The Day Obama Won

"The Day John McCain Lost the Election"-- This was the headline of a recent Slate article. The body of the article revealed the position that after of the events of September 24, 2008, McCain was toast. That was the day that he "temporarily suspended" his campaign to attend to the economic crisis, only to emerge from Washington and resume campaigning with nothing accomplished and nothing to show.

While this certainly was a significant moment in campaign '08, I think it overlooks "The Day Barack Obama Won the Election," which was actually a little over seven years prior. September 11, 2001, to be exact.

Of course, this defies the conventional wisdom that 9-11 was politically advantageous to the Republicans. To be sure, the GOP got a lot of short term benefit and political capital as the party perceived to be better equipped to prevent a re-occurrence of this tragedy. But I believe that when assessing the impact of that day on not just American politics, but American culture as a whole, we can apply a corollary to "Amara's Law," which states that we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

While 9/11 had immediate tangible effects on geopolitics worldwide, the lasting effect and legacy of that day might turn out to have less to do with foreign policy than with undermining a seemingly immobile cultural paradigm--which I will call, for lack of a better term, "The Age of Irony." I use this term to describe a general postmodern sensibility that anything and everything can be subverted through detachment and mockery, that such subversion is desirable, that the only real virtue is sophistication, which is defined as the absence of earnestness, or taking oneself too seriously, which is the only real sin. In other words, this was the the outlook on life that made Seinfeld the highest-rated TV show of the 1990s.

This paradigm was seemingly ensconced as dominant, the teleological culmination of all previous paradigms, precisely because it eschewed teleology as a legitimate phenomenon. Whereas worldviews were previously supplanted by other worldviews in the name of "progress," this particular worldview declared progress a dated concept, and declared itself outside of (and hence above) such considerations.

What was always evident but never acknowledged by purveyors of this philosophy was that progress can only be deemed deficient if a society has matured sufficiently enough to allow introspection. In other words, such a philosophy is only hatched after an incubation, and security is necessary for incubation. Thus, only areas of the world which achieved some degree of economic and political stability embraced The Age of Irony.

With this in mind, it becomes easy to see how irony is not a transcendence of progress, but a resistance to progress. Change can bring about positive or negative results, and if the status quo is acceptable, change might not be worth the risk. And change requires passion, so irony, the absence of passion, serves as a check on change.

But irony as a resistance mechanism is only workable insofar as people are secure. Once security, or even the perception of security, is altered, all bets are off. And all this is a very long-winded way of saying that the pundits were right in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: Irony was dead.

It may have taken a few years for the full effect of this truth to materialize, but it was fully evident on election night. Many people were quoted as saying they never thought they'd see a black president in their lifetime. However, I had a different reaction. I never thought I'd see people dancing in the streets after a presidential election in this country in my lifetime. That was something that happened in newly formed democracies, not in the "too cool" USA.

So while analysts debate whether Obama is a "post-racial" president, I perceive him more as a "post-ironic" president. He was elected because he was the candidate most compatible with the new epoch. I don't doubt that the fact that he looks different from all previous presidents played a part in this, but I also think his relative youth was a big factor. When a paradigm shift has occurred, the youngest are in best position to both understand and benefit from it. And of course, his oratorical and rhetorical skills were in complete harmony with the spirit of the age. "Yes We Can" would have been as open to mockery as "I feel your pain" was 16 years ago, or "A kinder, gentler, nation" was 20 years ago. But in the post-ironic era, it worked brilliantly.

Yet in the final analysis, we will have a president with the middle name Hussein largely because of the actions of Middle Eastern terrorists. So perhaps irony isn't completely dead, after all.