A HuffPo blog entry from several days ago tries to keep everyone updated on the spirit of the times: “If you haven’t noticed—we’re living in the era of the hybrid.” A few examples follow, (incidentally all purchases that the author is considering): a new hybrid car, some new sort of dog called a Puggle (“Breeders call them mutts. But owners call them hybrids”), and a half off-road, half racing bicycle.
But also, Barack Obama.
New mixes. New cultural combinations. And with this new era of Hybrid Politics — an opportunity to see the word in a new way. Barack Obama is both genetically, socially, educationally, and politically a Hybrid.
As if to remove any doubt abot what’s going on here, the author proceeds to answer the post’s titular question, “Is Barack Obama a ‘Hybrid’?”
Lets take a look.
His father is Kenyan
His mother American (Wichita, Kansas)
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
At age six he moved to Jakarta(the list continues…)
A previously useful term-turned-concept has now worked its way back around to its original, prosaic usage while retaining its now totally unjustified theory-esque cache. The result is this weird comment that actually treats Obama as a sort of biological specimen. This could have required a denouncement and/or rejection back before “hybrid” came to mean (and be) “fashionable”—when it was just a regular word that didn’t require midsentence capitalization. Why isn’t this just a sophisticated (elitist?) version of “Is Barack Obama a Halfbreed?”
The self evident answer is to refer to the new function of “hybrid” as a watchword for our cr-azy post-modern times. However, such an excessively literal application of the word’s figurative usage is suggests that the sentiment it reflects is an extremely shallow one. The consequence is a commitment to a notion of authentic hybridity that vitiates the insights that the term is supposed to help elucidate:
Obama has remained himself. He is well spoken, passionate, literate, and able to speak with his own voice. Compare this “Hybrid” Kenyan/American to Hillary Clinton’s southern drawl and you see the natural conflict between the Hybrid make of Obama and the attempt to impersonate roots that she simply can’t claim.
Aside from repeating the “clean and articulate” trope, this comparison introduces passion and authentic speech as the virtues of his partially sub-altern origins. Hillary, by contrast, is only faking the “white working class” thing.
This is incredibly pernicious. For politics to descend into a conflict over whose claim to their roots is more legitimate is a disaster. Not only does it contribute to the trend of utterly contentless media maneuvering that seems to dominate the national campaign, it materially impacts the outcome and policy discourse.
Hillary’s allegedly inauthentic main street charm seems to have served her well enough in Pennsylvania. At best, Obama’s appeal as a representative of new cultural combinations fell short. And for all its enthusiasm, the above hybridity hypothesis didn’t help either. Not that this particular post should be expected to. Rather, the impulse it channels is a dangerous one for Obama’s candidacy. Aren’t hybrid cars, designer dogs and the outdoors/athletic chic of special bicycles exactly the sort of “elitist” indulgences that supposedly alienate all those small town voters?
And more than those particular (expensive) commodities, the rhetoric around and ideology behind the hybrid label hardly seem the sort of thing that would dispel the charge that Obama is “out of touch with the mainstream.” The problem is not that celebrating all these new cultural forms isn’t an effective selling point (though it probably isn’t for anyone not already on board). The problem is that all this hopeful talk has eclipsed other, perhaps more substantive reasons to support him, putting online communities like the Huffington Post (and DailyKos and others) even more firmly in the role of preaching to the choir.
As for policy, look at trade. A more sophisticated discourse about Obama as a cosmopolitan candidate might expect him to be all for transnational flows and what have you. A superficial hybridity characterization based on his genetics can be content with the fact that he sticks to the democratic party line. More to the point, he has to in order to have even a fighting chance of cutting into Hillary’s base. In Ohio, Pennsylvania and now also Indiana (among some others) the campaigns have traded ads and mailers over who is more against trade. Because, you know, it gives all the jobs to the foreigners.
It’s not just a matter of economic self-interest though. It involves those “imagined communities”—which are first and foremost imagined economies. Collective sentiments about how production is supposed to be. The same fossilized market morality to which Michael Moore appeals when he rages against the collapse of the Flint Michigan manufacturing industry because of how it’s ruining that community. Objecting to trade seems to be a sort of political prerequisite to being part of, or “in touch with”, such a community. That leaves little room to disagree. To do so is already to be an outsider of whose motives one should be suspicious.
For continuity’s sake, I’ll point out the similarity to the situation written about in the other long post. Once again, there’s a sort of fluffy abstract world in which discussions take place and and decisions get made (or influenced). Delegates are frantically counted, recounted and debated when it doesn’t really matter and blogs blog about blogs blogging about hybridity. Meanwhile, there’s global famine. As Cowen and the cover story of The Economist argue, this might be due in part to failures of global trade. At the very least, the default anti-trade posture to which both democrats are pandering seems ill-advised at this point.
To be as blunt and alarmist as possible, doesn’t it bother anyone that the presidential candidates are fighting over who is furthest on the wrong side of keeping the world from starving? At a minimum, the topic will not get the discussion or even policy positioning it merits from the candidates because of the need to establish oneself as “fighting to keep jobs at home,” whether that really helps people anywhere or not. The imperative to achieve authenticity or connectedness pre-empts any possibility of changing the prevailing political winds on the issue.
Just because the paradigm for Obama’s authentic nature is different doesn’t make it any less distorting. Cheering on the age of the hybrid and Obama as its mascot is probably ultimately harmless, if a bit frivolous. But the attitude it betrays is one that has consequences for how politics is happening. Not just the “bittergate” kind, potentially the “how do we feed the people?” kind too.
