Militaristic or Moral: Do Governments Have to Choose? | Jelani Cobb | Big Think

Militaristic or Moral: Do Governments Have to Choose?

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America has a split personality, and the country it wants to be is constantly being foiled by the country that it is. In an ideal world, says Jelani Cobb, there is a way of using power that does not entail the oppression and exploitation of other people. But how do we get there? America operates on two kinds of power: moral authority – through which citizens and members of the international community invest in the United States’ message of a better future – and military might – the stark opposite of morality, whereby presidents overreach their authority and breach sovereign territory to meet their own objectives. Barack Obama represented the tension between these ideals, espousing morality in speech while engaging the US’s military might in action. The country America wants to be is constantly being foiled by the country that America is. Journalist Jelani Cobbs asks: can America have it both ways? Is it noble to try, or merely hypocritical? Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest book is The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.

Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest book is The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.

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JELANI COBB :

William Jelani Cobb writes about the enormous complexity of race in America. In 2015, he received the Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism for his New Yorker columns, in which he combined "the strengths of an on-the-scene reporter, a public intellectual, a teacher, a vivid writer, a subtle moralist, and an accomplished professional historian."

His articles include "The Anger in Ferguson," "Murders in Charleston," and "What We Talk About When We Talk About Reparations." In awarding him the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, the jury wrote, "No one has done a better job of placing [the events in Ferugson, MO]—and similar happenings in other places like Sanford, Florida, Cleveland, Ohio and Staten Island, New York—in their broader context than Jelani Cobb." Further: "Cobb met the challenge of describing the turmoil in Ferguson in a way that cut through the frantic chaos of 'breaking news' and deepened readers’ understanding of what they were seeing, hearing, and feeling. Ferguson was not an aberration, he showed, but a microcosm of race relations in the United States—organically connected to the complicated legacy of segregation and the unpaid debts of slavery itself. "

Cobb was formerly associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, where he was director of the Africana Studies Institute. He has received Fellowships from the Fulbright and Ford Foundations. He is the author of Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, and The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays. His forthcoming book is Antidote to Revolution: African American Anticommunism and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1931.

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TRANSCRIPT :

Jelani Cobb: There’s the kind of power that comes from having military advantages and having a large army and weaponry and so on. There’s the kind of power that comes from having moral authority and having people invested in your cause – people believing that you are representative of somehow a better future in some ways. There’s a tension between those two kinds of ideals. There are people who point to the United States having this sprawling military empire and bases all around the world as the basis for American power and there are people who look at this as a kind of, excuse me, people who look at this as an example of a society struggling to be democratic, to operate and organize itself as a democracy.

At the beginning of his presidency and during the campaign Barack Obama relied more on the latter than the former. He famously when he was campaigning for senate seat in Illinois talked about his opposition to the Iraq war. He did say he wasn’t opposed to all wars, just dumb wars and he categorized this as a dumb war. But when he talked about the United States what he really dwelled on was the strength of the U.S. as an example. Which was ironic but people then said that the people accused him of not thinking the United States was exceptional and not embracing the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

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