This is not about politics but about history and historical imagination, both backward and forward. The argument has been made by John McWhorter, and it is humanly grounded, elegant, convincing. It appears in a recent issue of New York. I wish he had given it to us. Another article of his, also historically rooted, does appear in our next issue, as have several others in recent years. McWhorter has been, as I have, a supporter of Barack Obama’s run for the presidency since the beginning.
Because McWhorter is a man of skeptical temperament I would have expected him to be predisposed to a certain kind of conservative (or non-enthusiastic) politics, not to Obama’s politics. I might have expected that of myself. And yet here we are. I don’t think we are here because of Obama’s muddled Iraq policy.