. And the Tea Parties, FOX News bloviators led by the unhinged religious radical Glenn Beck, and the massively successful Rush Limbaugh are all increasing their support base.
Typological thinking leads people to abandon their own principles and values because they remain unconvinced that their principles can succeed on their own. When we look at the current political situation in the US and the sorry state of the Sephardim, we see that there is no hope because there is no faith that things can be any different.
Those who strike out and articulate an independent stance based on moral and political values more in tune with traditional mores are struck down like dogs in the street. The opposition – the Republicans in America and the Ashkenazim in contemporary Judaism – is totally united and ready to strike at every moment. Like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, there is no lack of enthusiasm on the Right. They are coiled like a snake just waiting to pounce on those who are against them.
Unfortunately, typological thinking has led those on the moderate side and on the progressive Left to abandon the very things that they believe in.
Nature abhors a vacuum, so it is highly unlikely that pretty words will change anything. Rather than digging deep inside himself and standing up to those who are attacking him, President Obama has given up the fight and is caught up in his own empty rhetoric. His policies as presently formulated will have little chance of changing what Bush set into place.
Again, we see the same thing when it comes to Sephardim. Right now, as we speak, Ashkenazim control huge chunks of the Sephardic world. Sephardim, like the “House Negroes” of old, are set in place to do the bidding of their Ashkenazi masters. Like the beleaguered Americans, we Sephardim are further away than ever from cultural renewal and normalizing our traditional identity. There is no taste in the Sephardic world for a fight – and those who do actually have the temerity to do battle are beaten back without mercy.
Such pessimism reflects the ongoing process of failure that permeates Liberalism in the US and Sephardim in the larger Jewish world. Rather than going out into the marketplace of ideas and the political arena and battling it out with their opponents, we see a complete abdication of personal responsibility brought on by an internal cultural confusion enabled by PILPUL which marks things as they are not.
Until these typologies of identity are reversed and an authentic organic identity is restored, we will continue to see our cultures erode and fade away. This painful process is cemented by a mental assimilation to the ways and ideas of our enemies – enemies who carry the toughness and courage that we lack.
David Shasha