The loves of Barack Obama

What would it mean, then, to ask whether Obama loves this country? Surely he would summon an affection for the country that elevated him to his high office—or at least to those voters who were willing to lift him to that station. But what of the regime whose defining principles made that election possible? For Obama, the country begins with the Constitution. But for Lincoln the nation began before the Constitution with the “proposition,” as he called it, that “all men are created equal,”—that the only rightful government over human beings would draw its just powers from the consent of the governed. As the understanding ran, one didn’t rule human beings in the way that human beings were compelled to rule dogs and horses. That proposition would hold true in all times and places where that nature remained the same and human were distinguishable from animals. As Lincoln said, that proposition stated “an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times.

But Obama made it clear in his autobiography that there are no moral truths of that kind. “All men are created equal” was a high-flown sentiment, but not a truth, and for Obama the telling point was that the Founders who owned slaves did not truly honor it. But to say that people have not lived up fully to the principle is not to say that the principle is false. It was in fact the danger of making an acceptance of slavery in principle—and changing radically the character of the regime—that brought on the “crisis of the house divided” and the Civil War.

Obama constantly invokes the concern for equality, but unlike Lincoln and the Founders, he does not think that there is any moral truth anchoring that judgment. And if he is attached to the regime founded on those principles, it is not because there is anything in those principles themselves that command his respect as truths.