More precisely, Andrew Ferguson‘s latest Weekly Standard column ponders President Obama’s frequent use of the rhetorical crutch “who we are as Americans.”
The little clump of words about who we are as Americans pops out of the president’s mouth so often it’s easy to miss it, even when he says it twice on the same occasion, a few sentences apart, as he sometimes does. It’s not necessarily annoying. Often when he tells us who we are the phrase has a nice, friendly lilt to it, as though the president were giving us a pat on the back. You hear him at the 9/11 museum saying, “Nothing can ever break us. Nothing can change who we are as Americans,” and you think, Thanks, Obama!
Unfortunately, Americans might also get confused about who we are, assuming we’re paying attention to our president. It’s easy to lose track.
“That’s who the American people are—determined, and not to be messed with,” the president said again last summer. So, number one, we’re bad ass. This is probably related to our being football fundamentalists. But make no mistake: We have a gentler side. All the Christmas parties, Seders, and Muslim religious ceremonies the president hosts at the White House “are an affirmation of who we are as Americans.” So, number two, we’re religious, without overdoing it. …
… The phrase, you’ll notice, carries a vaguely therapeutic air. Our language everywhere shows the smudgy hand of the therapist, the life coach, the counselor, the facilitator. People nowadays say they “reach out” to people that they just used to talk to, and “share” things when they just used to say things, and talk of themselves, of their feelings and impressions and habits, without ceasing. It is the mission of the therapists and life coaches to enable you to find yourself, “to discover who you really are as a person,” to decant the authentic you. I suppose it was inevitable that the seductive language of therapy would migrate into the language of politics.
And who we truly are is often obscured, in national life as in personal life, beneath layers of self-deception, pretense, and misunderstanding. The politician and his codependent audience, like therapist and patient, have penetrated America’s true self and returned to deliver the news to everyone else. This makes it a perfect trope for a certain kind of rhetoric, in which unexceptional, even banal, sentiments (“hope,” “change”) are cast as moral insights that transcend the “false choice” that befuddles a politician’s opponents.
“Who we are” serves other purposes. It allows the president’s followers to absorb the jingoism of less sophisticated people—all those vulgar crowds chanting USA! USA!—and refine it into the moral vanity they more highly prize. (Self-flattery is who they are.) Democrats have been bedeviled for decades by the canard that they are somehow less patriotic than conservatives. “Who we are” allows them to turn the tables, so long as who we are is Democrats. If, for example, you think that 99 weeks of unemployment insurance payments is about all we can afford, then you’re not just wrong, you’re un-American. You’re not who we are. It’s super-patriotism for the passive-aggressive. If we still had a House Committee on Un-American Activities we could rename it the House Committee on Activities of People Who Are Not Who We Are as Americans.