22 The New York Review
about Obama’s birth certificate were
white fantasies of being able to say who
belongs, who is American:The audience howled as Trump sat
in silence, cracking a tepid smile. I
couldn’t begin to guess what went
through his mind during the few
minutes I spent publicly ribbing
him. What I knew was that he
was a spectacle, and in the United
States of America in 2011, that was
a form of power. Trump trafficked
in a currency that, however shal-
low, seemed to gain more purchase
with each passing day. The same
reporters who laughed at my jokes
would continue to give him air-
time. Their publishers would vie to
have him sit at their tables.Trump’s dangerous obsession with
wiping out all evidence of Obama’s pres-
idency may not have started at a black- tie
dinner, but his outer- borough venge-
fulness for being laughed at by suave,
black, thin Obama will never go away:I knew that the passions he was
tapping, the dark, alternative vi-
sion he was promoting and legiti-
mizing, were something I’d likely
be contending with for the remain-
der of my presidency.The partisan affiliation that would blot
out everything was part of a darker re-
ality, the repetitive, angry rituals—not
about who belongs, but to whom it all
belongs. The forces gathering to invali-
date the social compact rather than see
it expand operated with a license not
displayed so openly in half a century:Was Václav Havel correct in sug-
gesting that by raising expecta-
tions, I was doomed to disappoint
them? Was it possible that abstract
principles and high- minded ideals
were and always would be noth-
ing more than a pretense, a palli-
ative, a way to beat back despair,
but no match for the primal urges
that really moved us, so that no
matter what we said or did, history
was sure to run along its predeter-
mined course, an endless cycle of
fear, hunger and conflict, domi-
nance and weakness?The First Lady was wise: when others
go low, we go high.
Biden’s arrival is rescue. As with
Obama, a Democratic administration
steps in after Republican Party rule- by-
deregulation has made a mess. Biden’s
popularity says that as the pandemic con-
tinues, after chaos- by- Twitter, enough
people want sobriety and managerial
competence.
The storming of the Capitol has
shaken up our perspective. Even when
we said we knew it was there, we hadn’t
seen it like this, the leviathan in the
swirling waters. Obama was correct
in the calm of his government, for all
the obstruction and frustrations he had
to deal with. The only way to defend
democracy is to trust in it, as a well-
regulated power that can resist the po-tency that Crazy has over the American
imagination at the moment. Millions
voted for the autocrat- envious man in
the carnival mirror, the fantasist and
his enablers who through indifference
and venality sent so many of them to
hospital emergency rooms. “I remem-
bered what the dissident writer Alek-
sandr Solzhenitsyn once said about
politics during the Soviet era, that ‘the
lie has become not just a moral cate-
gory but a pillar of State,’” Obama says.
A presidential campaign may not be,
after all, a social movement, but it does
ask us to make decisions. Obama’s place
as chief executive was to be at the cen-
ter of our politics, and then above them,
as commander in chief, in the duties
of the office. “I knew I wasn’t going to
win over any voters by labeling my op-
ponents racist.” Nothing changed, but
he changed everything, representing, ashe does, more than anyone or anything
on the planet at the moment what con-
servatives despise most: the prestige of
liberal ideas in human history. Biden
has something like a mandate to make
sense of our direction, even if “pre- crisis
normalcy” isn’t coming back. He is
there because Horatius kept the bridge.
Obama was not just a caretaker.
People in Germany find the lead-
ership of Chancellor Angela Merkel
so reassuring they do not want her to
retire next year. He finds a lesson for
America in her straightforwardness:Her stolid appearance reflected her
no- nonsense, analytical sensibility.
She was famously suspicious of
emotional outbursts or overblown
rhetoric, and her team would later
confess she’d been initially skepti-
cal of me precisely because of my
oratorical skills. I took no offense,
figuring that in a German leader,
an aversion to possible demagogu-
ery was probably a healthy thing.As the first black president Obama
governed under the old, unspoken pres-
sure that can still freeze a black student
at a predominantly white school: one
must be twice as good in order to break
even. For a leader who had no leeway,
he found a way to make a way out of no
way, as Dr. King once said black people
could always do. QNew York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Children’s Collection, and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams
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BINA
A NOVEL IN WARNINGS
Anakana Schofield
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