Tears of Transformation

Judith Warner comments on the significance of Barack Obama's election:

This moment of triumph marks the end of such a long period of pain, of indignity and injustice for African-Americans. And for so many others of us, of the trampling and debasing of our most basic ideals, beliefs that we cherished every bit as deeply and passionately as those of the “values voters” around whose sensibilities we’ve had to tiptoe for the past 28 years.

The election brought the return of a country we’d lost for so long that it was almost forgotten under the accumulated scar tissue of accommodation and acceptance.

For me, this will be the enduring memory of election night 2008: One generation released its grief. The next looked up confusedly, eager to please and yet unable to comprehend just what the tears were about.

Warner's speaking of the woman and her daughter above, in one of those priceless moments in time that captures a flick on the radar of epochal change.

But Warner preceded these remarks with some considerably less eloquent words (Republicans, for example, are marked by a "miserly indifference to the poor and middle class").

As the son of a black man who was born in Missouri, a former slave state, in 1913 during the depths of Jim Crow, and as one who's faced my own questions of racial acceptance in a society of "white hegemony," to borrow Warner's phrasing, I can testify to the significance of Obama's victory: It's revolutionary, not in the regime-change sense, but in the scope of social significance.

This I welcome. Had my father - a New Deal Democrat himself - been here to witness history this week I'm sure he would have been overcome, and I would have placed my hand on his cheek in comfort (for he endured tremendous pain).

I don't think, however, Warner and folks like her are doing American society any good by speaking of the Reagan Revolution in terms of "intellectual and moral paucity." Obama himself, during the primaries, recognized President Reagan's power of opitimism and singular character that changed a nation.

The Democratic-left certainly earned this moment, and I know how it feels to thrill in victory. I can't help but think, however, that all the calls for post-partisan transformation will be long-forgotten well before the Obamas get settled into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.